Genetically modified crops and the food crisis: discourse and material impacts
Glenn Davis Stone & Dominic Glover
Development in Practice,  Volume 21, Numbers 4–5, June 2011
  http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/~anthro/research/stone/Stone_Glover_2011.pdf

[EXTRACTS ONLY]

A surge of media reports and rhetorical claims depicted genetically modified (GM) crops as a solution to the ‘global food crisis’ manifested in the sudden spike in world food prices during 2007–08. Broad claims were made about the potential of GM technologies to tackle the crisis, even though the useful crops and traits typically invoked had yet to be developed, and despite the fact that real progress had in fact been made by using conventional breeding. The case vividly illustrates the instrumental use of food-crisis rhetoric to promote GM crops.

In Spring 2008, with the global spike in food prices near its peak, print and online media were alive with stories linking the problem and its solution to genetic modification (GM) of crops.

Headlines included: 

"Gene modified crops the key to food crisis, says scientist" (Harvey and Parker 2008)

"Biotechnology Can Help Solve the Food Crisis" (Engineering News Online 2008)

"Biotechnology Could Help Solve Food Crisis, Monsanto Asserts" (Copans 2008)

"GM crops are part of the answer to food crisis – Monsanto" (Surman 2008)

"Radical Science Aims to Solve Food Crisis" (Moskowitz 2008)

"Biotechnology a Key to Solving Food Crisis" (Reuters 2008)

"Genetic Farming can Help Solve Food Crisis: Expert" (Basu 2008)

"Biotechnology May Have Potential to Solve Food Crisis" (Energy & Envirofinland 2008)

"Brown must embrace GM crops to head off food crisis – chief scientist" (The Guardian 2007)

"Genetically modified crops “may be answer to global food crisis” (The Telegraph 2008)

"Biotech crops seen helping to feed hungry world" (Reuters India 2008a)

and "World Goes for GM Crops to Tackle Food Crisis" (Commodity Online 2008)

– among many others.

...In spite of explicit claims by industry spokespeople, academics, and government officials that GM technology could help to solve (or was even essential to solving) the recent food crisis, virtually none of the claims in 2008 identified how any specific GM crop or technology was helping or would help to alleviate the immediate crisis. Below the headlines, the discussion inevitably veered into a general call for raising agricultural productivity. 

Conclusion

Our discussion of the discourse surrounding genetic modification of food during the global food crisis of 2007–08 suggests that, while the crisis was real, the purported agri-biotechnology solution was a figment of opportunistic spin. While the crisis led to very minor change in biotech food-supply chains, mainly affecting treats consumed by industrialised Asian countries, there was a surge in media coverage and commentary about the potential role of biotechnology to solve the food crisis. Biotechnology advocates used media platforms to conflate acute and chronic food shortages and generate publicity for specific transgenic technologies that had only distant or long-term connections to ways of resolving the immediate crisis.

The authors:

Glenn Davis Stone is Professor of Anthropology and Environmental Studies, Washington University in St. Louis.
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Dominic Glover is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Technology and Agrarian Development at Wageningen University.
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