BIOTECHNOLOGY: A SOLUTION TO WORLD HUNGER?
Carmelo Ruiz-Marrero
Carmelo Ruiz-Marrero
Mr. Ingo Potrykus is angry, furious, livid. In fact, the man's mad as hell.
Potrykus, a Swiss biotechnologist, is the co-inventor of the so-called golden rice, a rice that has been genetically altered so that its grains contain beta carotene, a substance that the human body converts into vitamin A. According to the United Nations, two million children risk blindness due to vitamin A deficiency. The World Health Organization estimates that severe vitamin A deficiency affects 2.8 million children under the age of five worldwide.
Considering this data, Dr. Potrykus' work seems worthy of a Nobel prize, no? But not everyone cheers him on. Activists, like Greenpeace and Vandana Shiva, remain steadfastly opposed to genetically modified (GM) crops, including golden rice, claiming that they won't put an end to world hunger and could actually worsen it. Potrykus has declared that those who try to stop his work on golden rice should stand trial in an international tribunal for crimes against humanity. In his viewpoint, opponents of GM crops are directly responsible for millions of unnecessary deaths in the Third World when they oppose the use of a technology that could save the lives of starving children.
Potrykus and his allies claim that golden rice invalidates all the arguments that have been made against GM crops. The critics say that GM crops are genetically modified to contain traits that have no relevance to the quality or nutritional value of the plant, like for example herbicide resistance. But that's not the case with golden rice, developed specifically and explicitly to improve human nutrition.
Biotech opponents say that GM crops are developed by agribusiness corporations that are moved solely by short-term profit and not by the better interests of humanity. But Potrykus points out that his golden rice was developed by European public research institutions with funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, a non-profit entity.
What about intellectual property rights? Don't they keep the potential benefits of biotech agriculture from reaching the poor? To get over this hurdle, Potrykus worked out agreements with all the corporations that own the dozens of patents that were being potentially infringed by his work on golden rice. Advocates of agricultural biotechnology claim that these agreements demonstrate that the intellectual property rights enforced by international agreements like TRIPs, so intensely criticized by the anti-globalization movement, are not necessarily an obstacle to improving human welfare.
Will the cost of golden rice place it beyond the reach of poor small Third World farmers who need it most? Will it create new forms of dependence? Not at all, Potrykus and his philanthropic backers will distribute it for free.
But the activists remain opposed, alleging that this GM rice is a public relations trojan horse for the biotech industry. Why do they say that? Potrykus cannot fathom why, and supposes that his critics have no legitimate motivations. He and his supporters reason that perhaps the opposition responds to some sinister, cynical ideological agenda against science and progress.
Let's suppose for a moment that the industry is right and that the party-pooper environmentalists are wrong, that GM products are perfectly safe. Will they help fight world hunger then? In order to answer this question we must first discuss what causes people to go hungry in the first place.
Advocates of industrial agriculture and GM foods base their views on world hunger on a bizarre form of mathematics that I like to call Malthusian calculus. In a nutshell: there's too many people and not enough food, and in the years to come there will be more and more people. Therefore, agricultural production must continuously increase if we are to avert a planetary catastrophe.
But, is food really scarce? Is food scarcity really the cause of world hunger? Let's look at India, a country that Malthusian ideologues love to go on and on about. Listening to their alarmist and catastrophist rants one would believe that not enough food is being produced there. But in reality the country has a grain surplus that ranges in the tens of millions of tons.
Commenting on the problem of hunger in her country, world-famous writer Arundhati Roy said in her book "Power Politics" that India today produces more milk, sugar and grain than ever before. In recent years, farmers who planted too much grain found prices plummeting and the government had to step in and buy their surplus, which turned out to be more than it could store or use.
In 2001 the Indian government's warehouses were bloated with 42 million tons of grain. "While the grain rots in government warehouses, 350 million Indian citizens do not have the means to eat a square meal a day", says Roy. “And yet, in March 2000 the Indian government lifted import restrictions on 1,400 commodities, including milk, grain, sugar, cotton, tea, coffee and palm oil. This despite the fact that there was a glut of these products in the market."
Put bluntly, scarcity is a myth. This is not news. Frances Moore Lappe and Joseph Collins told us this three decades ago in their ground-breaking book Food First. At the start of the new century Lappe went to India with her daughter Anna, where they spoke with the man in charge of the country's food distribution and fair-price shops (their exchange is narrated in their recent book Hope's Edge). He proudly boasted to them about India's surpluses, which were the largest in its history. When they asked him how about giving this surplus to his starving compatriots, the poor bureaucrat changed colors and said "Oh no, we couldn't do that. We already give too many subsidies to the poor."
But enough about India. Let's talk now about the USA, the world's breadbasket. If hunger had anything to do with scarcity, then Americans should be the world's best fed people, right? Wrongo. According to the American Journal of Public Health, today 10 million Americans (4 million of them children) go hungry. In the world's richest country, one out of every five children is born in poverty. These statistics are closely monitored by the Oakland-based Food First, a food policy research and advocacy organization inspired by the book with the same title.
As millions of Americans go hungry, overproduction is a real headache for American farmers. The United States is burdened with the cost of stockpiling massive grain and dairy surpluses. As a matter of fact, the American wheat surplus is enough to make 600 pounds of bread a year for each hungry child in the country.
If people are hungry and even starve to death in the midst of absurdly large agricultural surpluses, then one can understand why anti-biotech activists cannot possibly conceive GM foods as an even marginally useful tool in fighting hunger. The solution (or solutions) to the problem lie squarely within the realm of politics and economics. Meanwhile, Potrykus goes about lashing out at his critics.
