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Biotechnology: A False Sense of Food Security
In his Foreign Policy essay "Attention Whole Foods Shoppers," Robert Paarlberg paints the movement for sustainable food production and security as a Western elite preoccupation. He writes, "From Whole Foods recyclable cloth bags to Michelle Obama's organic White House garden, modern eco-foodies are full of good intentions... Food has become an elite preoccupation in the West, ironically, just as the most effective ways to address hunger in poor countries have fallen out of fashion."
In the same breath that he criticizes these "Western elites" who support sustainable food production, Paarlberg espouses the very Western, elitist argument that the only definition of "good," "modern," or "improved" agricultural inputs are the ones created, patented and sold by big Western biotech companies such as Monsanto, where Paarlberg serves on the Biotechnology Advisory Council (PDF).
Paarlberg seems to believe that the only two options for global agriculture are dirt poor subsistence farmers barely eking out a living or mass biotech production on the Green Revolution scale. But between these two extremes is a middle ground: A diverse and robust rural sector that includes small and medium farmers serving local communities and nations along with appropriate technologies that help re-balance the mix between locally sourced and imported food options. In my role at American Jewish World Service (AJWS), I see the wisdom of this third way set of approaches every day through initiatives like Lambi Fund of Haiti's home-grown seed banks.
The insistence that "modernization" only has one meaning and one possible approach puts Paarlberg out of step not only with many of the people on the ground actually living with this issue every day, but also with the current consensus among experts in the field as laid out by the findings of the International Science, Technology and Development (IAASTD) initiative. This process - a three-year intergovernmental research and analysis project on the state of global agriculture conducted under the co-sponsorship of the FAO, GEF, UNDP, UNEP, UNESCO, the World Bank and WHO - came to almost the exact opposite conclusion of Paarlberg's.
Wherever one stands on the issue of biotech in agriculture - and people of good will can disagree - the notion that all biotech practices are inherently "good" or "modern" whereas all non-biotech practices, such as indigenous seed banking and hybrid cultivation, composting and drip irrigation, are inherently "bad" or "backward" comes across as more ideological than scientific.
The first and biggest proponent of non-biotech food security is Via Campesina, a global social movement that represents millions of peasant and small-scale farmers in hundreds of developing countries. People who suffer from lack of food around the developing world do not need Western ‘eco-foodies' to tell them that local food sovereignty is the best way to feed their families. They already know it, and knew it long before "locavorism" came to these shores.
No one is seriously suggesting that the current system is working. Paarlberg is right that farmers need good inputs (seeds, fertilizer, etc) as well as the existence of basic infrastructure (roads, power, etc) to succeed. But he undercuts his argument by failing to discuss the many factors that led to the current situation, other than a throwaway line about food aid, with which I heartily agree and wish Paarlberg would expound upon.
AJWS is paying particular attention to this aspect of hunger issues in Haiti, where huge influxes of US-subsidized bio-tech produced rice will continue to undercut local farmers' ability to feed their country if something isn't done soon. AJWS is asking Congress to support common-sense aid to Haiti - you can make your voice heard by signing our petition.
Most can agree with Paarlberg that food aid has not helped hungry people in the developing world and that we must switch from investing in sending bags of food to the continent to sending real support for agricultural development assistance. AJWS strongly supports US foreign assistance for sustainable agricultural initiatives, but only when they are supported and led by the people on the ground. People who really care about feeding the world's hungry cannot create situations that just replace the old dependency on foreign food aid with a new dependency on inputs that are wholly controlled biotech corporations.
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26 Comments so far
Show All"such as indigenous seed banking and hybrid cultivation, composting and drip irrigation, are inherently "bad" or "backward" comes across as more ideological than scientific."
I'm a "bad" "bad" man! Gregor Mendel was probably a better scientist than any monsanto have.
The most effective way to fight the truth, when it hurts your cause, is to hang the truth with labels like "elite", and before you know it, people like me who work every day are being called "chardonnay sipping do-gooders".
