1. And the World Food Prize Goes To… Monsanto?
2. The True Deservers of a Food Prize
3. GMO Giant Monsanto Wins World Food Prize… What?
NOTE: The latest World Food Prize has gone to a career Monsanto executive, a Syngenta scientist, and a private industrial scientist who will share the $250,000 prize for "feeding a growing global population". This extraordinary move has come in for much ridicule. One food sovereignty campaigner called the announcement "better suited to the pages of The Onion" and condemned the award for showcasing "a company who should have been merely the punch-line to a twisted joke."
http://blog.whyhunger.org/2013/06/monsanto-wins-the-world-food-prize/
Many commentators have notes that the Prize's donors include not only Monsanto, which has donated $5 million, but other GM firms and their staunch supporters, such as DuPont Pioneer, the Gates Foundation, the Syngenta Foundation, Cargill, and ADM.
Eric Holt-Gimenez of Food First has accused them of awardng the World Food Prize to the monopolies profiting from hunger, and has compared it to giving the Nobel Peace prize for going to war.
http://www.foodfirst.org/en/war+on+hunger
More charitably, Doug Gurian-Sherman of the Union of Concerned Scientists says, "While these awardees have made some important contributions to science, it has not translated into major positive contributions to agriculture and food security - the supposed purpose for awarding the World Food Prize" (item 1).
Even The New York Times in its coverage suggested this award may be a PR attempt to counter the growing global backlash against GMOs.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/20/business/monsanto-executive-is-among-world-food-prize-winners.html
---
---
1. And the World Food Prize Goes To… Monsanto?
Doug Gurian-Sherman
Civil Eats,June 21 2013
http://civileats.com/2013/06/21/and-the-world-food-prize-goes-to-monsanto/
As reported in the New York Times, the prestigious World Food Prize was awarded this week to a trio of scientists who had important roles in the early development of crop genetic engineering. One, Robert Fraley, is at Monsanto, and another Mary-Dell Chilton, is with another seed giant, Syngenta. The third is European scientist Marc Van Montagu.
When I was a doctoral student doing research using molecular biology in the 1980s (and in the early 90s as a post-doctoral researcher at USDA), the contributions of Chilton and Van Montagu were invaluable. Thirty years later, the science of applied molecular biology in agriculture, genetic engineering, is mired in controversy.
While these awardees have made some important contributions to science, it has not translated into major positive contributions to agriculture and food security—the supposed purpose for awarding the World Food Prize.
Feeding the World?
Although genetic engineering has been widely adopted in a few major crops—mainly soybeans, corn, cotton, and canola—only two general types of engineered genes, for resistance to herbicides and for killing certain insects, have been widely commercially successful after 30 years of trying.
These have provided some benefits, such as a reduction of chemical insecticide use on some of these crops, and some relatively small yield increases. Most of the yield increases for small farmers are from cotton, a low value crop, which is unlikely to pull these farmers out of poverty.
At the same time, in the countries that have used these technologies the longest, big problems are emerging. Weeds resistant to the herbicide used on Monsanto’s crops have reached epidemic proportions in the U.S., reportedly infesting about 60 million acres and increasing rapidly. This has increased herbicide use by hundreds of millions of pounds above where it probably would have been had these crops not existed.
And now insects resistant to Bt are emerging around the world. I was at the University of Illinois recently, where I heard a respected corn entomologist bemoaning the intention of corn farmers to return to the use of chemical insecticides to control rootworms that have developed resistance to Monsanto’s Bt gene for controlling that important pest.
On top of that, USDA does not even count the over 90 percent of corn seed—that’s close to 90 million acres—that is treated with neonicotinoid insecticides that are implicated in seriously harming bees and other beneficial organisms. One of the major producers of these insecticides is Chilton’s company, Syngenta.
The point is that the static and narrowly focused economic analyses that have touted the (limited) benefits of GE do not take into account that these products have been developed for use in monoculture agriculture systems, where their nominal value is very temporary (the industry’s solution is more of the same, e.g., new herbicide-resistant crops that will further increase herbicide use).
Add to this the questions raised about monopoly control of the seed supply via intellectual property (patents), weak-kneed regulators, and the challenge of using GE successfully for developing genetically and physiologically complex traits like drought tolerance, and the successes of this technology as applied so far are seen to be meager, and substantially outweighed by its faults.
