News from the GM front. 10

Comments View as Flat

1. 

   Forrest Posted 8:46 am
   16 Jun 2005

   combatting hungerI'm sure, given the readership of this blog, that you will get some comments about how GM foods are not currently labeled (so it is in fact difficult to make a choice to not consume them), and about how they can spread into fields where people don't want them, especially in wind pollinated crops (like wheat & corn).  So Instead, I want to respond to your hope that GM foods can help reduce hunger.
   Most of the chronically hungry people in the world live in poor countries.  People in poor countries live predominantly in rural areas.  People in rural areas are largely dependent on agriculture for their income.  So most of the world's hungry people depend on agriculture for their income.  If food becomes cheaper, the urban poor who work in industry have an easier time buying it, but the rural poor have a harder time selling it.  That's right, I am saying that lower food prices will often increase hunger among the most vulnerable populations.  So if GM foods reduce food prices, it will increase hunger.
   Does that mean GM foods have no role in alleviating hunger and deprivation?  Possibly, but not necessarily.  There are two important lines of arguement that your comment misses.  
   First, farm income is the difference between profits and expenditures.  Since profits for many poor farmers are largely out of their control - determined by the vagaries of global markets and weather - the best way to increase income may be by reducing costs.  If GM crops can reduce costs - say by decreasing losses to pests, or by growing more effectively under drought conditions, or by decreasing the amount of purchased inputs in any way, then they might help the agricultural poor
   But, if GM crops make farmers more dependent on purchased inputs, even while they raise outputs, the effect on the agricultural poor will be negative.  An interesting historical example of this happened in the American Midwest, when hybrid corn, which must be grown from purchased seed, fertilized and pesticided heavily, and supported by tractors, took over.  Output increased - but farm profitability decreased.  If farmers in Africa switched to Monsanto marketed Round-up Ready crops, their costs might go up dramatically because 1. they have to buy seeds from Monsanto instead of saving their own seeds from last year 2. they have to buy Round-up from Monsanto.  Meanwhile, increased production will probably lead to a reduction in market price.  uh-oh!
   If GM crops are going to make a big difference in world hunger, it probably won't be because they increase corn productivity... for more details on this, from the folks who taught me all of my agricultural economics, read This paper which argues that the benefits from GM towards hunger will have to come from the crops that the poor grow and eat - which are often tubers or other locally important crops, which receive little public or private investment.
   So in short, there are alot of other big problems with GM crops aside from the biodiversity concerns you mention.

   Permalink

2. 

   David Roberts Posted 10:07 am
   16 Jun 2005

   Biotech in the right hands...the benefits from GM towards hunger will have to come from the crops that the poor grow and eat - which are often tubers or other locally important crops, which receive little public or private investment.
   This is a legitimate problem, and one of the reasons I'm excited about open-source biotechnology, the results of which will be freely available to everyone. Local communities can use it to increase yields in the crops that they grow and eat.
   As with so many areas, greens' opposition to corporate mis-use of biotech has led them to oppose biotech generally. This drags the argument in the wrong direction and leaves greens looking anti-technology. But technology is not the problem. Monsanto is throwing around money and influence, gaming the system, pushing insufficiently-tested products on communities that don't need them, and using its enormous financial clout to sue and silence anyone who opposes it.
   That's the problem -- unrestrained corporate power.  Not the technology itself.
   IMO.
   
   www.grist.org

   Permalink

3. 

   Andy Brett Posted 1:37 pm
   16 Jun 2005

   Rural vs. urbanIf food becomes cheaper, the urban poor who work in industry have an easier time buying it, but the rural poor have a harder time selling it.I see this going in a different direction. If the rural poor are having a harder time selling crops, fewer will continue to be rural and will stop depending on the land for sustenance; they will move to cities. GM crops reduce the amount of labor and people power necessary to produce high yields and large amounts of crops. So I disagree with the conclusion that lowered prices are bad on the whole.
   This transition from rural to urban is in one sense my response to your second point about the increase in costs and therefore decrease in profits that GM crops bring. I would say that the best course of action here is to get people off of these razor thin profit margins in the first place, and get them into cities. If you have a few bad weeks in a city, you are still alive, but if you have a few bad weeks on a farm, you are dead, to loosely quote Stewart Brand's lecture.

   Permalink

4. 

   jdhlax Posted 3:53 pm
   16 Jun 2005

   Wrong Question = Wrong AnswerThe real issue here is whether one supports further destroying the Earth -- this time with Franken science -- in order to feed a grossly overpopulated species.
   The human mind is like an out-of-control car with no one steering it: all intellect and no wisdom.  GM science is just another acceleration of the car.

   Permalink

5. 

   Biodiversivist Posted 12:36 am
   19 Jun 2005

   Excellent comments AndyCreating clean, economically vibrant, well run cities is a key to saving our planet's biodiversity. Poor farmers are yet another group eating up the planet. Many would happily trade their intensely environmentally destructive way of life for a good job in a good city.
   Destruction of the Amazon rose to 10,088 square miles in 2003-2004 from 9,496 square miles a year earlier. Environmentalists blamed the destruction on an agricultural boom that has pushed farmers to seek more land to plant crops and graze cattle where forests once stood.
   Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8084491
   
   In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Help acquire and protect ecological hotspots, give to a conservation organization: http://www.saveourbiodiversity.com

   Permalink

6. 

