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Date sent: Tue, 05 Sep 2000 12:41:35 -0700
To: (Recipient list suppressed)
From: Sid Shniad <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Biotech Has Bamboozled Us All - The Manchester Guardian (UK)
The Manchester Guardian (UK) August 24, 2000
Biotech Has Bamboozled Us All
by George Monbiot
The advice could scarcely have come from a more surprising source.
"If anyone tells you that GM is going to feed the world," Steve Smith, a
director of the world's biggest biotechnology company, Novartis, insisted,
"tell them that it is not... To feed the world takes political and
financial will
- it's not about production and distribution."
Mr Smith was voicing a truth which most of his colleagues in
biotechnology companies have gone to great lengths to deny. On a
planet wallowing in surfeit, people starve because they have neither the
land on which to grow food for themselves nor the money with which to
buy it. There is no question that, as the population increases, the world
will have to grow more, but if this task is left to the rich and powerful -
big
farmers and big business - then, irrespective of how much is grown,
people will become progressively hungrier. Only a redistribution of land
and wealth can save the world from mass starvation.
But in one respect Mr Smith is wrong. It is, in part, about production.
A series of remarkable experiments has shown that the growing
techniques which his company and many others have sought to impose
upon the world are, in contradiction to everything we have been brought
up to believe, actually less productive than some of the methods
developed by traditional farmers over the past 10,000 years.
Last week, Nature magazine reported the results of one of the
biggest agricultural experiments ever conducted. A team of Chinese
scientists had tested the key principle of modern rice-growing (planting a
single, hi-tech variety across hundreds of hectares) against a much older
technique (planting several breeds in one field). They found, to the
astonishment of the farmers who had been drilled for years in the
benefits of "monoculture", that reverting to the old method resulted in
spectacular increases in yield. Rice blast - a devastating fungus which
normally requires repeated applications of poison to control - decreased
by 94%. The farmers planting a mixture of strains were able to stop
applying their poisons altogether, while producing 18% more rice per
acre than they were growing before.
Another paper, published in Nature two years ago, showed that
yields of organic maize are identical to yields of maize grown with
fertilisers and pesticides, while soil quality in the organic fields
dramatically improves. In trials in Hertfordshire, wheat grown with
manure has produced higher yields for the past 150 years than wheat
grown with artificial nutrients.
Professor Jules Pretty of Essex University has shown how farmers in
India, Kenya, Brazil, Guatemala and Honduras have doubled or tripled
their yields by switching to organic or semi-organic techniques. A study
in the US reveals that small farms growing a wide range of plants can
produce 10 times as much money per acre as big farms growing single
crops. Cuba, forced into organic farming by the economic blockade, has
now adopted this as policy, having discovered that it improves both the
productivity and the quality of its crops.
Hi-tech farming, by contrast, is sowing ever graver problems. This
year, food production in Punjab and Haryana, the Indian states long
celebrated as the great success stories of modern, intensive cultivation,
has all but collapsed. The new crops the farmers there have been
encouraged to grow demand far more water and nutrients than the old
ones, with the result that, in many places, both the ground water and the
soil have been exhausted.
We have, in other words, been deceived. Traditional farming has
been stamped out all over the world not because it is less productive
than monoculture, but because it is, in some respects, more productive.
Organic cultivation has been characterised as an enemy of progress for
the simple reason that it cannot be monopolised: it can be adopted by
any farmer anywhere, without the help of multinational companies.
Though it is more productive to grow several species or several varieties
of crops in one field, the biotech companies must reduce diversity in
order to make money, leaving farmers with no choice but to purchase
their most profitable seeds. This is why they have spent the last 10 years
buying up seed breeding institutes and lobbying governments to do what
ours has done: banning the sale of any seed which has not been
officially - and expensively - registered and approved.
All this requires an unrelenting propaganda war against the tried and
tested techniques of traditional farming, as the big companies and their
scientists dismiss them as unproductive, unsophisticated and unsafe.
The truth, so effectively suppressed that it is now almost impossible to
believe, is that organic farming is the key to feeding the world.
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