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Date Published: 26/10/2001
Author: Devinder Sharma In the wake of a new UNDP report, Devinder Sharma argues that
biotechnology will bypass, rather than benefit, the hungry.
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The former Prime Minister of India, the late Mr Morarji Desai, strictly adhered to an unwritten principle. He would not inaugurate any conference, whether national or international, which did not focus on rural development. It so happened that during his tenure the aircraft industry wanted to hold a conference in New Delhi.
In the eyes of the industry, the inauguration of their international conference by anyone other than the Prime Minister was not palatable. Knowing full well that the Prime Minister would not make an exception, the aircraft industry came up with an imaginative title for the conference: Aerodynamics and rural development.
The global community is following suit. Agricultural biotechnology advances are being desperately promoted in the name of eradicating hunger and poverty. The misguided belief that the biotechnological ‘silver bullet’ can solve hunger, malnutrition and real poverty has prompted industry and the development community, political masters and policy makers, agricultural scientists and economists to chant the mantra of ‘harnessing technology to address specific problems facing poor people’. And, into the bargain, what is being conveniently overlooked is that what the world’s 840 million hungry need is just food, which
is abundantly available.
The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) annual Human Development Report (HDR) 2001,
Making New Technologies Work for Human Development, is yet another biotechnology industry-sponsored study. It categorically mentions on the one hand that ‘technology is created in response to market pressures – not the needs of poor people, who have little purchasing power,’ and yet, goes on unabashedly to eulogise the virtues of an untested technology in the laboratories of the North. These in
turn are being pushed onto the gullible resource-poor communities of the South – and that too in the name of eradicating hunger and poverty.
The report states that emerging centres of excellence throughout the developing world are already providing hard evidence of the potential for harnessing cutting-edge science and technology (as biotechnology is fondly called) to tackle centuries-old problems of human poverty. But what the report does not mention is the fact that the biggest challenge facing the global community is increasing hunger and poverty in the developing countries, which need to be tackled by a social and political commitment rather than a market-driven technological agenda.
To say that ‘if the developing community turns its back on the explosion of technological innovation in food, medicine and information, it risks marginalising itself’, is in reality a desperate effort to ensure that the US economic interests are not sacrificed at the altar of development.
Attacking poverty – or the poor?
Such is the desperation at the growing isolation of the US in the global food market because of its ‘transgenic’ food that all kinds of permutations and combinations, including increased food aid to Africa’s school-going children, are being attempted. The deft manipulation of the prestigious HDR to promote US farm interests, however, will cast an ominous shadow over the credibility of future UN programmes for human development.
In agriculture, the HDR claims plant breeding promises to generate higher yields and resistance to drought, pests and diseases. Biotechnology offers, it says, the only or the best ‘tool of choice’ for marginal ecological zones – left behind by the green revolution but home to more than half the world’s poorest people, dependent on agriculture and livestock. It is true that the green revolution left behind the small and marginal farmers living in some of the world’s most inhospitable areas. But the way the tools of cutting-edge technology are being applied and blindly promoted, biotechnology will certainly bypass the world’s hungry and marginalised.
A third of the world’s hungry and marginalised live in India. And if India alone were to launch a frontal attack on poverty eradication and feeding its 320 million hungry, much of the world’s hunger problem would be resolved.
Never before in contemporary history has the mankind been witness to such a glaring and shameful ‘paradox of plenty’. In India alone, more than 60 million tonnes of food grains are stacked, the bulk of it in the open, while some 320 million go to bed hungry every night. In neighbouring Bangladesh and Pakistan too, food silos are bursting. And yet, these three countries are home to nearly half the world’s population of hungry and the marginalised. While none of these countries has shown the political courage to use the mountains of food grain surplus to address the age-old problem of hunger, the international scientific and development community too is equally guilty by turning a blind eye to the biggest human folly of the 21st century.
After all, science and technology is aimed at removing hunger. The Green revolution was aimed at addressing the problem of hunger, and did a remarkable job within its limits. And now, while stockpiles of food are left to rot, the global community appears reluctant to make it available to the marginalised communities who cannot afford to buy pay for it. No aid agency, including the so-called philanthropic ones: Ford, Rockefeller, ActionAid, Christian Aid, Oxfam, the British Department for International Development and the like are willing to take the bull by the horns.
