Transgenic crops: global success or global swindle?
[First published in Organic NZ, July /August 2010].
Transgenic patterns on global landscapes
Fourteen years after the first commercialised transgenic crops began to be widely planted in the USA, over 90% of these crops are still grown only in North and South America.1 Only two countries have committed more than half of their cropland to transgenics, and only seven countries have more than ten percent of their agricultural land coverted to GM cropping. These seven countries grow almost all the world's transgenic crops. Of the other eighteen countries which make up the sum total of the world's GM crop producers, not one has more than 4% of its farmland converted to transgenics, and most have less than 1%.2 Globally less than 3% of farmland grows transgenic crops. Although just under a third of US farmland is in transgenics, because this is a huge acreage (three times as much as the next largest producer) the USA still produces over half of the world's GM crops.3
What are the 'Big Seven' growing? Just four plants make up 99% of the world's commercial production of transgenic crops.4 According to the genetic engineering support organisation ISAAA, the first fully commercial genetically-engineered plant, soy, is still the world's dominant transgenic crop. 77% (60.3 million ha) of the global soy crop is transgenic. Next comes maize, with 41.08 m ha (26% of the global maize crop), then cotton (16 million ha/49%) and canola (6.5 million ha/21%).5 Soy was engineered to be 'Roundup Ready' (resistant to the herbicide glyphosate). Until 2000 glyphosate was under exclusive patent to former agri-chemical and now transgenic seed company Monsanto, which has patents on both the RR soy seeds and the genes used to modify them. Herbicide tolerance is still the dominant trait engineered into crop plants, mainly soy and canola, but the other principal modification, the engineered insecticide Bt, is gaining ground as more transgenic cotton and maize is planted. Bt rice was approved for planting in China in 2009, which may further increase Bt modified acreages. However, due to the increasing practice of 'gene-stacking' (combining glyphosate tolerant, Bt and other modified genes in one seed), it is becomingly more difficult to accurately calculate just how many hectares are really in transgenic production, with transgenic advocates being accused of double counting land planted to stacked GM crops.
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Top transgenic crop producers 2009
Ranking by million hectares in GM crops1
Ranking by % of farmland in GM crops2
Ranking by % of farmland in GM crops2
1. USA 64 Paraguay 66% 1
2. Brazil 21.4 Argentina 65% 2
3. Argentina 21.3 Uruguay 35% 3
4. India 8.4 USA 32% 4
5. Canada 8.2 Brazil 23% 5
6. China 3.7 Canada 13% 6
7. Paraguay 2.2 South Africa 11% 7
8. South Africa 2.1 India 4% 8
9.= Uruguay 0.8 China 2% 9
9.= Bolivia 0.8
1. Source: ISAAA Brief 41-2009, www.isaaa.org/resources/publications/briefs/41/default.asp
2. Source: Heinemann, Jack A. (2009) Hope Not Hype, Penang: Third World Network
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Keep your Bt out of my brinjal
Although a few GM fruits and vegetables have been commercially released, they are only grown in the countries which already freely accept GM crops. With the exception of papaya grown in Hawaii and sugarbeet grown in in the US and Canada, none have much market share. Indeed, the de facto imposition of GM papaya on Hawaiian growers led to a loss of their major market, Japan, and hence to a halving in the number of papaya growers.5 Although GM cotton now covers some eight million hectares in India, there was such strong opposition to the proposed commercial release of transgenic brinjal (eggplant) that in February 2010 the goverment placed a moratorium on releasing it. 6 A month later the Bulgarian government placed such stringent conditions on growing any GM crops that they amount to a de facto country-wide ban,7 thus becoming the third European country, after Austria and Hungary, to impose a total ban.
So by 2010 only twenty five countries had chosen to freely permit or encourage growing GM crops, and even some of those draw the line at producing or consuming transgenic fruit and vegetables. Why is this? For the varied ways transgenic crops have failed to live up to the promises on the label see the box 'Myth-busting: Transgenic Crops'. Their failure to make any impact on global hunger and malnutrition (and indeed to make things worse in two countries where nutritional status was improving prior to the introduction of GM crops) needs further exploration. This result can only be understood in the light of economic, social and political factors which are ultimately far more powerful than any changes in technology
Feeding animals and feeding cars - the transgenic scam
Only three of the four dominant GM crops are edible and only one, canola, is used primarily for human food, as an edible oil. Over half of the GM soy produced in the world is processed into animal feed, and is fed to cattle, poultry and pigs kept in close confinement in pens, cages and battery sheds. GM maize is also grown primarily for feed for animals kept in confinement. In 2006 the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy calculated that in the USA soy and maize producers had received US$18 billion in state subsidies in the previous five years, and that battery meat producers had been the main beneficiaries of these subsidies, which made their inhumane and unhealthy form of production more profitable.8 The use of the two most widely planted GM crops for battery animal feeding rather than human food is the main reason why GM crops have not only not made any useful contribution to feeding the poor and hungry in any part of the world, but have also made their plight worse in the two countries (Paraguay and Argentina) which have committed over 60% of their croplands to transgenic soy and/or maize.