Give me a break from big corporate lying profit sucking "do-gooders", whose mission is to make money, and who do that by parading as saviors of the world. Being a humble savior of the world deflects attention away from the real role of destroyer of earth's diversity.
Guess what? There is no way to save the world. There couldn't be, when we currently grow enough food on this planet to feed nine billion, while our population hovers around six billion, and billions go to bed hungry each night. With that, we must face the fact that the politics of who eats and who starves has nothing to do with crop yields. This would be true even if frankenfood seed yielded more food per acre, which it does not.
Precisely, it is the banksters in places like New York, London and Tokyo who determine who gets resources, including food.
You mean the bankers actually collaborate with Monsanto and the likes?
Wow! A fine article dealing with food issues on CD. I'm sure stranger things have happened, but anyway, this was a pleasant and informative surprise.
I am not a farmer but I do garden as one of my favorite hobbies so I only know so much about GMO biotech foods. That does not mean that I am prepared to accept the pro-GMO propaganda that Monsanto and companies like them poison the airwaves with. For one thing, they claim that GMO reduces the usage of pesticides and in effect reduces oil usage but if that is supposed to be true, then why aren't these corporations standing up to "drill baby drill" ? I challenge the pro-GMO hacks to prove to me that GMO biotech actually reduces dependency on oil and give a full explanation as to why they then can't or won't stand up and say that with GMO, there is no need for offshore drilling. I don't trust GMO biotech garbage and I suspect that it is being used as an experiment to develop the next set of mind controlling food as if putting corn and pesticides in everything didn't do enough to damage people's abilities to think and reason well. I will stick to gardening with my neighbors and maintaining the crops as regularly as possible. It is great exercise and real food security.
It might be a good idea for people that are not farmers to stop repeating this nonsense about GMO seeds and crops going to ruin the world. Real farmers have used those products for a number of years now, and the benefits are proven or they would not buy the expensive seed. Yes it is true that pesticides and herbicides are not needed at all, or in small amounts in some cases. There is also a fuel saving due to much less need to go over the land with more operations. We are about as likely to go back to small subsistence farming as to go back to Mom & Pop grocery, hardware, and clothing stores. Monsanto could not sell their seeds if farmers did not ask for them and they will sell non-GMO seeds if one wants them. In fact, they have to be planted as a refuge to keep pests from becoming resistant. I have been farming for over 50 years so do have some knowledge of goes on out in the country.
Good response.
GMO seeds are not forced on any farmer as the left wing on CD seems to claim. Today's NYT has an article about how farming with GMO seeds are in some trouble because weeds are now becoming resistant to Roundup. The left wing just doesn't understand that GMO soybeans allow for no-till farming. Direct planting of soybeans into corn stubble is just not really possible without GMO seeds.
Going back to old practices of intensive tilling, more spraying and hand cutting to get rid of weeds is more energy intensive and causes much more erosion. I can't see why the left wing just doesn't get that?
I am amazed at the leftists who scream anti-GMO stuff but have no knowledge about farming.
I use gm seed and I no-till. Most farmers now understand that 100% glyphosate (roundup) is a poor recipe for weed control year after year. One or more additional chemicals should be used now and then to avoid resistance to roundup becoming a major problem. Today there are a great many options. In the old days we used pounds per acre of atrazine. Now, with newer chemicals, we sometimes get by with a fraction of an OUNCE per acre! I believe it is possible to no-till without gm, but the timing of herbicide applications becomes much more critical. If a windy or rainy period occurs at the wrong time, then yield losses and weed escapes are more likely.
Ooohhh, but just think! If you had several other ways of producing any raw material on your farm that has market value, such as some of or all of or others not listed of the possible alternative crops I mentioned above...it might not matter so much if weather conditions don't cooperate with you to produce the expected yields of that one crop of corn you need to get to keep the bank from foreclosing on your farm again this year because you can't make the payments on your $100,000 ferrari of a tractor...
