Gm Food

– Benefit Or Hazard Essay, Research Paper

One of the biggest issues facing governments around the world is ensuring there is enough food for every person on this planet. When compared to the many advances made in almost every field, the production and distribution of food in the third world and developing nations has remained very poor. Technology has made now it possible to clone and mutate existing plants so that they can be relocated to almost any area of the world to be harvested. With population statistics showing an adding on average of 78 million people every year, by the year 2050 there will be between 7.3 and 10.7 billions people (United Nations Population Estimates, www)

The great challenge of the 21st Century will be how to provide people around the world with sufficient quantities of nutritious food, while limiting the environmental impact caused by added agricultural production. Biotechnology will not be the only solution to this challenge, but it can be an important part of the solution. This visionary statement by the Council for Biotechnology Information, founded by influential biotechnological giants DuPont, Aventis, Novartis, BASF, and Monsanto, clearly presents their belief that the decrease of world poverty and the overall improvement of quality of life standards lies in the integration of biotechnology into agriculture. Convenient cultivation, easier food processes and the ability to grow plants with minimal care in areas previously unsuitable have made these multinational corporations confident in arguing for genetically modified crops and seeds as the recipe for feeding the world and solving the problem of too many mouths to feed that has cropped up in third world countries. The goal to wipe out starvation and poverty covers the fact that the gene revolution, especially the trading of transgenetic crops and seeds, is more a profit driven science, rather than based on the necessity of true social and environmental sustainability and the urge for human needs. By focusing on how the American and European GM companies currently introduce their products into the developing world of the Asia Pacific, particularly India, and illustrating the negative consequences that are already occurring I will argue that the road these biotechnological companies are following leads to a direction which is more likely to worsen current situations. The use of moral promises and the public popularity of concepts such as sustainable development allow these massive corporations to open up new economic sources, increasing their own growth and power. Rather than fixing they worsen existing problems caused by earlier technologies and aggravate dependencies of developing countries by the further encouragement of monocultures and most importantly the patenting of genetic information. Presuming the increase in the amount of food is going to eliminate starvation and poverty is misleading. Hunger is the result not of insufficient food being grown, but of people being excluded from the access to that food. (Nottingham, 1998: 157). By large monocultural production of transgenetic plants these outputs will again exclusively been grown for exports into already food overloaded countries. The Asia Pacific region is of particular interest in regard to cultivating these transgenetic seeds. Fertile grounds and ideal climates account for around 90.7% of the world s genetic resources. (Juma, 1989: 23) The conservation of agricultural biodiversity is crucial in terms of keeping used grounds fertile and productive. The UN Food and Agricultural Organization estimates that we have already lost 75% of the genetic diversity that we had in agriculture at the beginning of this century. (Jany, 1998: 8) The loss was mainly driven by mass monocultural production methods. The UN FAQ determined that food output must increase by 60 per cent over the next 25 years to keep up with demand. This figure is the driving force for MNC s counting on the success of biotechnology. Another following figure also makes the independence of the rise of food-quantities and poverty clear. The worlds food production increased by one per cent per year in the last decades, but starvation still spreads and the western countries are more and more overfed. (Nottingham, 1998: 157 ff)

India is one of those countries in the Asia Pacific that suffers significantly from poverty and starvation. Almost one-third of the population lives in poverty and over 50% of the children are undernourished. Strangely, the country does not lack agricultural output, but most products are grown for export purposes and access for local consumption is rare or unaffordable. The paradox being that workers are dependent on the sale of these products for income, but at the end of the day cannot afford to buy these products for themselves.

India became of high interest to biotechnological companies because its main trading products are rice, soybeans and cotton; belong to the outriders of genetic modified products. In the early stages, when the first trials were started, biotechnological firms located themselves far away from their own countries, the lax regulations and relative lack of knowledge in the developing countries proved attractive. This tentative gesture to dedicate this development to the troubled countries pleased governments on all sides and so the details were perhaps not scrutinized as thoroughly as they should have been. This