Staring at the plate

Agriculture is in deep trouble globally. The world’s population will increase by about 1.7 billion in the next 20 years – mostly in the Asian and Pacific regions. It will have to be fed but the agricultural innovations of the late 20th century have peaked. Along with declining productivity, the supply of gas for fertilisers and pesticides, and oil required for machinery and transport is becoming more difficult to obtain and more expensive. Water is fast approaching critical scarcity in the main food-producing regions of the world. Soil fertility is declining because of the heavy usage by industrialised agriculture that tends to neglect rotations and care needed to nurture soil. In fact the small farmer has been wiped out in countries like USA where the total farming population is less than half the population of New York, and all of it in penury. GM (Genetically Modified) foods and GM seeds, products of modern bio-technology, are touted as the cure for world hunger.

This may be one way to fight world hunger, but is contested by several activist groups and scientists globally. An American Anti-War group on its web site has calculated that the money spent on the Iraq war was enough to feed the world’s hungry for five years. Governments, anxious to avoid droughts and crop failures and farmer suicides, tend to see the GM revolution as a short-term answer to the problem.

Mankind has over centuries developed its food habits and food. Traditional biotechnology was discovered early when bread was made, or yogurt, wine or cheese. They were all ultimately a result of manipulating micro-organisms to start the fermenting process – that is how scientists would describe the exquisite Bordeaux or the full Bourgogne. No gene modification is involved.

Modern bio-technology, is however, different and still the subject of debate and even controversy among scientists, environment activists, sociologists and the big business houses that want to sell the new GM food and seeds. This has involved new techniques as tissue culture, cell culture and embryo culture. Its application in agriculture has led to GM food claimed to be as good as natural food and GM seeds that are supposed to have several advantages over traditional seeds. In the USA, where by the end of 1999, two-thirds of all processed food had GM ingredients, no distinction is made between GM food and organic food.

The Europeans have been insisting that GM foods be labeled before the products are put on their supermarket shelves. USA, Canada and Argentina – the main producers of GM food see this as an unfair trade barrier and US companies like Monsanto which have invested massive sums in this technology and totally dominate the GM seed market, have tried to recover their losses by transferring their products elsewhere.

Bio technology has a lot to offer but all this is not unmitigated benign technology. Many scientists have doubted this and warned of the dangers that lie ahead and it is not just the fear of the unknown.

In his research paper, “Biotechnology Briefing - A technology we do not need”, David Fleming even argues that GM organisms are not even necessary for agriculture, while Nathan Batalion warns that this is the most potent technology the world has ever known – and more powerful than even atomic energy. Batalion lists 50 harmful effects of GM foods affecting health, environment, farming, and the economic, political and social threats. Scientists will debate and argue on the effects on health – about the various viruses and bacteria and allergies that could become rampant, and the morality of tinkering with nature and it would require many lengthy articles to discuss these fully.

In 1994 the US FDA had approved Monsanto’s rBGH, a genetically produced growth hormone for injection into dairy cows even though scientists had warned that this was linked to 400-500% higher risks of breast, prostate, and colon cancer. It is possible that since then these and some other risks have been overcome. This is precisely one of the problems with GM foods – that one does not know enough about their after effects. Too much is happening too soon. Dr George Wald, Nobel Laureate in Medicine said in 1967 that restructuring nature was not part of the bargain and that “potentially it could breed new animal and plant diseases, new sources of cancer, novel epidemics”. Science must bring progress but do we need salmon that would grow six times faster and several times larger threatening the natural fish or do we need to cross animals with plants as part of an experiment?

It is not just a matter of what is grown but also how GM food and seeds are grown and marketed that should be worrying. Biotechnology has been one of the fastest growing sectors of the world economy in recent years, particularly in the USA. Up until 1992 very little area was under GM cultivation, but in the ten years that followed, more than 52 million hectares were under GM cultivation, and 99% was in USA, Argentina, Canada and China. GM soybean accounted for nearly two thirds of the crop, followed by corn, cotton and rapeseed. Five companies - Pharmacia, Dupont, Syngentia, Dow and Aventis owning 71% or 973 of the agro-biotechnology patents – dominated technology ownership globally in 2001.

Companies like Monsanto also patent their seeds. Farmers who buy seeds have had to sign a contract which prohibits saving, reselling or exchanging seed. Family owned farms in poorer countries depend on saved seed for survival but biotech companies not only have patented other people’s seeds – basmati rice and neem, they have also introduced technology to protect their seed patents and markets through terminator and traitor seed technology. A terminator seed will grow but the seeds it produces are sterile; so the farmer has to purchase them afresh each season. Traitor technology controls the stages or life cycles of plants, -- in other words, when a plant will leaf, flower, and bear fruit. Pollen spreads GM genes very fast and wide, destroying natural seeds. Winds can carry tree pollen as far as 600 kilometres, apart from that spread naturally by birds, fungi, bacteria and rain. All this means creating an economic dependence. According to Fleming, it is no longer possible to grow GM-free crops of maize, oil seed rape and soya any where in Canada.

Large private collectives would suit USA and Canada but in India with 70% rural population one wonders what would happen to the small farmer here if he decides to follow this pattern. Local intelligence, local seeds, local experience and local knowledge will get wiped out in time. And should the GM experiment fail, there will be no going back to old techniques because these simply would have been forgotten by then.

Thousands years of sustainable agriculture on this globe is now sought to be changed in a matter of a few decades. And not every one is convinced even in the West that the change is for the better. Oil production and distribution is increasingly controlled in one part of the world, so is technology for the manufacture of weapons both conventional and non-conventional; financial control is exercised by three or four institutions in the West, and if what food is to be grown and consumed is also controlled by one part of the world, then the rest of the world is staring at total subservience.

There has to be an open and transparent debate in this country to discuss the economic, political and social impact of this rapid change in the way India has to live and eat.


Source : Hindustan Times 27th Dec 2004