Several
weeks ago, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation released its annual letter that
enumerated its goals for 2012. The first
quarter of the letter outlines the Foundation’s plans to promote innovations in
agriculture, with special emphasis placed GMO crops. The Gates premise goes
like this: there are far too many people in extreme poverty, and at risk of
starvation, in Africa, India, and Southeast Asia, and the solution to this
problem is to invent new crops that will help farmers overcome the harsh
growing conditions and pests that far too often ruin their harvests. In this letter, Bill Gates supports this
initiative by touting the success of the “Green Revolution” that increased the
agricultural production of impoverished regions of the world during the 1960s.
No
one questions the good intentions of the Gates Foundation, but plenty of people
have lined up to question its logic on these agricultural initiatives. The first problem, many argue, is that the
Foundation’s memory of the Green Revolution is skewed. From Gates’s perspective, the Green
Revolution was an unmitigated success because “researchers created new seed
varieties for rice, wheat, and maize (corn) that helped many farmers vastly
improve their yields. In some places, like East Asia, food intake went up by as
much as 50 percent. Globally, the price of wheat dropped by two-thirds. These
changes saved countless lives and helped nations develop.” Other observers describe this global
agricultural policy differently. A
2008 article in The Seattle Times describes provides this historical
summary: “Using strains of crops that
required fertilizer, pesticides and irrigation, the Green Revolution methods
increased yields. But they also damaged the environment, favored wealthier
farmers and left some poorer ones deeper in debt”.
If
we split the difference between these perspectives, it’s fair to suggest that
the Gates Foundation should at least temper its enthusiasm about the Green
Revolution, provide some discussion about what went wrong during this early
round of “agricultural innovation,” and explain how this second Green
Revolution will avoid those problems.
The closest the Foundation has come to addressing
these concerns is to pledge that “local involvement and farmer choice are
project cornerstones,” and that the “transgenic” seeds the plan will provide to
farmers “will be available royalty-free to farmers, who will not have to pay
any additional fees to use them.”
Just
as the Gates Foundation overlooks the socioeconomic failures of the Green
Revolution in favor of its completely positive version of history, the
Foundation also fails to address the legitimate concerns about the “transgenic”
seeds in which it sees so much promise.
The problems with these seeds are widely recognized—they have been the
subject of highly credible news
reports, web sites, and documentaries, and significant
numbers of Americans are arguing that products derived from genetically
modified crops should be labeled as such—but on all of this the Gates
Foundation remains silent.
Bill
Gates bases his entire agricultural plan on the idea of innovation, and the
innovation he imagines is largely technological—biotechnological. His point of
view is not the only one, however, and we should listen to the alternative
voices. Beyond all of this, though, we should consider the larger questions
that underlie the entire issue of providing for the poor and feeding the hungry.
Do we trust corporations like Monsanto to stand by their purported promises to
give poor farmers royalty-free seed stock when nothing in their U.S. track
record (again, see the news reports and documentaries I referred to above) suggests
that they would abide by such agreements? Do we trust that the needs of small
farmers in desperate situations will be treated with dignity and respect by
corporations that have trampled on farmers with considerably greater resources
and political capital in the United States?
The
greatest question of all is this one: do we think, as Bill Gates does, that
GMOs are the only way to feed the constantly ballooning world population, or
can we imagine other alternatives?
The alternatives may be right before us—in
all the organizations, like Upstate Locally Grown, that show us it is possible
to feed ourselves without an industrial food system that consolidates a system
of national production in places thousands of miles from where we live and
relies on massive transportation systems.
Even on the international stage there are it may be possible to feed the
global poor and hungry with
methods that are cheaper and more effective than the transgenic solutions
offered by biotech companies and promoted by powerful organizations like the
Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
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