Feeding the World or the Corporations?

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26 Nov 2004 15:13:01 -0000

 

Feeding the World or the Corporations?

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The Institute of Science in Society Science Society

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ISIS Press Release 26/11/04

 

Feeding the World or the Corporations?

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Food agencies are feeding corporate greed while an estimated

880 million people in the world go hungry. Sam Burcher

reports

 

Sources for this report are available in the ISIS members

site http://www.i-sis.org.uk/full/FTWOCGFull.php. Full

details here http://www.i-sis.org.uk/membership.php

 

FAO report condemned, GM food aid rejected

 

The United Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO)

has upset a broad coalition of consumers, farmers,

environment groups, peasant organisations and social

movements by producing a report overtly biased towards

promoting the interests of multinational corporations like

Monsanto and Syngenta. The report omits to mention that

Monsanto control over 90% of total world area sown to

transgenic seeds.

 

The FAO report, Agricultural biotechnology: meeting the

needs of the poor? states that GMOs could be key to solving

world hunger, and pushes for more funding. The report was

denounced by 650 worldwide civil society organisations in an

open letter to the Director of the FAO in Rome. The letter,

signed by 800 individuals from more than 80 countries,

demanded structural changes in access to land, food and

political power, to be combined with support for sustainable

technologies in farmer-led research. It was also rejected by

five international NGOs at a Hunger, Food Aid and GMOs

meeting at Maputo, Mozambique in July 2004.

 

Via Campesina, an organisation representing the interests of

peasant-farmers worldwide said that promoting a

technological solution to the problem of hunger in the form

of GM crops is " a slap in the face for those who defend food

sovereignty. " The development of industrial agriculture has

already caused millions of rural people to be displaced from

their lands and condemned them to lives of misery. GM crops,

the latest offering in industrial agriculture, will only

intensify that trend.

 

Consumers International Regional Office for Africa, União

Nacional de Camponeses (UNAC) Mozambique (Via Campesina),

Environmental Rights Action (Friends of the Earth Nigeria),

the Oakland Institute and the Third World Network (TWN) said

that the FAO's report has betrayed rural people and

consumers by recommending GMOs. Their consensus is that the

donation of GM food developed from untested and unreliable

technologies can only complicate hunger issues. It is

unacceptable at least until the safety of GM food and feed

has been proven beyond any reasonable doubt.

 

ISIS was the first to call for GM-free food aid in 2002 on

grounds that the malnourished with compromised immune

systems would be especially susceptible to the potential

hazards of GM food ( " GM-free food aid! "

www.i-sis.org.uk/GM-freefoodaid.php).

 

Consumers International (CI), which has 250 member

organisations in 115 countries worldwide, became concerned

about GM food aid in 2000 when a shipment of US GM maize

arrived in Africa without any labelling or any indication as

to the nature of the cargo. A petition was immediately sent

to the then Clinton Administration and the UN, requesting

that food donations be positively and explicitly labelled so

recipient countries could give informed consent to donations

after having been made aware of their contents.

 

The petition served to attract marginalized groups of

farmers, NGOs and environmentalists who together decided

that GM food aid raised the broader issue of the denial of

fundamental consumer rights.

 

In May 2004, 65 groups representing farmer, consumer,

environmental and development organisations from 15 African

countries sent an open letter to the World Food Programme

(WFP), protesting against the pressure exerted on Sudan and

Angola over their respective decisions to impose

restrictions on GM food aid.

 

They demanded that the WFP and USAID (US Agency for

International Development) immediately desist from

misleading the governments of Angola and Sudan with a

scenario of no choice, and from forcing them to accept GM

food aid. The called on the WFP to respect the decisions of

recipients of food aid, and to actively seek alternative

food - or cash donations to purchase food – available at the

local and regional level.

 

Corporate propaganda misleading the public

 

Polls conducted in Europe have firmly rejected GM crops

across the board except on the issue of feeding Third World

hunger. Some 55% of people believe that GM can solve Third

World hunger, mainly because they were misled by corporate

propaganda. Many African nations reject handouts or

dependence on corporate owned seeds. Instead, they want

self-sufficient sustainable agricultural production methods

to enable them to feed themselves. (See Public Say No to

GMO's SiS 19, 2003

http://www.i-sis.org.uk/isisnews/sis19.php)

 

Africa fights for self-sufficiency against GM crops

 

In 2002 Zambia, under intense pressure from the UN,

nevertheless refused GM food aid (see " Africa unites against

GM to opt for self-sufficiency " SiS 16

http://www.i-sis.org.uk/isisnews/sis16.php)

and went on to double their own maize yield and successfully

fed themselves and neighbouring countries for the following

year. The African country of Benin has placed a moratorium

on the import and cultivation of GMOs.

