Let them eat GMOs
The feds say genetically modified seeds can solve world hunger. They forgot to mention one thing: people are starving because of politics and economics – not because they lack scientifically enhanced foods.

By Rachel Brahinsky

TO SURVIVE THE trade show at the U.S. Department of Agriculture's conference on agricultural technology in Sacramento last month, you had to either have a messianic zeal for high-tech products or a well-toned sense of humor.

Take the case of Florian Urmetzer, a young P.R. flack from Germany who touted the benefits of a computer program to teach rural farmers in Kenya and India how to better care for their livestock.

When he talked about plans for setting up computer stations in distant villages for farmers' use, his eyes gleamed: "I wouldn't have thought it could be true a few months ago [when he was first hired to promote the product] – but now I believe."

Urmetzer's faith in science and technology was emblematic of the passion conveyed by most organizers and presenters at the USDA conference. The meeting was attended by more than 400 government officials from 120 countries and protested by several thousand activists who risked arrest over the course of four days.

Ann Veneman, President George W. Bush's agriculture secretary, insisted the goal of the conference was to share ideas that would teach the world's approximately 800 million hungry people to feed themselves. But the vast majority of the event was arranged to boost support for (and ease international trade barriers to) biotechnology, particularly genetically modified seeds.

"Biotechnology is already helping both small- and large-scale farmers around the world by boosting yields, lowering costs, reducing pesticide use, and making crops more resistant to disease, pests, and drought," Veneman said in her opening remarks.

Her comments kicked off three days of assertions about the power of technology with little public critique and few questions about the assumptions behind its relevance in solving world hunger. Keeping the debate one-sided is key to the United States' attempts to force the European Union to accept imports of (mostly U.S.-grown) genetically modified foods, which have been limited there since 1998. Critics of the conference say it was designed by the Bush administration to grease the wheels for an upcoming meeting of the World Trade Organization in Cancún, Mexico, where delegates will be urged to try to remove trade barriers to biotech products.

While officials and industry reps at companies such as Monsanto Co. (which controls some 91 percent of the global acreage of biotech crops, according to Michael Hansen of the Consumer Policy Institute) promote such products as sound and safe, critics are concerned about the impact biotech foods have on human health and the environment. People on both sides of the argument are equally passionate, and weeding through the debate can be quite complex.

But before getting there, it's important to look at the premise of the USDA conference. Even if genetic engineering could make safer, better crops, would it be the answer to world hunger? In other words, Can food technology eliminate hunger?

Rafael Mariano, the leader of a Philippine federation of landless peasants who are part of the target population of the USDA event, says the answer is no.

"GMOs [Genetically Modified Organisms] are the wrong answer to the wrong problem," Mariano explained in an interview published in January 2001 in the Unesco Courier. The interview was later reprinted by the Oakland-based policy think tank Food First/Institute for Food and Development Policy.

"The problem is not that there is not enough food, but that too many people have no access to adequate food," he said. "Four out of five hungry people live in countries that are exporting food, while Europe and North America are facing a food surplus problem. That is why they want to break open the markets of poor countries for their agricultural products."

Forcing food on Zambia

It's hard to imagine a case in which a poverty-stricken nation with a starving population would reject free food for any reason. Meet the people of Zambia, a southern African country slightly larger than Texas. Last year, when severe drought led to crop failure among one-third of rural farmers, the nation was desperate.

"We had only 50 percent of our normal food needs," Drinah Nyirenda, executive director of the nonprofit Program Against Malnutrition, told us. "And people had no money to purchase food." Zambian officials appealed to the international community for 215,000 metric tons of food aid, she said.

The United States responded with shipments of corn. "We asked, Is it genetically modified? When they said yes, we said we didn't want it." Zambia had been on record for years as opposing imports of GMOs, citing fears of health and environmental problems. Still, it was a pretty dramatic stand to take at a time when people were starving.

With non-GMO food aid from other nations that eventually trickled in, Zambia survived the famine. But U.S. pressure to accept GMO foods continues. A foreign aid bill recently approved by Congress suggests that HIV/AIDS funds should be withheld if nations won't accept GMO foods.

Zambians say they have several reasons to oppose GMO imports. Nyirenda, speaking with us June 24 in the lobby of a Sacramento hotel near the USDA conference, said she was especially concerned about the impact a GMO corn diet could have on the rural poor, who eat raw cornmeal porridge three times a day, all year round.

