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Friday, October 11, 2013

The F Words: Food is Fundamental, Fun, Frightening, and Far-Reaching


Simon Batterbury at The Conversation website:
"I am an academic driven by concern for agrarian societies in some of the poorest countries of the world, and I have spent long periods working in a few, notable Burkina FAso. I am unconvinced by pro-GM arguments (I have to take GM pharm to survive - no choice in that, but also not happy). The possible health effects of GM foods are the least important.If these emerge, we will soon know - and lawsuits will shut down the industry. Environmental concerns and the really, really unpleasant capitalist model pervading the sector turn me right away from it in my research and teaching. This is shared my much of the general public. Rather than go on, have a look at the session on 'feeding 10 billion' at the Melb Uni Festival of Ideas last week. This was pretty good I thought. http://ideas.unimelb.edu.au/events/feeding-10-billion-people-and-sustaining-the-planet . What came across from the poll at the end was that the audience actually got the main point always overlooked by the pro-biotech, pro-GM food lobby, who are terrible at understanding what Prof Paul Richards calls the 'technography' of GM foods."

David Tribe responds: "Simon,  like you, I deplore the polarisation of this discussion and see your civilised and very welcome comments as an opportunity for a real conversation that has long been delayed by the red herrings of alleged lack of safety of genetically modified crops and the falsehood that they are not evaluated carefully. It is a pity that is taken many unnecessary years before the public in general start getting the message of exactly how much evidence there is about the safety of transgenic crops to both human health and the environment.
And sadly, there has not been very much discussion of the issues you raise in many forums.

But if you read widely you can find it. One excellent example of a welcome middle ground  is

"Both Sides Now" Fallacies in the Genetic- Modification Wars, Implications for Developing Countries, and Anthropological Perspectives, Glenn Davis Stone 2002 Current Anthropology Volume 43, Number 4, August–October 2002.

