Genetic Engineering and World Hunger.

• Author: Sexton, Sarah

Denying Food to the Hungry

To a public confronted with television images of the starving in Sudan and elsewhere, the claim that genetically engineered crops will feed growing numbers of people in the Third World has great moral appeal. Its proponents seem highly responsible, even altruistic.

Yet the claim is deeply misleading. It seems plausible only if one overlooks the real causes of malnutrition, hunger, starvation and famine, and erroneously assumes that the hungry must be hungry because there is not enough food.

More than enough food is already being produced to provide everyone in the world with a nutritious and adequate diet--according to the United Nations' World Food Program, one-and-a-half times the amount required. Yet at least one-seventh of the world's people--some 800 million--go hungry. About one-quarter of these are children. They starve because they do not have access to land on which to grow food, or do not have the money to buy food, or do not live in a country with a state welfare system.

Responding to a British scientist's claim that those who want to ban genetically engineered crops are undermining the position of starving people in Ethiopia, Tewolde Berhan Gebre Egziabher, Ethiopia's representative at the ongoing negotiations to draw up a biosafety protocol as part of the Convention on Biological Diversity, recently stated:

"There are still hungry people in Ethiopia, but they are hungry because they have no money, no longer because there is no food to buy ... We strongly resent the abuse of our poverty to sway the interests of the European public."

While few doubt that more food will have to be grown in future if the increasing numbers of people in the world are to be adequately fed. Those who starve or go hungry today (whether in Ethiopia or in the United States) do so primarily because they are denied access to food. A whole range of unjust and inequitable political and economic structures, especially those relating to land and trade, in combination with ecological degradation, marginalize poorer people and deprive them of the means to eat.

Genetic engineering in agriculture will do nothing to address the underlying structural causes of hunger, nor the inequalities that support them. In fact, far from staving off world starvation, genetic engineering is set to threaten crop yields; to force farmers to pay for their rights to fertile seed; to undercut foreign demand for some Third World produce; and to undermine poorer farmers' access to land on which to grow food. Its cruelly deceptive promise of a technical fix for many people's lack of food not only conceals the unjust distribution of land and of economic and political power which underpin world hunger today; if adopted widely, genetic engineering technologies in agriculture would also entrench and extend these forces.

The high costs of genetically engineered crops are likely to squeeze many small and medium-sized farmers out of business, with the result...