Genetic Engineering of Food Crops for the Third World: An Appropriate Response to Poverty, Hunger and Lagging Productivity?
Proceedings of the INTERNATIONAL
CONFERENCE ON SUSTAINABLE AGRICULTURE IN THE NEW MILLENNIUM - THE IMPACT
OF MODERN BIOTECHNOLOGY ON DEVELOPING COUNTRIES, Albert Hall, Brussels,
May 28-31 2000, Friends of the Earth Europe
Peter Rosset, Ph.D.
Abstract
In this essay I refer primarily to
agricultural production of foodstuffs for domestic consumption. When we
speak of national markets, we find that small and peasant farmers, despite
their disadvantaged position in society, are the primary producers of
staple foods, accounting for very high percentages of national production
in most third world countries.
Their agriculture is complex, diverse
and risk prone. This is because they have historically been displaced
into marginal zones characterized by broken terrain, slopes, irregular
rainfall, little irrigation, and/or low soil fertility; and because they
are poor and are victimized by pervasive anti-poor and anti-small farmer
biases in national and global economic policies.
In order to survive under such circumstances,
and to improve their standard of living, they must be able to tailor agricultural
technologies to their variable but unique circumstances, in terms of local
climate, topography, soils, biodiversity, cropping systems, market insertion,
resources, etc. For this reason such farmers have over millennia evolved
complex farming and livelihood systems which balance risks -- of drought,
of market failure, of pests, etc. -- with factors such as labor needs
versus availability, investment needed, nutritional needs, seasonal variability,
etc. Typically their cropping systems involve multiple annual and perennial
crops, animals, fodder, even fish, and a variety of foraged wild products.
Under such highly varied circumstances, uniform varieties, such as those
put forth under the green revolution, or newer genetically engineered
or ‘transgenic’ varieties, are unlikely to be widely adopted
or found useful by many such farmers.
When transgenic varieties, carrying
Bt insect resistance, for example, are "forced" into such cropping systems,
the risks are much greater than in green revolution, large, wealthy farmer
systems, or farming systems in Northern countries. For example, in the
Third World there will typically be more sexually compatible wild relatives
of crops present, making pollen transfer to weed populations of insecticidal
properties, virus resistance, and other genetically traits more likely,
with possible food chain and super-weed consequences. Such farmers are
unlikely to plant refuges, making resistance evolution by insects more
likely. Horizontal transfer of genetic material is also highly risky in
such circumstances.
Furthermore, the widespread crop failures
reported for transgenics (i.e., stem splitting, boll drop, etc.) pose
economic risks which can affect poor farmers much more severely than wealthy
farmers. If consumers reject their products, economic risks are equally
high. Also, the high costs of transgenics introduce an anti-poor bias.
The risks seem to outweigh the potential
benefits for such farmers, especially when we consider the factors that
currently limit their ability to improve their livelihoods, and the proven
agroecological, participatory and empowering alternatives available to
them.
It is not a lack of technology which
holds such farmers back, but rather pervasive injustices and inequities
in access to resources, including land, credit, market access, etc., and
other anti-poor policy biases. Two approaches make the most sense under
such conditions: 1) technologies which have pro-poor diseconomies of scale,
like agroecology, and 2) organization into social movements capable of
exerting sufficient political pressure to reverse policy biases. There
is little useful role that genetic engineering can play.
Introduction
The question I wish to address in
this essay is whether genetically engineered crop varieties can, as industry
and mainstream research and policy institutions would suggest (Council
for Biotechnology Information, undated; Pinstrup-Andersen, 1999; McGloughlin,
1999a,b), raise the productivity of poor third world farmers, feed the
hungry, and reduce poverty?
I refer primarily to agricultural
production of foodstuffs for domestic consumption. When we speak of national
markets, we find that small and peasant farmers, despite their disadvantaged
position in society, are the primary producers of staple foods, accounting
for very high percentages of national production in most Third World countries.
This sector which is so important for food production, is itself characterized
by poverty and hunger, and in some cases, lagging agricultural productivity.
If these problems are to be addressed by a proposed solution – genetic
engineering in this case – we must begin with a clear understanding
of their causes. If the causes lie in inadequate technology, then a technological
solution is at least a theoretical possibility. Thus let me begin by examining
the conditions faced by peasant producers of staple foods in most of the
third world.
Historical Background
The history of the third world since
the beginning of colonialism has been a history of un-sustainable development.