And what about the opportunity costs of using this expensive technology instead of more effective and cheaper breeding methods and agroecology? It is often argued that we need all the tools in the toolbox to meet the coming challenges of agriculture (this is merely an assertion–there is really no real science behind it one way or the other). But with finite public resources for improving agriculture, it is also important to focus on the most cost-effective approaches, and those that give the best social outcomes. This is not an argument against GE per se, but against the facile, but convincing-sounding, argument that we “must” use it.
U.S. policy in support of corporate goals
Sadly, Secretary of State John Kerry also overstated the case about GE in his address at the World Food Prize announcement ceremony, claiming “dramatic increases in yield,” (not really very dramatic, and importantly, less than what crop breeding and agroecology provide).
He made several aspirational claims, saying that biotechnology will reduce pesticide use (that is not the trend, as I have discussed above), or will reduce nitrogen fertilizer pollution. We have carefully analyzed this last claim, and while traditional breeding has made some progress toward improving nitrogen use efficiency, so far GE has not, and there is no good evidence that GE will improve upon what breeding can do. His claim that it has dramatically reduced loss to disease is simply wrong, unless one means the mere few thousand acres planted to a few virus-resistant crops.
Biotech has made some narrowly-defined progress on a very few crop traits, but they have been underwhelming when examined in the context of better alternatives like breeding and agroecology.Given all of the real problems surrounding the use of this technology in the real world, how could the caretakers of the Prize possibly present it to these scientists?
Follow the money
Is anyone surprised to find that the biotech industry is a major supporter of the World Food Prize? Monsanto, according to the NYT article, has donated $5 million. Included in the long list of sponsors are other biotech giants, such as DuPont Pioneer, and supporters including the Gates Foundation and the Syngenta Foundation (not Syngenta Company, but we know who butters that bread).
The caretakers of the WFP have claimed that industry money did not influence their decision. Of course they would say this; can you imagine them saying something different? That is why the strong appearance of conflicts of interest is considered to be almost as important as a more direct smoking gun, because the latter is usually very well hidden. The current award of the WFP fails the appearance test miserably.
This is, unfortunately, all a part of the perverse influence that multinational industry money is having on science. For example, my colleague Gretchen Goldman recently posted a blog revealing a trail of corrupt influence by Syngenta on the process of science.
The role of private money in leveraging influence on science is exacerbated by congressional ideologues that have been hacking away at productive public sources of funds for decades, making scientists at public research institutions more and more dependent on handouts from the private sector that come with long strings attached, as I discussed several months ago. Unless this trend is reversed, we will all pay a high price when we can no longer have confidence in the independence of such a major facet of our society.
Originally published by Union of Concerned Scientists.
- See more at: http://civileats.com/2013/06/21/and-the-world-food-prize-goes-to-monsanto/#sthash.DYdV0QQi.dpuf
---
---
2.The True Deservers of a Food Prize
MARK BITTMAN
New York Times, June 25 2013
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/25/the-true-deservers-of-a-food-prize
If Secretary of State John Kerry’s GMO-boosting speech announcing the World Food Prize at the State Department last week is any indication of his ability to parse complicated issues, he might be better off windsurfing. Because Kerry appears to have bought into the big ag-driven myth that only by relying on genetic engineering will we be able to feed the nine billion citizens of our planet by 2050. And he enthusiastically endorsed granting this mockery of a prize to three biotech engineers, including Robert Fraley, executive vice president and chief technology officer at Monsanto and a pioneer of genetic engineering in agriculture.
Never mind that Monsanto is a sponsor of the prize (and that the list of other backers reads like a who’s who of big ag and big food), or that we never get to know the names of either the nominees or the nominators.[1] Never mind that we’re not feeding the seven billion now, or that we’re sickening a billion of those with a never-before-seen form of malnourishment. Never mind that we already grow enough food to feed not only everyone on the planet but everyone who’s going to be born in the next 30 or 40 years. And never mind that, despite the hype, there’s scant evidence that the involvement of genetic engineering in agriculture has done much to boost yields, reduce the use of chemicals or improve the food supply.
The carping ends here. (I wrote about genetic engineering recently, and anyway, you’ll find plenty of griping about this prize elsewhere.) Rather, I thought I might ask a few friends and colleagues for their opinions on who might qualify for a food prize that wasn’t sponsored by its recipients.
