By Peter Rosset and - -
BERKELEY, Oct 1 2006 (IPS)

The Gates-Rockefeller initiative to bring a \’new\’ Green Revolution to Africa ignores the lessons of the failures of the first Green Revolution, which caused worse hunger and environmental degradation, writes Peter Rosset, author of World Hunger: Twelve Myths, Food is Different, and A New Green Revolution for Africa? (forthcoming), and Visiting Scholar in Environmental Science, Policy & Management at the University of California at Berkeley. In this article, Rosset writes that free-trade agreements have made it easier for private traders to import subsidised food from the US and the EU than to negotiate with local farmers, driving local farm prices below the cost of production and farmers into urban slums in search of low wage jobs. African farmers could easily produce far more food than they do at present but don\’t because they cannot get credit to cover production costs, obtain fair prices that would give them a minimum profit margin, or find buyers. Under such circumstances, what difference could a new \’\’technology package\’\’ make? They still could neither afford the inputs, sell what they grow, nor make a living as farmers. Not to mention the severe environmental and human health risks of genetic engineering technology.

The most recent philanthropic effort to attack hunger in Africa is sadly misguided and may actually worsen the problem. The announcement that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation will team up with the Rockefeller Foundation to bring a ‘new’ Green Revolution to Africa ignores the lessons of the failures of the first Green Revolution, in which the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations supported the export of industrial-style agriculture — based on chemicals and ‘high response’ seeds — to the Third World.

Paradoxically the outcome was greater production of a few food crops accompanied by even worse hunger and environmental degradation. Pesticides and chemical fertilisers eventually undercut the capacity of the land, leading to declining productivity, while the high cost of these purchased inputs deepened the divide between rich and poor farmers, swelling the ranks of the poor and hungry.

The Gates’ apparent naivete about the causes of hunger have led them to make private investments in genetically-engineered seeds and to launch this 150-million-dollar altruistic offensive to promote technology packages that use irrigation, fertiliser, and — not surprisingly, given their investments — new seeds. This is despite both the historical lessons and the current realities of contemporary rural Africa, which will likely reduce the results to higher profits for the agricultural seed and fertiliser industry, negligible impacts on total food production, and worsening exclusion and marginalisation in the countryside. The Gates would do better to support the efforts of the global family farmer and peasant alliance, La Via Campesina (www.viacampesina.org), to address the true causes of hunger in Africa and elsewhere in the world by promoting ”Food Sovereignty”.

Rural Africa has been devastated by 25 years of free-trade and anti-peasant policies imposed on the continent’s governments by the World Bank, IMF, WTO, United States, and European Union. The forced privatisation of food crop marketing boards — which though flawed, once guaranteed African farmers minimum prices and held food reserves for emergencies — and rural development banks –which gave farmers credit to produce food– have left farmers without either financing to grow food or buyers for their produce. Free trade agreements have made it easier for private traders –the only buyers and sellers of food who are left now that the marketing boards are largely gone– to import subsidised food from the US and the EU than to negotiate with thousands of local farmers, driving local farm prices below the cost of production. Faced with this negative situation, peasant families across the continent have abandoned agriculture in search of low wage jobs in urban slums and in the international migrant stream.

Understanding this reality is critical to addressing hunger in Africa. First, rising hunger is largely due to the increased impoverishment of the very rural people who once grew food. Second, African farmers could easily produce far more food than they do at present but don’t because they cannot get credit to cover production costs, obtain fair prices that would give them a minimum profit margin, or find buyers. Under such circumstances, what difference could a new ”technology package” make? They still could neither afford the inputs, sell what they grow, nor make a living as farmers. Not to mention the severe environmental and human health risks of genetic engineering technology.

In contrast, the Via Campesina will hold a world conference on Food Sovereignty in Mali in February 2007. Civil society delegates from across Africa and around the world, and selected government representatives, will debate the changes that are needed to truly reverse the policy-driven collapse of peasant agriculture in Africa and other continents. These policies, including a step-back from free-trade extremism and market fundamentalism, plus increased supports for family farmers, improved access to farmland for the poor, and ecological farming methods, are together called Food Sovereignty.