To quote Glenn Stone directly
[this article examines] the dominant industry and green positions on these two issues, using case material from India. The industry lobby plays the “Malthus card” by capitalizing on popular misconceptions about food supplies, and it intentionally obscures the differences between corporate and public crop biotechnology. The green lobby allows its political interpretation of hunger to blind it to the potential for some biotechnology to mitigate hunger, and—in an odd convergence of rhetorical strategies—it too obscures differences between corporate and public sector offerings that are relevant to helping developing countries...
...The level of rhetoric on genetically modified crops in developing countries remains very high, exerting a strong polarizing effect on the public and the scholarly/scientific community as well. While the following analysis was not necessarily conceived as an attempt to forge a middle ground, it does arrive at a ground quite apart from the orthodox industry and green positions...
The Green Lobby denying the potential
Critics of genetic modification stress that hunger in developing countries results from poverty rather than food shortage (e.g., Lappe´ , Collins, and Rosset 1998, Rosset 1999); this is demonstrably true, and the Indian case goes even farther in showing the deleterious effects of  overproduction.
Yet it does not follow that crop genetic modification has nothing valuable to offer to developing countries. The characteristic green position is that genetic modification will exacerbate the poverty behind hunger. For India, this perspective is argued most strongly by Vandana Shiva, who warns that genetically modified crops will only hamper developing countries’ food security by discouraging the cultivation of subsistence crops and disrupting the “free exchange of seed” (2000a:8). Therefore, engineering viral resistance in crops is seen as little more than a blunder that would create new viruses (Rifkin 1998:85), while Golden Rice is attacked as a “hoax” (Shiva 2000b) and a “Trojan Horse” (RAFI 2000) that will facilitate the penetration of corporate technology while contributing nothing to nutrition because of its low beta-carotene level. I would suggest that industry’s cynical use of Golden Rice does not keep it from holding some promise for developing countries, especially since the carotene level can probably be raised. The more important point is that the debate on the value of genetically modified crops to developing countries must not hinge only on this one overhyped technology. A wide variety of public research projects better illustrate the potential of crop genetic modification (Conway and Toenniessen 1999). In India, the sorghum and pearl millet that are discouraged by Indian agricultural policy are undergoing improvement through genetic modification by public researchers at the International Crops Research Institute for Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT); genetic modification of the pigeon pea also appears highly promising (Sharma and Ortiz 2000). But perhaps the most interesting example of promising crop genetic modification for developing countries is cassava.
Although not currently a major Indian cultivar, cassava (Manihot esculenta) is a crucial subsistence crop worldwide, ranked third (behind rice and maize) as a source of dietary calories in the tropics. It has special value in developing countries’ farming because it does well on poor soils and with low rainfall and because as a perennial it can be harvested as required. Its wide harvesting window allows it to act as a famine reserve and is invaluable in managing labor schedules (Stone, Netting, and Stone 1990). It is also a potential cash crop for farmers, supplying growing demands in starch markets.
However, cassava production has severe constraints, including rapid postharvest deterioration of the roots and serious deficiencies in protein and vitamins. Propagation via stem cuttings results in accumulation of pests and diseases in the planting material...
... Yet throughout the anti-genetic-modification literature, from Greenpeace to Jeremy Rifkin to Vandana Shiva to the Natural Law Party, there is an eerie silence about the accomplishments and potential of public research.
Blurring the boundaries
The studious avoidance of public genetic-modification research results from the position that crop genetic modification should be judged and rejected as a whole rather than analyzed as the varied enterprise that it is. The green media show a remarkable convergence with the corporate media in calling for a verdict on the monolithic entity of genetic modification. Dismissing public research allows bold condemnations of all crop genetic modification, as in the Turning Point Project’s “Biotechnology=Hunger” advertisement. Just as industry urges that crop genetic modification in general be supported because the public sector is working on Golden Rice, greens urge that crop genetic modification in general be condemned because the corporate sector is working on “Terminator.”...
...The greens’ scorn for public research appears to some to reveal a lack of genuine concern for the welfare of developing-country populations (Nash 2001), but it more likely results from a perceived need to engage the struggle on a large scale with strong financing and a wide following. Large, ardent followings of check-mailing opponents of genetic modification are better mobilized by bold black-and-white slogans than by critical evaluations of the potential effects of different genetically modified products. Mass marketing has led to a shameless “dumbing down” of the issues. Greenpeace, with a global presence and around 4 million paying supporters (Purdue 2000:73), offers one of the boldest condemnations of genetic modification; it is no accident that right next to the “No Genetic Modification” banner on its web page is the “click here to join” button.
However, the greens’ demonization of genetically modified crops has effects that are contradictory to their values. Promoting blanket disapproval of such crops helps drive public-sector genetic modification into the arms of industry. Genetic modification is expensive, and most public projects are in a constant struggle for funding. Industry provides some funds and access to genetic materials; greens provide no funding and obstruct philanthropic investment (ABC News Online 2001). Green activists may claim to have developing countries’ interests at heart, but many public researchers have devoted their careers to improving nutrition for the poor, often spurning better-paid positions in industry. Many actually share greens’ disapproval of increasing corporate control over developing countries’ food production, but they can hardly be blamed for disdaining activists who demonize public research along with corporate projects. They may fairly ask green critics why they do not approve of ongoing research such as cassava modification that is explicitly tailored to improving food security for the poor.
These words are as true today -- when we are witnessing activists carrying out  eco-sabotage of GM Golden Rice  and GM Aubergine field-trials in the Philippines, and GM papaya farms in Hawaii -- as they were when this article was written.


Simon Batterbury continues at The Conversation
 Food is intensely political and is more than just about producing 'more'. Thus the last two speakers easily carried the the day (and the poll). Simran Sethi pointing out that we have enough food but it is pooly distributed ( point raised decades ago by Nobel winner Amartya Sen), and that just producing more (though yield improvement and tweaking varieties and genes) does not actually help poor people who have no access to it - because of their own situation, the price of seeds, corporate control, their class position, people taking land, etc. She mentioned over-consumption and obesity as just as much a problem as lack of food for some.
 She has spent 4 months at the FAO collectign this data. Gary Egger took this much further to argue economic growth itself is a culprit, creating unhealthy people, esp. in Australia wh ere we have become accustomed to easy calories, cars, and lack of personal fitness, and are creating the conditions of our own destruction through carbon emissions.
 The GM food sector (basically 5 companies) - very much driven by an economic growth agenda, with some giveaway of technology but not of their real moneyspinners - is really is on the back foot. They don't focus on extremely tasteful and nutritional products (but stuff like more corn, much of it fed to animals and farmed as a commercial monocrop). They don't support small semi-subsistence producers much , because those guys have little money to pay for the transformation events and seeds coming from the GM companies, so there is no money in it for Bayer, etc.
They annoy those committed to social justice immeasurably, because as the recent Bowman case in the US demonstrates, they pursue their patents pretty mercilessly and are, in the last resort, commercial operations seeking a profit and a market share. So people feel they don't support the everyday farmer enough. They also constantly justify their work in terms of a forthcoming Malthusian emergency, where food runs out, using some terribly outdated (and frankly often wrong) projections about raw numbers of people and gross crop yield, concealing the differentiation both spatially and in terms of poverty/wealth in those stats.
The evidence for the latter is the subject of work by thousands of demographers and agro-economists, few of whom agree at this point at least that we are heading for a meltdown (Ron Herring, if you are starting).
All these failures of the GM industry are a gift to conventional plant breeders actually, as we have been saying in MSLE - smaller scale, less investment,needed, better track record. That is where our lab skills may be better focussed at this point.
The evidence for the forthcoming Malthusian emergency (particularly in Africa, where I work) is dubious as best since the work of small producers is constantly underestimated and there is much more capacity in our existing food systems, both there and elsewhere - if people retain access to land rightfully theirs, do their own varietal selection based on thousands of years of knowledge, and continue ag. intensification by conventional means (see Mike Mortimore on all of this).
Yes this does mean some pesticide and yes some will be able to afford GM vatieties, but many I have worked with cannot afford either, even when there ss national licencing, as in India for cotton.
 And there is a slowdown in pop.growth in many regions . Food is power, and the power currently resides in the wrong place - ie not with the producers, or with poor urban consumers. This is what academics and activisits need to change. And for western consumers, eating less and better is an option. Wed 16th Oct 2013 is 'nude food day ' in Aus. primary schools - no packaging. Nutritious local food is unlikely to need any. http://www.nudefoodday.com.au/ "

