Attempts to genetically modify food staples, such as crops and cattle, to increase their nutritional value and overall performance have prompted world-wide criticism by environmental, nutritionists and agriculture experts, who say that protecting and fomenting biodiversity is a far better solution to hunger and malnutrition.

Two cases have received world-wide attention: one is a project to genetically modify bananas, the other is an international bull genome project.

In June, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced that it has allocated some 10 million dollars to finance an Australian research team at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT), working on vitamin A-enriched bananas in Uganda, by genetically modifying the fruit.

On the other hand,  according to its project team, the “1000 bull genomes project” aims “to provide, for the bovine research community, a large database for imputation of genetic variants for genomic prediction and genome wide association studies in all cattle breeds.”“It makes little sense to support genetic engineering at the expense of (traditional, organic) technologies that have proven to substantially increase yields, especially in many developing countries” – ‘Failure to Yield’, a study by the U.S. Union of Concerned Scientists

In both cases, the genetic modification (GM) of bananas and of bovines is an instrument to allegedly increase the nutritional value and improve the overall quality of the food staples, be it the fruit itself, or, in the case of cattle, of meat and milk.

James Dale, professor at QUT, and leader of the GM banana project, claims that “good science can make a massive difference here by enriching staple crops such as Ugandan bananas with pro-vitamin A and providing poor and subsistence-farming populations with nutritionally rewarding food.”

In the ‘1000 bull genomes project’, the scientists involved (from Australia, France, Germany, and other countries) have sequenced – that is, established the order of – the whole genomes of hundreds of cows and bulls. “This sequencing includes data for 129 individuals from the global Holstein-Friesian population, 43 individuals from the Fleckvieh breed and 15 individuals from the Jersey breed,” write the scientists in an article published in Nature Genetics of July 13.

The reactions from environmental activists, nutritionists, and scientists could not be more critical. The banana case has even prompted a specific campaign launched in India – the “No to GMO Bananas Campaign”.

The campaign, launched by Navdanya, a non-governmental organisation founded by the international environmental icon Vandana Shiva, insists that “GMO bananas are … not a solution to” malnutrition and hunger.

The group argues that so-called bio-fortification of bananas – “the genetic manipulation of the fruit, to cut and paste a gene, seeking to make a new or lost micronutrient,” as genetic expert Bob Phelps has put it – is a waste of time and money, and constitutes a risk to biodiversity.

“Bananas are highly nutritional but have only 0.44 mg of iron per 100 grams of edible portion,” a Navdanya spokesperson said. “All the effort to increase iron content of bananas will fall short the (natural) iron content of indigenous biodiversity.”

The rationale supporting bio-fortication suggests that the genetic manipulation can multiply the iron content of bananas by six. This increase would lead to an iron content of 2.6 mg per 100 grams of edible fruit.

“That would be 3,000 percent less than iron content in turmeric, or lotus stem, 2,000 percent less than mango powder,” the spokesperson at Navdanya said. “The safe, biodiverse alternatives to GM bananas are multifold.”

Scientists have indeed demonstrated that the GM agriculture has so far failed to deliver higher yields than organic processes.

In a study carried out in 2009, the U.S. Union of Concerned Scientists demonstrated that the yields of GM soybeans and corn have increased only marginally, if at all. The report, “Failure to Yield“, found out that increases in yields for both crops between 1995 and 2008 were largely due to traditional breeding or improvements in agricultural practices.

“Failure to Yield” also analyses the potential role in increasing food production over the next few decades, and concludes that “it makes little sense to support genetic engineering at the expense of (traditional, organic) technologies that have proven to substantially increase yields, especially in many developing countries.”

Additionally, the authors say, “recent studies have shown that organic and similar farming methods that minimize the use of pesticides and synthetic fertilizers can more than double crop yields at little cost to poor farmers in such developing regions as Sub-Saharan Africa.”

Yet another ground for criticism is the fact that Bill Gates has repeated an often refuted legend about the risk of extinction of the banana variety Cavendish, grown all over the world for the North American market.

In his blog, Gates claims that “a blight has spread among plantations in Asia and Australia in recent years, badly damaging production of … Cavendish. This disease, a fungus, hasn’t spread to Latin America yet, but if it does, bananas could get a lot scarcer and more expensive in North America and elsewhere.”

The risk of extinction, however, is practically inexistent, as the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO), among other institutions, had already shown in 2003.

“What is happening is the inevitable consequence of growing one genotype on a large scale,” said Eric Kueneman, at the time head of FAO’s Crop and Grassland Service. That is, monoculture is the main cause of the fungus.

“The Cavendish banana is a “dessert type” banana that is cultivated mostly by the large-scale banana companies for international trade,” recalled Kueneman, today an independent consultant on agriculture.

On the other hand, as FAO numbers show, the Cavendish banana is important in world trade, but accounts for only 10 percent of bananas produced and consumed globally. Virtually all commercially important plantations grow this single genotype, and by so doing, make the fruit vulnerable to diseases. As FAO said in 2003, “fortunately, small-scale farmers around the world have maintained a broad genetic pool which can be used for future banana crop improvement.”

Actually, the most frequent reasons for malnutrition and starvation can be found in food access, itself a consequence of poverty, inequity and social injustice. Thus, as Bob Phelps, founder of Gene Ethics, says, “the challenge to feed everyone well is much more than adding one or two key nutrients to an impoverished diet dominated by a staple food or two.”

