ISIS Report 26/11/04
Feeding the World or the Corporations?
Food agencies are feeding corporate greed while an estimated 880
million people in the world go hungry. Sam
Burcher reports
Sources
for this report are available in the ISIS members site.
Full details here
FAO report condemned, GM food aid rejected
The United Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) has upset a
broad coalition of consumers, farmers, environment groups, peasant
organisations and social movements by producing a report overtly biased towards
promoting the interests of multinational corporations like Monsanto and
Syngenta. The report omits to mention that Monsanto control over 90% of total
world area sown to transgenic seeds.
The FAO report, Agricultural biotechnology: meeting the needs of the
poor? states that GMOs could be key to solving world hunger, and pushes
for more funding. The report was denounced by 650 worldwide civil society
organisations in an open letter to the Director of the FAO in Rome. The letter,
signed by 800 individuals from more than 80 countries, demanded structural
changes in access to land, food and political power, to be combined with
support for sustainable technologies in farmer-led research. It was also
rejected by five international NGOs at a Hunger, Food Aid and GMOs meeting at
Maputo, Mozambique in July 2004.
Via Campesina, an organisation representing the interests of
peasant-farmers worldwide said that promoting a technological solution to the
problem of hunger in the form of GM crops is "a slap in the face for those who
defend food sovereignty." The development of industrial agriculture has already
caused millions of rural people to be displaced from their lands and condemned
them to lives of misery. GM crops, the latest offering in industrial
agriculture, will only intensify that trend.
Consumers International Regional Office for Africa, União
Nacional de Camponeses (UNAC) Mozambique (Via Campesina), Environmental Rights
Action (Friends of the Earth Nigeria), the Oakland Institute and the Third
World Network (TWN) said that the FAO’s report has betrayed rural people
and consumers by recommending GMOs. Their consensus is that the donation of GM
food developed from untested and unreliable technologies can only complicate
hunger issues. It is unacceptable at least until the safety of GM food and feed
has been proven beyond any reasonable doubt.
ISIS was the first to call for GM-free food aid in 2002 on grounds that
the malnourished with compromised immune systems would be especially
susceptible to the potential hazards of GM food ("GM-free food aid!"
www.i-sis.org.uk/GM-freefoodaid.php).
Consumers International (CI), which has 250 member organisations in 115
countries worldwide, became concerned about GM food aid in 2000 when a shipment
of US GM maize arrived in Africa without any labelling or any indication as to
the nature of the cargo. A petition was immediately sent to the then Clinton
Administration and the UN, requesting that food donations be positively and
explicitly labelled so recipient countries could give informed consent to
donations after having been made aware of their contents.
The petition served to attract marginalized groups of farmers, NGOs and
environmentalists who together decided that GM food aid raised the broader
issue of the denial of fundamental consumer rights.
In May 2004, 65 groups representing farmer, consumer, environmental and
development organisations from 15 African countries sent an open letter to the
World Food Programme (WFP), protesting against the pressure exerted on Sudan
and Angola over their respective decisions to impose restrictions on GM food
aid.
They demanded that the WFP and USAID (US Agency for International
Development) immediately desist from misleading the governments of Angola and
Sudan with a scenario of no choice, and from forcing them to accept GM food
aid. The called on the WFP to respect the decisions of recipients of food aid,
and to actively seek alternative food - or cash donations to purchase food
– available at the local and regional level.
Corporate propaganda misleading the public
Polls conducted in Europe have firmly rejected GM crops across the board
except on the issue of feeding Third World hunger. Some 55% of people believe
that GM can solve Third World hunger, mainly because they were misled by
corporate propaganda. Many African nations reject handouts or dependence on
corporate owned seeds. Instead, they want self-sufficient sustainable
agricultural production methods to enable them to feed themselves. (See Public
Say No to GMO’s SiS 19, 2003)
Africa fights for self-sufficiency against GM crops
In 2002 Zambia, under intense pressure from the UN, nevertheless refused
GM food aid (see "Africa unites against GM to opt for self-sufficiency"
SiS 16) and
went on to double their own maize yield and successfully fed themselves and
neighbouring countries for the following year. The African country of Benin has
placed a moratorium on the import and cultivation of GMOs.