Colonial land grabs pushed rural food producing societies off the best
lands most suitable for farming, the relatively flat alluvial or volcanic
soils with ample, but not excessive, rainfall (or water for irrigation).
These lands were converted to production for export in the new global
economy dominated by the colonial powers. Instead of producing staple
foods for local populations, they became extensive cattle ranches or plantations
of indigo, cocoa, copra, rubber, sugar, cotton and other highly valued
products. Where traditional food producers had utilized agricultural and
pastoral practices developed over thousands of years to be in tune with
local soil and environmental conditions, colonial plantations took a decidedly
short-term view toward extracting the maximum benefit at minimal costs,
often using slave labor and production practices that neglected the long
term sustainability of production (Lappé et al., 1998).
Meanwhile local food producers were
either enslaved as plantation labor or displaced into habitats which are
marginal for production. Pre-colonial societies had used arid areas and
desert margins only for low intensity nomadic pastoralism, had used steep
slopes only for low population density, long fallow shifting cultivation
(or sophisticated terracing in some cases), and had used rain forests
primarily for hunting and gathering (with some agroforestry)–all
practices that are ecologically sustainable over the long term. But colonialism
drove farming peoples–accustomed to the continuous production of
annual crops on fertile, well drained soils with good access to water–en
masse into these marginal areas. Whereas pre-colonial cultures had
never considered these regions to be suitable for high population densities
or intensive annual cropping, in many cases they were henceforth to be
subject to both. As a result forests were felled and many fragile habitats
were subject to un-sustainable production practices, in this case by poor,
newly destitute and displaced farmers, just as the favored lands were
being degraded by continuous export cropping at the hands of Europeans
(Lappé et al., 1998).
National liberation from colonialism
did little to alleviate the environmental and social problems generated
by this dynamic, as the situation in fact worsened in much of the third
world. Post-colonial national elites came to power with strong linkages
to the global export-oriented economy, often, indeed, connected to former
colonial powers. The period of national liberation, extending over more
than a century, corresponded with the rise of capitalist market and production
relations on a global scale, and in particular, with their penetration
of third world economies and rural areas. New exports came to the fore,
including coffee, bananas, ground nuts, soy beans, oil palm, and others,
together with new, more capitalistic (as opposed to feudal or mercantile)
agroexport elites. This was the era of modernization, whose dominant ideology
was that bigger is better. In rural areas that meant the consolidation
of farm land into large holdings that could be mechanized, and the notion
that the "backwards and inefficient" peasantry should abandon farming
and migrate to the cities where they would provide the labor force for
industrialization. This ushered in a new era of land concentration in
the hands of the wealthy, and drove the growing problem of landlessness
in rural areas. The landless rapidly became the poorest of the poor, subsisting
as part-time seasonal agricultural or day laborers, share croppers or
migrating to the agricultural frontier to fell forests for homesteads.
Also among the poor were the "land poor:" sharecroppers, renters of small
plots, squatters, or legal owners of parcels too small or too infertile
to adequately support their families (Lappé et al., 1998).
Thus rural areas in the third world
are today characterized by extreme inequalities in access to land, in
security of land tenure and in the quality of the land farmed. These inequalities
underlie equally extreme inequities in wealth, income and living standards.
The poor majority are marginalized from national economic life, as their
meager incomes make their purchasing power insignificant (Lappé
et al., 1998).
This creates a vicious circle. The
marginalization of the majority leads to narrow and shallow domestic markets,
so landowning elites orient their production to export markets where consumers
do have purchasing power. By doing so, elites have ever less interest
in the well-being or purchasing power of the poor at home, as the poor
are not a market for them, but rather a cost in terms of wages to be kept
as low as possible. By keeping wages and living standards low, elites
guarantee that healthy domestic markets will never emerge, reinforcing
export orientation. The result is a downward spiral into deeper poverty
and marginalization, even as national exports become more "competitive"
in the global economy. One irony of our world, then, is that food and
other farm products flow from areas of hunger and need to
areas were money is concentrated, in Northern countries (Lappé
et al., 1998)..
The same dynamic drives environmental
degradation. On the one hand, rural populations have historically been
relocated from areas suitable for farming to those less suitable, leading
to deforestation, desertification and soil erosion in fragile habitats.
This process continues today, as the newly landless continuously migrate
to the agricultural frontier.
On the other hand, the situation is
no better in the more favorable lands. Here the better soils of most nations
have been concentrated into large holdings used for mechanized, pesticide
and chemical fertilizer-intensive, monocultural production for export.
