On Genetically Modified Seeds

In March 2009, the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee passed its Global Food Security Act. The legislation, known as the Lugar-Casey Act, aims to focus on longer-term agricultural development, and restructure aid agencies to better respond to crises. Funding for agricultural development—some US$7.7 billion worth—would be directed in large part to genetically modified crop research.

In other words, food aid policy for the first time mandates the use of genetic modification technologies. Engineered crops will need engineered seeds—seeds that are no longer a result of natural cross-pollination.

The Lugar-Casey Act represents the biggest project in agriculture since the original Green Revolution in the 1950s and 1960s. Fifty years ago, developing countries had yearly agricultural trade surpluses of over US$1 billion. Today the Southern food deficit has grown to over US$11 billion per year, helping create dependency on the volatile international markets that led to the 2008 food crisis.

The first Green Revolution increased global food production by 11 percent in a very short time, but per capita hunger also increased equally as much. How could this be? Green Revolution technologies are expensive. The fertilizers, seeds, pesticides, and machinery needed to cash in on productive gains put the technology out of reach of most small farmers, increasing the divide between rich and poor in the developing world.

Poor farmers were driven out of business and into poverty-stricken urban slums. The new Green Revolution highlighted in the Lugar-Casey Bill suffers from all these same problems. This time, however, the genetically-engineered seeds will be under patent and privately owned by the biotechnology corporations that monopolize the seed industry, and farmers will have to buy new seed each year.

R&D dollars in the millions go to engineered climate-smart seeds as a solution to food security under climate stress. DuPont, Monsanto, Syngenta and Limagrain control 29 per cent of the world market in seeds, with Monsanto controlling almost all of the genetically engineered seed. The Gates and Rockefeller foundations’ partnership with Monsanto to bring an Asian-type Green Revolution to the African continent will invest US$150 million into the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA).

The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa puts the costs of developing 200 crop varieties better adapted to local environments at US$43 million. The development of bioengineered maize by Monsanto is said to have cost US$10-25 million. At some point, there will have to be a return on this investment—in Argentina Monsanto claimed this back retroactively.

In 2008, the number of farmers using GM crops worldwide increased by 1.3 million from 1996 to 13.3 million—and the number of countries growing these crops increased from six in 1996 to 25 in 2008. More than 90 percent of farmers using GM crops in developing countries are small and resource poor.

The testing ground for modified seeds is spreading across African fields. In South Africa in 2009, Monsanto’s genetically modified maize failed to produce kernels and hundreds of farmers were devastated. While Monsanto compensated the large-scale farmers to whom it directly sold the seed, it gave nothing to the numerous small-scale farmers who had been handed out free sachets of seeds.

In a globalised world in which agriculture is increasingly industrial, farming is based on monocultures of a limited number of plant species. The trend for agriculture to be increasingly mechanized in the hands of fewer and fewer farmers cultivating larger and larger expanses of land is leading to a simplification of our landscapes and a reduction of our plant varieties.

Wherever people’s needs are largely supplied by a local food system, the farms in that region are themselves more diverse. Farmers who supply local markets have strong incentives to diversify their production. Seed saving farmers have selected plants for certain traits including their success in local microclimates and soil types.

Agricultural biodiversity steadily multiplies as a result. When farms are small in scale, and especially when farmed organically, they also enable a wide range of non-food species to co-exist within the farm system. In some cases the farm itself mimics the wilderness. There is a lot of ground to recover and species to reclaim.

Nidhi Tandon is founder and director of Networked Intelligence for Development. This is an abridged version of an article originally published in Pambazuka, Foreign Policy In Focus, www.fpif.org.