RISING food prices have given new perspective to the debate over genetically altered food.
While hard-core environmental groups continue to attack genetically modified crops as “frankenfood,” more politicians and food company heads are thinking the failure to adopt the technology for high yield production will lead to greater hunger and pressure to plow erosion-prone land and wildlife habitat.
Jose Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission, has urged European leaders to accept GM crops as one solution to soaring food prices.
Peter Brabeck, chair of giant food company Nestle, told the Financial Times in June that the world cannot be fed without GM organisms.
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“We have the means to make agriculture sustainable in the long term. What we don’t see for the time being is the political will.”
But that might be changing as major developing countries start to embrace the crop technology.
For the past decade global attitudes to GM crops have been split with Canada, the United States, Brazil and Argentina adopting it and Europe rejecting it.
While the European Commission supports GM crops, several member governments, notably France, remain skeptical and block the commission’s efforts to ease introduction of GM crops. European opposition has influenced many African countries to also avoid them, to the ridiculous point of rejecting GM corn food aid because of health worries.
But developments in the world’s most populous countries could push the global balance in favour of GM crops.
India has a strong crop genetic research program that recently produced a Bt cotton resistant to insects and is expanding into food crops
China’s government last month decided to greatly increase its GM crop research budget to produce high-yield, pest-resistant crops, part of a national strategy to boost grain production to 95 percent self sufficiency by 2040.
A major factor behind resistance to GM crop technology in Africa has been a perception that only the large multinational corporations that have led the science will profit from them, while poor farmers’ production costs will increase.
But if India and China’s GM crop programs, led by public researchers and policies that allow seed to be saved for sowing, produce successes, African resistance might fade.
That would be good because poor African countries need all the help they can get to grow more food at a time when climate is becoming less conducive to crop production.
The next generation of crops from the GM research pipeline will be higher yield, drought resistant, water efficient, tolerant of saline soil and more nitrogen efficient. These will be critical to meet the world’s growing food needs while avoiding plowing land in conservation reserves and tearing up virgin land and wildlife habitat.
Bruce Dyck, Terry Fries, Barb Glen, D’Arce McMillan and Ken Zacharias collaborate in the writing of Western Producer editorials.
