Food Security Resilience or Genetically Modified Obsolescence?

“Nowhere in the world, in no act of genocide, in no war, are so many people killed per minute, per hour and per day as those who are killed by hunger and poverty on our planet.” —Fidel Castro, 1998

I think of a planet that has evolved over 4 billion years. I think of natural selection where nature has encoded within DNA the ability of plants and organisms to exhibit a range of traits, some are favoured by nature some die off. It is nature’s way of perfecting survival and in recognition that the natural world is in constant change. So it is a system of adaption. Therefore, the toughest and most hardy species survive. This is an intelligent system of trial and error to ensure resilience.

According to the State of the World Report (2011) by the Worldwatch Institute 925 million people are undernourished. Did you know that 40% of food currently produced worldwide is wasted before it is consumed. There is an efficiency issue there and also turning my mind to Australia and Health Regulations, no left over food from restaurants can be given away. Moreover, food security evokes for me an instant feeling connected with Agri Business. I was going to post the State of the World Report in this one but found an article I think is important to overview. In the next blog I will post the State of the World Report 2011 press release for comparisons.

First just by introduction, I’d like to share with you a personal experience I had which forced me to make a choice which has changed my career and indeed life.

I used to be a Market Research Analyst years ago. I was invited to apply for a position at the CSIRO (Commonwealth Scientific Industrial Research Organisation) in Canberra, my career would have taken off for sure had I gone for it. Al Gore comes to mind ‘the money or the planet’?. The position was to Commercialise Scientific Technology. I had expertise in Market Research and I had been headhunted after a presentation I had done and my association with Robert de Castella (Olympian) and work I had done for him and also as a Mentor with the Institute of Company Directors, I had a reputation. Interestingly, I didn’t have much money at the time and I found myself faced with a dilemma do I take the job or live on very little money, one of those life changing decisions. My dilemma was in respect to the scientific technology I would have to commercialise including Genetic Engineering. My gut feel at the time was ‘don’t do it’. Interestingly, my partner at the time, an artist, encouraged me to take it. Moreover, at the exact time he was given a metal sculpture of plant life as a gift. Imagine a long triangular base (stand) around 3 inches wide and 1.5 to 2 metres in length. A simple structure. It had metal prongs coming up across the length of it and they were of unequal heights with a twist at the end. When you hit one end of the sculpture all the metal prongs would wave like grass. Anyway what it depicted was plants and the twist at the end was the DNA double helix. I was not lost on the point nor the timing. Tell me – what are the chances in the week of my decision of receiving a sculpture depicting life with DNA double helix visible. That was the issue for me – the tampering with the blueprint of life. Anyone who read my blog about Edward de Bono would know that I don’t believe in coincidences, I also believe things happen for a reason and I pay attention to any signposts along my way. Anyway, I questioned the Manager of this Department and raised my concerns about Genetic Engineering for commercial purposes and the fact that Multinational Companies have no idea of the ecological balance, the subtle signals and the impacts down the track of altering genetic structures. I had concerns of cross pollinations e.g. Canola fields with other varieties of plants. I sought his viewpoint on this and he wasn’t concerned, he didn’t give much thought to the Multinational companies impact on nature. When you hear about companies like Monsanto creating varieties of plants that have seeds that have one season, they become redundant (built in obscelence), warning bells go off. Commercialism looks for the profit not the natural balance with the whole of life in mind and extending from that the life of human beings as part of that matrix. I asked this guy the question and he wasn’t pleased but as a consequence I didn’t take the job. I decided to live on my $20 and trust life. Good decision. Life for me has been challenging financially but I feel great in myself, life seems to be looking after me.

So coming back to the central idea of Food Security, we have to find a balance with nature. For me it links to the nuclear issue where we call it clean energy and yet we see the after shocks in Japan as the radiation is the worst ever recorded and the veil is lifted that it is toxic not clean. My gut around that issue was the same as Genetic Engineering. We are tampering with the sub-atomic levels of which we have the barest of knowledge from the perspective of the whole. I seek and intuit natural solutions and feel it is important to help people become self sufficient as quickly as possible. Yesterday would be good.

I had a brief conversation with friends who live in the country here in Brisbane. I suggested they may want to get solar panels. They are about to go on an expensive holiday. They said they can’t afford solar panels. We walked passed a shop in a village on top of the mountain covered in solar panels, within I feel a inner smile. I know it is one of the ways. After speaking briefly with these friends I couldn’t help wonder how they will feel when the electricity goes off if coal is no longer feasible. Self sufficiency is very important, I am certainly going to find a way to live off the land but using methods that are in harmony with nature. For me Bill Mollison’s Permaculture (see my posts on this subject) are the most balanced and appropriate ways and Earth ships (see my blog on the subject or google).

Here is an article I found it is from a socialist perspective, I am familiar with the arguments and I also share the concerns and connected with my inner feeling of Agri Business. I am following a thread here. So I will let you decide for yourself. The title ‘no food shortage’ is the key issue at present (future is another matter). Starvation is the moral dilemma that reveals immorality. It reveals flaws to the current system of economic distribution and political will. The basis of economics is the market will provide through demand and supply fair distribution of resources. Comparative advantage ensures that those with an advantage in a commodity supply it and we end up with fair distribution. Economic distribution and the politics of food (stored food in silos to await price increases) is another central issue.

