Corporate Control

The European public’s anti-GM crop stance stems primarily from the success of environmental advocacy groups such as Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth. Numerous demonstrations have occurred throughout Britain, France, and other EU countries where GM crops have been uprooted and destroyed. Unfortunately, activist organizations rarely cite credible scientific evidence in their positions and have won much public sympathy by exploiting popular fears and misconceptions about genetic-engineering technology.

One issue they highlight that might prove significant, however, is the role of corporate interests in the GM-crop debate. A few years ago, Monsanto’s attempt to acquire the “terminator” technology sparked tremendous controversy. This patent consisted of an elaborate genetically engineered control system designed to inhibit the generation of fertile seeds from crops. In essence, it was developed so that farmers would need to purchase new GM seeds each year, although arguments were raised that this technology could help prevent uncontrolled GM crop breeding. After much pressure from the non-profit advocacy group Rural Advancement Foundation International, however, Monsanto announced in late 1999 that it would not market the “terminator” technology.

The “terminator” ordeal attracted so much attention because it placed Monsanto’s corporate interest directly against the strongest argument in favor of genetic-engineering technology: potential cost savings and nutritional value of GM crops to developing countries. The UN Development Programme recently affirmed that GM crops could be the key to alleviating global hunger. Although the United Nations has expressed concern over precautionary testing of crops (through agencies like the World Health Organization), some contend that Western opposition to this technology ignores concerns of sub-Saharan and South Asian countries where malnutrition and poverty are widespread.

India is among those nations that could benefit from GM-crop technology. India’s population has been growing by 1.8 percent annually; by 2025 India will need to produce 30 percent more grain per year to feed the twenty million new mouths added to its population. The need for higher food productivity is highlighted by incidents of poor farmers in Warangal and Punjab who have committed suicide when faced with devastated crops and huge debts on pesticides. The Indian government has approved several GM crops for commercial production, and testing has also commenced on transgenic cotton, rice, maize, tomato, and cauliflower, crops that would reduce the need for pesticides. A recent furor erupted over the discovery of around 11,000 hectares of illegal Bt cotton in Gujarat. The Gujarat administration responded immediately by ordering the fields stripped, the crops burned, and the seeds destroyed. There is still uncertainty over who will repay the farmers, who claim that Mahyco, a Monsanto subsidiary, is attempting to monopolize the distribution of Bt crops in India, and that the Indian government is also yielding to pressure from pesticide manufacturers. Corporate battles still abound in a nation where many farmers appear to be in need of agricultural change.

Feed the World

Many opponents of GM crops argue that the technology is not needed to help solve the problem of world hunger, with 800 million people who do not have enough to eat. They often argue that the world produces enough food to feed nine billion people while there are only six billion people today, implying that global hunger is simply a matter of distribution and not food productivity. Unfortunately, fixing the distribution problem is a complex issue. Purchasing power would need to increase in developing countries, coupled with increased food production in both developing and developed countries so that crops can be marketed at a price the underprivileged can afford. Since land for farming is limited, the remaining option for increasing crop productivity is to increase yield. While GM-crop technology is not the only method that can be used to achieve this end, it can contribute greatly toward it.

Some consider GM crops part of a series of corporate attempts to control markets in developing countries and thus they brand GM technology another globalization “evil.” Dr. Vandana Shiva of the Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Ecology argues that globalization has pressured farmers in developing countries to grow monocultures—single-crop farming—instead of fostering sustainable agricultural diversity. Genetic engineering, in this view, is the next industrialization effort after chemical pesticides, and would also bear no greater benefit than indigenous polycultural farming. The Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations also notes the leaning of research investment toward monocultures, spurred on by the profit potential of GM crops.

On the other hand, GM-crop technology serves to increase crop yield on land already in use for agricultural purposes, thereby preserving biodiversity in unused land. In the words of Dr. C. S. Prakash “using genetics helped [to] save so much valuable land from being under the plow.” On Shiva’s argument for supporting local knowledge in agricultural practices, Dr. Prakash argues that, from experience, “[local knowledge] is losing one third of your children before they hit the age of three. Is that the local knowledge that you want to keep reinforcing and keep perpetuating?”

Continuing along these lines and bringing GM technology in developing countries into the broader context of morality, leaders including Per Pinstrup-Andersen, director of the International Food Policy Research Institute, and Hassan Adamu, Nigeria’s minister of agriculture, emphasize the importance of providing freedom of access, education, and choice in GM technology to the individual farmer himself. In Africa, for example, many local farmers have benefited from hybrid seeds obtained from multinational corporations. On a larger scale, however, Africa’s agricultural production per unit area is among the lowest in the world, and great potential lies in utilizing GM crops to help combat pestilence and drought problems. On the issue of local knowledge, Dr. Florence Wambugu of the International Service for the Acquisition of Agribiotech Applications in Kenya (ISAAA) asserts that GM crops consist of “packaged technology in the seed” that can yield benefits without a change in local agricultural customs.

On another front of the world hunger debate, a promising benefit that GM-crop technology brings to developing countries is the introduction or enhancement of nutrients in crops. The first product to address this was “golden rice,” an engineered form of rice that expresses high levels of beta-carotene, a precursor of Vitamin A, which could be used to combat Vitamin A deficiency found in over 120 million children worldwide. Although many advocacy groups claim that the increased levels of Vitamin A from a golden rice diet are not high enough to fully meet recommended doses of Vitamin A, studies suggest that a less-than-full dose can still make a difference in an individual whose Vitamin A intake is already deficiently low. Currently the International Rice Research Institute is evaluating environmental and health concerns. After such tests are completed, however, there remains one final hurdle in the marketing process that advocates on both sides of the GM debate do agree on: multilateral access and sharing between public and private sectors. The International Undertaking on Plant Genetic Resources was established to foster such relationships for the world’s key crops, but more discussions will have to take place on the intellectual-property rights of GM-crop patents.