David Tribe responds: And I agree completely that food is intensely political and not just about producing more.

I do think however it is important not to misread Amartya Sen. Dr Sen did not say, I believe, that famines are never caused by lack of food, and it would be interesting to read his analysis of the famines that  occurred in China during the great cultural Revolution thoroughly described by Frank Dikotter (see e.g. " Amartya Sen's entitlement thesis muddied by history of China's great famine: Food for Arms".


One might even want to consider the possibility that misreading the compelling need to pursue future food security by both  appropriate technology advances as well as political change because of naive and flawed assumptions about the world having plenty of food might fall into the same category of intellectual and moral blunders that caused the famines that Amartya Sen so sensitively does analyse.

I would add that the Malthusian crisis we might face is not likely to be about famines. It might be about war and ecological collapse, and sustainably intensified farming might be part of the solution.

The world will always have plenty of food. And it will always be imperfectly distributed, and much of it wasted by pest damage and inadequate storage and non-frugal eating patterns. But in the real world production shortages will hurt many urban poor because of high food prices that are transmitted -- like it or not -- through the economic system and these high food prices have tangible harmful effects among the urban food, as the food riots in recent years demonstrate.

And the so-called Malthusian trap is not just about food and food prices. It's about environmental damage from farmland expansion, over use of water, and fertiliser run-off into rivers, and we should continue a conversation about that very big topic.

And I think we should continue to discuss the fascinating many dimensions to our perceptions and opinions about food that you kindly point out.

These are indeed usually glossed over by the so-called "Pro-GM lobby".

There is the wonderful evolutionary psychology of food popularised by Steven Pinker and including the remarkable insights of expert psychologists such as Paul Rozin mentioned in Steven Pinker's How the Mind Works:
QUOTE What is disgust for? Rozin points out that the human species faces the "the omnivore's dilemma". Unlike, say, koalas, who mainly [eat] eucalyptus leaves and vulnerable when those become scarce, omnivores choose from a vast manual  potential foods. The downside is that many are poisonous. Many fish, amphibians,  and invertebrates contained potent neurotoxins. Meats that are ordinarily harmless can house parasites like tapeworms, and when they spoil, meats can be downright deadly, because the microorganisms that cause putrefaction release toxins to deter scavengers and thereby keep the meat for themselves
Rozin ventured that disgust is an adaptation that deterred our ancestors from eating dangerous animals stuff. Faeces, carrion, and soft, Wet animal parts are home to harmful microorganisms and ought to be kept outside the body. The dynamics of learning about food in childhood fit right.  Which animal parts are safe depends on the local species and their endemic diseases, so particular tastes cannot be innate.
Children use their older relatives the way kings used food tasters, if they ate something and lived, it is not poison. Thus very young children are receptive to whatever their parents let them eat, and when they are old enough to forage on their own, they avoid everything else...
See also the previous post at GMO Pundit..

Yes,  I agree with you Simon, and think Paul Rozin is right. "Food Is Fundamental, Fun, Frightening, and Far-Reaching'.


Paul Rosin @ JSTOR: Social Research, Vol. 66, No. 1 (SPRING 1999), pp. 9-30: "PAUL ROZIN
Social Research Vol. 66, No. 1, FOOD: NATURE and CULTURE (SPRING 1999), pp. 9-30
Published by: The New School Article Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40971298

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