Johannesburg, South Africa
February 15, 2008
Source:
IRIN News
Once heralded as an environmentally friendly “silver bullet” in
the fight against poverty and hunger, genetically-modified (GM)
crops today generate huge controversy over their safety and
impact.
The debate widened on Thursday with the release of two
conflicting reports, one by the pro-GM
International Service for the
Acquisition of Agri-Biotech Applications (ISAAA), the other
from the environmental group
Friends of the Earth International (FEI).
ISAAA’s ‘Global Status of Commercialised Biotech Applications’
reported a growth in the use of GM crops worldwide, mainly soya,
maize and cotton, and said this had raised farmers’ incomes. "At
a time when you have soaring commodity prices and sky-rocketing
energy prices, you want a technology that will increase the
supply side and bring down the cost of production, and that is
what you have with this technology," Clive James, chairman and
founder of ISAAA, was quoted as saying in the Financial Times
newspaper.
The ISAAA presents itself as a not-for-profit organisation but
is widely regarded as lobbyists for the GM industry.
GM crops are produced from genetically modified organisms (GMO),
altered through genetic engineering. The GM debate commonly
focuses on human and environmental safety issues, intellectual
property rights and food security. FEI’s study, ‘Who Benefits
from GM Crops – the Rise in Pesticide Use’, released to coincide
with the annual ISAAA report, concluded that GM crops “have
caused an increase rather than a decrease in toxic pesticide
use, and have failed to tackle hunger and poverty”.
“GM crops have been researched for 25 to 30 years but they are
not bringing the promised results, they are not a silver bullet
solution [to global hunger],” Helen Holder, European coordinator
of FEI’s GMOs, food and farming campaign, told IRIN.
No chance on small farms?
“The problem is general in Africa: what the industry has been
trumpeting has not happened, especially for small-scale
farmers,” Nnimmo Bassey, of Environmental Rights Action and FEI
Nigeria, said. “GM crops would not solve poverty in Africa but
would rather entrench poverty,” he added. The main reason was
that the scale of farming in Africa was too small to reap the
benefits.
According to Margaret Karembu, Director of the ISAAA Africentre
in Nairobi, the criticism was unfounded because GM crops had not
yet been given a fair chance on the continent. “We don’t have
many countries in Africa using GM crops so we can’t yet
demonstrate the impact,” she said.
“African farmers don’t have the hands on experience,” but based
on experience in countries like China and India, “farmers in
Africa will start demanding GM seeds,” Karembu told IRIN.
According to an FEI statement, “Large scale commercial farmers
in the US and Argentina, who represent a small minority of the
world’s farmers, have benefited from GM crops due mainly to the
‘convenience effect’. This includes reduction in farm labour and
increased flexibility in the timing of herbicide applications.
The ability to farm more acres with less labour has facilitated
the worldwide trend to fewer and bigger industrial-style farms.”
These benefits would not translate in the African context,
Bassey argued. As an example he noted: “the longest and best
documented example of GM crops in Africa is the case of GM
cotton in the Makhatini Flats area of South Africa. The ISAAA
had portrayed this as a success story that proves the benefits
of GM crops for small farmers in the continent.” But, after more
than eight years of growing GM insect resistant (Bt) cotton, the
number of small cotton farmers in the area had plummeted from
3,229 in 2001/02 to just 853 in 2006/2007.
Yes, no, maybe?
“Clearly GM crops could not have benefited these farmers,”
commented Bassey.
However, the Makhatini Flats experience remains a contested
issue, as drought also played a part in the decline in cotton
production in the area.
Karembu acknowledged that GM crops were no panacea for African
food insecurity. GM crops were “part of a bigger package,” where
other farm inputs such as irrigation, fertilizer and knowledge
also played an important role. “It’s a technology that needs to
be complemented,” she explained.
The main obstacle to expanding GM crop use in Africa was now the
wait for governments to develop and pass “regulation to guide
the safe and responsible use of GM crops,” she added.
Biowatch South Africa, an NGO concerned with food security and
promoting organic farming methods, has long been opposed to the
use of GM crops in the region. In an earlier interview with
IRIN, Biowatch Director Leslie Liddell said: “By and large,
those farmers don't understand the contracts they sign with
multinationals supplying the seeds. They are not allowed to
replant the seeds because of copyright laws. These companies are
beginning to own our agricultural systems, and farmers are no
longer storing their seeds."
According to an FEI statement, hunger and poverty are complex
political and social challenges. “They are exacerbated more by
lack of access to land, illiteracy and poor healthcare than by
deficient agricultural production techniques.”
And while increasing crop yields was a good idea, food
insecurity in Africa was more an issue of access, according to
Bessey: “Food shortages tend to be localised. When there is a
shortage in one part of the continent there is a surplus
elsewhere, but a lack of infrastructure means there is a problem
of access.”
|
|
