The U.S. Embassy to the Holy See, in cooperation with the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, hosted a seminar at the Gregorian University in Rome on September 23, 2004. The theme of the seminar is Feeding a Hungry World: The Moral Imperative of Biotechnology.
Before going on to address the feed-the-world claim, it is important to remember that research on these novel crops is on-going. This week's issue of The New Scientist (September 20, 2004) reports that scientists from the US Environmental Protection Agency found that pollen from a genetically engineered grass was carried by the wind and pollinated other grasses 21 kilometres away from the original site. The authors say that this "is much further than previously measured". In a similar way there has not been sufficient research on the impact of GE foods on human health to determine whether they might be harmful or not. In July 2002 scientists at the University of Newcastle in Britain found to their surprise that a relatively large proportion of genetically engineered DNA survived the passage through the small bowel. Proponents of GE food had repeatedly said that this could not happen. A report commissioned by the US Department of Agriculture and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) published in July 2004 concluded that GE foods were safe. It went on, however, to caution that breeding techniques that alter a plant or animal using genetic engineering has the potential to create unintended changes in the quality or amounts of food components that could harm health. The report say that the scientific community should keep checking those who eat GE food to see what impact it has on their health . This suggestion makes little sense since there is no basic epidemiological data against which one can check for allergies or other serious medical conditions. The Biotech companies will fight tooth and nail in the courts to protect themselves from lawsuits as their tobacco cousins are doing so at the moment where they are facing a $250 billion claim by the US government for all the lives they cynically destroyed. Furthermore in the US the biotech industry has successfully opposed any form of labeling so a person cannot be sure whether they are eating GE foods or not.
Given this uncertainty about GE crops the precautionary principle would dictate that much more research ought to be carried out before they are released into the environment. Otherwise all creation and the human population are guinea pigs in an experiment that could turn out to be very nasty and costly. It took five decades for scientists to recognise that CFCs were damaging the ozone layer.
Leaving aside these considerations speakers at the seminar will be arguing that GE foods can feed the world. The flyer promoting the event begins with the UN statistic that one person dies from hunger and malnutrition every six seconds. It goes on to state that 1.5 billion people live in poverty. Then it claims that, since humankind has developed genetically engineered (GE) crops that can resist extreme weather, disease and pests, there is now a moral obligation on everyone to promote GE food in order to banish hunger and starvation. The Vatican has a special role to play as many of the one billion Catholics in the world live in Third World countries. In 1992 Monsanto’s chief executive, Robert Shapiro spoke along similar lines in a long interview with Joan Magretta in the Harvard Business Review . He argued that genetic engineering of food crops is a further improvement on the Green Revolution that saved Asia from starvation in the 1960s and 1970s.
Critics of genetic engineering reject the argument that GE foods will stave off global famine. They also question the accepted wisdom that the impact of the Green Revolution has been entirely positive. The Indian scientist, Dr.Vandana Shiva, in correspondence with Norman Borlaug, considered by many to be the father of the Green Revolution, debunks many of the myths surrounding the Green Revolution. Dr. Shiva challenges the first myth that India was unable to feed itself until the Green Revolution was launched. She points out that the last famine in India took place in 1942 during British rule. She admits that India experienced a severe drought in 1966 and was forced to import grain from the US. She indicts the US for using the food shortage to push non-sustainable, resource-inefficient, capital and chemical-intensive agriculture on one of the most ancient agricultural civilisations in the world. She is convinced that American agricultural experts like Borlaug did not introduce the Green Revolution to 'buy time' for India. They introduced it to sell chemicals to India . Proponents of the Green Revolution gloss over the fact that it has contributed to the loss of three-quarters of the genetic diversity of major food crops and that the rate of erosion continues at close to 2 per cent per annum .