The same goes for the genome sequencing of bulls and cows, says Ottmar Distl, professor at the Institute for Animal Breeding and Genetics at the University of Hannover. “Some years ago, we thought that it would impossible to obtain more than 1,000 kilograms of milk per year per cow,” Distl said. “Today, it is normal to milk 7,000 kilograms, and even as much as 10,000 kilograms per year.”

But such performance has a price – most such “optimised” cows calve only twice in their lives and die quite young.

And yet, the leading researchers of the “1000 bull genomes project” look at further optimising the cows’ and bulls’ performance by genetic manipulation of the cattle in order to, as they say in their report, meet the world-wide forecasted, rising demand for milk and meat.

Distl disagrees. “Whoever increases the milk output hasn’t yet done anything against worldwide malnutrition and hunger.” In addition, he warned, the constant optimisation of some races can lead to the extinction of other lines, thus affecting the populations depending precisely on those seldom older races.

It goes without saying that such an extinction would hardly serve the interests of the world’s consumers.

A court-appointed committee in India has called for a ten-year moratorium on field trials of GM crops. Credit: F Delventhal/CC-BY-2.0

By Ranjit Devraj
NEW DELHI, Nov 28 2013 (IPS)

Food security activists who secured a moratorium on introducing genetically modified brinjal (aubergine) into India fear that their efforts are being undermined by the release of GM brinjal in neighbouring Bangladesh.

“India and Bangladesh share a long and porous border and it is easy for GM  brinjal varieties to be brought over,” says Suman Sahai, director of Gene Campaign, a Delhi-based research and advocacy group devoted to the conservation of genetic resources and indigenous knowledge.

GM brinjal is spliced with a gene derived from a soil bacterium to confer inbuilt resistance against the fruit and shoot borer pest, and reduce dependence on pesticide spraying. The U.S.-based Monsanto Corp., which owns the patents for GM brinjal, markets the seeds through Mahyco, an Indian subsidiary."India and Bangladesh share a long and porous border and it is easy for GM brinjal varieties to be brought over."

Sahai tells IPS that although Bangladeshi authorities have prescribed strict sequestration of its GM brinjal crops, there is real danger of genetic contamination of Indian brinjal varieties through natural cross-pollination in the long run.

According to an Oct. 31 announcement by the Bangladesh Agricultural Research Institute (BARI), cultivation of GM brinjal would be carried out under official supervision. Farmers would first be trained to take bio-safety measures, and the produce would be clearly labelled at the markets.

However, such measures are considered inadequate by the Coalition for a GM-Free India which has called on the Indian government to ensure that there is no illegal or unintentional transfer of seeds or of the crop across the common border.

“Since the India-Bangladesh border is porous, we demand a ban on the import or  transfer of crops, fruits, seeds and food of brinjal and related species, genus or family, which have remotest possibility of contamination directly or indirectly through Bt Brinjal,” the coalition members said in an open letter to India’s Minister for Environment and Forests in October.

According to Chitra Devi, a scientist with India’s National Bureau of Plant Genetic Resources, the structure of the brinjal flower favours rapid cross-pollination. “Contamination with the bacterial genes spliced into GM brinjal would be rapid and  irreversible,” she tells IPS.

Such concerns guided the 2010 Indian moratorium on the cultivation of GM brinjal that was supposed to have become India’s s first GM food crop.

Prospects for cultivating GM food crops in India further receded in July when a technical advisory committee (TEC) appointed by India’s Supreme Court recommended a 10-year moratorium on all field trials of GM food crops.

“Based on the examination of the safety dossiers, it is apparent that there are major gaps in the regulatory system,” the TEC informed the apex court which is continuing to hear arguments for and against the recommended moratorium.

The TEC had also recommended a ban on the “release of GM crops for which India is a centre of origin or diversity,” which rice, brinjal, and mustard.

Earlier in August 2012, the parliamentary standing committee on agriculture had called in a report for a complete ban on GM food crops in the country. Provincial governments in states like Himachal Pradesh, Bihar, West Bengal, Orissa, Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and Kerala have also opposed GM food crops.

Devinder Sharma, chair of the independent collective Forum for Biotechnology & Food Security in New Delhi, believes that it is no accident that the Bangladesh Agricultural Research Institute resorted to GM brinjal technology from Mahyco, the Indian subsidiary of Monsanto.

“Similar strategies have been used in Latin America to achieve a fait accompli by illegally releasing GM crop varieties into the environment,” Sharma tells IPS. “In fact this route was used to foist GM cotton on India and get around opposition by farmers and activists trying to protect biodiversity.”

Leading food security specialists in Bangladesh have also questioned the rush to release GM brinjal. Farida Akhtar, founder of UBINIG, a Bangladeshi NGO which runs one of the biggest community seed banks in the world, says the research on GM brinjal “was not done on the basis of need.”

In an emailed interview with IPS, Akhtar said “neither farmers nor officials have adequate knowledge of biosafety measures around GM brinjal or that there could be potential impacts on health and environment.”

Akhtar said the threat was not only to the Indian sub-continent but to Bangladesh itself with its over 100 varieties of brinjal that now stand to get contaminated through cross-pollination. “UBINIG alone has a collection of 41 different varieities,” she said.

“Subsistence farmers who account for 84 percent of farming households in the country are the custodians of local varieties of brinjal which are now going to be hit by  biological pollution caused by GM brinjal,” Akhtar said. “It is also possible that pests would now begin to selectively attack the natural varieties and finish them off.”