1. GM crops: the genetic colonialists
2. GM crops won't help African farmers
3. Owen Paterson's cheerleading for GM crops to tackle hunger rings hollow
---
---
1. GM crops: the genetic colonialists
Kumi Naidoo
The Guardian, 24 June 2013
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jun/24/gm-crops-the-genetic-colonialists
*The UK and Owen Paterson can help "feed the world and save the planet" – by opposing GM crops and African land grabs
Given the British government's approach to protecting the environment by trying to sell forests, culling badgers, and cutting environmental protection, the environment secretary's enthusiastic embrace of the genetic modification (GM) lobby is rather predictable, but no less of a disappointment for that.
Some of my colleagues are still reeling that, with his views on climate change, Owen Paterson would see fit to lecture anyone about science – but as someone born and raised in Africa, I felt particularly keenly his attempt to portray GM as the solution to world hunger. Most GM is in fact for commodity crops production using chemical-intensive methods. But pressure is constantly applied to African governments, mainly by big US corporations, because Africa and Asia are the only industry hopes for GM expansion.
Global hunger is a complex problem, and is as much a matter of economics and politics as of agriculture itself. Though while we are producing enough food for everyone but failing to distribute it equitably (even in the UK half a million people get food handouts), advances in biotechnology to help us produce more are to be welcomed in a world with an increasingly destabilised climate and a growing population.
Sophisticated plant breeding techniques have brought us blight-resistant potatoes and crops enriched with nutrients; flood-tolerant scuba rice that can survive under water for a fortnight or more; and drought-tolerant maize that increases yields by up to 30%. These crops are being used successfully by thousands of farmers in Africa today.
However, none of these seeds were genetically engineered. They were produced using marker-assisted breeding, genome sequencing and traditional cross-breeding and grafting techniques, allied to a greater understanding of crop biology. And they work.
But we still urgently need reforms to land ownership and trade if all of us are to benefit. In my own country, under the 1913 Natives Land Act South Africa's black majority was excluded from land ownership in favour of the white minority. The act destroyed traditional farming. A century later, the unequal distribution of land in South Africa is still a big political issue. It's a pattern that is repeated throughout Africa, and is becoming a bigger problem as land grabbing by foreign enterprises spreads. I fear that GM crops corporations, and Owen Paterson, are using the "feed the world" argument as a Trojan horse for a new form of colonialism.
Owen Paterson parrots the agrochemical industry's claims that the next generation of genetically engineered crops will do all of these things, save the planet and feed the world, but what it actually gives us is mostly empty promises, contamination scandals, corporate capture of our food and increasing use of agrochemicals. The poster crop of the agrochemical industry is still, after 15 years of development, "golden rice". Its developers say that it will be ready for cultivation in another two years. Meanwhile Paterson trots out the simplistic line that people who are anti GM are responsible for children going blind. In practice, one of the solutions that is saving the lives of millions of children is adding vitamin A supplements to their diet twice a year. According to the World Health Organisation, this is one of the most successful health prevention programmes. But, what would save our children in a sustainable future is not so much a technical fix, and only dealing with vitamin A, but a healthy balanced diet that gives them the vitamins they need from the food they eat. Is this too much to ask?
If the UK government really wants to adopt the slogan "feed the world and save the planet" as policy goals rather than just PR gloss for a corporate agenda, then it should be supporting the ecological farming solutions offered by the United Nations International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD), and the UK all-party parliamentary group on agroecology.
Governments around the world can move us towards a resilient and ecological agriculture by prioritising the resource needs and knowledge of the world's small-scale ecological farmers. We must support ecological farming systems that can address climate change. And finally we have to recognise the interrelated principles of food sovereignty and the right to food.
---
---
2.GM crops won't help African farmers
Million Belay and Ruth Nyambura
The Guardian, 24 June 2013
http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/poverty-matters/2013/jun/24/gm-crops-african-farmers?INTCMP=ILCNETTXT3487
*The UK's environment minister says GM crops will help combat hunger in developing countries. But Owen Paterson is wrong
Last week we heard that Owen Paterson, the UK's environment minister, is claiming that GM crops are necessary to help address hunger in developing countries, and that it would be immoral for Britain not to help developing countries to take up GM. Millions of small-scale farmers in Africa would disagree. African farmers and civil society have repeatedly rejected GM crops, and asked their governments to ban them.
Paterson does not appear to understand the complex realities and challenges of farming in Africa. Nor does he seem to grasp the limitations of GM crops. He fails to recognise that farmers in Africa already have effective approaches to seed and agriculture, which are far more environmentally and farmer-friendly than GM. Most of all, he fails to acknowledge the devastating impact that GM crops will have on African farmers and farming systems.
In the UK, Africa is often talked about as a failing continent where the hungry apparently wait around for northern benefactors to save us. Talk of Africa seems to imply that we have little or no food production, that our farmers are clueless, our seed unproductive. We won't go into how patronising and insulting this attitude is. Instead, we will focus on how this failure to acknowledge African farming systems and seed is being used to wipe them out.
Traditional African farming systems have developed an incredible diversity of seed varieties, which are able to deal with the multiple challenges of farming. Seed breeding is a complex art, and scientists who really listen and engage will realise that African farmers have a vast amount of ecological knowledge. Having many different types of seed – bred for their flavours and better nutrition, and which have evolved with local pests and diseases and are adapted to different soils and weather patterns – is a far better strategy of resilience than developing a single crop that is bound to fail in the face of climate change.
It is a myth that the green revolution has helped poor farmers. By pushing just a few varieties of seed that need fertilisers and pesticides, agribusiness has eroded our indigenous crop diversity. It is not a solution to hunger and malnutrition, but a cause. If northern governments genuinely wish to help African agriculture, they should support the revival of seed-saving practices, to ensure that there is diversity in farmers' hands.
