Group says growth of GM adding to world hunger

Environmental group Greenpeace stressed the need for sustainable farming methods, saying that industrial agriculture and the rise of genetically engineered produce are not the answer to the problem of food security.

It noted that "not since the hunger crisis of 1984 in Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa has the issue of ‘feeding the hungry’ been so prominent in the global news agenda. In the year between the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburgh and the WTO Ministerial Meeting in Cancun, the already overblown rhetoric claiming that Genetic Engineering (GE) would solve the problem of world hunger has reached even more outrageous proportions."

"This is particularly true in the Untied States. Most parts of the US government, from Congressional legislation on aid to Africa, to the US Trade Representative, to President Bush himself addressing the graduating class of the US Coast Guard Academy have acted as enthusiastic cheerleaders for the GM industry," Greenpeace said in a briefing paper.

"Yet despite the enthusiasm for high tech solutions to the problems of world hunger, the fundamental truth about food and hunger remains unacknowledged by the GM advocates: people go hungry because they are poor, powerless, both or have no land upon which to grow food. Genetic engineering and GM crops will do nothing to solve these problems, and show every likelihood of making them worse."

It said that despite advances in technology, the modernization has not made agriculture better in the long run.

"Today’s agriculture industry is more like mining than farming. Its system compromises the very earth on which all our future food needs depend. Only about 16 percent of the world’s farmland remains free of problems such as chemical pollution. Rather than growing food to meet the needs of local communities for a healthy, diverse diet, industrial agriculture produces crops to sell on world markets. This agriculture uses costly farm chemicals and machinery. While world crop production has trebled since the 1950s, more people go hungry now as 20 years ago. Small family farmers are driven of their land and local people cannot afford to buy what is grown. Too often, the result is a downward spiral of environmental destruction, poverty and hunger."

Its advocacy, it said, is to "ensure the ability of the Earth to nurture life in all its diversity. That includes human life — and meeting people’s food needs, through sustainable farming practice, is at the heart of our survival. Farming methods that undermine people’s food security affect more than just those who go hungry. They undermine the environment. Forest wilderness and wildlife are destroyed in the search for food and land to farm."

Hunger and poverty go hand-in-hand. Technological "solutions" like GM obscure the real social and environmental problems causing hunger. These issues include who grows the food, how and where it is grown, how it is distributed, and who has access to it. Simple practical changes such as improving rainwater collection can increase harvests dramatically. Basic social measures are also critical. Between 1970 and 1995, provision of basic health care and improvements in women’s status and education were responsible for nearly 75 percent of reductions in childhood malnutrition.

Greenpeace maintained that there is a way for the world to feed itself in the future through sustainable farming practices. It said it has documented projects on millions of farms in more than 50 countries around the world. The findings, it said, showed that switching to sustainable farming methods increases harvests for these farmers by an average of 73 percent.

"Solutions lie not in feeding the world but allowing the world to feed itself," it said.

Food security—the ability of a community to feed itself consistently on a diverse diet—is a complex problem that will not be solved in the short-term. It depends on people having access to land and money, it said.

GM provides neither. Not only do GM crops not provide the solution, they also pose a threat of irreversible harm to the environment—the real basis of people’s food security. GM technology, and the industrial system it maintains, increases dependence on expensive farm chemicals and single food or commodity crops, denying people a balanced diet and destroying the environment on which people depend.