Many of our planet's best soils–which had earlier been managed sustainably
for millennia by pre-colonial traditional agriculturalists–are today
being rapidly degraded, and in some cases abandoned completely, in the
short term pursuit of export profits and competiveness. The productive
capacity of these soils is dropping rapidly due to soil compaction, erosion,
waterlogging, and fertility loss, together with growing resistance of
pests to pesticides and the loss of in-soil and above-ground functional
biodiversity. The growing problem of "yield decline" in these areas has
recently been recognized as a looming threat to global food production
by a number of international agencies (Lappé et al., 1998).
Structural Adjustment and Other
Macro Policies
As if that were not enough, the past
three decades of world history have seen a series of changes in national
and global governance mechanisms, which have in their sum, eroded the
ability of governments in southern nations to manage national development
trajectories with a view to the broad-based human security of their citizens.
Their ability has been critically weakened to ensure the social welfare
of poor and vulnerable people, achieve social justice, guarantee human
rights, and protect and sustainably manage their natural resources. These
changes in governance mechanisms have been made within a paradigm that
sees international trade as the key resource for promoting economic growth
in national economies, and sees that growth as the solution to all ills
(Lappé et al., 1998; Bello 1999).
In order to make way for increased
import/export activity and export-promoting foreign investment, structural
adjustment programs (SAPs), regional and bilateral trade agreements, and
GATT and World Trade Organization (WTO) negotiations, have all shifted
the balance of governance over national economies away from governments
and toward market mechanisms and global regulatory bodies like the WTO.
Southern governments have progressively lost the majority of the management
tools in their macroeconomic policy toolboxes. They have been forced to
drastically cut government investment through deficit slashing requirements,
to unify exchange rates, devalue and then float currencies, to virtually
eliminate tariff and non-tariff import barriers, to privatize state banks
and other enterprises, and to slash or eliminate subsidies of all kinds,
including social services and price supports for small farmers. In most
cases, either in preparation for entering trade agreements, or with international
financial institution (IFI) funding and/or guidance, governance over land
tenure arrangements has followed suit, with privatization, land markets
and market mechanisms coming to the fore, in search of greater investment
in agricultural sectors (Lappé et al., 1998; Bello 1999).
While such changes have in some cases
created new opportunities for poor people to exploit new niche markets
in the global economy (organic coffee, for example), they have for the
most part undercut both government provided social safety nets and guarantees,
and traditional community management of resources and cooperation in the
face of crises. The majority of the poor still live in rural areas, and
these changes have driven many of them to new depths of crisis in their
ability to sustain their livelihoods. Increasingly they have been plunged
into an environment dominated by global economic forces, where the terms
of participation have been set to meet the interests of the most powerful.
Small farmers find the prices of the staple foods they produce dropping
below the cost of production, in the face of cheap imports freed from
tariffs and quotas. They are increasingly without the subsidized credit,
marketing and prices which once helped support their production, and with
communal land tenure arrangements under attack from legal reforms and
private sector investors. The result is the declining productivity of
small farmers who produce food for domestic consumption, especially in
regions like Sub-Saharan Africa (Lappé et al., 1998).
Lagging Productivity
Third world food producers demonstrate
lagging productivity not because they lack ‘miracle’ seeds that
contain their own insecticide or tolerate massive doses of herbicide,
but because they have been displaced onto marginal, rain-fed lands, and
face structures and macroeconomic policies that are increasingly inimical
to food production by small farmers. When development banks are privatized
by SAPs, credit is withdrawn from small farmers. When SAPs cancel subsidies
for inputs, small farmers stop using them. When price supports end, and
domestic markets are opened to surplus food dumped by Northern countries,
prices drop and local food production becomes unprofitable. When state
marketing agencies for staple foods are replaced by private traders, who
prefer cheap imports or buying from large wealthy farmers, small farmers
find there are no longer any buyers for what they produce. These then,
are the true causes of low productivity. In fact, in many parts of the
third world, especially in Africa, farmers today produce far less then
they could with presently available know-how and technology, because
there is no incentive for them to do so–there are only low prices
and few buyers. No new seed, good or bad, can change that, and thus it
is extremely unlikely that, in the absence of urgently need structural
changes in access to land and in agricultural and trade policies, genetic
engineering could make any dent in food production by the world’s
poorer farmers (Lappé et al., 1998; also see debate between McGloughlin,
1999b, and Altieri and Rosset, 1999a,b).