There already is such a thing, of course: the Food Sovereignty Prize. But I’m countering the tremendous public relations boost Monsanto received from the World Food Prize, and instead showcasing just a few of the many people around the world who are working to establish sustainable and fair food systems.[2]
Doug Gurian-Sherman, a plant pathologist at the Union of Concerned Scientists[3], mentioned Zeyaur Khan, who developed the “push-pull” system of pest control in sub-Saharan Africa. The system uses a legume[4] to “push” stem borers away from desired crops (mostly corn); at the same time, a “pull” crop is planted nearby, one that attracts the stem borers. “Input costs are low for farmers using this system,” says Gurian-Sherman, “while yields are often more than doubled.” Neither of those things can be said of the genetically modified Bt corn, which is designed to achieve the same results.
Raj Patel[5], author of “Stuffed and Starved” and a fellow at the Institute for Food and Development Policy, talked about the international peasant organization, La Via Campesina[6]: “At their 20th anniversary meeting earlier this month, La Via Campesina put violence against women at the forefront of their concerns around food sovereignty.” (Sixty percent of the world’s undernourished people are female.) “That’s a very 21st century understanding of how hunger works, and how to end it,” he said. “And it’s far more powerful than the World Food Prize’s magic-beans talk.”
Anna Lappé, director of Food MythBusters and author, most recently, of “Diet for a Hot Planet,” nominates the United Nations special rapporteur on the right to food, Olivier De Schutter, a tireless traveler who has visited dozens of countries to learn about and address food insecurity.
“De Schutter’s promotion of agroecological solutions,” says Lappé, “is rooted in the understanding that the chemical approach breeds debt and dependency on costly inputs like fertilizer, chemicals or genetically engineered seeds. As he told me a few years ago, ‘We have failed to end hunger using the traditional recipe that saw hunger as a technical problem, requiring only that we produce more. We’ve failed because we’ve underestimated the need to empower people and hold governments accountable.’”
Speaking of Lappés, Tom Philpott, a food and agriculture writer at Mother Jones, brings up Anna’s mother, Francis Moore Lappé: “Her central insights in “Diet for a Small Planet” — that growing grain to feed animals for meat is grievously inefficient; that the world already produces more than enough calories and the real problem is economic inequality — have become so commonplace in alternative-ag circles, so accepted, that we forget where they came from. (Now if policy makers would only listen!) She is an unsung intellectual giant, and her work remains vital today.”
Finally, Michael Pollan, Knight professor of journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, and author, most recently, of “Cooked,” speaks about Miguel Altieri, an agronomist at Berkeley and one of the world’s leading proponents of agroecology.
“Altieri has shown that casting the future of farming as either low-yield subsistence agriculture or export-oriented industrial farming is a false choice,” Pollan says. “Working with peasant farmers in Latin America, he has demonstrated that impressive increases in yield can be achieved by means of crop diversification, integrated pest management, and nutrient cycling. Small-holder farms currently produce half the world’s food, and Altieri’s work suggests that they could produce considerably more without shifting to capital-intensive export crops that often undermine rural economies and diminish food security. Altieri is also an eloquent advocate of ‘food sovereignty’, the principle that localities and nations should be able to retain control of their food systems rather than leave them at the mercy of the global market.”
That’s hardly it: Without thinking hard, I could speak of Lester Brown, founder of both Worldwatch and the Earth Policy Institute; Matt Liebman of Iowa State, whose pioneering work on sustainable agriculture I wrote about last year; and Vandana Shiva, who has devoted her life to so many progressive environmental and agricultural causes one doesn’t know where to begin.
In this day hunger comes not because there is not enough food; it comes because some are unable to either buy it or produce it. Hunger represents inequality: there are no hungry people with money. Alleviating hunger, in part, is recognizing that the right to eat is equivalent to the right to breathe, which trumps the right to make profits. The real heroes in the world of food are those who recognize this, and who work to improve the kind of low-input agriculture upon which the majority of the world’s people — and the vast majority of farmers — rely. There are hundreds of people deserving of “prizes” for this kind of work. The bigwigs at Monsanto are not among them.
[1]. “Similar to the Nobel Prizes,” a World Food Prize spokesperson e-mailed me when I inquired.
[2]. Part of the problem, it seems to me, is that because the involvement of genetic engineering in agriculture is actively supported by the Federal government, we tend to forget there is a bigger, global picture. It’s hard to believe that any organization in the European Union, for example, would be silly enough to give an award for genetically engineered crops — since they’re barely grown there. And, by the way, their agricultural yields are as good as ours.
[3]. See Doug’s post about the World Food Prize.
