The genetically-modified diet

Najma Sadeque

For decades now, Western multinational agri-based corporations have been spreading the word that traditional agriculture can no longer feed the world's current and future peak population, and that industrial agriculture is the only solution - in other words, only large-scale, corporate-run, export-oriented agriculture can save the world. Based on this justification, they first brought out the so-called High-Yield-Variety (HYV) seed in the Sixties, followed by other supposedly high-output packages over the years. Although the seed corporations deny failure, the fact remains that their 'contribution' did not reduce the numbers of the world's hungry; instead they soared in leaps and bounds at a higher rate than before the Sixties.
The latest 'life-saver' is a genetically-modified seed for what they call 'Golden Rice'. This rice variety has the gene of the daffodil flower introduced into it because it can produce beta-carotene, which can then be converted into Vitamin A in the human body. Why did the seed industry feel the need to do this? Because, they claimed, Vitamin A deficiency can lead to blindness and infectious diseases among the poor; eating Golden Rice - which gets its faint orange colour from its partial daffodil parentage - would prevent such problems, they asserted. Therefore, on these grounds, they called Golden Rice the 'miracle grain'.
They, however, did not mention a few other vital details that the more skeptical discovered later. According to the International Forum on Globalisation, an adult male would need to eat at least 18 pounds of Golden Rice a day to obtain his daily minimum Vitamin A requirements; an adult woman, a little less. But babies and nursing mothers would fare worst of all. For an infant to obtain enough of its Vitamin A needs from breast milk, the mother would have to eat 40 pounds of Golden Rice a day! - something all mothers, and all humans for that matter, would find impossible to do since forty pounds of any kind of rice would ordinarily take two to three months for an individual adult to finish eating.
They also neglected to mention that if a person did not include adequate amounts of fat and protein in his or her diet, the body would not be able to convert the beta-carotene into Vitamin A, and since the poor are malnourished because they lack protein and fats in their diets, Golden Rice would actually be useless for them. In fact, indigenous rice would serve them better with almost twice as much Vitamin A as Golden Rice, which gives only 8 per cent of daily needs. It would be far more nourishing - and tastier - to draw Vitamin E simply by eating green, leafy vegetables which are the easiest to grow if one has to do so oneself.
If Golden Rice had been released as a superior health food in the European and American markets, the producers would have sooner or later been sued for fraud and false claims by independent activist watchdog organisations, if not the government. But 'Golden Rice' was invented for export dumping in the unsuspecting rice-eating developing world, 90 per cent of rice-consumers being in Asia alone.
And yet the Western agro-based corporations continue pushing new brands of genetically modified seeds and companion pesticides as techno-fixes on the grounds that they are only trying to help feed the world while making a buck, or rather, garnering almost all the bucks in the world.
Starting in the Sixties when they came to 'save' South Asia from famine, they have been able to sell this fiction to governments and other decision-makers easily enough, because the people they seek to convince are not agriculturists or rural people of the developing countries but urbanites who are clueless about agriculture, whether in government or the private sector.
Yet, recurring research of the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) finds that for the last half century at least, notwithstanding the famines and droughts occurring frequently in much of the southern hemisphere, food has always been in abundance. As far as the staples are concerned such as wheat, rice, beans and corn and so on, and in spite of so much conversion from food to cash-crop production, there is still enough food produced in the world to provide each and every single person in the world - 2.5 pounds of grain, beans and nuts, one pound of fruits and vegetables, and almost a pound of meat, milk and eggs - a total of 4.3 pounds of food per person per day!
So, why are 1.1 billion people in the world starving? Where does all this food go? Well, some of it goes to the other 1.1 billion people who are overweight, mostly in the West and most of all in America where obesity has become a national crisis (not only from overeating but also the growth hormones in the food); while most of the grain goes to feed Western cows and other livestock that would prefer to eat grass - but are nevertheless far better fed than most people in the Third World.
Although there is enough food to feed twice the world's population today if only it could be distributed equitably, the planet can actually produce even more - provided more grain and vegetable products than meat products are consumed. Industrial meat farming is highly inefficient because a high proportion of land to grow fodder or grain for animals must first be grown. The animals then have to consume that feed for a long period ranging from a few months to a few years before it is ready for slaughter. This amounts to 10 to 20 times, as much land to feed people on plant food is needed to feed just the animals!
The other corporate claim that drowns out the voices of activists is that contrary to the 'ignorant' protests of ordinary people, mass-produced 'industrial food' is not only safe to eat, it is highly nutritious. So 'safe' and 'nutritious' is it, that USA, the world's capital of industrial agriculture, alone suffers an average of 86 million cases of food poisoning a year. No developing country comes close to even a fraction of that despite contaminated water and lack of sanitation.
