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OAKLAND, Calif.–The biotechnology industry must have done something good in a previous life. Or have some powerful friends. Little else can account for the activities recently undertaken on its behalf by the U.S. government.
For instance, at the graduation ceremony at the U.S. Coast Guard academy in May, George Bush lambasted Europeans for their moratorium on genetically engineered organisms, a key product from the biotechnology industry.
“European governments should join–not hinder–the great cause of ending hunger in Africa,” he argued, saying that European consumer fears around GMOs were preventing the dissemination of technology that might feed the hungry.
To supplement its moral suasion, the administration has adopted more direct approaches. Last month, the United States initiated proceedings at the World Trade Organization, arguing that the European moratorium is illegal.
Further afield, the U.S. Agency for International Development has been distributing genetically modified corn as food aid to famine-afflicted areas. Not everyone in the Third World was happy about this. When India said that the science to approve a GM crop import had not yet been completed there, and biosafety protocols still hadn’t been developed, a USAID official responded rather curtly: “Beggars can’t be choosers.”
Last year, Zambia caused an international diplomatic incident by rejecting food aid because the U.S. government could not guarantee it free of GMOs, in line with Zambian law. The United States responded to Zambia by applying immense amounts of diplomatic pressure. In an effort to circumvent the government and talk directly to Zambia’s large Catholic population, Colin Powell even phoned Archbishop Jean-Louis Tauran, the Vatican foreign minister, to ask him to declare GMOs safe. The Vatican declined so to do.
The latest push began last week, when the USDA, USAID, and the State Department hosted an Agricultural Science and Technology Ministerial and Expo in Sacramento, Calif., to which ministers from 180 countries were invited.
The humanitarian pitch
The main argument offered by the U.S. government to justify this enthusiastic taxpayer-funded promotional activity is that GMOs will, in fact, feed the Third World. By remarkable coincidence, this solution to starvation is concordant with the goals of GMO industry. Since the solution is so clear, it would seem that public debate is unnecessary, regardless of whether the issue is as fundamental as our food, who gets to eat, and the ability of the hungriest people in the world to obtain enough to survive.
So let’s look at the government’s claim. The key assumption here is this: The reason people starve is because there’s not enough food around. Therefore, if GMOs can increase the amount of food in the world, hunger will disappear.
But Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen, backed up by volumes of subsequent research, suggests a different reason for hunger. Sen argues that in every major famine since the war, food has been available within the famine region. The major factor in preventing access to the food has been peoples’ income, not the quantity of food in existence. In other words, it’s not that there’s a shortage of food, it’s that people are too poor to afford it.
A striking example can be seen right here in the United States. It is hard to argue that, with the most advanced system of industrial agriculture on the planet, with supermarket shelves bulging with processed foods, and with the onset of an epidemic of obesity, that there’s any shortage of food at all. Yet the USDA’s latest statistics tell us that 37 million people in the United States–a staggering 12 percent–are food insecure.
Similar, albeit more extreme, stories abound in the Third World. Take India, the world’s third-largest producer of food. In 2001, starvation deaths were reported in over 13 states while the storage facilities of the Food Corporation of India were full of grain–80 million tons of excess food, rotting and rat-infested. There was a proposal to dump the surplus food in the sea, to make storage space for the next crop, when export markets could not be found.
Answering a non-problem
Clearly, GMOs are not helpful if they merely provide more food, since this was never the problem to begin with. In fact, the GM industry’s approach seems to get things a little backward. Think for a moment about who the poorest, and therefore hungriest, people in the world are. Mostly, they are farmers living in developing countries.
To be sure, the economics of rural life have always been precarious. The fortunes of vast tracts of the world have always been mortgaged on the whims of weather and the prevalence of pests. Over millennia, societies have found ways to mitigate this, by saving and sharing seed, breeding new crops, and providing social insurance in the event of a bad year.
Rural communities today face more powerful fears than drought, though. First, the social safety nets and price supports that had originally been the single guarantee of predictable income for farmers have been knocked away. Governments in the Third World, as part of their submission to IMF “structural adjustment” policies and World Bank conditionalities, have removed any economic supports to family farmers, leaving them exposed to the vicissitudes of the world market.
This might even be an endurable sacrifice, “a correction” that the Third World would have to suffer, if world markets were fair, if the playing field were level. But the field is systematically tipped. The United States and Europe, unhindered by the need to implement the World Bank’s advice on their economies, subsidize export crops to the tune of over $1 billion a day. And this hurts Third World farmers directly.
Absurd though it may seem, one of the greatest threats facing poor farmers is cheap food. When crops are dumped in their local markets, the price for their produce goes down. Their livelihoods are destroyed. An abundance of cheap food actually compromises the incomes of the poorest people on earth.
The causes of hunger in the Third World have little to do with a shortage of food. Agricultural dumping, land insecurity, slashed welfare entitlements, and, to put it simply, poverty are the main reasons why people in the Third World go hungry.
These are social and political issues that biotechnology cannot address, and which the Bush administration, if it’s serious about hunger in the Third World, is in a strong position to tackle.