[4]. Called desmodium, or tick-trefoil, if you’re interested. Planting legumes, of course, also fixes nitrogen in the soil, which means lowered use of chemical fertilizers.
[5]. Who is a friend.
[6]. Which won the first Food Sovereignty Prize.
---
---
3.GMO Giant Monsanto Wins World Food Prize… What?
Navdanya, June 25 2013
http://www.navdanya.org/blog/?p=700
This statement originates with those Councilors of the World Future Council and Laureates of the Right Livelihood Award whose names appear below.
GMO Giant Monsanto Wins World Food Prize…What?
In honoring the seed biotechnology industry, this year’s World Food Prize — often considered the Nobel Prize for food and agriculture — betrays the award’s own mandate to emphasize “the importance of a nutritious and sustainable food supply for all people.”[1]
The 2013 World Food Prize has gone to three chemical company executives, including Monsanto executive vice president and chief technology officer, Robert Fraley, responsible for development of genetically modified organisms (GMOs). Yet, GMO seeds have not been designed to meet the Prize’s mandate, and function in ways that actually impede progress toward the stated goals of the World Food Prize.
Twenty years after commercialization of the first GMO seeds, most are of just two types: not engineered for better nutrition but to produce a specific pesticide or to resist a proprietary herbicide. But even in reducing weeds, the technology is failing, for it has generated herbicide-‐ resistant “super weeds” now appearing on nearly half of American farms.[2]
GMO seeds undermine sustainability in several other ways as well.
While profitable to the few companies producing them, GMO seeds reinforce a model of farming that undermines sustainability of cash-‐poor farmers, who make up 70 percent of the world’s hungry. GMO seeds continue their dependency on purchased seed and chemical inputs. The most dramatic impact of such dependency is in India, where 270, 00 farmers, many trapped in debt for buying seeds and chemicals, committed suicide between 1995 and 2012.[3]
GMOs also threaten sustainability because they continue agriculture’s dependence on fossil fuels, mined minerals, and water—all resources that will only become more expensive as they become more scarce.
This award not only communicates a false connection between GMOs and solutions to hunger and agricultural degradation, but it also diverts attention from truly “nutritious and sustainable” agroecological approaches already proving effective, especially in the face of extreme weather. The Rodale Institute, for example, found in its 30-‐year study, that organic methods outperformed chemical farming during drought years by as much as 31 percent.
Organic methods can use 45 percent less energy and produce 40 percent less greenhouse gases.[4]
Further evidence from around the world is showing how ecological methods dramatically enhance productivity, improve nutritional content of crops, and benefit soil health, all without leaving farmers dependent on ever-‐more expensive inputs.[5] The UN, through its Office of the Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, has documented ecological agriculture’s potential in hungry regions to double food production in one decade.[6] Chaired by former World Food Prize awardee Dr. Hans Herren, the 2008 International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) report, developed by 400 experts and endorsed by 59 governments, calls for redirection of agricultural development toward such sustainable practices.[7] Across the world, agroecology and food sovereignty are emerging solutions shaped and chosen by scientists and citizens worldwide.
Note that the World Food Prize mandate is also to recognize contributors to food “for all people” but GMO seeds make this goal harder to reach. The planet already produces more than enough food for all — and 40 percent more per person than in 1970. Yet, approximately the same number, 870 million people, still suffer from extreme, long-‐term undernourishment because they lack power to access adequate food. Developed and controlled by a handful of companies, genetically engineered seeds further the concentration of power and the extreme inequality at the root of this crisis of food inaccessibility. An estimated 90 percent of U.S.-‐grown soybeans and 80 percent of corn and cotton crops.[8]
The choice of the 2013 World Food Prize is an affront to the growing international consensus on safe, ecological farming practices that have been scientifically proven to promote nutrition and sustainability. Most regions of the world and most governments have rejected GMOs and millions of citizens have marched against Monsanto. In living democracies, discounting this knowledge and these many voices is not acceptable.