However, unlike most Third World countries, only the industrialised countries document maintain extensive records to be able to examine in detail the processes of economic activity. This includes the food industry which encompasses not only farm production but also processing it into packaged and canned foods on a massive scale which together with the American 'junk food and drink' services industry (of which there are over 100,000 outlets all over the world), has succeeded in making most ordinary people choose fast-food and pre-cooked meals over home-cooked meals made from fresh, chemical-free ingredients.
While Europe is making a slow but steady effort to return to organic farming, the US with its heavily protected and subsidised agriculture owned mostly by big farmers and companies, clings stubbornly to industrial farming. Since Pakistan and many other developing countries intently seek to ape the worst of the US, it is only appropriate to highlight their unenviable track record which history we are in danger of replicating.
The USA alone saturates its farmlands every year with 12 billion pounds of chemical nitrate fertilizers and 1 billion pounds of toxic pesticides, herbicides and fungicides. Thousands of tonnes of antibiotics and hormones into its 'factory-farmed' cattle, chickens and pigs; in fact, 80 per cent of all antibiotics produced in USA are used not on humans, but livestock. The humans end up with it anyway from the animal food they eat, so that in time, when the antibiotics are most needed in illness or other emergency work with difficulty or not at all.
As virtually every Asian and other developing country dweller knows, there is no better fertilizer in the world than manure - provided the livestock eat only grass and other plant matter. But American cows live on a regular diet of antibiotics and eat chemically-grown grain. This renders most of the manure unfit for use as fertilizer unless first treated, something not cost-effective. So the manure is dumped into rivers or underground which in turn contaminates soils and water. In the Third World, organic manure only needs to be dried in the sun.
Furthermore, there are no bigger livestock operations than in the West, and there is nothing unusual about chickens being squeezed in flocks of 100,000 or cattle 'factories' of 50,000 animals. A modest-size beef feedlot with 20,000 cows produces as much sewage as a city of 320,000 people. So there is that much more of antibiotic and other pharmaceutical residues that pass from animals to humans through diet. This is part of 'corporate farming', the sort that the Pakistan government is inviting through foreign investment.
Contrary to what people believe, animals need clean water just as much as humans do. Because the marshes and mangroves and other wetlands are either being drained or used as dumping places into which to throw industrial waste, agricultural chemical runoff and sewage, they are dying out, not only killing off the breeding grounds of hundreds of thousands of plant and wildlife species, but also nature's built-in filtering and recycling mechanism that however can absorb only organic and limited amounts of waste at any given time. Because this is not recognised, more and more artificial, expensive industrial systems of purifying water is resorted to, which in turn produces more waste and undesirable gases in the environment in the process of using mineral fuel to run them.
Environmental agencies in the US and UK find pharmaceuticals, including cancer-drugs, blood-pressure drugs, painkillers, contraceptives and much else are taken orally, so that their residues end up in the lakes and rivers. Anti-inflammatory and anti-cholesterol drugs and anti-depressants are found in otherwise 'clean' drinking water. Since the sewage and water treatment plants are not designed to remove these 'specialised' residues, the population at large is indirectly ingesting drugs not meant for them - not to mention the mind-boggling amount of antibiotics and hormones being given to livestock - a little at a time, but accumulating to an excessive amount because it is ongoing and unending.
Over a 100,000 chemical compounds flood the world, including those banned in the West but somehow get exported to or are produced in the Third World, and new ones are constantly being formulated.
Perhaps the most disturbing feature is the 'feminisation' of wildlife which is spreading. The hormones and other chemicals dumped into the waters and the soils end up in the bodies of wildlife as well, and for some years now a large number of creatures where industrial pollution is high in America, have been appearing with both male and female characteristics yet unable to reproduce, while many are deformed.
A UN environmental report finds that some 850 valuable species around the world have become extinct already because of wrong human intervention. Even more alarmingly, in recent times toxic chemicals have been found in the umbilical cords of hundreds of babies. Since most governments have been lax in dealing with the agro-multinationals and the corporate lobbies, matters only promise to get worse.
Clearly, even if the developing countries could afford the huge, wasteful cost of 'modern', industrial farming methods (which most cannot, except with destructive foreign investment), as long as the rich and powerful erroneously believe they can always buy a techno-fix to save their own necks if not others', and as long as the wider business and industrial communities of the world that use agricultural products in some way or other, whether as food or lubricant or cosmetic or pharmaceutical or whatever, and remain indifferent to how it is produced, agricultural self-destruction will ultimately be able to wipe out all living organisms in a way that even the worst weapons of mass destruction cannot.