Potrykus, a Swiss biotechnologist, is the co-inventor of the so-called golden rice, a rice that has been genetically altered so that its grains contain beta carotene, a substance that the human body converts into vitamin A. According to the United Nations, two million children risk blindness due to vitamin A deficiency. The World Health Organization estimates that severe vitamin A deficiency affects 2.8 million children under the age of five worldwide.
Considering this data, Dr. Potrykus' work seems worthy of a Nobel prize, no? But not everyone cheers him on. Activists, like Greenpeace and Vandana Shiva, remain steadfastly opposed to genetically modified (GM) crops, including golden rice, claiming that they won't put an end to world hunger and could actually worsen it. Potrykus has declared that those who try to stop his work on golden rice should stand trial in an international tribunal for crimes against humanity. In his viewpoint, opponents of GM crops are directly responsible for millions of unnecessary deaths in the Third World when they oppose the use of a technology that could save the lives of starving children.
Potrykus and his allies claim that golden rice invalidates all the arguments that have been made against GM crops. The critics say that GM crops are genetically modified to contain traits that have no relevance to the quality or nutritional value of the plant, like for example herbicide resistance. But that's not the case with golden rice, developed specifically and explicitly to improve human nutrition.
Biotech opponents say that GM crops are developed by agribusiness corporations that are moved solely by short-term profit and not by the better interests of humanity. But Potrykus points out that his golden rice was developed by European public research institutions with funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, a non-profit entity.
What about intellectual property rights? Don't they keep the potential benefits of biotech agriculture from reaching the poor? To get over this hurdle, Potrykus worked out agreements with all the corporations that own the dozens of patents that were being potentially infringed by his work on golden rice. Advocates of agricultural biotechnology claim that these agreements demonstrate that the intellectual property rights enforced by international agreements like TRIPs, so intensely criticized by the anti-globalization movement, are not necessarily an obstacle to improving human welfare.
Will the cost of golden rice place it beyond the reach of poor small Third World farmers who need it most? Will it create new forms of dependence? Not at all, Potrykus and his philanthropic backers will distribute it for free.
But the activists remain opposed, alleging that this GM rice is a public relations trojan horse for the biotech industry. Why do they say that? Potrykus cannot fathom why, and supposes that his critics have no legitimate motivations. He and his supporters reason that perhaps the opposition responds to some sinister, cynical ideological agenda against science and progress.
Let's suppose for a moment that the industry is right and that the party-pooper environmentalists are wrong, that GM products are perfectly safe. Will they help fight world hunger then? In order to answer this question we must first discuss what causes people to go hungry in the first place.
Advocates of industrial agriculture and GM foods base their views on world hunger on a bizarre form of mathematics that I like to call Malthusian calculus. In a nutshell: there's too many people and not enough food, and in the years to come there will be more and more people. Therefore, agricultural production must continuously increase if we are to avert a planetary catastrophe.
But, is food really scarce? Is food scarcity really the cause of world hunger? Let's look at India, a country that Malthusian ideologues love to go on and on about. Listening to their alarmist and catastrophist rants one would believe that not enough food is being produced there. But in reality the country has a grain surplus that ranges in the tens of millions of tons.
Commenting on the problem of hunger in her country, world-famous writer Arundhati Roy said in her book "Power Politics" that India today produces more milk, sugar and grain than ever before. In recent years, farmers who planted too much grain found prices plummeting and the government had to step in and buy their surplus, which turned out to be more than it could store or use.
In 2001 the Indian government's warehouses were bloated with 42 million tons of grain. "While the grain rots in government warehouses, 350 million Indian citizens do not have the means to eat a square meal a day", says Roy. “And yet, in March 2000 the Indian government lifted import restrictions on 1,400 commodities, including milk, grain, sugar, cotton, tea, coffee and palm oil. This despite the fact that there was a glut of these products in the market."
Put bluntly, scarcity is a myth. This is not news. Frances Moore Lappe and Joseph Collins told us this three decades ago in their ground-breaking book Food First. At the start of the new century Lappe went to India with her daughter Anna, where they spoke with the man in charge of the country's food distribution and fair-price shops (their exchange is narrated in their recent book Hope's Edge). He proudly boasted to them about India's surpluses, which were the largest in its history. When they asked him how about giving this surplus to his starving compatriots, the poor bureaucrat changed colors and said "Oh no, we couldn't do that. We already give too many subsidies to the poor."
But enough about India. Let's talk now about the USA, the world's breadbasket. If hunger had anything to do with scarcity, then Americans should be the world's best fed people, right? Wrongo. According to the American Journal of Public Health, today 10 million Americans (4 million of them children) go hungry. In the world's richest country, one out of every five children is born in poverty. These statistics are closely monitored by the Oakland-based Food First, a food policy research and advocacy organization inspired by the book with the same title.
As millions of Americans go hungry, overproduction is a real headache for American farmers. The United States is burdened with the cost of stockpiling massive grain and dairy surpluses. As a matter of fact, the American wheat surplus is enough to make 600 pounds of bread a year for each hungry child in the country.
If people are hungry and even starve to death in the midst of absurdly large agricultural surpluses, then one can understand why anti-biotech activists cannot possibly conceive GM foods as an even marginally useful tool in fighting hunger. The solution (or solutions) to the problem lie squarely within the realm of politics and economics. Meanwhile, Potrykus goes about lashing out at his critics.
******
Ruiz-Marrero is a Puerto Rican journalist and environmental educator. He is a Research Associate of the Institute for Social Ecology, and a senior fellow of the Environmental Leadership Program. He is also the director of the Puerto Rico Project on Biosafety (http://bioseguridad.blogspot.com/).
Check out his bilingual blog in issues of ecology, agriculture, biotechnology and globalization: http://www.carmeloruiz.blogspot.com/
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