[asia-apec 1784] U.N. Dead Wrong About Engineered Crops

[Anuradha Mittal]

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U.N. Dead Wrong About Engineered Crops

by Anuradha Mittal

Comments about genetically engineered (GE) crops expressed in the
just-released "Human Development Report 2001", the flagship publication 
of the United Nation Development Program (UNDP), and in accompanying 
press statements, reveal a shocking degree of Northern arrogance in tone 
and content.

The authors of the report urge rich countries to put aside their fears 
of genetically engineered (GE) food and help developing nations unlock 
the potential of biotechnology. UNDP head Mark Malloch Brown, praised 
the report, saying that it has moved in a new direction by challenging 
some cherished opinions about what the Third World needs.  Yet as a 
citizen of India I ask, who nominated Mark Malloch Brown, in his New 
York office, to speak for the needs of poor countries and to say what we 
need?

The UNDP report accuses opponents of genetically-modified food of 
ignoring the food needs of the Third World.  It goes on to say that the 
movement is driven by conservationists in rich countries, and claims 
that the current debate mostly ignores the concerns and needs of the 
developing world. Western consumers who do not face food shortages or 
nutritional deficiencies, or work in the fields are more likely to focus 
on food safety and the loss of biodiversity, but farming communities in 
developing countries emphasize potentially higher yields and greater 
nutritional value" of these crops, the authors say.

Obviously the UNDP and Mark Malloch Brown have done only part of their
homework. While they have read up on the genetic engineering debate in 
the U.S. and Europe, they have ignored the even louder debate going on 
in the Third World. In my country, for example, the debate pits mostly
U.S.-trained technocrats, seduced by technological fixes, against farmer 
organizations and consumers who overwhelmingly say no to genetically 
engineered crops.  Surely it is worth noting when the people who are to 
use the modified seeds, and those who are to eat the modified food, want 
nothing to do with them?

This UNDP report further fails to acknowledge that despite 
overproduction, even a country like the United States faces massive 
problems of hunger with over 36 millions Americans food insecure and 
ignores the lives of millions of farm workers in the fields of this 
country, while converting all Americans into consumers of unlabelled 
modified foods.

The report rehashes the old myth of feeding the hungry through miracle
technology, the mantra that has been chanted forever, whether it was to
push pesticides or genetic engineering. The famous green revolution of
Northern technology sent to the South may have increased food 
production, at the cost of poisoning our earth, air and water. But it 
failed to alleviate hunger.  Of 800 million hungry people in the world 
today, an estimated 250-300 million live in India alone. Its not that 
India does not produce enough food to meet the need of its hungry, it's 
the policies that work against the working poor--slashing of social 
safety nets, for example, at the behest of Northern agencies like the 
IMF, that are the root cause of today's hunger.

Over 60 million tons of excess food grain-unsold-- because the hungry 
are too poor to buy it--rotted in India last year, while farmers in 
desperation burnt the crops they could not sell, and resorted to selling 
their body parts like kidneys or committing suicide, to end the cycle of 
poverty. A higher, genetically engineered crop yield would have done 
nothing for them. And if the poor in India cannot buy two meals a day, 
how will they purchase nutritionally rich crops such as rice engineered 
to contain Vitamin A?  No technological fix can help change the 
situation. Only political commitment can.

The report compares efforts to ban GM foods with the banning of the
pesticide DDT, which was dangerous to humans but was effective in 
killing the mosquitoes which spread malaria. The choice presented to the 
Third World then was the choice of death from DDT or malaria. Its 
appalling that even today the development debate in the North can only 
offer the Third World the option of dying from hunger, or from loss of 
livelihoods or unsafe foods.

The North ignored the cries from the South at the time of the DDT 
debate, that if our national health budgets were not slashed, perhaps we 
could deal with malaria differently. Malaria, like hunger, is a disease 
of poverty. When economic conditions improve, it disappears, just as it 
did in the U.S. and Italy. Why is the focus never on the root causes of 
the problem, but always on the symptom. Once again, UNDP has decided to 
focus on the symptom of hunger and not the root cause of poverty.

Yes, a debate that affects communities in the Third World should not be
driven solely by conservationists in the rich countries. It should also 
not be driven by corporate apologists like Mr. Brown.  It would do UNDP 
good to learn that the anti-GE debate is also driven by civil society in 
the Third World, which is concerned about corporate concentration in our 
food system, loss of livelihoods as corporations gain control of our 
biodiversity and seeds, and that several of our countries, including Sri 
Lanka, Thailand, Brazil, Mexico, and China, among others, have taken 
national action and imposed a moratorium on some or all GE crops.  If 
UNDP indeed cares about the Third World, it would do much better by 
respecting the sovereign will of our nations.

+++++++++++
Anuradha Mittal, a native of India, is co-director of Food First/The
Institute for Food and Development Policy (http://www.foodfirst.org).

Join the fight against hunger. For more information contact foodfirst at foodfirst.org.

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