In reality famine and hunger around the world have more to do with the absence of land reform, social inequality, biases against women farmers in many cultures, a lack of access to cheap credit, and basic agricultural technologies, rather than with a scarcity of super seeds. This fact was accepted at the World Food Summit in Rome in November 1996. The participants acknowledged that the main causes of hunger are economic and social. People are hungry either, because they do not have access to food production processes or do not have enough money to buy food. Do the proponents of GE food think that agribusiness companies will distribute genetically engineered food free to the hungry poor who have no money? There was food in Ireland during the famine in the 1840s but those who were starving did not have access to it or money to buy it. Economic decisions made by Charles Trevelyan led to the death of hundreds of thousands of Irish people. In the past 20 years the burden of Third World Debt and the Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) forced on poor nations by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have caused the impoverishment of tens of millions of people. But these inequitable economic factors do not appear in calculus of the feed-the-world mantras of the biotech industry.
Access to food is the crucial question. The world is not short of food. Research conducted by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) in the late 1990s found that current production if shared equally could provide everyone each day with two and a half pounds of grain, beans and nuts; about a pound of fruits and vegetables and nearly another pound of meat, milk and eggs . Another study by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, found that 8 out 10 malnourished children in poor countries live surrounded by food surpluses . Brazil is one of the world's largest exporter of food while over one fifth of its population, 32 million go hungry. A study published in 1999 by Christian Aid on whether GE crops would feed a hungry world is aptly titled Selling Suicide: farming, false promises and genetic engineering in developing countries, states that GE crops are irrelevant to ending hunger. I would suggest that people read the latest book by the English zoologist, Colin Tudge. His previous work, The Variety of Life, is a magnus opus about all life on earth. In So Shall We Reap, he examines the global food industry and shows how - without resorting to GE crops - we can take back control from the corporate barons, feed the world and, ultimately ensure the survival of humanity .
Claims that GE crops lead to fewer chemicals in agriculture in the long term are also being challenged. A comprehensive study using US government data on the use of chemicals on GE crops was carried out by Charles Benbrook. He is head of Northwest Science and Environment Policy at Sandpoint, Idaho. He found that when GE crops were first introduced they needed 25 percent fewer chemicals for the first three years. In 2001, 5% more chemicals were sprayed compared to conventional crop varieties. Dr. Benbrook stated that: the proponents of biotechnology claim GE varieties substantially reduce pesticide use. While true in the first few years of widespread planting ….. it is not the case now. There's now clear evidence that the average pound of herbicide applied per acre planted to herbicide tolerant varieties have increased compared to the first few years .
Who currently benefits from GE crops? At the moment the bulk of the GE corn and soya harvest is fed to animals, not people. In 1990, the World Food Program at Brown University calculated that, if the world harvest over the previous few years was distributed fairly to all the people of the world, it could provide an adequate vegetarian diet for 6 billion people. In contrast, a meat rich-diet could only manage to feed 2.6 billion. Human society is increasingly going to be faced with the option of getting its protein from animals or plants. If we opt for animals it will mean a more inequitable world with increasing levels of malnutrition, hunger and starvation. The tragedy is that many countries, as they become richer, are adopting the Western meat-rich diet. In 1960, for example, Mexico fed only 5% of its grain harvest to animals. By 2004 the figure has climbed to 45%. Similarly, Egypt has gone from 3% to 31% in the same period. Most worrying of all is that China, with one sixth of the world's population, has gone from feeding 8% of its grain to animals to 26% in the same 40 years. In all of these countries poor people could use this grain to stave off malnutrition and improve their health. Unfortunately, they do not have the money to buy the grain . So growing GE grain to feed to animals is, in fact, contributing to world hunger, not solving it. If the Catholic Church really wants to play a part in alleviating world hunger it could achieve that goal much more efficiently by promoting abstinence from meat on a number of days each week rather than pushing GE crops
Terminator Gene
The development by a Monsanto owned company of what is benignly called a Technology Protection System, but what is more aptly called 'terminator' technology, is another reason for asserting that the 'feed-the-world' argument is completely spurious . Terminator seeds self-destruct after the first crop which force farmers to return to the seed company for seeds for each planting. This technology, if it becomes widespread, will surely strike the death knell for the almost 1.6 billion small, subsistence farmers who live mainly in the Third World. Sharing seeds among farmers has been at the very heart of subsistence farming since the domestication of staple food crops eleven thousand years ago. The terminator technology would effectively stop farmers sharing seeds. Hope Shand, the research director with the Canadian ECT civil society organisations (CSO) is alarmed at such a development . Half the world's farmers are poor. They provide food for more than a billion people but they can't afford to buy seeds every growing season. Seed collection is vital for them . Terminator technology will enable corporations like Monsanto to control and profit from farmers in every corner of the globe. It will lock farmers into a regime of buying genetically engineered seeds that are herbicide-tolerant and insect-resistant, copper-fastening them on to the chemical treadmill.