But GM crops pose an even greater threat to Africa's greatest wealth. GM companies make it illegal to save seed. We have seen that farmers in North America whose crop was cross-pollinated by GM pollen have been sued by the GM company. About 80% of African small-scale farmers save their seed. How are they supposed to protect the varieties they have developed, crossed and shared over generations from GM contamination? This will be a disaster for them.
Paterson refers to the use of GM cotton in India. But he fails to mention that GM cotton has been widely blamed for an epidemic of suicides among Indian farmers, plunged into debt from high seed and pesticide costs, and failing crops.
Paterson also refers to the supposed potential of GM crops developed to be drought-tolerant. These crops are not yet on the market, and we don't know if they ever will be. The only two varieties of GM that have been sold in the past 15 years are resistant to a particular type of pest and a particular type of herbicide. Ask farmers if stalk borers or weeds are a cause of hunger in Africa, and they will laugh at you.
Instead of waiting for expensive GM solutions that may never arrive – and will ruin us if they do – we have worked with communities who were able to produce surplus food in times of drought by returning to their traditional varieties. A long-term study (pdf) in Ethiopia showed that crops fare much better in an environment where soil and water is conserved in composted land than on land that is pumped full of fertiliser and imported seeds. Communities increasingly understand that modern seeds often fail in these times of changing climates and unpredictable weather. The only way to ensure real food security is to support farmers to revive their seed diversity and healthy soil ecology.
As Esther Bett, a farmer from Eldoret in Kenya, said last week: "It seems that farmers in America can only make a living from GM crops if they have big farms, covering hundreds of hectares, and lots of machinery. But we can feed hundreds of families off the same area of land using our own seed and techniques, and many different crops. Our model is clearly more efficient and productive. Mr Paterson is wrong to pretend that these GM crops will help us at all."
• Million Belay is co-ordinator of the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa . Ruth Nyambura is advocacy officer of the African Biodiversity Network, which last year co-released the film Seeds of freedom
---
---
3. Owen Paterson's cheerleading for GM crops to tackle hunger rings hollow
John Vidal
The Guardian, 20 June 2013
http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/poverty-matters/2013/jun/20/owen-paterson-gm-crops-hunger
*In making a plea of GM technology for the poor and hungry, is the environment secretary acting for the many or the few?
The UK environment secretary, Owen Paterson, says it would be immoral for rich countries like Britain to not help developing countries adopt GM technology. In a powerful speech to research scientists, he claimed GM crops would prevent death, blindness, hunger, loss of wilderness and the overuse of herbicides, and would make farmers richer and the environment better.
Even the big GM companies never make all these claims, so who was Paterson speaking for and what is the British agenda? Is the UK government truly concerned about hungry people in Africa and south-east Asia, or is Paterson just doing the work of the few agribusiness giants that want a slice of the vast and growing developing world market?
Similar questions came up nearly 15 years ago when, after the Guardian ran several sceptical articles about the emerging technology, five Monsanto directors asked for a meeting. They came into the offices, met science, environment, and business specialists, and within minutes were saying they wanted to feed the world with GM and that anyone who opposed them did not understand the potential of the technology. The impression they gave was that the company, which had just launched what it called a global food revolution, really believed that hunger was caused by a simple lack of food rather than poverty and/or exclusion.
Today, the silver techno-bullet they promised has still not emerged. The industry has failed to make much progress in Europe, but it has overwhelmed the US market, and the GM companies are now close to controlling the key seed supplies of many countries. Their patented GM seeds comprise more than 80% of the US seed market for major crops like soybeans, corn, canola and cotton. By last year, the global area of their crops had reached 170.3m hectares (420m acres) – a supposed 100-fold increase since commercialisation began in 1996.
But behind the rosy statistics another, bumpier, picture emerges of GM's progress. Billions of dollars of public and private money has been spent on research and development, lobbying and the acquisition of seed companies, yet only 17.3m out of a total 513m (3.4%) farmers have ever actually planted GM crops, and most of these have been growing cotton rather than food. Only 28 countries grow the crops, and in the US, where the technology is far and away the most adopted, GM has clearly failed to eradicate hunger and poverty.
Moreover, legitimate concerns over GM safety, the contamination of nearby crops, patents, the amount of pesticides used and the yields these seeds actually produce will not go away.
Paterson said the British public needs to be reassured about the crop's safety, but there is far more at stake in poor countries where agriculture makes up a much greater proportion of farmers. The real fear in many countries is that GM is being used to adopt a certain kind of farming, which inevitably means people being moved off the land, and the power and influence of the world's food and seed industries growing.
Just five companies – Monsanto, Dupont, Syngenta, BASF, Bayer, and Dow – now control nearly all GM research, and nearly 60% of all the crops are resistant to the herbicide glyphosate, a product patented by Monsanto. In what may be a sign of what is to come elsewhere, the price of seeds has spiralled in the past five years as the market concentration of the companies has grown.
One big question is whether GM is now yesterday's technology and whether poor countries can leapfrog it to adopt better, more sophisticated, genetic techniques that do not carry the same risks and uncertainties.
In the 15 years since Monsanto commercialised the crops, conventional plant breeding has massively advanced and, thanks to developments in genetic sequencing and "marker assisted breeding", scientists can now combine genetics with conventional breeding, and avoid all the regulatory and political baggage of genetic engineering. In addition, there is much greater understanding that GM is not going to increase yields that much, and that the problem of hunger will not be solved by a few giant companies imposing a discredited technology on vulnerable populations.
Conventional advances, which are within the reach of developing country scientists, hold much greater promise for developing countries than handing over food production to US, or European, corporate control. Paterson's crude cheerleading of GM crops for the poor and hungry looks rather as if he is acting for the very few rather than for the many.