When seen in this light, it should
be clear that genetic engineering is tangential at best to the conditions
and needs of the farmers we are told it will help – it in no way
addresses the principal constraints they face. But tangential is a far
cry from ‘bad.’ Now I turn to the question of whether genetically
engineered crops are simply irrelevant to the poor, or if they might actually
pose a threat to them. First we must ask about the actual circumstances
of peasant farming.
A Complex, Diverse and Risk-Prone
Agriculture
Because peasant farmers have historically
been displaced, as described above, into marginal zones characterized
by broken terrain, slopes, irregular rainfall, little irrigation, and/or
low soil fertility; and because they are poor and are victimized by pervasive
anti-poor and anti-small farmer biases in national and global economic
policies, their agriculture is best characterized as complex, diverse
and risk prone (Chambers, 1990).
In order to survive under such circumstances,
and to improve their standard of living, they must be able to tailor agricultural
technologies to their variable but unique circumstances, in terms of local
climate, topography, soils, biodiversity, cropping systems, market insertion,
resources, etc. For this reason such farmers have over millennia evolved
complex farming and livelihood systems which balance risks -- of drought,
of market failure, of pests, etc. -- with factors such as labor needs
versus availability, investment needed, nutritional needs, seasonal variability,
etc. Typically their cropping systems involve multiple annual and perennial
crops, animals, fodder, even fish, and a variety of foraged wild products
(Chambers, 1990).
Repeating the Errors of Top Down
Research
Such farmers have rarely benefited
from ‘top down’ formal institution research and ‘green
revolution’ technologies (Chambers, 1990; Lappé et al, 1998).
Any new strategy to truly address productivity and poverty concerns will
have to meet their needs for multiple suitable varieties. Peasant farmers
typically plant several different varieties on their land, tailoring their
choice to the characteristics of each patch, whether it has good drainage
or bad, is more or less fertile then the rest, etc. However, such varieties
cannot be easily developed with current research and extension structures
and methods – the same structures that biotech proponents use for
genetically engineered varieties.
Formal research methods are not able
to handle the vast complexity of physical and socio-economic conditions
in most third world agriculture. This stems from the discrepancy between
hierarchical research and extension systems, which value monocultural
‘yield’ above all else, and complex rural realities. The result
of the mismatch is that numerous variables important to farmers have to
be reduced in order to produce new technologies. Measured in a few variables,
new seeds are perceived by researchers to be better than old ones, who
are puzzled when farmers fail to adopt them widely (Chambers, 1990).
In reality seeds have multiple characteristics
that cannot be captured by a single yield measure, as important as this
measure may be, and farmers have multiple site-specific requirements for
their seeds, not just controlled condition high-yields. These interconnections
stand in direct contrast to formal breeding procedures where varieties
are selected individually for discrete traits, then crossed to combine
these individual traits. According to Jiggins et al (1996), high-yielding
variety trials in Sub-Saharan Africa show "larger variations, for
both ‘traditional’ and ‘improved,’ among farmers
and between years, than the mean differences between ‘traditional’
and ‘improved’ yields in a single year. There is indeed overwhelming
evidence throughout SSA that the yield response to fertilizer and improved
varieties, soil management and other practices is highly site-, soil-,
season, and farmer-specific."
Given such conditions the inescapable
conclusion is that a different approach, participatory breeding by organized
farmers themselves, which takes into account the multiple characteristics
of both seed varieties and farmers, is essential–miracle seeds will
not just be developed in laboratories and on research stations and then
effortlessly distributed to farmers (Chambers, 1990). Yet genetic engineering
is the very antithesis of participatory, farmer-led research. Proponents
of genetically engineered varieties are repeating the very ‘top down’
errors which led first generation green revolution crop varieties to have
low adoption rates among poorer farmers.
Yet many would argue that possibility
of delivering enhanced nutrition to the poor should outweigh such concerns,
for example in the case of the famous ‘golden rice’ which has
been engineered to contain additional beta-carotene, the precursor of
vitamin A.
Enhanced Nutrition?
The suggestion that genetically altered
rice is the proper way to address the condition of 2 million children
at risk of Vitamin A deficiency-induced blindness reveals a tremendous
naivete about the reality and causes of vitamin and micro-nutrient malnutrition.
