- A handful of companies is moving towards owning every
stage of the global food system, writes Gyorgy Scrinis.
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- Public opposition to genetically modified foods has been
a stumbling block to the commercialisation of GM crops and animals. The
agri-biotech industry is hoping GM foods with "consumer-friendly"
traits might overcome some of this opposition.
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- But they have also been running big advertising campaigns
in an attempt to convince the public that GM foods will be required to
"feed the world". These are the kinds of predictable arguments
being aired at the International Congress of Genetics in Melbourne.
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- In reality, the new genetic technologies will largely
be used to feed the power and profits of agri-food corporations, and they
are more likely to exacerbate - rather than alleviate - the problems of
widespread hunger and malnutrition in the Third World.
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- GM products are primarily being developed to fit into
large-scale, chemical-intensive, mechanised and capital-intensive farming
systems. Any increase in yields of crop and animal products will be headed
for its usual destination: well-off consumers.
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- Research and development of GM products is largely aimed
at adapting crops and animals to the requirements of the global food industries.
For example, producing non-softening fruits for long-distance transport
so well-off consumers can have access to year-round supplies of out-of-season
fruits.
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- Genetic technologies are also facilitating the rapid
corporate integration and concentration of the food system, as a handful
of corporations move towards the ownership and effective control of every
stage of the global food system. One such strategy for monopoly control
is the patenting of all GM crops, with the aim of preventing farmers from
saving and replanting their own seeds.
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- Overall, genetic technologies are facilitating a shift
from a chemical-industrial to what I call a "genetic-corporate"
form of agriculture - and this food system is undermining the food security
of the world's poor and malnourished.
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- Widespread hunger already exists today, in the context
of a global oversupply of food. This is one of the cruellest ironies of
the contemporary era. Most countries with the greatest incidence of poverty
and hunger are net exporters of food. Growing more food can, in fact, exacerbate
food insecurity for the world's poor depending on how, where and by whom
this food is produced.
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- Genetically engineered crops and animals further threaten
the food security of the poor in a number of ways. First, to the extent
that they enable large-scale, chemical-industrial farms to increase their
productivity or profitability, this competitive advantage will enable the
further squeezing out of small-scale farmers.
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- Second, GM crops may accelerate the erosion of farm labouring
work in poor rural areas through the further introduction of labour-replacing
technologies.
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- Third, by engineering crops to be sterile, and buying
out smaller seed companies, agri-food corporations aim to diminish the
availability of unpatented and self-reproducing seeds.
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- Proponents of GM food have celebrated the engineering
of vitamin A rice (so-called "golden rice") as an example of
a crop that - if and when it is made freely available in a decade or so
- will help alleviate malnutrition in the Third World. Here is a breath-taking
example of what I call the "ideology of genetic precision".
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- Such arguments effectively promote the idea that malnutrition
is the result of the nutritional inadequacy of non-modified foods, and
can be alleviated through the nutritional modification of these foods,
rather than the result of a lack of access to an adequate and diverse diet.
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- This isn't to deny that genetic technologies could be
used to modify traditional crops in ways that may benefit small-scale,
capital-poor farmers. But that is to miss the big picture in terms of the
primary direction of GE research, and in terms of the primary causes of
hunger and malnutrition.
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- What is actually required is a redistribution of fertile
land, of incomes and of economic power, rather than access to genetic products.
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- There is an obscene arrogance in the idea that GM crops
will "feed the world", or that the poor need to be fed by us.
For, in reality, poor people and communities around the world will either
feed themselves, or they will not feed at all.
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- Genetic-corporate agriculture is, in fact, a system for
feeding on the world rather than for feeding the world. It is about corporations
and well-off consumers continuing to feed on the food, the cheap labour
and other extractable resources of the Third World; about large-scale industrial
producers consuming and displacing more small-scale and subsistence producers
and rural communities; and about transnational agri-food corporations feeding
on the work of more farmers by swallowing up and patenting the seeds and
knowledge developed by traditional farmers over thousands of years.
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- Dr Gyorgy Scrinis is a research associate in the Globalism
Institute at RMIT University.
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- Copyright © 2003. The Sydney Morning Herald.
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- http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/07/09/1057430279267.html
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