Without such changes, no farming technology whether chemical, genetically-engineered, organic, or ecological, can truly address hunger. In contrast to the Gates/Rockefeller guaranteed-to-fail approach, creating such a favorable policy environment for family agriculture would make it possible for the hungry to feed themselves using sustainable, ecologically-sound farming methods.(END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

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By Peter Rosset and - -
OAKLAND, Oct 1 2003 (IPS)

A major new study on the environmental impact of genetically- engineered (GE) crops adds yet another concern to the growing list of ecological risks associated with transgenic crops, writes Peter Rosset, biologist and co-director of the Institute for Food and Development Policy, also known as Food First, based in the USA. In this article, Rosset writes that the study found that there were very serious impacts on biodiversity. In two of the three crops studied, herbicide use drastically affected plant biodiversity and consequently also had very negative affects on birds, bees, and butterflies. This raises the spectre of widespread above-ground ecosystem disruption in areas with broad use of herbicide-tolerant crops. Each new study adds new risks to an already overflowing list. In many cases these are risks –like lower soil fertility, reduced natural population control of pests, and loss of local varieties– that will effect poor farmers more severely than wealthy farmers and threaten their livelihoods. The question is, when will governments ban international trade and planting of these unnecessary and dangerous crop varieties? the author asks.

A major new study on the environmental impact of genetically-engineered (GE) crops has just been released by the British Royal Society. While the study examined only a single potential problem, the results add yet another concern to the growing list of ecological risks associated with transgenic crops.

The authors set out to answer a rather narrow question: whether plant and animal biodiversity is affected by the change in herbicide use in fields planted with crops engineered to tolerate proprietary brands of herbicide.

The study was flawed from the start. For one, the authors compared only three GE crops — beets, canola and maize — with ‘their’ herbicides, to conventional, Green Revolution-style non-GE crops, which use other herbicides.

A better experimental design would have also compared the herbicide-guzzling GE crops with ecologically-managed crops that use no herbicides at all. They also failed to ask any questions at all about the transgenic nature of the crops, choosing instead to focus only on a secondary effect, the impact of changing patterns of herbicide use.

Nevertheless, the study found that there were very serious impacts on biodiversity. In two of the three crops studied, herbicide use drastically affected plant biodiversity and consequently also had very negative affects on birds, bees, and butterflies. This raises the spectre of widespread above-ground ecosystem disruption in areas with broad use of herbicide-tolerant crops.

This risk should be added to the long list of other potential risks already found by other researchers. With regard only to the effects of herbicides in GE crops, there are also serious concerns about effects on below-ground biodiversity — and thus soil fertility — from the build-up of herbicides in the soil. It also seems that herbicide-tolerant GE crops are in some cases more susceptible to plant diseases and in general may be less vigorous than normal varieties.

The imprecise nature of the insertion of foreign genes into crop varieties also produces completely unexpected problems, like the stem splitting of some herbicide-tolerant soy varieties under high temperature conditions, leading to heavy yield loss for farmers. This is in addition to the fact that herbicide-tolerant GE crops already yield an average of 5 percent less than normal varieties.

While herbicide-tolerant varieties account for the largest share of GE crops, so-called “Bt crops”, which are engineered to contain their own pesticides, are the second most common type. Here a whole range of other ecological risks have been discovered. For example, Swiss researchers have found that the Bt pesticide kills not only ‘target’ pests but also many other insects which are actually enemies of crop pests because they are predators and parasites that feed on them.

Mathematical simulations at the University of California show that this effect, which amounts to the suppression of natural population control of pests, often cancels out the pest control effect of the Bt gene, even as pests themselves rapidly develop resistance to the Bt. The likely outcome after several years of planting Bt crops is that the farmer will be faced with greater, more uncontrollable pest problems, as the insect biodiversity that once worked in his favour will no longer be present.

Moreover, researchers associated with the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and others, have found that the Bt pesticide persists in the soil long after the crop has been harvested, with major negative impacts on soil biodiversity and possible negative effects on soil fertility.

As if this weren’t enough, the GE scandal in Mexico, where local maize varieties developed over millennia by indigenous peoples have been contaminated by GE pollen from illegal plantings of GE varieties, grows worse and worse, with new revelations coming out all the time. The latest study, carried by peasant and indigenous organisations themselves, found not only that the contamination is much more widespread than previously reported but also that there are cases of multiple contaminations where a single plant displays several transgenes that each came from a different patented variety.

The most serious aspect of this contamination of local varieties comes from preliminary evidence that a ‘promoter’ gene inserted in all GE varieties may introduce genetic instability into these ‘creole’ varieties, potentially leading to their degradation and eventual loss after having been generated over thousands of years of crossing and selection.

It seems that each new study adds new risks to an already overflowing list. In many cases these are risks –like lower soil fertility, reduced natural population control of pests, and loss of local varieties– that will effect poor farmers more severely than wealthy farmers. Poor farmers lack cash to buy chemical fertilisers and pesticides and depend on locally-adapted native crop varieties. For them these risks of GE crops clearly threaten their livelihoods.

The question is, when will governments take the precaution seriously and ban international trade and planting of these unnecessary and dangerous crop varieties? (END/COPYRIGHT IPS)

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