Signatories
Ibrahim Abouleish, RLA 2003, Egypt
Swami Agnivesh, RLA 2004, India
Uri Avnery, RLA 2001, Israel
Maude Barlow, RLA 2005, Canada
Dipal Barua, RLA 2007, Bangladesh
Nnimmo Bassey, RLA 2010, Nigeria
Andras Biro, RLA 1995, Hungary
Zafrullah Chowdhury, RLA 1992, Bangladesh
Tony Clarke, RLA 2005, Canada
Mike Cooley, RLA 1981, UK
Erik Dammann, RLA 1982, Norway
Hans-Peter Dürr, RLA 1987, Germany
Daniel Ellsberg, RLA 2006, USA
Anwar Fazal, RLA 1982, Malaysia
Irene Fernandez, RLA 2005, Malaysia
Johan Galtung, RLA 1987, Norway
Ina May Gaskin, RLA 2011, USA
Stephen Gaskin, RLA 1980, USA
Monika Hauser, RLA 2008, Germany
Martín von Hildebrand, RLA 1999, Colombia
Mohamed Idris, RLA 1988, Malaysia
Bianca Jagger, RLA 2004, Nicaragua
Erwin Kräutler, RLA 2010, Brazil
Felicia Langer, RLA 1990, Germany
Birsel Lemke, RLA 2000, Turkey
Hunter Lovins, RLA 1983, USA
Ruchama Marton, RLA 2010, Israel
Tapio Mattlar, RLA 1992, Finland
Manfred Max-Neef, RLA 1983, Chile
Raúl Montenegro, RLA 2004, Argentina
Frances Moore Lappe, RLA 1987, USA
Helena Norberg-Hodge, RLA 1986, UK
Evaristo Nugkuag, RLA 1986, Perú
Juan Pablo Orrego, RLA 1998, Chile
Nicanor Perlas, RLA 2003, Philippines
Fernando Rendón, RLA 2006, Colombia
Sima Samar, RLA 2012, Afghanistan
Vandana Shiva, RLA 1993, India
Sulak Sivaraksa, RLA 1995, Thailand
Michael Succow, RLA 1997, Germany
Suciwati, widow of Munir, RLA 2000, Indonesia
Hanumappa Sudarshan, RLA 1994, India
Alice Tepper Marlin, RLA 1990, USA
Shrikrishna Upadhyay, RLA 2010, Nepal
Janos Vargha, RLA 1985, Hungary
Alyn Ware, RLA 2009, New Zealand
Chico Whitaker, RLA 2006, Brazil
Alla Yaroshinskaya, RLA 1992, Russia
Angie Zelter, RLA 2001, UK
Additional WFC Councillors:
David Krieger
Rama Mani
Alexander Likhotal
Thais Corral
Pauline Tangiora
Anna Oposa
Scilla Elworthy
Katiana Orluc
Riane Eisler
Ashok Khosla
Hafsat Abiola, Founder and President of the Kudirat Initiative for Democracy (KIND)
Rafia Ghubash
Vithal Rajan
[1] World Food Prize, About the Prize, http://www.worldfoodprize.org/en/about_the_prize/
[2] Resistant Weeds – Intensifying by Kent Fraser, January 25, 2013 Status Research,
http://www.stratusresearch.com/blog07.htm
[3] Wesley Stephenson , “ Indian farmers and suicide: How big is the problem?” News Magazine, BBC, January 23, 2013. Notes 270,000 suicides as the “official” estimate. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-‐21077458
[4] The Farming Systems Trial: Celebrating 30 Years, Rodale Institute, 2012, http://66.147.244.123/~rodalein/wp-‐content/uploads/2012/12/FSTbookletFINAL.pdf
[5] Jules Pretty, “Sustainable Intensification in African Agriculture,” Jules Pretty, Camilla Toulmin, and Stella Williams, International Journal of Agricultural Sustainability. 9(1) 2011; pp. 5–24, doi:10.3763/ijas.2010.0583 # 2011 Earthscan. www.earthscan.co.uk/journals/ijas; Soil health, see “Agro-‐ecology and the Right to Food,” Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, http://www.srfood.org/index.php/en/component/content/article/1174-‐report-‐agroecology-‐and-‐the-‐ right-‐to-‐food; Elaine Ingham, Life in Natural Agriculture Soil, Rodale Institute, http://rodaleinstitute.org/tag/dr-‐elaine-‐ingham/
[6] Ibid.
[7] Agriculture at a Crossroads, United National Environmental Program, 2009.
http://www.unep.org/dewa/agassessment/reports/IAASTD/EN/Agriculture%20at%20a%20Crossroads_Synthesis%20Report%20%28English%29.pdf
[8] Robert Langreth and Matthew Herper, “The Planet Versus Monsanto”, Forbes.com, 12, 31.09, http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2010/0118/americas-‐best-‐company-‐10-‐gmos-‐dupont-‐planet-‐versus-‐ monsanto.html