 

As consumer demand for genetic engineering shrinks and more

countries adopt biosafety laws and labelling regulations, so

the volume of surplus GM crops increases. Rejected by

Europe, GM giants Monsanto and Syngenta have turned their

attention to Asia, and in particular, Africa, to profit from

dumping GM food as aid, and to support agricultural research

and `biosafety' initiatives designed to facilitate

acceptance of their untested products. The US based aid

agency USAID, which funds the African Agricultural

Technology Foundation, is in turn funded by Monsanto,

Syngenta and the Rockerfeller Foundation. USAID clearly

states its intention to " integrate biotechnology into local

food systems and spread technology throughout regions in

Africa. "

 

The huge sums invested in the biotech industry supposed to

alleviate world hunger have failed to deliver thus far. The

USAID-funded Consultative Group for International

Agricultural Research (CGIAR) has recently received $100

million towards its " Harvest Plus Plan " to produce " second

generation " GM crops - maize, cassava and sweet potato in

Africa. But there is already evidence that organic farmers

are achieving record yields with their crops in Africa

without the need for GM varieties (see " Greening Ethiopia "

series, SiS 23 http://www.i-sis.org.uk/isisnews/sis23.php).

 

At the World Food Summit in 2002, the FAO engaged with the

NGO Forum on Food Sovereignty to make a commitment to

strengthen the principle of patent-free seeds and local food

production by rural people. But they have clearly reneged on

their commitment in saying that hunger can be solved by

genetic engineering.

 

With this change of mind, the FAO now appears to be open to

supporting terminator technology (sterile seed lines), which

would be another radical departure from their stance only

four years ago. And this has called their independence and

integrity into question. This effective support of corporate

bio-piracy is responsible for threatening the collective

work of farmers over countless millennia in creating new

breeds of agricultural crops.

 

Ten years of GM failures

 

The first decade of commercial GM crops have failed even the

biotech companies. Promises have been broken and benefits

from GM have not materialised. Moratoriums and bans against

GM crops have been put into place in many countries mainly

because of concerns over health and transgenic

contamination. Citizen opposition in Europe has ensured that

GM products are kept off the shelf and consumer and retailer

rejection has forced Monsanto to delay commercialisation of

GM wheat planned for 2004. The biotech vision of predominant

GM monocultures will fuel mounting concerns over the

ecological impacts of industrial agriculture. Fortunately,

there are many sustainable low input alternatives that are

safe and more cost effective. (See The Case for a GM-Free

Sustainable World, ISP Report.

http://www.indsp.org/A%20GM-Free%20Sustainable%20World.pdf

 

How civil society can safeguard their civil rights

 

Aside from the UN Guidelines for Consumer Protection,

Consumers International has identified four crucial tools

that civil society can use to safeguard their civil rights:

 

The African Model Law on Safety in Biotechnology, which

provides for clear labelling on GM foods and advocates

participation in decision making to protect Africa's

biodiversity, environment and health from risks associated

with GM. The Model Law's provisions are also very

comprehensive and provide for strict regulation, taking into

account the importance of Africa as a centre of origin and

diversity of many food crops.

 

The Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety, which puts into

operation the Precautionary Principle. It also establishes

the principle of prior informed consent with regard to the

import of GMOs and preserves the right of a country to

reject applications for the import of GMOs. So far only 27

African countries have ratified this protocol and more must

be persuaded to do so.

 

The Food Aid Convention Articles iii, viii and xiii, which

state that GM food aid should only be accepted after

recipient countries have discarded alternatives and non-GM

food aid as non-options.

 

The Rio Declaration, in which Principle 15 endorses the

Precautionary Approach to be applied by States where

scientific certainty of safety is lacking.

 

Steps must be taken to improve citizens' rights to redress,

so that farmers are adequately compensated for damages and

losses incurred when GM crops fail in harvest, or GM seeds

and pollen contaminate local crop varieties. CI also

supports consumer education rights whereby critical

information on the development of biotechnology is

accessible and wholly in the public domain. It cautions

against measures that destroy existing healthy food

production systems, exclude the majority of small-scale

farmers (1 in 6 people in developing countries are food

producers) and reduce the diversity of food bases for the

future.

 

Historically, hunger is a political problem that requires

political will to create stable markets for small food

producers and to encourage land use by rural families. This

would enable the production of larger amounts of quality

foodstuffs in rural areas through investing in truly

sustainable alternatives such as agroecology and

biodiversity management (see " Corporate hijack of

sustainable agriculture " , ISIS report 17 Nov 2004)

http://www.i-sis.org.uk/CHSA.php.

 

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