Of all arguments in support of genetically modified crops, perhaps the most
compelling is their potential to ease global hunger. In a world where 800
million people are chronically without enough to eat, shouldn't
bio-engineered plants be given a chance to make a difference? Shouldn't this
life-or-death question trump doubts about unseen health effects, potential
creation of super weeds, and so on?
Perhaps it should. But as a new report from the United Nations Food and
Agriculture Organization makes clear, GM crops have thus far delivered
negligible benefits to the world's poor, while enriching the creators and
their agribusiness clients in rich nations. There is little indication that
these trends will change. And so the notion that a Gene Revolution will take
up where the Green Revolution left off seems fanciful at best. Consider
these key findings by the FAO:
The crops that have come into production since 1987 -- corn, cotton,
canola and soybeans -- are important chiefly to agriculture on an industrial
scale. There has been comparatively little interest in genetically
strengthening the crops most significant to the world's
agriculture-dependent poor, such as cassava, millet, sorghum and rice.
Resistance to insects and herbicides, the primary traits spliced into crop
genes, create convenience and cost savings for big growers in systems where
the goal is steadily supplying the grain trains and barges. Subsistence
farmers would be more interested in biotech solutions addressing drought,
poor soils and suboptimal nutritional content.
Moving biotech's benefits from the well-fed to the poor would require at
least a massive investment in public research and development programs, with
virtually free transfer of the results. But private investment depends on
firm protection of property rights in the new plants.
Even if a biotech company could agree to donate, say, a genetically
enriched, pest-resistant strain of millet to the developing world, most
recipient farmers would still be hampered by poor access to land, water,
credit and markets.
It should also be noted that simple modifications of traditional farming
practice -- modified planting strategies, for example, and integrated pest
management -- might do as much as genetic engineering for farmers in poor
countries. Moreover, these techniques lack what may be biotech's biggest
downside risk -- increased reliance on monocultures, with their built-in
vulnerability to the next new plague.
Worth remembering, too, is the plausible argument that world hunger today is
less a consequence of scarce food stocks than of the economic and political
forces that control their distribution. Of course, these same forces dictate
the dispersal of biotechnology and its benefits. Barring some dramatic
change in those arrangements, any promise that brave new crops will save the
world's starving people is likely to remain as empty as their rice bowls.Star Tribune:
