Interesting. All this from a guy who sat on Monsanto's Board of
Directors, has worked with them to promote wide-spread permanence of GM
death seeds. Like everyone else with influence, he can parrot some
sensible ideas, but his pocket book is lined with some mighty dirty
money. So, like David Stockman, he can be appreciated for what you may
agree with, while you are free to remain skeptical of his beliefs that
have been nurtured by greed.
Natalia
http://www.businessweek.com/investing/green_business/archives/2008/06/jeff_sachs_why.html
Jeff Sachs: Why we need GM seeds tool help fight food shortages
Posted by: Adam Aston on June 12, 2008
In this week's issue, my colleague Brian Hindo talked with Jeff Sachs,
an expert on the interplay between global development and the
environment at Columbia University. Here are his comments on the role of
genetically modified seed strains and crops in the context of rising
food shortages and question over the use of converting food to fuel.
===
In reporting this week's story about Monsanto's goals to boost global
food production, I spoke with Jeffrey Sachs, the director of Columbia's
Earth Institute and one of the leading public voices on global poverty.
He's a backer of genetically modified seeds, and is especially keen on
drought-tolerance technology that Monsanto and others have in their
research pipelines. He's worked with Monsanto on projects in Malawi and
is excited by the potential for biotech to help poor farmers. "I think
there are clearly some really great possibilities -- so far unproven --
but with high potential," Sachs says. "Not only is drought one of the
great killers and big source of crises, but it's only going to get worse."
Sachs is definitely aware of the controversy that tends to swirl around
Monsanto -- as the market and technological leader in biotech seeds,
it's most often associated with criticism about the safety and efficacy
of GMOs. "The human safety concerns really have not been shown to be so
significant. Of course they need to continue to be monitored, there's no
doubt about it. But so far the record is clear and encouraging," Sachs
says. "Then there are the environmental questions. They also require a
lot of attention and care." For instance, scientists are only just
beginning to build a body of work on the impact of planting acres of
GMOs on other plants, insects, and other non-GMOs.
Intellectual property is another thorny issue. Biotech seeds are
patent-protected. Farmers who buy Monsanto's biotech seeds are charged a
premium for the genetic technology baked into them (resistance to
herbicide, for instance). And they must sign "technology agreements"
asserting the farmer will respect Monsanto's intellectual property. How
this plays out in Africa is unclear. Monsanto says patents (on
drought-tolerance, for example) will be licensed to aid groups, which
will then sublicense them to local seed companies for "royalty-free"
distribution to farmers.
(snip)
http://www.thenation.com/blog/166804/opinionnation-should-jeffrey-sachs-be-next-world-bank-president#
Today, Sachs's approach to development remains, at its core, top-down
and formulaic. Elsewhere, we have critiqued
<http://www.ifg.org/pdf/Broad%20Cavanagh.pdf> Sachs's book /The End of
Poverty/ for overemphasizing the power of trade and new technologies to
put the poorest on a ladder to modernization. (He once famously said
<http://www.nytimes.com/1997/06/22/weekinreview/in-principle-a-case-for-more-sweatshops.html>,
"My concern is not that there are too many sweatshops but that there are
too few.")
Sachs has applied this approach in his well-publicized Millennium
Villages in Africa. African colleagues have relayed criticisms that mesh
with our own. Through these villages, Sachs has been a promoter of
outside money to pay for (among other things) chemical-dependent "green
revolution" farming. One village alone is reported to have had a $50,000
a year fertilizer bill
<http://www.wilsonquarterly.com/article.cfm?aid=969>. While this
undoubtedly can lead to an initial boost in agricultural yields, it is
hardly sustainable
<http://www.earthisland.org/journal/index.php/eij/article/can_danilo_atilano_feed_the_world>
in the longer run economically (yields dwindle as soils get compacted
from chemical inputs), socially (farmers drown in debts), or
environmentally (fossil fuel-based chemical fertilizers contribute to
climate change).
The reality of the villages' chemical-dependent agriculture undermines
Sachs's reputation as an expert on climate change and other
environmental issues. UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food Olivier
de Schutter
<http://www.srfood.org/images/stories/pdf/officialreports/20110308_a-hrc-16-49_agroecology_en.pdf>
has pulled together years of evidence to show that small-scale farmers
can grow ample food and can reduce fossil-fuel emissions by shifting
from chemical to "agro-ecological" farming. The international
small-scale farmer-led Via Campesina <http://viacampesina.org/en/>
movement has embraced such an environmentally sustainable "food
sovereignty" approach.
The next World Bank president should support this shift. Farmers and the
poor need more control over natural resources, not a transfer of
aid-dependent inappropriate technologies which serve neither farmers,
nor consumers, nor the planet.
On 01/04/2013 12:55 PM, Ray Harrell wrote:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/01/opinion/on-the-economy-think-long-term.html?hp&_r=0
REH
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