Food First News & Views Winter 2010
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In his January 10, 2011 New York Times Blog, Beyond the Eternal Food Fight, Andrew Revkin quizzes Lester Brown and Vaclav Smil, two people he considers to be food and disaster experts, asking “are the current food price spikes the edge of the cliff or just another bump in a long, climbing road?” Predictably, Lester Brown advances his environmental catastrophe argument, while Smil argues for better governance coupled with preventing the Chinese from adopting grain-fed meat diets. Revkin pleads for a “least-regrets course forward.” All three seem to agree that developed countries shouldn’t live so high on the hog (literally). Brown recognizes that the current food and economic system is destroying the environment we depend upon to survive (something Smil does not), while Smil argues that we have more than enough food to go around—it just doesn’t get around.
Unfortunately they all uncritically support the well-worn “solutions” of genetic engineering and individual consumer choices, thus propping up the global corporate food regime’s assumptions that all problems have a
technological solution, and that liberal (“free”) markets are inviolate. The recycling of these failed neoliberal solutions keeps us from addressing the root causes of hunger including poverty, unregulated markets, monopoly
concentration and the inequitable distribution of food-producing resources.
Crop scientists now know that genetically engineered crops (GMOs) are not intrinsically higher yielding. For a time pest losses were reduced by inserting the gene from Baccillus thurengensis (Bt), or losses to weeds by
inserting a gene that makes plants resistant to herbicides like Roundup. However, as farmers in the U.S. and elsewhere are already painfully aware, insects develop resistance to Bt and weeds build resistances to herbicides resulting in “superweeds.”
To read the entire issue open the attached pdf.