   Storm Dragon Posted 10:21 am
   27 Mar 2006

   Not that simpleI'm afraid that simply taking farmers off their land, and sticking them in the cities is not a panacea for social and environmental problems.  For one thing, the farmers, (in developing countries, anyway) will most likely end up doing dead-end jobs, and living in squalid shanty towns.  Some of them will, in desperation, try to emigrate to wealthier countries, risking starvation, exploitation, and deportation in order to feed their families.
   
              Furthermore, we must consider the fact that the cities are able to exist because of farming-everyone needs to eat, after all.  This means that if small farmers are taken off the farms,  one of two things will need to happen.  Either the farms will be turned over to Big Agri-Buisness, or food will have to be imported.  Both options have serious social and ecological ramifications.  There has to be a better solution.

   Permalink

7. 

   Tom Philpott Posted 10:32 pm
   27 Mar 2006

   "Feeding the world," etc.Andy Brett said: "I would say that the best course of action here is to get people off of these razor thin profit margins in the first place, and get them into cities."
   But that's already happening, in places like Mexico City, Sao Paulo, Manilla, etc., etc. (to speak nothing of New York, LA, and Chicago, all magnets for displaced rural dwellers from Mexico and Central America.)
   All of these cities lack the infrastructure and economic clout to absorb these economic refugees. One of the things they lack is food-production infrastructure. (A bunch of these folks are trying to create such infrastructure in LA; the effort has hit a road bump
   
   ) I think it's pretty casual to create policies designed to shake out (one hesitates to say "cleanse," but that's how it looks sometimes) the countryside of excess people and hope they can make it in "diverse" cities. But that's what's happening.
   Meanwhile, here in the great model of modern food production, where less than 2 percent of the population farms, our food system is looking pretty fragile. It depends on huge regular infusions of government cash ($23 billion in 05), it's radically energy intensive, our "bread basket" (the midwest) is an economic basket case, two-thirds of us are overweight and diabetes is on the rise, our ag trade balance is about to go negative, etc. This is the model that's supposed to "feed the world"?
   Somewhere, execs from Monsanto, ADM, John Deere, etc, are rubbing their paws together.
   So far, efforts to create transgenic tubers have failed. I have another idea. For 50 years, public policy in places like the UN, the World Bank--and among elites in global south countries--have been directed toward spreading input-heavy, commodity-style agriculture as a way to combat rural poverty. The movement has been called the Green Revolution. Has the effort been a success? What has become of the countryside in this region under  Green Revolution policy? And what's become of the cities? Must the Green Revolution, as its apologists argue, no be followed by the Gene Revolution?
   I say, no. Let's use the resources at our command to identify and leverage local knowledge. I'm calling on no less radical a scheme than consulting the poor about how their problems might be fixed. A head-in-the-clouds social experiment with no control group? While the urban shanty towns of the global south swell and its countryside withers, under policies instituted by technocrats who know all they need to know, that might be a more wise approach than unleashing Monsanto, et al, on Africa, etc. as a panacea.
   
   

   Permalink

8. 

   Tom Philpott Posted 10:41 pm
   27 Mar 2006

   Food as commodityHere--http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2006/1/16/83315/7771--is a link to a post I did responding to some pretty typical discourse from the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). In short, FAO argues that commodity ag has been a disaster for the "developing world." Its solution will come as no surprise: more commodity agriculture.

   Permalink

9. 

   amazingdrx Posted 1:45 am
   28 Mar 2006

   Won't work TomMore food won't do it,without reproductive rights for women to get over-population under control.
   It's math.  Population growth..exponential.
   Food growth efficiency gains...incremental.
   Google Malthus and Bucky Fuller.
   Just say no to genetic engineering.  Unless it's something that switches off the patriarcal part of the male brain and resulting dictatorship and slavery of women on most of spaceship earth?  Nawww, even that would be a disaster.
   If you want an emergency to get excited over, try the melting permafrost and methane release.  Forget genetic engineering to (temporarily) save people from starvation.
   
   http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog

   Permalink

10. 

    atreyger Posted 4:38 am
    28 Mar 2006

    Cities and biotech are not the answerWhen was their a working city in a developing country? How many are there in developed countries? Sure they have the potential, but it's never realized. Crime, drugs, unemployment and starvation are a major problem where the rural poor have been displaced by a lack of jobs, see favelas in Brazil.
    Biodiversivist's remark re:
    
    Destruction of the Amazon rose to 10,088 square miles in 2003-2004 from 9,496 square miles a year earlier. Environmentalists blamed the destruction on an agricultural boom that has pushed farmers to seek more land to plant crops and graze cattle where forests once stood.
    is also way off the mark, since the ag in this case is soybeans and cattle, grown by large scale ranchers and farm managers who tend to shoot anyone who tells them other than what they want to hear. These products are feeding Americans.
    I'm for higher food prices (I think that is an excellent way to slow down deforestation and big agribusinesses and health insurance costs) and for open-sourced biotech (especially if the effects are researched well and especially for non-food items). However, when was the last time a poor person had enough education to take advantage of this, and how often do grants come out for helping the poor utilize this technology, David? Biotech is not the solution, because only Monsanto is funding and they only care about corporate profit.

    Permalink