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Let Them Eat Promises
by Devinder Sharma

It was in 2001 that hundreds of people in the United States, most of them agricultural scientists, signed an AgBioWorld Foundation petition asking multinational seed giant Aventis CropScience to donate some 3,000 tons of genetically engineered experimental rice to the needy rather than destroy it. Beyond feeding the hungry, the appeal was a public relations exercise to demonstrate the concern of biotechnology’s proponents for feeding the world’s poor.

Aventis had expressed worry about global hunger,stating that it is "working hard to ensure that U.S. farmers can grow abundant, nutritious crops and we hope that by contributing to that abundance all mankind will prosper".

At the same time, the AgBioWorld Foundation conveyed its "disapproval of those who, in the past, have used situations similar to this one to block approved food aid to victims of cyclones, floods and other disasters in order to further their own political (namely, anti-biotechnology) agendas."

Eradicating global hunger is certainly a worthy intention. But when told that India had 65 million tons of non-genetically modified surplus food in 2001, and has a staggering population of some 320 million people whose food requirements are unmet, those who signed the appeal were suddenly not interested.

All the concern and “humanitarian intentions” vanished into thin air. Food surplus in India has now been reduced by eleven million tons, with the balance exported in the past year.

If you are wondering whether the international community is in any way genuinely concerned at the plight of the hungry, don’t hold your breath. At the time of the first World Food Summit (WFS) in Rome in 1996, Heads of State from all the countries of the world ‘reaffirmed the right to have access to safe and nutritious food, consistent with the right to adequate food and fundamental right of everyone to be free from hunger.’ They considered it unacceptable that more than 840 million people throughout the world did not have enough food to meet their basic nutritional needs.
These leaders vowed to halve that number by the year 2015, meaning that they would need another twenty years to provide food to the other 400 million hungry people. In other words, they postponed the job. By 2015, the world’s hungry will have multiplied to 1.2 billion — so, essentially, the Heads of State actually expressed their helplessness in tackling hunger and malnutrition.

The Heads of State met in Rome again for the ‘WFS plus Five’ in June 2002, to take stock of the efforts made to reduce hunger since they met five years earlier. That, too, at a time when some 24,000 people die every day from hunger, starvation and related diseases. And by the year 2015, by which the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization aims at reducing the number of hungry by half, more than 122 million people would succumb to mankind’s greatest shame — hunger during times of plenty.

Not acknowledging that the lack of political will exacerbates hunger and destitution, or that political power is being used to promote technologies and strategies that deepen the imbalances at the heart of this human debacle, politicians have joined hands with industrialists and agricultural scientists to chant the mantra of the potential of genetic engineering to boost food production and abolish hunger and malnutrition.

At the same time, free trade and globalisation are being used to push highly subsidized agricultural products from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) into the Global South. The richest trading block in the world, the OECD provides agricultural subsidies of $1 billion a day to its farmers, resulting in underpriced food imports being dumped on developing countries. These imports have already resulted in further marginalization of small farmers and the loss of supplementary livelihoods and other poverty-coping mechanisms for millions of agricultural workers in the developing world. Since importing food is like importing unemployment, the world is fast heading towards a situation when the developing countries will be left with little option but to remain dependent upon the West for their basic food requirement.

Free trade and market domination of food and agriculture will quite clearly be inadequate to make food reach those who need it most. Market interventions in the developing countries are geared towards supporting more commercial farmers and export crops. However, projections indicate that market demand for food can be met mostly from within developing countries. Reliance on food production by those who need it is far healthier than imports from the developed world.

The food-insecure populations need income through employment generated in the production of food, not just its physical availability.
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 ground realities, hunger will only grow in the years to come.

What is also not being accepted, for obvious reasons, is the startling fact that South Asian warehouses are overflowing when the average productivity of cereals hovers around 2 tons per hectare — amongst the lowest in the world. India has more than 54 million tons of food surplus at present. Till recently, Pakistan and Bangladesh, too, were overflowing with foodgrains. These are the countries inhabited by nearly 40 per cent of the world’s poor and hungry. These countries have the potential to raise production at least by three times with the available technology.

Launching a frontal attack on hunger to ensure that food reaches those who need it most could drastically reduce the number of the world’s hungry. The world does not have to wait until 2015 for everyone to have enough to eat.

Devinder Sharma is an Indian journalist, writer, and thinker. Trained as an agricultural scientist, Devinder quit active journalism to research policy issues concerning sustainable agriculture, intellectual property rights, environment and development, biotechnology and hunger, and the implications of the free trade paradigm for developing countries. He was the founding member of the Chakriya Vikas Foundation (Foundation for Cyclic Development), is on the Asia Rice Foundation’s board of directors, and chairs the Forum for Biotechnology & Food Security in New Delhi.