Funferal

Food and famine

There’s an interesting piece in the latest edition of Steven Talbott’s Netfutures newsletter dealing with food, famine, and biotechnology. This quote, from Susan Lindee, skewers some of the simplistic arguments for biotechnology responses, and places the argument, properly, back in a critical framework:

People can starve when the grain elevators are full; they can have enough to eat when crop yields are disastrous. India, for example, has in recent years faced dual crises of both overproduction of food and profound malnutrition. By December 2000, millions of tons of wheat and rice stocks were rotting in India’s granaries, while 1.5 million children were dying annually of diseases linked to malnutrition. Promoters of genetically modified organisms often claim that anyone opposed to transgenic crops is turning a blind eye to the needs of those who are starving. But the anthropologist Glenn Davis Stone has suggested that the real moral outrage is the strategic use of hungry people to justify corporate programs to develop these crops. “Malthusian biotechnologists need to explain why crop genetic modification will feed hungry Indians when 41.2 million tons of excess grain will not”.

The argument above, of course, merely neutralises a pro-GMO argument, and does not provide a reason to actively oppose GMOs (though this is of course a necessary task in itself). While Talbott moves to critique the overall industrialized agricultural system, I think it can prove beneficial to focus particularly on the intellectual property elements of the race toward GMOs.
While the health dangers of GMOs have yet to be proven – though vigilence is desirable – we already know that the new economic system will place farmers more firmly under the control of the bio-tech firms. With Terminator genes and patented seeds it becomes illegal for farmers to harvest seeds for use the following year, As a result whether or not the altered seeds have short-term benefits (in terms of higher yields or allowing cheaper production techniques) the farmers are tied in as permanent customers of the biotech firm – they are mortgaging their long-term interests for short-term gain.