The 1996 World Food Summit goal to halve
by the year 2015 the 800 million people who go
hungry each day could be compromised by trade
policies which favour the interests of
agrochemical corporations over those of small
farmers. The growing linkages between pesticides
and seed companies promoting genetically
engineered (GE) crops are exacerbating the trend.
The problems of food security
lie in poverty, rather than lack of food
production. Economist Amartya Sen, honoured this
year with the Nobel Prize for Economics,
demonstrated in the early 1970s that the great
famines in India, Bangladesh and the Saharan
countries were due to a complex combination of
factors and not solely to lack of
locally-available food(2).
The agrochemical industry,
however, promotes the view that hunger can be
eliminated by expanding agricultural production.
The US company Monsanto, producer of crops
genetically engineered to use its best-selling
herbicide glyphosate (marketed as Round-up)
recently ran a series of ads in the UK under the
headline: "Worrying about starving future
generations won't feed them. Food biotechnology
will."(3) However at a recent meeting on
biotechnology Carlos Joly of Monsanto admitted
that the ad campaign was 'a spectacular failure'
as there is little public confidence in GE food.
There is no real evidence that genetic
engineering will expand food production -
particularly without severe environmental
impacts. Nevertheless many governments implicitly
support the industry focus on agricultural
production rather than the underlying causes of
food insecurity.
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The main markets for
agrochemicals are the US, Europe and Japan. But
with no room to increase sales in these regions,
companies seek ways of ensuring long-term
profitability from consolidation of their
interests in agriculture. They also look to
increase sales in developing countries. India is
now the tenth largest pesticide user, and Asia
and Latin America are major targets. A comparison
of Chinese rice production, where farmers spend
on average $6.7/ha on pesticides, with the
Japanese average of $752/ha reveals the corporate
logic(4). Even so, Chinese rice yields are
second only to Japan. In spite of population
growth in China rice production has kept pace
with demands including reserves of 17% of annual
food needs.
The leading pesticide companies
have expanded into the seed industry and into
genetic engineering, packaging themselves as the
'Life Science' corporations. Takeovers and
mergers have escalated through the 1990s and by
1997 three companies accounted for 17% of the $23
billion seeds industry companies (see chart).
Leading the trend are Monsanto and Novartis. Dow
AgroSciences has a 20% ownership in the world's
largest seed company, Pioneer Hi-Bred. Zeneca
(formerly ICI) of the UK, DuPont (US) and AgrEvo
(an amalgamation of the German companies Hoechst
and Schering) have taken the same steps.
An industry analyst has
observed that: "The days of seed companies
selling commodity seed products that will be
sprayed with pesticides marketed by a separate
industry are clearly numbered. Seed companies are
now selling seed brands engineered to express
pest resistance genes or to be tolerant to
specific herbicides.(5)"
The gains for industry could be
phenomenal. Some predict that this new wave of
agricultural technology could take the global
crop protection market up to a $100 billion a
year industry(6). The cost of the race to control gene
technology implies companies share this view: in
July 1998, Novartis announced a $600 million
investment to establish the world's biggest crop
gene mapping project, the Novartis Agricultural
Discovery Institute, in California
Food choice threatened
One seed industry analyst predicts that by 2000
"nearly all commercial seeds of all major
crops will contain one or more bio-engineered
traits."(8) Industry implies that the technology
holds the key to feeding future generations but
their history and practice indicates that
corporate survival rather than food production
drives their research and genetically engineered
crops reflects this trend.
The main GE crops now on the
market express 'input characteristics' such as
herbicide-tolerance and resistance to the
bacterial insecticide, Bacillus thuringiensis
(Bt) (see p. 6). Future development of 'output
characteristics' is unlikely to be driven by the
food security needs of developing countries, but
will focus on characteristics desirable in rich
markets: genes which would extend shelf life,
improve appearance, and promote desirable
processing characteristics. The high research
costs lead corporations to consider market
expansion and profits, rather than such
characteristics as improving nutritional quality
or access to food.
More use - more
dependence
As with pesticides, GE crops are likely to have a
number of undesirable impacts. GE crops are
designed to increase dependency of farmers on
inputs. At the APPA meeting farmers'
organisations and NGOs indicated that many
farmers in the Philippines have already been sold
herbicide-resistant crops. There is, however, no
evidence that these will bring increased yields
and no evidence that they will enable the
pesticides they are dependent on to be used
safely under the conditions of use in developing
countries.
Companies argue that
herbicide-resistant crops will reduce the use of
herbicides. However sales of glyphosate
(Monsanto's 'Round-up' herbicide which must be
used with its GE crops) are soaring. Individual
test farms may show one less spray per season,
but global usage is dramatically increasing and
developing countries are the targets, as there is
little room for expansion in the saturated
European and US markets. It is also uncertain
whether herbicide-resistant crops reduce use on
individual farms (see p. 20). Furthermore, with
only three seasons of GE crops in cultivation,
there is already evidence that the genes cross
into related species and are likely to create
'super-weeds', leading to further chemical
applications.
GE crops promote monoculture.
In developing countries, farmers successfully
control pests by encouraging biodiversity in
their fields and encouraging beneficial insects
and crops. FAO points out that more plant
diversity has been lost to industrial agriculture
than any other cause. GE crops will increase the
problem. Scientists have shown that reductions in
biodiversity have led to the evolution of
aggressive pests and diseases which are more
difficult to control than those from which they
have been derived(9).
