How we
engineered the food crisis
The
Guardian (London) March 21,
2011
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/mar/20/food-farming
How
we engineered the food
crisis
Thanks to
dysfunctional regulation of
genetic engineering
and
misguided
biofuels policy, the world's
poorest are going
hungry
By Henry
Miller
Food prices
worldwide were up by a whopping
25% in 2010, according
to
the UN's
Food and Agriculture
Organisation, and February marked
the
eighth
consecutive month of rising
global food prices. Within
the
past two
months, food riots helped to
trigger the ousting of
ruling
regimes in
Tunisia and Egypt. (It is
noteworthy that food
prices
increased
17% last year in Egypt, and the
price of wheat, a
critical
staple
there, soared by more than 50%.)
For poor countries that
are
net
importers of food, even small
increases in food prices can
be
catastrophic,
and recent bumps have been
anything but small.
There are
several causes of rising prices.
First, large-scale
disasters
have precipitated localised crop
failures, some of
which
have had
broad ripple effects - for
example, Russia's ban on
grain
exports
through at least the end of this
calendar year resulted
from
fires and
drought. Second, deadly strains
of an evolving wheat
pathogen (a
rust) named Ug99 are increasingly
threatening yields in
the major
wheat-growing areas of southern
and eastern Africa,
the
central
Asian Republics, the Caucasus,
the Indian subcontinent,
South
America,
Australia and North America.
Third, rising incomes
in
emerging
markets like China and India have
increased the ability
of
an
expanding middle class to shift
from a grain-based diet to
one
that
contains more meat.
And fourth,
against this backdrop of lessened
supply and heightened
demand,
private investment in R&D on
innovative practices
and
technologies
has been discouraged by arbitrary
and unscientific
national
and international regulatory
barriers - against, in
particular,
new varieties of plants produced
with modern genetic
engineering
(aka recombinant DNA technology
or genetic
modification,
or GM).
Genetic engineering offers plant
breeders the tools to
make
crops do
spectacular new things. In more
than two dozen
countries,
farmers are
using genetically engineered crop
varieties to produce
higher
yields, with lower inputs and
reduced impact on the
environment.
But
exploiting this advanced
technology has been a tough row
to hoe.
Regulation
commonly discriminates
specifically against the use of
the
newest,
most precise genetic engineering
techniques, subjecting
field
trials to
redundant case by case reviews
and markedly inflating
R&D
costs. A
veritable alphabet soup of United
Nations' agencies and
programmes
are prime offenders, perpetuating
a regulatory approach
that is
both unscientific and
obstructionist. These public
policy
failures,
in turn, inhibit the adoption and
diffusion of new
plants
that boast
a broad spectrum of new high
value-added input and
output
traits.
Can the
flawed public policy that
prevails in most of the world
be
rationalised?
Nina Fedoroff, professor of
biology at
Pennsylvania
State
University, former state
department senior adviser
and
currently
visiting professor at King
Abdullah University in
Saudi
Arabia, is
not optimistic:
"The
continuing distaste for
[genetically engineered
plants] and
their
consequent absurd over-regulation
means that the most
up-to-date,
environmentally benign crop
protection strategies
are
used almost
exclusively for the mega-crops
that are profitable
for
biotech
companies. The public
agricultural research sector
remains
largely
excluded from using modern
molecular technology. Will
this
change
soon? I don't think
so."
Fedoroff
continues:
"The
screams of pain will come first
from the poorest countries
that
already
import way beyond their ability
to pay and [are] too poor
(or
perhaps
unwise) to make the requisite
investments in developing
new
high-tech
approaches to agriculture in hot
places. And now we
we're
pouring our
ag [agriculture] bucks
into biofuels, of all
the
imaginable
absurdities."
In fact,
the United States and Europe are
diverting vast and
increasing
amounts of land and agricultural
production into making
ethanol.
The United States is approaching
the diversion of 40% of
the
corn
harvest for fuel and the EU has a
goal of 10% biofuel use
by
2020. The
implications are worrisome. On 9
February, the US
department
of agriculture reported that the
ethanol industry's
projected
orders for 2011 rose 8.4%, to
13.01bn bushels, leaving
the
United
States with about 675m bushels of
corn left at the end of
the
year. That
is the lowest surplus level since
1996.
If only the
ingenuity of genetic engineers
were unleashed, we
would
likely see
innovative approaches to the
production of energy
from
non-food
organisms, including switchgrass,
trees and algae. But
as
Steven
Strauss, professor at Oregon
State University and an expert
in
genetic
engineering of plants, has
pointed out, regulators'
approach
to such
sources of energy make field
trials and
commercialisation
unfeasible.
Related to
this issue is that discriminatory
regulation has been
complemented
by outright antagonism to
genetically engineered
crops
from
anti-technology, anti-business
NGOs, and some governments,
which
has caused
farmers to become concerned about
the acceptability of
such crops
to importers of seeds and other
agricultural products.
This is
part of the ripple effect of
flawed, discriminatory
regulation.
Finally, the United Nations'
brokering of an
international
agreement on "Liability and
Redress" in the event
of
damages,
real or imaginary, from the use
of genetically
engineered
crops is
yet another drag on investment in
and the use of these
products.
What are
the implications of this profound
and costly policy
failure?
Mixed,
according to Juergen Voegele,
director for agriculture
and
rural
development at the World
Bank:
"Somewhat
higher food prices are a good
thing for overall global
food
production
because they stimulate
investments in the
agricultural
sector
which are long overdue. Those
investments need [to]
be
economically,
socially and environmentally
sustainable,
everywhere,
but
particularly in poor countries
because they are most
vulnerable
to climate
change and social
disruption."
That might
be so, but the classic
relationship between supply
and
demand is
being distorted by public policy
that discourages the
private
sector investment that would
otherwise be stimulated
by
market
forces. Voegele goes on to
observe that the inflation of
food
prices also
has negative
implications:
"Somewhat
higher food prices are a bad
thing for the poor
because
they cannot
afford a healthy diet in the
first place and are
forced
to make
further cuts on education and
health spending if their
food
bill goes
up. We already have close to one
billion people
go[ing]
hungry
today, not because there is not
enough food in the world
but
because
they cannot afford to buy
it."
And therein
lies the real - and escalating -
tragedy of our
current,
flawed
regulatory excesses. Voegele
muses about whether we will
be
able to
feed 9 billion people in
2050:
"Without a
doubt we can. But not by
continuing business as usual.
Or
we will
have 1.5 to 2 billion hungry
people in the world by 2050.
It
will
require very significant
investments in agriculture
R&D and in
overall
productivity
increases."
But
investment alone will not be
enough: like trying to run
a
locomotive
with the brakes on, it is
wasteful - and ultimately
futile
- to focus
on the "supply side" of research
without considering
the
inhibitory
effects of gatekeeper regulation;
the regulatory
barriers
are, in
fact, rate limiting.
Greater
global food security certainly
cannot be accomplished
without
innovative
technology. And that, in turn,
cannot be developed in
the
face of
unscientific, gratuitous and
excessive regulatory
barriers.
As
Professor Strauss says, "Solving
these problems will require
new
ways of
thinking and strong scientific
and political leadership
to
move us
toward a regulatory system that
enables, rather than
arbitrarily
blocks, the use of genetic
engineering."
He is
correct, but there is neither
impetus nor momentum to move
us
in that
direction, no hint of
bureaucrats' willingness to
correct
past
mistakes. Yet again, the poorest
and most vulnerable
and
powerless
among us will suffer
most.