"Since it's not known what it will do to them, our fears outweighed our desire to use it as food," she said. "When you have 19 percent sick with HIV/AIDS and as much as 48 percent malnourishment among children, you worry about the vulnerability of the population."

She also worries about crop contamination. "Farmers generally save some maize for seed – but GMO maize is not suitable for growing." When GMO corn planted in one field cross-pollinates with plants in the next, the altered genes – which typically are genes that act as pesticides – are spread.

Nyirenda is also concerned about the social structures that cause hunger for her people. In developing nations worldwide, U.S.-controlled institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund offer loans and aid to countries in exchange for compliance with economic and government restructuring. In Zambia, as elsewhere, government shrank under these rules, and state-run market programs to help small farmers were shut down.

Before those changes, Nyirenda said, "hunger in Zambia was not a normal thing. We had a diversified agricultural system. People produced different types of crops. When structural adjustment began in the 1990s, the hunger began." Without government support, corn that used to be sold at market rates was suddenly worth far less, and small farmers were unable to make a profit, sending them through a downward cycle of poverty.

USDA spokesperson Edgar Lloyd was unwilling to answer our questions about the socioeconomic causes of world hunger.

Untested science

If you talk to a true believer like Judith Kjelstrom, you might walk away feeling like Nyirenda's fears about biotechnology are unfounded. A self-described St. Francis of Assisi parishioner and former hippie, Kjelstrom says her heart is set on the problem of solving hunger.

She also is a scientist, the associate director of the UC Davis biotech program, where young minds get turned on to designing new kinds of tomatoes that grow in salty water, and plants that survive drought. To a curious scientific mind, it must be a fascinating process. And certainly some of these projects, like drought-tolerant crops, could appeal to people in a place like Zambia.

Speaking in front of a booth at the trade expo accompanying the USDA conference, Kjelstrom insisted that the safety of biotech foods is indisputable. "I trust our FDA and USDA and EPA to supply the safest food supply in the world," she said. "These crops are safe to eat. I am not afraid for the woman in Zambia. I will assure her that she will not get sick."

But when faced with the question of liability – that is, Who is responsible if the Zambians get sick? – Kjelstrom didn't really have an answer. "Food is risky in itself," she said, pointing out that the food scares of recent years had nothing to do with biotechnology and more to do with contamination by E. coli and other microbes.

Yet she didn't refute that there is no independent testing requirement for biotech crops and that company tests are voluntary. Instead, government regulators review company-supplied data. Take the example of Monsanto's Roundup Ready Corn, a widely planted crop that comes with herbicide in the seed.

An Oct. 18, 2000, letter from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to Monsanto made the following conclusion about the crop's safety: "It is our understanding that Monsanto has concluded that the Roundup Ready NK603 corn grain and forage derived from the new variety, are not materially different in composition, safety and other relevant parameters from corn grain and forage currently on the market. And that it does not raise issues that would require premarket review or approval by FDA."

In other words, Monsanto – the company that profits from the sale of Roundup Ready corn and that has the right to sue farmers whose fields are contaminated with this corn for copyright infringement – says it's safe, so federal regulators say it's safe. (Monsanto executives and employees, by the way, gave $9,250 to the President Bush during his 2000 campaign, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.)

Testing and the lack of safety data is behind the fight between the United States and the European Union over biotech crops. The U.S. position – to aggressively attack even relatively benign labeling legislation – is a clear sign of the strategies expected from U.S. officials in the coming months, say food policy analysts closely watching the issue.

With the WTO scheduled to meet in September in Cancún, the United States likely hopes to establish a precedent that could be used to bully other countries into accepting GMOs.

Meanwhile, many nations are trying to refuse biotech foods. In Africa and Europe, as well as in Mexico, Brazil, China, and Thailand, GMO bans are in place, according to Peter Rosset of Food First. Back in the United States, some 70 percent of our processed foods contain GMOs, Rosset says. Consumer uproar here has not reached a mass enough to change this.

In the developing world, critics are asking that international aid agencies recognize alternative approaches to increasing crop yields and dealing with drought and pests. Amadou Kanoute, regional director of the Zimbabwe-based Consumers International, says farmers in his country have developed, through cross-pollination, a new kind of rice that is easier to harvest and has higher yields – but that doesn't contain pesticides.

"The technology being promoted won't help access," he told us. "The [U.S.] policy is to ensure that some corporations really enslave food production. They put so much money into these types of corporate approaches. Why not put money into farmer-led approaches? That type of policy is the one we want."

E-mail Rachel Brahinsky