If one reflects upon patterns of development and nutrition one must quickly
realize that Vitamin A deficiency is not best characterized as a problem,
but rather as a symptom, a warning sign if you will. It warns us
of broader dietary inadequacies associated with both poverty, and with
agricultural change from diverse cropping systems toward rice monoculture.
People do not present Vitamin A deficiency because rice contains too little
Vitamin A, or beta-carotene, but rather because their diet has been reduced
to rice and almost nothing else, and they suffer many other dietary illnesses
that cannot be addressed by beta-carotene, but which could be addressed,
together with Vitamin A deficiency, by a more varied diet. A magic-bullet
solution which places beta-carotene into rice–with potential health
and ecological hazards–while leaving poverty, poor diets and extensive
monoculture intact, is unlikely to make any durable contribution to well-being.
To use the words of Dr. Vandana Shiva, such an approach reveals blindness
to readily available solutions to Vitamin A deficiency-induced blindness,
including many ubiquitous leafy plants which when introduced (or re-introduced)
into the diet provide both needed beta-carotene and other missing
vitamins and micro-nutrients (Altieri and Rosset, 1999a,b; ActionAid,
1999; Mae-Wan Ho, 2000).
Yet it is clear that the biotech juggernaut
is moving ahead a full speed. What then are the risk associated with ‘forcing’
transgenic (genetically engineered) varieties into complex, diverse and
risk-prone circumstances?
Risks for Poor Farmers
When transgenic varieties are used
in such cropping systems, the risks are much greater than in green revolution,
large, wealthy farmer systems, or farming systems in Northern countries.
The widespread crop failures reported for transgenics (i.e., stem splitting,
boll drop, etc.) pose economic risks which can affect poor farmers much
more severely than wealthy farmers. If consumers reject their products,
the economic risks are higher the poorer one is. Also, the high costs
of transgenics introduce an additional anti-poor bias into the system
(Altieri and Rosset, 1999a,b).
The most common transgenic varieties
available today are those that tolerate proprietary brands of herbicides,
and those than contain insecticide genes. Herbicide tolerant crops make
little sense to peasant farmers who plant diverse mixtures of crop and
fodder species, as such chemicals would destroy key components of their
cropping systems (Altieri and Rosset, 1999a,b).
Transgenic plants which produce their
own insecticides – usually using the ‘Bt’ gene, closely
follow the pesticide paradigm, which is itself rapidly failing due to
pest resistance to insecticides. Instead of the failed "one pest-one chemical"
model, genetic engineering emphasizes a "one pest-one gene" approach,
shown over and over again in laboratory trials to fail, as pest species
rapidly adapt and develop resistance to the insecticide present in the
plant. Bt crops violate the basic and widely accepted principle of "integrated
pest management" (IPM), which is that reliance on any single pest management
technology tends to trigger shifts in pest species or the evolution of
resistance through one or more mechanisms. In general the greater the
selection pressure across time and space, the quicker and more profound
the pests’ evolutionary response. Thus IPM approaches employ multiple
pest control mechanisms, and use pesticides minimally, only in cases of
last resort. An obvious reason for adopting this principle is that it
reduces pest exposure to pesticides, retarding the evolution of resistance.
But when the product is engineered into the plant itself, pest exposure
leaps from minimal and occasional to massive and continuous exposure,
dramatically accelerating resistance. Most entomologists agree that Bt
will rapidly become useless, both as a feature of the new seeds and as
an old standby natural insecticide sprayed when needed by farmers that
want out of the pesticide treadmill. In the United States, the Environmental
Protection Agency has mandated that farmers set aside a certain proportion
of their area as a ‘refuge,’ where non-Bt varieties are to be
planted, in order to slow down the rate of evolution by insects of resistance.
Yet it is vanishingly unlikely that poor, small farmers in the third will
plant such refuges, meaning that resistance to Bt could occur much more
rapidly under such circumstances (Altieri and Rosset, 1999a,b).
At the same time, the use of Bt crops
affects non-target organisms and ecological processes. Recent evidence
shows that the Bt toxin can affect beneficial insect predators that feed
on insect pests present on Bt crops, and that windblown pollen from Bt
crops found on natural vegetation surrounding transgenic fields can kill
non-target insects. Small farmers rely for insect pest control on the
rich complex of predators and parasites associated with their mixed cropping
systems. But the effect on natural enemies raises serious concerns about
the potential of the disruption of natural pest control, as polyphagous
predators that move within and between mixed crop cultivars will encounter
Bt-containing non-target prey throughout the crop season. Disrupted biocontrol
mechanisms may result in increased crop losses due to pests or to the
increased use of pesticides by farmers, with consequent health and environmental
hazards (Altieri and Rosset, 1999a,b).