The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations, which works towards reducing hunger, has also shied away from this Herculean task. It has instead convened a meeting of Heads of State in Rome in November, five years after the World Food Summit, to reiterate its promise of halving world’s hunger by the year 2015.
The reality of hunger and malnutrition is too extreme to be easily comprehended. Hunger cannot be removed by producing transgenic crops with genes for Vitamin A. Hunger cannot be addressed by providing mobile phones to the rural communities. Nor can it be eradicated by providing the poor and hungry with an ‘informed choice’ of novel foods. Somehow, the authors of the HDR have missed the basic realities, overlooked the reality of the commercial interests of the biotechnology industries. In their over-enthusiasm to promote an expensive technology at the cost of the poor, they have forgotten that biotechnology has the potential to further the great divide between the haves and have-nots. No policy directive can help in bridging this monumental gap. The twin engines of economic growth – the technological revolution and globalisation – will only widen the existing gap. Biotechnology will, in reality, push more people into the hunger trap. With public attention and resources being diverted from the day-to-day reality, hunger will only grow in the years to come.
This does not, however, imply that this writer is against technology. Technology is essential to every society but must be used in a way that helps promote human development. Technology cannot be blindly promoted, as is done in the UNDP report, in an obvious effort to bolster the industry’s interests. Ignoring food security in the name of ensuring ‘profit security’ for private companies, can only further marginalise any gains there may be. And herein lies a grave danger.
The science of avoidance
While political leaders and the development community are postponing till the year 2015 the task of halvinge the number of the world’s hungry, the scientific community too has found an easy escape route. In almost all of the genetic engineering laboratories, whether in the North or in the South, the focus of research is on crops which address the problems of malnutrition or ‘hidden hunger’ by incorporating edible vaccines or genes for Vitamin A, iron, and other micro-nutrients. But what is not being realised is that if the global scientific and development community were to aim at eradicating hunger at the first place, there would be no ‘hidden hunger’.
Take, for instance, the much-touted ‘golden rice’, which contains the genes for Vitamin A. It is true that there are
12 million people in India alone who suffer from Vitamin A deficiency. To say that ‘golden rice’ would provide the poor with a choice of ‘novel foods’ is to ignore the realities. It is also known that almost the entire Vitamin A deficient population in India lives in marginalised areas and comprise people who cannot or who do not have access to two square meals a day. If these hungry people were to get their adequate dietary intake or the two square meals a day, they would not suffer from Vitamin A deficiency or for that matter any other micro-nutrient deficiency. If poor people cannot afford to buy their normal dietary requirement of rice for a day, how do we propose to make ‘golden rice’ available to them?
This reminds me of exactly what another former Indian Prime Minister, the late Mrs Indira Gandhi, used to do when it came to addressing problems.
If the ethnic crisis confronting the northeast Indian State of Assam became unmanageable, she would create another problem in northwestern Punjab. National attention gets diverted to the fresh crisis confronting Punjab, and the country forgets Assam. Simple. And when terrorism in Punjab gets out of control, create another problem down south, in Tamil Nadu. And slowly, people would forget about Punjab. For political leaders, Mrs Gandhi’s mantra does provide an easy escape route.
And this is exactly what the Heads of State of 170-odd countries intend to do when they gather at the second World Food Summit in Romein November.
Scientists, development agencies and policy-makers (and now of course the United Nations) seem to have derived their futuristic vision from the political sagacity of Mrs Gandhi. After all, there are only two ways to divert the attention of the international community from the more pressing and immediate problems of abject hunger and poverty. One is to postpone, as the FAO has done, the deadline for reduction of hunger (and then by only a half) to the year 2015. The second is to talk of the virtues and potentials of biotechnology for eradicating ‘hidden hunger’ and malnutrition in the next two decades.
Who will take on the biggest challenge of all, the elimination of that hunger which is the root cause of real poverty and lopsided human development, is an issue on which no one is willing to stick his neck out. With even the UNDP buckling under industrial pressure, the monumental task of feeding the hungry – at a time when food surpluses are rotting – may eventually be left to market forces.
The underlying message is very clear: the poor and hungry will have to live on hope.
Devinder Sharma is a New Delhi-based
food and trade policy analyst. His recent works include two books: GATT to WTO: Seeds of Despair and In the Famine Trap. He can be contacted at: [email protected].
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