Genetic engineering no magic bullet

Published in the Des Moines Register.


Genetic engineering no magic bullet for Africa's hunger

BY ERIC HOLT-GIMENEZ
SPECIAL TO THE REGISTER


November 17, 2006

The Rockefeller Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation recently announced their joint $150 million Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa for the continent's 180 million impoverished farmers who - they claim - were bypassed by the Green Revolution.

What? For 25 years, the Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research - the entity that brings together the key Green Revolution institutions - invested 40 percent to 45 percent of its $350 million-a-year budget in Africa. If these public funds were not invested in a Green Revolution, then where were they spent? If they were spent on the Green Revolution, then why does Africa need another one? Either the Green Revolution's institutions don't work, or the Green Revolution itself doesn't work - or both. The Green Revolution did not "bypass" Africa. It failed.

Why are Rockefeller, Gates, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization and even U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Anan proposing more of the same? Some writers who contributed essays to the Register in conjunction with World Food Prize festivities called for a second Green Revolution, too, this time employing the magic bullet of genetic engineering. Why should we believe that another multibillion dollar super-seeds project will be any more successful at ending hunger in Africa? Why would it avoid the first Green Revolution's extensively documented - but less celebrated - failures?

Indian economist Amartya Sen won the Nobel Prize for demonstrating that hunger doesn't result primarily from a lack of food, but from the poverty of the hungry, who can't afford the food that is available. Around the world, poor people go hungry while their country exports grain. During the heyday of the Green Revolution (1970-90), the total food available in the world rose by 11 percent per person. However, (excluding China), the number of hungry people also increased by more than 11 percent, from 536 million to 597 million.

In South America, food per capita rose almost 8 percent, but the hungry increased by 19 percent. The rise in hunger clearly was not due to population increase because total food per person went up. Rather, it resulted from the tendency of the Green Revolution to exacerbate unequal access to food and food-producing resources. Throughout the 1980s, sub-Saharan Africa's exports grew faster than imports. By 1994, 11 countries in the region were net exporters of food. During the terrible droughts of the 1960s and '70s, the value of agricultural exports was three times that of imported grain. Even in India, the country's heralded 26 million-ton grain surplus could easily feed its 320 million hungry people, but does not. Why? Because starving villagers are too poor to buy the food.

Aside from inducing soil degradation and pest explosions on the marginal lands of poor farmers, Green Revolution crops are also water-intensive. In India, they are responsible for widespread, catastrophic declines in water tables, forcing farmers to return to rain-fed agriculture or give up farming altogether.

Industry spokespeople insist that genetically engineered crops are the only alternative to mass starvation - bashing concerned opposition as "elitist." This name-calling masks the truth: Genetic engineering is more about controlling seeds, selling more chemicals and reviving the sagging Green Revolution than about saving the world from hunger. More than 80 percent of the world's biotech crop acreage is planted to herbicide-tolerant varieties that have increased herbicide use in the United States alone by more than 100 million pounds since 1996, while genetically engineered soybeans suffer from lower yields. Hardly a solution to hunger.

Hunger will also be exacerbated by the criminalization of seed-saving. According to a 2005 report from the Center for Food Safety in Washington, D.C., America's hard-strapped family farmers have already paid Monsanto more than $15 million in lawsuits for allegedly saving and replanting the company's exorbitantly priced genetically engineered seeds.

African farmers beware. The genetically engineered Green Revolution may lead to the enrichment of seed, fertilizer and herbicide companies - but it will not end hunger in Africa. Indeed, it might make things worse.

*ERIC HOLT-GIMENEZ* is executive director of the Institute for Food and Development Policy (Food First), Oakland, Calif. For a policy report on the Green Revolution see www.foodfirst.org .