But you don't have several ways of producing other income streams to protect your rear-end, because you're too busy farming 300 acres of just corn, and sitting in one big-assed tractor all day, every day, just staring at those rows and rows of corn, and waiting for some d+ck in Chicago to tell you your corn ain't gonna sell for more than the cost of producing it, and that's if your lucky, cause the alternative is to sell it for less than it costs to produce it, and that's why you keep cashing those subsidy checks.
It is your myth that you need gmo seed for no-till planting. The world has plenty of organic farms using no-till methods. Besides, roundup and insecticides sterilize the soil, killing off the life in the soil that makes it fertile. You then have to follow up with chemical fertilizers. None of this is any good. Trying to make planet earth into a food factory will ultimately fail, and "who could've known?" seems to be the cry that works for our so called leaders, whether it's terrorists flying jets into buildings, levies failing to hold back storm floods, or oil rigs spewing hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil into the sea. Who coulda known? That's what the gmo geniuses will be saying when massive crop failures occur, or when people start being born lame or blind from the latest genetic modification experiment in prenatal vitamins, or whatever it might be coming down the pike.
I am no farmer but I looked up more information tilling. Here are the basics I found:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tilling_%28agriculture%29
Frankly, I think that we need to bring back the older and truly safe methods of farming. For all our young people out here in the heart land who are unemployed, the least that farmers could do is hire them and give them some real work in farming. That would sure beat keeping them unemployed and obese.
"Going back to old practices of intensive tilling, more spraying and hand cutting to get rid of weeds is more energy intensive and causes much more erosion."
Real farmers don't say that. Instead of relying on GMO to do your work for you while you sit like a HEEHAW CLOWN watching Fox Noose, some hard work of tilling, hand cutting, and frequently checking up on your crops is a great exercise for both the body and mind. A brain whacked nincompoop like you could do some hard labor. You are not a real farmer.
Stanley__there are many farmers like myself that cannot stand to listen to the Fox propaganda, as farmers have brains or they would not still be in business. I would love to see you come out and hand cut the weeds on 300 acres of crops. I have done that type of work for many years, and believe me there is still plenty of exercise left on the farms even with the new labor saving methods. I have seen corn planted on this farm with a 2 row planter pulled by horses, and now we just finished planting GMO corn with a 36 row planter using no pesticides and none will be needed. Some of you people that have never set foot on a real farm need some education. Farming is not going to regress 50 or more years any faster than all the rest of our society will.
Kernelz, I understand that a lot of work for one farmer alone can be very difficult without those modern gizmos to assist. I may not have been a farmer but I know that there has been a lot of foul play going on in the last 50 years in the formation of factory farming and later GMO crops to add to it all at the expense of wiping out the small farmers.
My niece saw what farming in Europe was like and she has a lot to say about Europeans getting together and willing to learn both the old and the new methods and try all ways out instead of relying on some faith-based "free market" cookie cutter approach. That explains why there are far more small farms still standing in Europe and part of why Europeans are far healthier.
All this individualist silliness is not dominant in Europe as it is in the US. Furthermore, unlike the US, the European government does not play the cheating game of subsidizing Big Agri to my knowledge. I know government here in the US is cheating by unfairly subsidizing the corporate farmers at the expense of overtaxing and persecuting the remaining small farmers and it is wrong.
I have come across even progressives who claim that they can grow a farmland completely on their own without any assistance or team work and I know that they are wrong. However, at the same time, there is ample proof that nothing beats real team work and labor and no amount of changing this or that technologies in farming or the crops themselves will work because in the end, all these shortcuts do is result in foods deprived of the essential nutrients and replaced with bad chemicals even if it's not harmful upfront. I believe in putting quality first over profiteering and all this individualist silliness. Furthermore, all this profiteering comes from government spoiling farmers with corporate subsidies.
I respect your years of work as a farmer but please try to understand our outrage. If you were a small farmer but got wiped out and were put at the mercy of the corporations, at least state so. In any case, you should consider weighing in on profiteering like mad at the expense of people's health versus being one of those truly brave farmers who is ready to put quality first.
