Genetically modified crops successfully feed the world’s livestock, its cotton mills, and its biofuels industry. People, however, prefer conventional crops. Will food shortages force them to change their minds?
 | A Romanian farmer holds a genetically modified soya plant. Romania is the sole producer of GM soybeans on the continent with about 35,000 hectares under cultivation. Environmentalists accuse U.S. biotech firms of using poorer east European countries as a back door to a GM reluctant EU (Photo: Reuters) |
They occupy a mere seven percent of the world’s arable land, yet genetically modified crops dominate the debate about how to feed the world. But the noisy controversy has not answered the fundamental question: Can a GM-inspired new Green Revolution beat hunger?
“The findings are variable…information is anecdotal and contradictory, and uncertainty is unavoidable,” concludes the exhaustive 2008 International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD).
“Are transgenics the simple answer to hunger and poverty? I would argue, no,” said IAASTD director Robert Watson when the report came out, arguing that much more research was needed.
Great Leap Forward
Feeding a world population of 9.1 billion people in 2050 would require boosting food production by 70 percent, says the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). Pessimists say it’s not a revolution the world’s hungry need but a miracle.
Because land and water resources are scarce, 90 percent of that growth will have to come from higher yields. But growth in crop yields is down to one to two percent a year. Industrialized farming is reaching the limits of natural photosynthesis, the source of all plant growth.
Furthermore, climate change will reduce crop yields in parts of the developing world by up to 50 percent, predicts the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). Food prices could shoot up. It doesn’t help that modern farming is hitched to volatile oil markets because of its reliance on petroleum-based fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides.
No wonder people are searching for a massive leap forward in agricultural productivity; another Green Revolution like Norman E Borlaug’s Nobel Prize-winning development of high-yielding, disease resistant strains of wheat and rice that banished famine from Latin America and much of Asia.
Borlaug was convinced that GM fit the bill. “I believe genetically modified food crops will stop world hunger,” he said in 2002.
Fodder, Fuel, or Food
The GM industry hasn’t yet tackled that colossal task. It is currently dominated by four crops—soybean, maize, cotton, and rapeseed (canola). Staple foods critical to the world’s poor, like rice and wheat, are still missing, reflecting concerns about putting GM material directly into peoples’ mouths.
 | Picture Gallery (click on the picture to start)See the ten most important genetically modified crops (Photo: Reuters) |
Ninety percent of GM crops are grown in the United States, Argentina, Brazil, and Canada, almost half in the U.S. alone. In the U.S., almost 60 percent of crops are fed to livestock to serve the mushrooming meat market, while about 20 percent of U.S. GM crops went to biofuels in 2008.
So while GM foods have the potential to feed the hungry that is not what they are being grown for right now: livestock feed, cotton production, and biofuels dominate.
Rice, wheat, and vegetable crops are, however, in the GM pipeline. The first direct GM human food—Indian brinjal (eggplant)—may be available in 2010, and researchers are looking at improving the iron, vitamin A, or beta-carotene content of staple food crops.
Even if they don’t feed people directly, GM crops can help poor people feed themselves. “Increasing income of farmers contributes to the poverty alleviation of 70 percent of the world’s poorest,” says the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications (ISAAA).
Despite the U.S. dominance of GM land area, almost 90 percent of GM farmers (12.3 million) are from China and India. Most of them grow ‘Bt cotton’ and have seen their yields and incomes increase with new insect-resistant seeds. GM rice, currently being tested in China, could increase income by 100 dollars per hectare for 110 million households, says ISAAA.
For now, however, GM has “developed in too narrow a context” to help most of the poor, says the IAASTD, in part blaming a development model based on intellectual property rights: “Too often instruments such as patents are creating prohibitive costs, threatening to restrict experimentation while also potentially undermining local practices that enhance food security.”
Krystyna Swiderska, senior researcher at the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), also worries that growing corporate control of a dwindling variety of food genes is “narrowing our ability to adapt. A loss of genetic diversity could lead to a rise in malnutrition".
Alternatives to GM
Genetic engineering has a part to play, but alone it is not enough, as Walter Alhassan, biotechnology consultant at the Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa, explains:
“A maize variety that has been genetically modified to be resistant against a certain pest won’t deliver higher yields if you do not…develop conventional technologies in harmony with GM.”
These might include conventional cross breeding techniques. Most recently, New Rice for Africa (NERICA) hybrids were created by crossing high-yielding Asian rice with African rice that can thrive in harsh environments—in Uganda, production doubled between 2004 and 2008.
Or they could feature different cultivation, irrigation, and cropping systems. A UN Environment Programme survey of organic projects in East Africa recently found that yields more than doubled, beating chemical-intensive farming.
Cuba has adapted its agricultural system from a heavily industrialized model into a system of urban organic gardens or “organoponicos” that have made the country almost self sufficient in fruit and vegetables. Meanwhile the FAO has hailed conservation agriculture—minimum plowing and chemical inputs, crop rotation—as “a truly sustainable production system” that can enhance food security.
GM technology is clearly not a quick fix for the world’s food problems. But it could well be helpful for particular challenges that conventional agriculture cannot solve, says Walter Alhassan. “If you are able to really get drought-resistant varieties this would be very important.”
Maybe then GMOs will develop from being cattle feed and car fuel into an important, and accepted, tool to improve food security.
editor: James Tulloch
publishing date: October 11, 2009
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Food diversity and GM crops
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