GM foods: The Tunnel at the Light’s End

Genetically modified food will not reduce hunger. It will only enhance it.
October 16, 2006 was declared the UN World Food Day. The theme for this year—investing in Agriculture for Food Security—is an excellent, if not unimaginative, idea.
The world needs food security. The way to get there is through investing in agriculture. You’d think that’s a
no-brainer. You’d be wrong.
To fully understand why, one needs to dismantle some of the seductive mythology surrounding food’s worldwide demand-and-supply. Across the planet, there’s a glut when it comes to food production—gross agricultural yield has actually increased over the decades. But starvation and malnutrition-related deaths have also steadily kept pace.
At this point, to merely blame the population explosion for demand outstripping supply is to gloss over the gross inequities that keep 854 million people globally [and 320 million in our own country] starving and malnourished. Hunger in the ‘Third World’ is a complex phenomenon. The root causes of hunger are political and economic, rather than technological.
Methodology of Hunger
Globally, 80 per cent of the undernourished children in the developing world live in countries with food surpluses. So why is this happening?
Just look at the way arable land is used. One-fifth, at times even one–third, of the crops grown in the developing world feed grain for livestock consumption, rather than food-grain for human consumption. The livestock, of course, is destined for supermarkets, and the tables of those who can afford it.
While over 60 million tonnes of food-grain is rotting in Food Corporation of India granaries across our country, one out of every fourth Indian goes to bed hungry every day.
The State has Failed
The supply is there, and the demand is there. And if we can’t find a way of getting food from point A to point B, it’s a failure of the Indian State, not a failure of agriculture.
Ten years ago, the first Millennium Development Goal that world leaders pledged to was reducing hunger by half by 2015. Halfway to that deadline, we are nowhere closer. So why is this happening? Just look at how we’re pushing Genetically Modified [GM] food crops as a solution to world hunger. If governments and corporations—it’s difficult to tell the difference these days—worked as hard to end the civil wars, corruption and economic disparities that are behind starvation, we’d end starvation.
From Green to Gene Revolution
GM food’s inflated and exaggerated benefits (see box) notwithstanding, consider the potential hazards linked to it. If the Green Revolution led to the erosion of biodiversity and the erosion of diverse sources of nutrition for the poor, the Gene Revolution promises to unleash a biological Bhopal of biblical proportions.
In 2000, over 300 US supermarket products were found to be tainted with StarLink, a variety of GM corn declared unfit for human consumption. Some 140 million bushels were contaminated. Food processors and grain traders spent around $ 1 billion over six months trying to locate it and get rid of it. Even today traces of StarLink keep showing up occasionally in American corn exports.
The GM crops were designed not because they’re more productive but because they are patentable.
And just last month, Greenpeace found that the same good folk who brought you StarLink were caught contaminating US rice exports to the EU and Middle East. This time it’s LibertyLink, yet another variety declared unfit for human consumption. It boggles the mind. If you were trying to fight world hunger, at least you’d come up with stuff people can actually eat?
Given the various global implications of such an event, the reactions have been swift and severe. The US rice industry is now reeling under product recalls, testing requirements, import restrictions, brand damage, multiple lawsuits—all a result of falling rice prices and cancelled orders in many countries.
How will this happen? It’s quite simple. The GM lobby ‘field tested’ certain crops. These crops contaminated our food supply. That’s plain and simple commercialization of a crop by illegal means. That’s the story. In essence, what the biotech and agrochem industry calls ‘controlled or contained field testing of crops’ is anything but controlled or contained. This article isn’t the space to lift people out of the shameful literacy and criminal ignorance they display on the subject of pollination but, suffice to say ‘field testing’ is contamination on an unimaginable scale.
And what’s happened in the EU and Middle East in these last years isn’t a
by-stander’s account of an incident, it’s a First Information Report of an unfolding crime.
Think about all this. And while you’re thinking about it, consider that unlike most other kinds of scientific accidents, these accidents are forever. Genetically modified organisms that go awry cannot simply be recalled. Once illegal GM crops are in the food chain, removing them takes enormous effort and cost. Once genetic pollution gets into the environment, it mutates, it evolves, but it never degrades. And it can never, ever, be contained.
As a major rice consumer and exporter you’d think that India simply cannot afford to join this Russian roulette. But we’ve already picked up the revolver. The Genetic Engineering Approval Committee, as the name suggests, is lined wall-to-wall with people whose job is to approve Genetic Engineering, not examine it. Not surprisingly, the recently concluded International Rice Congress in Delhi was sponsored by Bayer and Monsanto.
The Tunnel At the End of the Light
Just because publicly-traded corporations introduce it, just because publicly-elected governments approve it, and just because, publicly, broadcast media extols it, GM food isn’t necessarily safe.
It’s not safe for the farmer—GM seeds are more expensive than conventional seeds and, because they are patented, farmers cannot save the new seeds for planting during the next growing season because those seeds belong to the biotech companies.
It’s not safe for our health—the long term safety tests to establish whether or not GM food poses a risk to human health have never been conducted. And GM crops lead to more people use, not less.
It’s not safe for the economy—a 1999 Time magazine poll revealed that close to 60 per cent consumers would avoid GM foods if they were labeled. If consumers don’t want to buy GM food, then those dealing in it are better off as snakeoil salesmen.
GM is simply not safe. It’s clear by now that those pushing GM crops as a solution to world hunger have anything but hunger on their minds.
These crops were designed not because they’re more nutritious but because they help sell more seeds, fertilizers and pesticides. And the message to Indian agriculture is clear—stay away from GM crops or you risk serious long-term economic damage to your market.
If the Indian government, a subsidiary of giant corporate interests, is really interested in ensuring food security for present and future generations of Indians, it’d quickly recognize that GM food is not the light at the end of the tunnel.
It’s the tunnel at the end of the light.
Anantapadmanabhan
The writer is Exec Director, Greenpeace India.