GM Crops Will Not Help Feed The World

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GM Crops Will Not Help Feed The World

 

 

Largely, genetic technologies will help feed the profitsof big corporations.

Public opposition to genetically modified foods has been a stumbling block to

the commercialisation of GM crops and animals. The agri-biotech industry is

hoping GM foods with ``consumer friendly'' traits might overcome some of this

opposition.

But they have also been running big advertising campaigns in an attempt to

convince the public that GM foods will be required to ``feed the world''. These

are the kinds of predictable arguments being aired at the International Congress

of Genetics in Melbourne.

In reality, the new genetic technologies will largely be used to feed the power

and profits of agri-food corporations, and they are more likely to exacerbate

rather than alleviate the problems of widespread hunger and malnutrition in the

Third World.

GM products are primarily being developed to fit into large-scale,

chemical-intensive, mechanised and capital-intensive farming systems.

Any increase in yields of crop and animal products will be headed for its usual

destination: well-off consumers.

Research and development of GM products is largely aimed at adapting crops and

animals to the requirements of the global food industries. For example,

producing non-softening fruits for long-distance transportation so well-off

consumers can have access to year-round supplies of out-of-season fruits.

Genetic technologies are also facilitating the rapid corporate integration and

concentration of the food system, as a handful of corporations move towards the

ownership and effective control of every stage of the global food system. One

such strategy for monopoly control is the patenting of all GM crops, with the

aim of preventing farmers from saving and replanting their own seeds.

Overall, genetic technologies are facilitating a shift from a

chemical-industrial to what I call a ``genetic-corporate'' form of agriculture -

and this food system is undermining the food security of the world's poor and

malnourished.

Widespread hunger already exists today, in the context of a global oversupply of

food. This is one of the cruellest ironies of the contemporary era. Most

countries with the greatest incidence of poverty and hunger are net exporters of

food. Growing more food can, in fact, exacerbate food insecurity for the world's

poor depending on how, where and by whom this food is produced.

Genetically engineered crops and animals further threaten the food security of

the poor in a number of ways. First, to the extent that they enable large-scale,

chemical-industrial farms to increase their productivity or profitability, this

competitive advantage will enable the further squeezing out of small-scale

farmers.

Second, GM crops may accelerate the erosion of farm labouring work in poor rural

areas through the further introduction of labour-replacing technologies.

Third, by engineering crops to be sterile, and buying out smaller seed

companies, agri-food corporations aim to diminish the availability of unpatented

and self-reproducing seeds.

Proponents of GM food have celebrated the engineering of Vitamin A rice

(so-called ``Golden Rice'') as an example of a crop that - if and when it is

made freely available in a decade or so - will help alleviate malnutrition in

the Third World. Here is a breath-taking example of what I call the ``ideology

of genetic precision''.

Such arguments effectively promote the idea that malnutrition is the result of

the nutritional inadequacy of non-modified foods, and can be alleviated through

the nutritional modification of these foods, rather than the result of a lack of

access to an adequate and diverse diet.

This isn't to deny that genetic technologies could be used to modify traditional

crops in ways that may benefit small-scale, capital-poor farmers. But that is to

miss the big picture in terms of the primary direction of GE research, and in

terms of the primary causes of hunger and malnutrition.

What is actually required is a redistribution of fertile land, of incomes and of

economic power, rather than access to genetic products.

There is an obscene arrogance in the idea that GM crops will ``feed the world'',

or that the poor need to be fed by us. For in reality, poor people and

communities around the world will either feed themselves, or they will not feed

at all.

Genetic-corporate agriculture is in fact a system for feeding on the world

rather than for feeding the world.

It is about corporations and well-off consumers continuing to feed on the food,

the cheap labour and other extractable resources of the Third World; about

large-scale industrial producers consuming and displacing more small-scale and

subsistence producers and rural communities; and about transnational agri-food

corporations feeding on the work of more farmers by swallowing up and patenting

the seeds and knowledge developed by traditional farmers over thousands of

years.

Dr Gyorgy Scrinis is a research associate in the Globalism Institute at RMIT

University.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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