At an ethical level I suggest that a technology that, according to Professor Richard Lewontin of Harvard University, introduces a ‘killer’ transgene that prevents the germ of the harvested grain from developing must be considered a grossly immoral act . It is a sin against the poor, against previous generations who freely shared their knowledge of plant life with us, against nature itself and, finally against the God of all creativity. To deliberately set out to create seeds that self-destruct is an abomination that no civilised society should tolerate. Furthermore, if anything goes wrong the terminator genes could spread to neighbouring crops and wild and weedy relatives of the plant that has been engineered to commit suicide. This would jeopardize the food security of many poor people. No wonder that there are those who consider it a form of biological warfare on subsistence farmers. One result of the controversy that surrounded the 'terminator' technology debate is that Monsanto have promised not to use the technology at this point in time. But the technology is there to be used when they feel it is appropriate.
This year the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) has chosen "Biodiversity for Food Security" as the theme of this year's World Food Day. Sustainable agriculture depends on vibrant biodiversity. However we are now experiencing the sixth largest extinction of species in the 3.8 billion years of life on earth. Instead of promoting genetic engineering the Church should use all its moral authority to stem the present mass extinction that threatens to wipe out one third to a half of all the species in the world in the next 40 years. The bio-geographer Chris Park, of Lancaster University, estimates that there are possibly 75,000 edible plants in the world. Many of these are highly nutritious and could be added to the larder of a much greater proportion of humankind with a minimum amount of research and funding. Don't expect the U.S. Embassy to sponsor a seminar on Biodiversity or the extinction of species. Sadly, there is very little money to be made from protecting the biosphere. The Convention on Biodiversity has been signed by 168 countries and the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety has been signed by 103 countries. The US has signed neither and we are expected to believe that the U.S. interest in GE food is purely altruistic!
Another way to protect food production globally is to address global warming. Global warming is causing glaciers to melt in the Andes and the Himalayas. The Ganges, Bramaputra, Mekong and Yangtze all depend on the Himalayan glaciers. One third of humanity depend on these rivers for their food production. A rise of one metre-and-a-half will submerge much of Bangladesh. Once again the government of the U.S. has not signed the Kyoto Protocol on greenhouse gas emissions even though its population, a mere 6% of humanity, is responsible for 25% of global greenhouse gas emissions.
The kind of agriculture that is being promoted by the agribusiness companies presupposes a constant and cheap supply of hydrocarbons. But we know that fossil fuel is limited and that we are drawing down the reserves at an extraordinary rate. Even after fossil fuel has been exhausted humans will still need to eat. We should be doing all in our power at this point in time to move away from agricultural systems that are heavily dependent on petrochemicals.
It is also worth remembering that there are also much cheaper ways of improving crop yield than resorting to genetic engineering. Early in 2003 a researcher at the Institute of Development Studies at Sussex University published an analysis of the GE crops which biotech companies are developing for Africa. Among the plants studied by the researcher, Aaron deGrassi, were cotton, maize and sweet potato. He discovered that conventional breeding procedures and good ecological management produced a far higher yield at a fraction of the cost. The GE research on sweet potato is now approaching its 12th year and has involved the work of 19 scientists. To date it has cost $6 million. Results indicate that yield has increased by 18 percent. On the other hand conventional sweet potato breeding working with a small budget has produced a virus-resistant variety with a 100 percent yield increase .