Sure, you might not be spraying pesticides with that GMO corn, but how about all of the petroleum-based chemical nitrogen fertilizers that leach into streams, rivers, and aquifers, polluting water and causing ecological damage? You can't plant large-scale corn mono-crops year after year on the same fields without that. Also, what about herbicide applications? Do you apply herbicides to your corn fields at some point between seeding and when the corn reaches a foot or two in height? Do you spray fungicides on your fields to combat fungal diseases in your corn crop?
So what if you don't use pesticides! You still use all the other toxic chemical applications that are required to prop up your crop. If you didn't have these chemical miracles, your crops would routinely fail! You have nothing left in your soil to feed the plant, to allow it to thrive, to fight disease and pest infestations with natural plant immunity, and the nutritional quality of what you grow is negligible as a result. So you have another subsidy-funded wonder of modern technology called a GMO corn farm! That's socialized farming for us! And all that corn is making us all fat, stupid and lazy! A bunch of fat sugar junkies plugged face first into the televised equivalent of an IV drip of straight corn syrup...complete with arteries clogged up with the remnants of corn-fed feedlot beef! And about that labor issue...no one would ever attempt to farm 300 plus acres with mainly human-driven labor! Will you work your whole farming career simply to get bigger tractors on interest? That is exactly why farms should be smaller! What do big farms that have been weaned off the petroleum tit look like? 100 or so acres or less. Diversified. Multiple crops...grains, vegetables, animals, fruits, honey, woodlots, leased hunting, micro-dairy, nursery crops, christmas trees, medicinal herbs, seed crops. Farms that can employ families again, sustain local communities...educate young people with a wide variety of skill sets, return biodiversity to ag lands...birds, insects, amphibians, reptiles, mammals, flowers, herbs, shrubs and trees. There is no real argument for industrial farming that will stand. We have 10% or greater unemployment in this country. We buy our food from South America and China. Your corn fuels factories producing packaged garbage that people happen to eat. Sorry sir, but most of us, when given the facts, would choose the type of farmstead set-up and scale and economy that built this nation up until the mid twentieth century in a heartbeat. We want our kids to play in the fields, not be poisoned by them.
stewardess__I guess you think all we do is raise corn to poison the population. Most of the corn people eat is sweet corn, not GMO field corn, which goes into livestock feed or is exported to other countries. It so happens we have had a dairy operation, beef cattle running on native pasture, wheat, chickens, and always a large garden. Our children grew up having 4-H projects of all kinds and did not spend all of their time out in poison cornfields. The GMO fields are much safer to be in than fields that are sprayed one or two times and have insecticide in the soil also. There are thousands of farmers raising a variety of crops and livestock so do not be so concerned about industrial agriculture as there is room for both types. It is wrong to paint all farmers except small organic types as industrial polluters. As for wearing out the soil, the residue from high yields builds the soil up and keeps it from wind and water erosion such as we had to a great degree with low yielding crops. We now use minimum or no till, which saves labor and fuel, and improves soil structure.Our farm uses both sprinkler and gravity (pipe) irrigation, and we do the labor ourselves on the gated pipe land as it is impossible to find anyone who will do that kind of hard work. Your dream of all of these people coming out to work in the fields is not realistic, as immigrants are the only ones interested in that.
Maybe farmers who raise a lot of corn don't in their hearts want to poison and fatten up the population but their zeal for profiteering blinds them from realizing that too much corn, GMO or otherwise, guzzles up water and fossil fuels and fattens up the populace as a result of including it in almost every food. If it were not for Reagan's policies of enriching the agri-businesses at the expense of the small farmer with Clinton to continue it, GMO would be nowhere that it is today.
Originally gmo corn was mainly for livestock feed, but now it is used in ubiquitous food additives. Ingredients to avoid in processed foods: corn oil, corn syrup, high fructose corn syrup, corn starch, corn meal. Besides, most of the canola oil on the market is gmo, and soy itself, and soy food additives.
There is nothing safe about Roundup, to which weeds are becoming resistant anyway, and nothing green about chemical fertilizers.
Thanks for raising the warning on Canola oil in addition to soy. The Asian market stores in my area have loads of canola and soy oil. I take it that the well known brands are most likely GMO while the unknown brands aren't.