As consumer demand for genetic engineering shrinks and more countries
adopt biosafety laws and labelling regulations, so the volume of surplus GM
crops increases. Rejected by Europe, GM giants Monsanto and Syngenta have
turned their attention to Asia, and in particular, Africa, to profit from
dumping GM food as aid, and to support agricultural research and
‘biosafety’ initiatives designed to facilitate acceptance of their
untested products. The US based aid agency USAID, which funds the African
Agricultural Technology Foundation, is in turn funded by Monsanto, Syngenta and
the Rockerfeller Foundation. USAID clearly states its intention to "integrate
biotechnology into local food systems and spread technology throughout regions
in Africa."
The huge sums invested in the biotech industry supposed to alleviate
world hunger have failed to deliver thus far. The USAID-funded Consultative
Group for International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) has recently received
$100 million towards its "Harvest Plus Plan" to produce "second generation" GM
crops - maize, cassava and sweet potato in Africa. But there is already
evidence that organic farmers are achieving record yields with their crops in
Africa without the need for GM varieties (see "Greening Ethiopia" series,
SiS 23).
At the World Food Summit in 2002, the FAO engaged with the NGO Forum on
Food Sovereignty to make a commitment to strengthen the principle of
patent-free seeds and local food production by rural people. But they have
clearly reneged on their commitment in saying that hunger can be solved by
genetic engineering.
With this change of mind, the FAO now appears to be open to supporting
terminator technology (sterile seed lines), which would be another radical
departure from their stance only four years ago. And this has called their
independence and integrity into question. This effective support of corporate
bio-piracy is responsible for threatening the collective work of farmers over
countless millennia in creating new breeds of agricultural crops.
Ten years of GM failures
The first decade of commercial GM crops have failed even the biotech
companies. Promises have been broken and benefits from GM have not
materialised. Moratoriums and bans against GM crops have been put into place in
many countries mainly because of concerns over health and transgenic
contamination. Citizen opposition in Europe has ensured that GM products are
kept off the shelf and consumer and retailer rejection has forced Monsanto to
delay commercialisation of GM wheat planned for 2004. The biotech vision of
predominant GM monocultures will fuel mounting concerns over the ecological
impacts of industrial agriculture. Fortunately, there are many sustainable low
input alternatives that are safe and more cost effective. (See
The
Case for a GM-Free Sustainable World, ISP Report.).
How civil society can safeguard their civil rights
Aside from the UN Guidelines for Consumer Protection, Consumers
International has identified four crucial tools that civil society can use to
safeguard their civil rights:
- The African Model Law on Safety in Biotechnology, which
provides for clear labelling on GM foods and advocates participation in
decision making to protect Africa’s biodiversity, environment and health
from risks associated with GM. The Model Law’s provisions are also very
comprehensive and provide for strict regulation, taking into account the
importance of Africa as a centre of origin and diversity of many food
crops.
- The Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety, which puts into operation
the Precautionary Principle. It also establishes the principle of prior
informed consent with regard to the import of GMOs and preserves the right of a
country to reject applications for the import of GMOs. So far only 27 African
countries have ratified this protocol and more must be persuaded to do so.
- The Food Aid Convention Articles iii, viii and xiii, which
state that GM food aid should only be accepted after recipient countries have
discarded alternatives and non-GM food aid as non-options.
- The Rio Declaration, in which Principle 15 endorses the
Precautionary Approach to be applied by States
where scientific certainty of safety is lacking.
Steps must be taken to improve citizens’ rights to redress, so that
farmers are adequately compensated for damages and losses incurred when GM
crops fail in harvest, or GM seeds and pollen contaminate local crop varieties.
CI also supports consumer education rights whereby critical information on the
development of biotechnology is accessible and wholly in the public domain. It
cautions against measures that destroy existing healthy food production
systems, exclude the majority of small-scale farmers (1 in 6 people in
developing countries are food producers) and reduce the diversity of food bases
for the future.
Historically, hunger is a political problem that requires political will
to create stable markets for small food producers and to encourage land use by
rural families. This would enable the production of larger amounts of quality
foodstuffs in rural areas through investing in truly sustainable alternatives
such as agroecology and biodiversity management (see "Corporate hijack of sustainable
agriculture", ISIS report 17 Nov 2004).
| 