The fact that Bt retains its insecticidal
properties after crop residues have been plowed into the soil, and is
protected against microbial degradation by being bound to soil particles,
persisting in various soils for at least 234 days, is of serious concern
for poor farmers who cannot purchase expensive chemical fertilizers, and
who instead rely on local residues, organic matter and soil microorganisms
(key invertebrate, fungal or bacterial species) for soil fertility, which
can be negatively affected by the soil bound toxin (Altieri and Rosset,
1999a,b).
When the Bt genes fail, what would
poor farmers be left with? It is entirely possible that they would face
the serious rebound of pest populations freed of natural control by the
impact Bt had on predators and parasites, and reduced soil fertility because
of the impacts of Bt crop residues plowed into the ground (Altieri and
Rosset, 1999a,b). These are farmers who are already risk-prone, and Bt
crops would likely increase that risk.
In the Third World there will typically
be more sexually compatible wild relatives of crops present, making pollen
transfer to weed populations of insecticidal properties, virus resistance,
and other genetically engineered traits more likely, with possible food
chain and super-weed consequences. With massive releases of transgenic
crops, these impacts are expected to scale-up in those developing countries
which constitute centers of genetic diversity. In such biodiverse agricultural
environments, the transfer of coding traits from transgenic crops to wild
or weedy populations of these taxa and their close relatives is expected
to be higher. Genetic exchange between crops and their wild relatives
is common in traditional agroecosystems and transgenic crops are bound
to frequently encounter sexually compatible plant relatives, therefore
the potential for "genetic pollution" in such settings is inevitable (Altieri
and Rosset, 1999a,b).
There is potential for vector recombination
to generate new virulent strains of viruses, especially in transgenic
plants engineered for viral resistance with viral genes. In plants containing
coat protein genes, there is a possibility that such genes will be taken
up by unrelated viruses infecting the plant. In such situations, the foreign
gene changes the coat structure of the viruses and may confer properties
such as changed method of transmission between plants. The second potential
risk is that recombination between RNA virus and a viral RNA inside the
transgenic crop could produce a new pathogen leading to more severe disease
problems. Some researchers have shown that recombination occurs in transgenic
plants and that under certain conditions it produces a new viral strain
with altered host range (Altieri and Rosset, 1999a,b). Crop losses caused
by new viral pathogens could have a more significant impact on the livelihoods
of poor farmers than they would for wealthier farmers who have ample resources
to survive poor harvests.
In sum, these and other risks seem
to outweigh the potential benefits for peasant farmers, especially when
we consider the factors that currently limit their ability to improve
their livelihoods, and the proven agroecological, participatory and empowering
alternatives available to them (Altieri et al., 1998).
The Parable of the Golden Snail
It is not a lack of technology which
holds such farmers back, but rather pervasive injustices and inequities
in access to resources, including land, credit, market access, etc., and
other anti-poor policy biases. Two approaches make the most sense under
such conditions: 1) technologies which have pro-poor diseconomies of scale,
like agroecology (Altieri et al., 1998), and 2) organization into social
movements capable of exerting sufficient political pressure to reverse
policy biases. There is little useful role that transgenics can play.
When a group of Filipino farmers were
asked recently for their thoughts on genetically engineered rice seeds,
a peasant leader responded with what might be called the ‘Parable
of the Golden Snail.’ It seems that rice farmers have long supplemented
the protein in their diet with local snails that live in rice paddies.
At the time of the Marcos dictatorship, Imelda Marcos had the idea of
introducing a snail from South America that was said to be more productive
and, as such, a means to help end hunger and protein malnutrition. But
no one liked the taste, and the project was abandoned. The snails, however,
escaped, driving the local snail species to the brink of extinction–thus
eliminating a key protein source–and forcing peasants to apply toxic
pesticides to keep them from eating the young rice plants. "So when
you ask what we think of the new genetically engineered rice seeds, we
say that’s easy," the leader said. "They are another Golden
Snail" (Rosset, 1999; Delforge, 2000).
Next time we hear of the latest ‘magic
bullet’ invention altruistically developed in private sector labs
for the benefit of the poor, we would do well to heed this parable, as
well as to keep in mind the true causes of hunger, poverty and lagging
agricultural productivity in the third world.
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