Millions of farmers in
developing countries rely on farm-saved seeds for
their crops: but once they begin to buy GE seeds
they will be dependent on future purchases.
Monsanto prohibits seed-saving(10).
No independent testing
Genetically engineered crops are proving deeply
unpopular with European consumers, who are
worried about food safety, lack of labelling, and
the environmental impacts. While pesticides must
be registered for use on each crop, requiring
detailed testing and submission of data to
governments, GE crops are being rushed to the
market before results have been published from
any independent scientific research. The Monsanto
contracts forbid use of seeds in research.
Impact of trade
liberalisation
With the inclusion of the Agreement on
Agriculture in the Uruguay Round, pressure has
mounted on developing countries to liberalise
markets and to remove protective measures. Many
developing countries have joined the World Trade
Organisation (WTO) hoping to access markets in
industrialised countries, and particularly to
increase exports of value-added processed crops.
This has yet to happen: instead agricultural
production for domestic use is being eroded and
areas once producing mixed crops for local and
national food security are moving into export
crops.
The Third International Women's
Conference Against APEC, which preceeded APPA in
November, heard that "throughout Asia and
South America peasants are losing access to land
and globalization is intensifying this problem
.... big corporations are producing for export or
taking land out of agriculture"(11). With
delegations of women from 18 countries, many
themselves farmers, they pointed out
that"women are predominantly responsible for
the provision of the food needs of their
families. Despite their multiple and vital roles
as farmers, fishworkers, farmworkers and
caretakers and managers of their households,
women often experience discrimination in terms of
access and control over land and water resources.
The Asian crisis has intensified this
gender-based discrimination and the exploitation
and violence against women, both within the
family and in the workplace."(12) Delegates
observed that transnational corporations are
benefiting, and increasing their control over
agriculture and fisheries, at the expense of
women and men farmers.
The situation in Mexico warns
of some of the dangers experienced after entering
the NAFTA trade liberalisation agreement with the
US and Canada in January 1994. Agricultural
policies which protected food security were
eliminated under NAFTA, although three million
Mexican peasants grow basic grains and oilseeds
on 80% of cultivated land. Mexico imported 9% of
grains consumed in 1990, but by 1996 this had
risen to 30%. Corn, which forms the basis of the
Mesoamerican diet and culture, was to be better
protected than other products, but import quotas
assigned to the US were exceeded in 1995, 1996
and 1998, and the import of 5.8 million tonnes of
tariff-free corn, more than twice the amount
specified by NAFTA, undercut Mexican farmers,
driving down domestic prices(13) . Peasants were encouraged to switch to
fruit and vegetable production for export:
requiring higher inputs of costly pesticides.
During the 1996 World Food
Summit, industry claimed that pesticides are
essential for global food security. They cite an
expanding world population and destruction of
wilderness areas for agriculture as evidence of
the case for pesticides. Radical industry
commentators like Dennis Avery, directly link
pesticide use and free trade objectives:
"The world must have free trade in farm
products, both to prevent Asian countries from
pursuing food self-sufficiency in a misguided
search of food security and to release the farm
production potential for Europe."(14)
But in reality, the pressure of
liberalisation is eroding the role of agriculture
as part of the social and cultural fabric of
rural areas, particularly in developing
countries. In the jargon of trade negotiations,
this is termed as the 'multi-functional nature of
agriculture' and promoters of free trade refuse
to allow this to sway the negotiations.
Conclusion
Corporate strategies are increasingly promoting
dependence on GE crops, locking farmers into seed
and pesticide purchases, which will pose grave
threats to farmers' incomes and to the
environment. At the same time, liberalised trade
is encouraging production of more high value,
high input crops, for an export market. Trade
agreements have failed to prevent subsidised
European and US grains from flooding the markets
of developing countries and this is undermining
national production of the grains that form the
basis of local and national diets. Together,
these pressures are threatening rural livelihoods
across developing countries, and the impact on
food security at both a local and national level
needs far more serious consideration in
international policy making and in the trade
negotiations.
References
1. The Third International Women's Conference Against APEC and the Asia-Pacific Peoples' Assembly, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, 8-15 November 1998
2. Sen, A., and Hussain, eds. Political Economy of Hunger, Clarendon, Oxford, 1995.
3. Independent Saturday Magazine, September 1998.
4. Grimes, Alison, Crop Production Opportunities in China, Agrow, 1998.
5. Beer, Andrew, 'Blurring the line between industries', Agrow Review of 1997 , PBJ Publications Ltd, UK, 1998.
6. Wood, Andrew and Fairley, Peter, 'Biotech crops flourish', Chemical Week, 4-11 February 1998, p. 27.
7. RAFI Communique, July/August 1998.
8. Op. cit. 6.
9. RA Ennos, The influence of agriculture on genetic biodiversity, BCPC, 1997.
10. Monsanto Roundup Ready - Gene Agreement for Roundup Ready Soybeans, 1996.
11. Confronting globalization: Asserting our right to food, Statement from the conference, available from PAN Asia Pacific.
12. Ibid.
13. Ana de Ita, Researcher at the Centre of Studies for Rural Change in Mexico, The impact of NAFTA on food security and the proposal for reordering Mexican territory, paper for APPA, Malaysia, 1998.
14. Avery, Dennis, 'Saving the planet with pesticides, biotechnology and European farm reform', Brighton Crop Protection Conference, Vol. 1, 1997.
[This article first appeared in Pesticides News No. 42, December 1998, pages 4-5]