Support for GM crops also means supporting the patenting of living organisms - seeds and animals. It is strange to find the Vatican, with its pro-life policies, approving the patenting of life. In my book Patenting Life? Stop I argue that patenting life is a fundamental attack on the understanding of life as a gift from God which is meant to be shared with everyone. It opts instead for an atomized, isolated understanding of life, where money and powerful interests control who has access to it . In the encyclical Sollicitudo Rei Socialis, Pope John Paul II interprets the Genesis 2: 16 -17 text as placing limitations on humans' use of the natural world: The dominion granted to man by the Creator is not an absolute power, nor can one speak of a freedom to 'use and abuse', or dispose of things as one pleases. The limitations imposed from the beginning by the Creator himself and expressed symbolically by the prohibition not to 'eat of the fruit of the tree' shows clearly enough that, when it comes to the natural world, we are subject not only to biological laws, but also to moral ones, which cannot be violated with impunity .
The statements of Pope John Paul II on GE crops over the past few years have been much more cautious than the title of the seminar about the alleged benefits of GE food. In his World Day of Peace message, January 1, 1990 he wrote: We can look with deep concern at the enormous possibilities of biological research. We are not yet in a position to assess the biological disturbance that could result from indiscriminate genetic manipulation and from the unscrupulous development of new forms of plant and animal life, to say nothing of the unacceptable experimentation regarding the origins of human life itself. It is evident to all that in any area as delicate as this, indifference to fundamental ethical norms, or their rejection, would lead mankind to the very threshold of self-destruction. Speaking at the Jubilee of the Agricultural World, November 11, 2000, the pope reminded people that the earth is entrusted to man's use, not abuse. He went on to state that: This is a principle to be remembered in agricultural production itself, whenever there is a question of its advance through the application of biotechnologies, which cannot be evaluated solely on the basis of immediate economic interests. They must be submitted beforehand to rigorous scientific and ethical examination to prevent them from becoming disastrous for human health and the future of the earth. On November 12, 2002 the pope spoke to an estimated fifty thousand Italian farmers. He exhorted them to resist the temptation of high productivity and profit that work to the detriment of the respect of nature. He added; when farmers forget this basic principle and become tyrants of the earth rather than its custodians … sooner or later the earth rebels. Later in the talk he returned to this theme and said that if modern farming techniques do not reconcile themselves with the simple language of nature in a healthy balance, the life of man will run ever greater risks, of which we already are seeing worrying signs. While the Pope did not specify what the risks might be, commentators believe that he was speaking about the risks involved in GE food .
It will be a tragedy if the Pontifical Academy of Sciences listens to the corporate voice rather than the voice of the Pope and countless Christian communities and their leaders in Third World countries. Why were Catholic development agencies who confront poverty on malnutrition on a daily basis not invited to the seminar. They know more about feeding the hungry than geneticists and biotechnologists. I worked with the T'boli people in Mindanao for over ten years during which I came to know and respect the bishop of the diocese of Marbel, Dinualdo Gutierrez. He has led a vigorous campaign against sowing Bt. corn in his diocese because he sees what the impact will be on the people and the land. If the Vatican supports GE foods he and many others around the world will feel that the Catholic Church has abandoned them in favour of giant biotech corporations who are poised to make billions of dollars selling patented GE seeds.
My main concern about GE crops is that it will give enormous control of the staple foods of the world to a handful of agribusiness companies. Margot Wallstrom, the European environment commissioner, hit the nail on the head when she said at a conference in London in October 2003 that, far from developing GE crops to solve the problem of starvation in the world, as they claimed, the biotech companies did so to 'solve starvation amongst their shareholders' .