A disturbing trend is appearing in the battle for control of the world\'s food resources. Having largely lost the arguments over productivity and lost the confidence of markets outside the US, and with many lingering safety concerns, corporations who have invested heavily in Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO's) as food have settled on a kind of moral blackmail: We should eat their GM products, they say, so that they can feed the poor.

When this argument was first used by Monsanto in the late 1990s, \'the poor\' had other ideas. African delegates during special negotiations of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization from Ethiopia, Burundi, Senegal, and Mozambique \"strongly\" objected to the fact that \"the image of the poor and hungry from our countries is being used by giant multinational corporations to push a technology that is neither safe, environmentally friendly, nor economically beneficial to us.\" In the developed world, customers, distributors, and retailers generally do not choose GM food.

The scientific community involved in GM food looks to hi-tech solutions to the complex social, environmental, and economic problem of hunger, regardless of whether they are best, or even appropriate solutions. Remember vitamin A rice? Meant to help prevent blindness in malnourished people? This seemed like a good idea at the time, until it became apparent that you would have to eat a truck-load of it to get a useful dose of vitamins. More importantly, the use of GMO in poor communities serves to obscure the real question of why these people are too poor to afford nutritious, locally available food.

So why do we need GM food at all? Even if the world was short of food, which it is not, available evidence suggests that using what is called \"sustainable agriculture\" - a mix of environmentally sustainable and \'pro-poor\' approaches to growing food, bring massively higher increases in overall productivity than anything achieved through genetic modification.

The use of GMO in poor communities serves to obscure the real question of why these people are too poor to afford nutritious, locally available food.

Almost everything that scientists are trying to achieve (so far with little unqualified success,) can be achieved in cheaper and less risky ways without using GMO. There are countless well-documented sustainable farming methods that can be used to control pests or weeds, and increase drought tolerance, yield, and nutrition. The problem for the poor is that these strategies are free, and do not return a profit to multi-national companies. GM advocates have only discovered the hungry now that they have something to sell.

To compound the problem, GM companies seem to ignore the reasons why people go hungry. It is not because there is not enough food - (with the possible exception of victims of war,) it is because poverty begets powerlessness, or a lack of land. GM crops do nothing to change this; in fact, they tend to further exclude the poor and marginalized through restrictive intellectual property laws, market distortion in favor of a few monopolistic companies, and the high levels of capital investment required by farmers.

The poor majority world has no chance to regulate, monitor, or segregate GM crops - they are being asked to let Monsanto decide their food and agriculture policies for them. Perhaps we should also ask them to let Enron run their utilities and Arthur Andersen keep their books.




Contributed by author Nick Macdonald, Senior Program Officer for Central Asia at Mercy Corps.

To read another Global Envision article about genetically modified foods, see Genetically Modified Food - Panacea or Pandemic?

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