The only way to know it isn't gmo is to buy organic. I recently read that some 70 percent of soy in the market is gmo.
A helpful site: www.truefoodnow.org
Also, there is no gmo peanut, at least not yet, so I love using peanut oil. I keep it in the fridge in a squatty lidded jar, so I can easily spoon out the amount needed for a recipe, and it doesn't go rancid. You can use it for really hot frying, in baked recipes, or for salad dressings, anything. It tastes great and it's an unsaturated fat, doesn't raise your cholesterol. Olive oil is for everything else, especially now that there is the Texas Olive Ranch brand. Of course you would look for something closer to home. Toasted sesame oil is great in Asian recipes, and one time I used the plain untoasted sesame oil to saute some veggies. It tasted really good, kind of buttery.
If the benefits have been there for years, we wouldn't be seeing this ongoing controversy to begin with. We can easily go back to small farming without GMO and history has proven it. Monsanto could not have sold its seeds had they not conspired with Big Pharma to "medicate" their seeds and with Big Media to brainwash the farmers into buying proprietary seeds. Now why does Monsanto continue to go out of their way to crush the spreading of non-GMO seeds? I have met dozens of farmers and not a single one of them who got into this GMO scam have gone on debt free. Some of them supported those agri giants and some haven't but either way, they have been unable to tell me that they are free of corporate slavery. Even as a gardener, I was able to grow truly healthy vegetables and prepare delicious meals for myself, my guests, and others who I would donate my food products to. I could compete with a GMO farmer in food growing contest and win hands down on health and quality. A few million more like myself and Monsanto and the likes would disappear into the twilight zone and you would be a true farmer to be proud of.
Timi Gerson, you mention food sovereignty in your article yet your title still uses the term food security. We need to stop thinking in terms of food security and listen to La Via Campesina when they say that food sovereignty is the key to building healthy, sustainable and democratic food systems. Don't perpetuate what you claim to be against.
let's get those gardens growing!
Thanks for all the comments, it's a good conversation! I wanted to clarify that I agree with Maggie2006stl that food sovereignty is the right approach. For me, I don't think the term food security is a defacto "dirty word" though. Food security is just the broader concept (everyone has enough food) whereas food sovereignty is the "how" everyone gets enough food (through democratic, sustainable, locally and regionally-based diverse systems). I agree the term has been abused, but it is one people are familiar with so I think it's okay to use it to meet people where they are and then explain what real food security looks like (i.e. food sovereignty).
The thing I found most ironic about the Paarlberg piece is that the very movement he accuses of being "elitist and Western" was in fact founded and led by the peasant farmers in Via Campesina and around the world. I've met and worked with many Via Campesina partners worldwide in this job and in my previous work on fair trade/global justice issues. I triple dog dare Paarlberg to go to a meeting of any of national campesino organizations in the Global South that belong to this social movement and find a so-called "Western eco-foodie." These are the people who get their hands dirty every day and my organization's core philosophy is that they are the folks we should be listening to.
I recently read the Viking in the Wheat Field by Susan Dworkin about University of Minnesota scientist Bent Skovmand and his quest to preserve seed collections, as well as improve yields and disease resistance in grain collections all over the world. Clearly demonizing biotechnology or scientists who have tried to improve nutrition by hybridizing grains and even targeting specific genes for better yields and resistance to disease is not a well thought out or complete argument. As a supporter of small local agriculture and organic foods, as well as, a scientist who has done genetic research, I think the message about biotechnology is that is isn't a complete answer and definitely in the hands of a for profit corporation whose motivation is different than that of the scientist it can lead to disastrous results. A little like the comment from "Jurassic Park" where the mathemetician played by Jeff Goldblum states, " I'll tell you the problem with the scientific power that you're using here: it didn't require any discipline to attain it. You read what others had done and you took the next step. You didn't earn the knowledge for yourselves, so you don't take any responsibility... for it. You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could and before you even knew what you had you patented it and packaged it and slapped it on a plastic lunchbox, and now you're selling it, you want to sell it!"