Tomorrow Obama is expected to make a big speech in Ghana, announcing a new American policy for food security in the Global South. There's a tiny bit of good in what he will announce - and a whole lot of bad. On the occasion of its Italy meeting, the G8 released a statement on food security that recognizes the need and the urgency for action. They say:
Effective food security actions must be coupled with adaptation and mitigation measures in relation to climate change, sustainable management of water, land, soil and other natural resources, including the protection of biodiversity.
That much is good, but sadly, they also call for more free trade, even after the ample amount of proof we already have that free trade policies (particularly coupled with the government subsidies in developed countries) harm food security rather than helping it. Their failure - and Obama's failure - to recognize the problems caused by free trade is nothing short of tragic.
So where's the good part I spoke of? Well, the U.S. is shifting from a "give a man a fish" strategy to a "teach a man to fish" strategy. Instead of shipping American-grown food to the developed world, we will focus on helping needy countries produce enough to feed themselves. And that much is fantastic - almost.
The problem is - and this is a big problem - the U.S. has no interest in taking the scientific, peer-reviewed, global consensus approach to global agriculture. We'd prefer to go a different route, one which has been dismissed by experts but embraced by multinational corporations.
More below... |
| If you want a very complete picture of what needs to be done vs. what we are doing, I recommend the book Hope Not Hype by Jack Heinemann. I'm only a few chapters in but it reads as an indictment of genetically modified organisms. Heinemann is no anti-GMO activist. Far from it. He's a professor of genetics and molecular biology. Knowing his background, I half-expected him to write a ringing endorsement of GMOs, but he did not.
Heinemann was one of the authors of the IAASTD report, a three year study and report done by the World Bank and the UN. The group was led by a Nobel Laureate (Robert Watson) and it included 400 scientists from around the world. In Heinemann's opinion - and in my opinion - the study is the single most comprehensive and trustworthy study of its kind. IAASTD stands for International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science, and Technology for Development. In other words, they were looking at what science, technology, and knowledge could solve the agricultural problems we face today.
Here are a few high-level conclusions he makes in his book, which is based on the IAASTD report:
Business as usual in agriculture is not a viable option. Significant change does not require radical action, but ignoring the problem will have terrible consequences.
The forms of biotechnology offered by developed countries are not appropriate for the rest of the world, and the emphasis on research and development securing private wealth is frequently at the expense of both sustainability and social goals.
Developed countries are increasingly bidding their high per capita fuel demands against the needs for food in developing countries, and subjecting poorer societies to the excesses of subsidized industrial agriculture by undercutting local markets with consequential threats to food security and loss of rural livelihoods.
The solutions lie in a return to the biotechnologies that have been and will continue to be successful at both providing enough high-quality food and allowing local innovation, ownership, and control. -p. 19
Heinemann and the IAASTD authors define 'biotechnology' as "all forms of manipulation of living things." While that is quite different from what we typically think of as "biotechnology" (i.e. GMOs), he notes that reserving the term for GMOs (which he refers to as "modern biotechnology") is "disparaging to the high-quality and sophisticated science and technology that has nothing to do with modern biotechnology."
So what's wrong with GMO's? A few things. He first takes a look at their purported benefits:
1. Increased Yield.
To date, we don't have any definitive proof that GMOs bring increased yield. In fact, no GMOs are engineered to produce increased yield. Rather, they are engineered to tolerate herbicide or produce their own insecticides. Presumably, if they can do so successfully, and you combine the herbicide-tolerant varieties with its complementary herbicide, then via reduced weeds or pests, you could produce a higher yield. However, that does not play out quite so well in the real world. As Heinemann says "There are anecdotal reports of both yield increases and decreases." Your success with GMOs depend upon the crop you are growing, the place you are growing it in, and the growing conditions that year. He says:
After a dozen years of commercial planting of GM crops, including maize, cotton, soybean, and oilseed rape, there is no evidence of sustained, reliable, or consistent increases in yield. In fact, there have been strong indications that the adoption of GM crops has resulted in yield declines. - p.9
2. Pesticide Reduction
This is an interesting one. He says it depends upon which country you look at, and which crop. Some countries don't use that much pesticide to begin with, so GM crops don't result in a decrease. And even in countries that do use a lot of pesticides (like the U.S.), it varies from crop to crop. An example he gives is corn vs. cotton. In 2005, insecticides were applied to 23% of maize acreage cultivated in 19 states surveyed by the USDA. However, 71% of cotton acreage was treated with pesticides that year. The Bt trait did not result in much decrease in additional pesticide use for corn, whereas it did result in a decrease in additional pesticide use for cotton. I say additional pesticide use because Bt itself IS a pesticide - the corn is producing it and it isn't being sprayed on, but it's still there. Another point to note is that pesticide use reductions, when achieved, may not be permanent benefits as pests can evolve resistance or new pests may arrive in the future.
3. Stress tolerance
Most of the time, this refers to promises of GM crops that are drought tolerant. An associated problem is salinity, which is especially a problem on irrigated land. Heinemann is doubtful that we will see stress tolerant GMOs in the future. He says:
All stress-tolerant GMOs remain promises rather than products despite a dozen years of commercial GM agriculture and over 25 years of research... This is probably because the physiology of stress tolerance involves the interactions of many different genes working in a complex, environmentally-responsive network... genetic engineering is unlikely to produce reliable drought tolerance in most crops grown in actual field conditions because it is unable to mix and match so many genes at once.
These alone are not the only problems cited about GMOs. They are also what he calls "locally black box" - that is, the farmers on the ground do not understand the technology, nor can they innovate on their own. The implication here is that technologies that can be taught and understood and manipulated by farmers would be better because farmers in each area can improve the specific technologies they require for their specific crops and growing conditions.
Another problem is the profit-motive of the biotech companies. Of course, a for-profit company is expected to act in a way to maximize profit, but leaving feeding the world up to them is not a reliable way to make it happen unless, for some reason, feeding the world happens to be profitable. In this case, the biotech companies don't often focus on the specific crops subsistence farmers in the developing world rely on, and, because GMOs require patent protection, the biotech companies have problems doing business in countries that lack the legal structure to enforce intellectual property law.
So what does Heinemann and the IAASTD report recommend instead? He says:
Alternative production systems, notably those based on agroecological methods, can be competitive with or superior to conventional and genetic engineering-based methods for productivity... Fortunately, these methods not only lower the environmental impacts of agriculture, they may also reverse past damage. The World Health Organization concluded that "[t]ransforming the agricultural systems of rural farmers by introducing technologies that integrate agro-ecological processes in food production, while minimizing adverse effects to the environment, is key to sustainable agriculture."
Agroecological methods, which include but are not restricted to those under the organic market certification label, significantly reduce the application of externalities such as petroleum-dependent fertilizers, improve water use efficiency, and restore to the soil those nutrients that are not replaced by fertilizer. - p.13
Translation: Skip the GMOs. Go organic.
He also notes that finding the perfect way to grow food is never going to be the solution alone because it doesn't occur in a political, social, or economic vacuum. Some of the solution can be found in farmer participatory breeding and extension services. However, the rich countries of the world reversing their trade policies that screw over the poor countries also has to be part of the answer.
The point to take away from Heinemann's book, the IAASTD report, and Obama's announcement tomorrow is that experts are basically in agreement on how we can work towards solving global hunger, and Obama is ignoring those experts. Instead, he is listening to the same old, business-as-usual, save the world with biotech and free trade crowd. And that's tragic, because there are a billion hungry people in this world whose lives depend on the U.S. and other developed countries finding the right answer. |
