Biotech, Lean Times and the New York Times

Today, the New York Times ran a story about the ways that food producers are being pressured, by market prices, to be less selective when it comes to preferring non-genetically modified inputs. On the one hand, I don't doubt that price pressures are influencing the choices of inputs large agri-food producers are selecting these days. On the other hand, there two additional suggestions in the article. The least objectionable of these two suggestions is that consumers may also begin to be less likely to choose non-GMO products in the supermarket in the face of lower prices for foodstuffs with GMO inputs. The more objectionable - and subtly implicit - suggestion is that the change in food prices and the rise of food shortages has something to do with the lower productivity of non-GMO crops, and therefore, the higher price associated with them.

First of all, under conditions where long-term industrial and chemical-intensive and conventionally monocropped agriculture has induced (or at least presented the perfect agroecological conditions for) soil erosion, perched watertables, soil infertility and salinization, and pest and weed infestations, some GM crops allow corporate growers and large farmers to reduce chemical inputs and sometimes increase productivity. However, Round-up Ready soybeans are generally less productive than conventional and actually leads to an increase in Round-up applications. Also, Bt-Corn in the Midwest has already begun to generate resistance corn rootworms; herbicide-tolerant canola in Canada has already begun to cross-pollinate with a primary weed, wild mustard; and Golden Rice has neither stickiness nor palatability necessary to successfully extend the supposed benefits of its higher Vitamin A composition to hungry and nutrient deficient people in southeast Asia.

Secondly, the problem with food prices and availability is still not a problem of productivity, it is a problem of profitability. Since the "Green Revolution" of the 1960s, only more accelerated and intensively since 1989, rural and urban development policy around the world has resulted in a massive decline in food self-sufficiency for families, regions and countries. Whereas the global South used to have high population growth, that rate of growth has always been associated with the displacement of self-sufficient rural peoples, particularly their displacement into the ever-expanding slums around mega-cities where displacement engenders deep male insecurity, women's declining status and the need for children to increase gross income and adult survival once incapacitated by infirmity or old age. As these slums have grown, demand for food increases proportionate to the inability of slum residents to produce - and often provide - for themselves.

That the explosion of urban slums across the global South is coincident with the rise of new industrial, informational and cultural elites and professionals seeking to consume at rates approaching those in the global North has not only driven up the price of food but also re-oriented agricultural production towards 1) exports in the name of World Bank-led development and IMF-enforced structural adjustment and 2) production of feed for high end animals rather than food for the people. Neither of these developments helps the hungry.

More recently, the coincident rise in demand for oil - the key input in most all pesticides, herbicides, machinery, refrigeration, processing and transportation - has generated all-but exponential multiplier effects on the price of food. What constrains the price in our supermarkets, somewhat, is how very little value embedded in the price of our food actually goes to the farmers/growers/producers who bear the brunt of these rising costs. The key, of course, is that a push for GM crops isn't going to generate anything like a real reduction in food prices since other inputs, processing, transportation and retail add far more to the price than production on the land.

Lastly, the resistance to GM crops is an inordinately complex thing - especially in Europe where scientific knowledge is more widely spread and cultural commitments are agri-nationalist. Resistance to GM crops has long been dismissed as anti-scientific romanticism when, in fact, much of the resistance comes from folks with legitimate ecological concerns, with variously viable health concerns - where the viability lies in the reproduction of unhealthy diets more than the particular health dangers of specific GM crops, and serious concerns for the reproduction of cultural landscapes and identities in the face of the power of international agrichemical, seed and biotech firms and the scalar efficiencies - at the level of price - of massive capitalist agricultural units. All of these concerns are generally youthful or middle and upper income concerns, admittedly, but they speak to parallel conditions tied to the destruction of traditional livelihoods, ecological patrimonies and heirloom varieties across the global South as well - though these voices tend to get drowned out en route to the American press.