No shortage of food

http://links.org.au/node/417

“The starting point for our analysis must be this: there is no shortage of food in the world today.

Contrary to the 18th century warnings of Thomas Malthus and his modern followers, study after study shows that global food production has consistently outstripped population growth, and that there is more than enough food to feed everyone. According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, enough food is produced in the world to provide over 2800 calories a day to everyone — substantially more than the minimum required for good health, and about 18% more calories per person than in the 1960s, despite a significant increase in total population.[1]

As the Food First Institute points out, “abundance, not scarcity, best describes the supply of food in the world today.”[2]

Despite that, the most commonly proposed solution to world hunger is new technology to increase food production.

The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, aims to develop “more productive and resilient varieties of Africa’s major food crops … to enable Africa’s small-scale farmers to produce larger, more diverse and reliable harvests.”[3]

Similarly, the Manila-based International Rice Research Institute has initiated a public-private partnership “to increase rice production across Asia via the accelerated development and introduction of hybrid rice technologies.”[4]

And the president of the World Bank promises to help developing countries gain “access to technology and science to boost yields.”[5]

Scientific research is vitally important to the development of agriculture, but initiatives that assume in advance that new seeds and chemicals are needed are neither credible nor truly scientific. The fact that there is already enough food to feed the world shows that the food crisis is not a technical problem — it is a social and political problem.

Rather than asking how to increase production, our first question should be why, when so much food is available, are over 850 million people hungry and malnourished? Why do 18,000 children die of hunger every day?

Why can’t the global food industry feed the hungry?

The profit system

The answer can be stated in one sentence. The global food industry is not organized to feed the hungry; it is organised to generate profits for corporate agribusiness.

The agribusiness giants are achieving that objective very well indeed. This year, agribusiness profits are soaring above last year’s levels, while hungry people from Haiti to Egypt to Senegal were taking to the streets to protest rising food prices. These figures are for just three months at the beginning of 2008.[6]

Grain Trading

* Archer Daniels Midland (ADM). Gross profit: $1.15 billion, up 55% from last year
* Cargill: Net earnings: $1.03 billion, up 86%
* Bunge. Consolidated gross profit: $867 million, up 189%.

Seeds & herbicides

* Monsanto. Gross profit: $2.23 billion, up 54%.
* Dupont Agriculture and Nutrition. Pre-tax operating income: $786 million, up 21%

Fertiliser

* Potash Corporation. Net income: $66 million, up 185.9%
* Mosaic. Net earnings: $520.8 million, up more than 1,200%

The companies listed above, plus a few more, are the monopoly or near-monopoly buyers and sellers of agricultural products around the world. Six companies control 85% of the world trade in grain; three control 83% of cocoa; three control 80% of the banana trade.[7] ADM, Cargill and Bunge effectively control the world’s corn, which means that they alone decide how much of each year’s crop goes to make ethanol, sweeteners, animal feed or human food.

As the editors of Hungry for Profit write, “The enormous power exerted by the largest agribusiness/food corporations allows them essentially to control the cost of their raw materials purchased from farmers while at the same time keeping prices of food to the general public at high enough levels to ensure large profits.”[8]

Over the past three decades, transnational agribusiness companies have engineered a massive restructuring of global agriculture. Directly through their own market power and indirectly through governments and the World Bank, IMF and World Trade Organisation, they have changed the way food is grown and distributed around the world. The changes have had wonderful effects on their profits, while simultaneously making global hunger worse and food crises inevitable.

The assault on traditional farming

Today’s food crisis doesn’t stand alone: it is a manifestation of a farm crisis that has been building for decades.

As we saw in part one of this article, over the past three decades the rich countries of the north have forced poor countries to open their markets, then flooded those markets with subsidised food, with devastating results for Third World farming.

But the restructuring of global agriculture to the advantage of agribusiness giants didn’t stop there. In the same period, southern countries were convinced, cajoled and bullied into adopting agricultural policies that promote export crops rather than food for domestic consumption, and favour large-scale industrial agriculture that requires single-crop (monoculture) production, heavy use of water, and massive quantities of fertiliser and pesticides. Increasingly, traditional farming, organised by and for communities and families, has been pushed aside by industrial farming organised by and for agribusinesses.

That transformation is the principal obstacle to a rational agriculture that could eliminate hunger.

The focus on export agriculture has produced the absurd and tragic result that millions of people are starving in countries that export food. In India, for example, more than one-fifth of the population is chronically hungry and 48% of children under five years old are malnourished. Nevertheless, India exported US$1.5 billion worth of milled rice and $322 million worth of wheat in 2004.[9]

In other countries, farmland that used to grow food for domestic consumption now grows luxuries for the north. Colombia, where 13% of the population is malnourished, produces and exports 62% of all cut flowers sold in the United States.

In many cases the result of switching to export crops has produced results that would be laughable if they weren’t so damaging. Kenya was self-sufficient in food until about 25 years ago. Today it imports 80% of its food — and 80% of its exports are other agricultural products.[10]

The shift to industrial agriculture has driven millions of people off the land and into unemployment and poverty in the immense slums that now surround many of the world’s cities.”