Another factor contributing to the worsening global food security situation is the move towards using food crops for 'car feed' i.e. biofuels. Soy and canola are converted to biodiesel, while maize has been genetically engineered to facilitate breaking it down into the biofuel ethanol. This form of maize was approved for human consumption in New Zealand in 2008. 9 It is unlikely that much of this corn will be grown here to make ethanol, but its approval for food means that in the event of it getting into the food chain (as transgenic corn not approved for human consumption has done in the past) there will be no legal need for expensive recalls of products. Its approval here and elsewhere has much more serious implications for poor Africans, for whom maize is an important food. The African Centre for Biosafety opposed importing ethanol-engineered maize into South Africa in 2006, both on environmental grounds and for food security reasons. Its briefing paper on the subject also summarised other evidence on the undesirability of using food crops for biofuels, including energy efficiency and climate change mitigation reasons. 10
GM crops have been 'successful' only in countries where they have received heavy financial subsidies, and/or where import and export markets have been distorted in their favour. They have also 'succeeded' only in industrialised agricultural systems. These are heavily dependent on fossil energy sources for machine fuel, fertilisers and pesticides, and they do not pay the true environmental costs of the degradation of land, soil and air that such inputs generate. These conditions do not apply to most of the world's farms, and they never will, since fossil energy sources are finite, using food for engine fuel does not make sense, and neither does degrading the natural resource base of farming. So are there alternatives that will simultaneously promote both food security and environmental sustainability goals? See Producing better food - GE myths and eco-realities.
Footnotes
1. FOEI (2009) Who benefits from GM crops? www.foei.org/en/resources/.../food.../2009/gmcrops2009full.pdf (p. 5)
2. Heinemann, Jack A (2009) Hope Not Hype The future of agriculture guided by the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development, Penang: Third World Network (p. 124)
3. FOEI (2009) p. 5
4. GM Watch (23 February 2010)
GM Crop Expansion Limited in 2009 –ISAAA figures show reduced areas in seven countries
www.gmwatch.org/latest-listing/1-news-items/11971-isaaa-figures-show-reduced-gm-crops-in-7-countries
5. James, Clive (2009) Brief 41: Global Status of Commercialized Biotech/GM Crops: 2009
The International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications (ISAAA)
www.isaaa.org/resources/publications/briefs/41/default.asp
5. Bondera, Deborah (2006) Hawaiian papaya: market loss and contamination,
www.biothai.org/cgi-bin/content/news/show.pl?0206
6. Rao, Anupama (2010) Reasons for the Bt Brinjal moratorium,
http://www.indiatogether.org/2010/feb/env-btbrinjal.htm
7. Bulgaria Puts Total Ban on GM Crops, March 18, 2010
www.novinite.com/view_news.php?id=114339
8. Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (2006)
Below-Cost Feed Crops An Indirect Subsidy on Industrial Animal Factories
www.agobservatory.org/library.cfmrefid=88122
9. See Food Standards Australia New Zealand A580 for the application for and assessments of 'Food derived from amylase-modified corn 3272' at
www.foodstandards.gov.au/consumerinformation/gmfoods/gmcurrentapplication1030.cfm
10. Mayet, Mariam (2007) Opening Pandora’s box: GMOs, Fuelish Paradigms and South Africa’s Biofuels Strategy, Briefing Paper, African Centre for Biosafety
http://www.biosafetyafrica.net/index.html/index.php/2007030789/Opening-Pandoras-box-GMOs-Fuelish-Paradigms-and-South-Africas-Biofuels-Strategy/menu-id-100027.html
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A review of
Hope Not Hype
The future of agriculture guided by the International Assessment
of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development
Jack A. Heinemann
Published by the Third World Network, 2009
(This book can be ordered via the Third World Network's on-line bookstore - http://www.twnside.org.sg/bookstore.htm. Price $US22, includes airmail postage to New Zealand.)
Between 2003 and 2008 the 400 plus members of a global working group on agricultural science and technology (the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) - www.agassessment.org/) conducted new research and analysed existing research to come up with the most comprehensive report ever produced on the global state of agricultural science and technology. The report is intended to provide a sound knowledge base for policy makers making decisions on how their country's agriculture might best be developed if multiple human development goals - reduction of hunger and poverty, improved health and nutrition, equitable livelihoods, and environmental sustainability - are to be achieved.
Jack Heinemann, professor in genetics and molecular biology at Canterbury University, was one of the experts contributing to the report. Hope Not Hype is a succinct but fully referenced summary of what the IAASTD found concerning agricultural biotechologies, and especially 'modern' biotechnology (the application of recent advances in genetic science to engineer transgenic plants and animals). This narrow application of genetic science has captured much of the private and public funding for new agricultural technologies in recent years, even though (as the IAASTD report documents) applying genetic science to stepping up conventional breeding programmes has already provided better yields and higher incomes for farmers. This is true even for the global minority of industrial farmers who can afford to lavish high inputs (energy, machinery, synthetic fertiliser and pesticides, water) on their crops. It is thus an extremely significant finding with regard to whether genetic engineering has any value as a technology to aid the majority of the world's farmers, who are currently low-input and likely to remain so.
Heinemann's book documents the multiple ways in which GE crops have definitively failed to live up to their hype of feeding the hungry world, protecting the environment, and making poor farmers better off. This is partly due to deficits in the design and performance of GMOs themselves, and partly due to the legal and commercial conditions attached to their production and sale. Hope Not Hype devotes three chapters to addressing the deficits in design and performance in some detail. It then summarises the research on the ways in which non-transgenic biotechnologies in particular, and advanced agroecological/organic approaches to farming in general, are already raising yields, protecting biodiversity and the environment, and improving incomes for poor farmers more successfully and sustainably than transgenics. Finally, it addresses the issue of how the current global intellectual property rights regime has almost destroyed public good agricultural science and technology research and development, and diverted wealth to IPR holders and away from farmers.
Hope Not Hype is a rather dense read, and not always an easy one, but it provides all the information needed to make a truly informed assessment of the promise and performance of modern biotechnologies in agriculture, and hence it is an essential reference guide not only for policy-makers, but also for citizens concerned about equity and sustainability in food production.
