Walden Bello
26 June 2009
opinion
In an extract from his forthcoming book Food Wars, Walden Bello critiques the orthodox views of economist Paul Collier on the global food price crisis. Collier argues that not enough food was produced to meet increased demand from Asia, thanks to a failure to promote commercial farming in Africa, the European Union ban against GMOs and the diversion of American grain to biofuels production.
Bello counters that a globalised system of production has 'created severe strains on the environment', 'marginalised large numbers of people from the market, and contributed to greater poverty and greater income disparities within countries and globally'. Defenders of peasant agriculture, says Bello, blame 'capitalist industrial agriculture, with its wrenching destabilisation and transformation of land, nature, and social relations' for today's food crises, with 'rates of profit determining where investment will be allocated' rather than the desire to satisfy 'the real needs of the global majority'.
Perhaps the most influential orthodox view on the causes, dynamics, and solution to the food price crisis was provided by Oxford University economist Paul Collier in an article that came out in Foreign Affairs[1] Collier, author of the controversial The Bottom Billion[2], asserted that the food price crisis stemmed from the increased demand for food in Asia, brought on by prosperity that was not matched on the supply side owing to three problems: The failure to promote commercial farming, especially in Africa, the ban against genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in the European Union (EU), and the diversion of around a third of American grain to the production of ethanol instead of food.
In the 1980s and 1990s, it was widely acknowledged that the world had enough food to feed some seven or eight billion and that hunger and malnutrition stemmed from unequal income distribution that translated into unequal access to food. By the turn of the millennium, the problem had become one of production. However, Collier's diagnosis of the supply constraints left much to be desired. The diversion of corn to agro-fuel production was one cause that was certainly incontrovertible, but the other two factors he identified - the European ban on GMOs and the restraints placed on the growth of commercial agriculture - were questionable.
Collier's identifying Europe's GMO ban - now eased, incidentally - as a key constraint on production is disingenuous. The main problem with European agricultural production has, in fact, been overproduction and dumping brought about by heavy subsidisation. He adds though, that he is concerned about the ban's impact on Africa's farmers, discouraging them from engaging in genetically engineered agriculture owing to fears of their exports being banned from entering Europe. A 'New Green Revolution' based on genetic engineering (GE) is necessary, says Collier, because the productivity of African agriculture is so low, having missed the first Green Revolution in the 1960s and 1970s.
Collier's attributing African agriculture's problems mainly to the lack of a GE-inspired miracle is idiosyncratic, to say the least. Moreover, his dismissal of concerns about GMO-based agriculture is cavalier, implying an unscientific stance among those critical of a GE transformation of agriculture. He fails to appreciate that the stance of critics of GE is a legacy of the well known negative ecological and social impacts that accompanied the first, chemical-intensive Green Revolution. Moreover, he fails to recognise that the fears about GE are not abstract but are concerns that are well-grounded empirically.
Proponents of GMOs have not been able to alleviate worries that transgenic foods have the potential for creating unexpected reactions in humans unless these foods, which have never been seen before and thus not selected for human consumption by eons of evolution, are tested rigorously in accordance with the universally recognised precautionary principle. Neither have they been able to allay worries that non-target populations might be negatively affected by genetic modification aimed at specific pests, as in the case of Bt corn's impact on the monarch butterfly. Nor have they dispelled the very real threat of loss of biodiversity posed by GMOs. The risks are hardly trifling, as noted by one account:
The effects of transgenic crops on biodiversity far extend the concerns already raised by monocropping under the Green Revolution. Not only is diversity decreased through the physical loss of species, but because of its 'live' aspect, it has the potential to contaminate, and potentially to dominate, other strains of the same species. While this may be a limited concern with respect to the contamination of another commercial crop, it is significantly more worrisome when it could contaminate and eradicate generations of evolution of diverse and subtly differentiated strains of a single crop, such as the recently discovered transgenic contamination of landraces of indigenous corn in Mexico.[3]
Collier's advocacy of GE is, in fact, out of line with even orthodox expert opinion at this point. The recently released International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science, and Technology for Development (IAASTD) - sponsored and funded by, among others, United Nations (UN) agencies, the World Bank, and other institutions - failed to endorse GM crops, choosing instead to highlight the lingering doubts and uncertainties regarding their ecological and health impacts.[4]
Collier's promotion of an African Green Revolution powered by genetic engineering is linked to his third contention - that it has been the non-development of commercial agriculture in Africa that has been responsible for the failure of supply to keep up with continental demand. Instead, 'over the past 40 years, African governments have worked to scale back large commercial agriculture.'[5] For Collier, the solution to Africa's food shortages are commercial agricultural farms employing genetically modified seeds. Further, peasant agriculture is part of the problem. Peasants, he says, are not entrepreneurs or innovators, being too concerned with their food security. Peasants would rather have jobs rather than be entrepreneurs, for which only a few people are fit. The most capable of fitting the role of innovative entrepreneurs are commercial farming operations:
'[Re]luctant peasants are right: Their mode of production is ill-suited to modern agricultural production, in which scale is helpful. In modern agriculture, technology is fast-evolving, investment is lumpy, the private provision of transportation infrastructure is necessary to counter the lack of its public provision, consumer food chains are fast-changing and best met by integrated marketing chains, and regulatory standards are rising toward the holy grail of traceability of produce back to its source.[6]'
Collier's account has, at least, the merit of posing starkly a choice between peasant and small farmer-based agriculture and industrial agriculture as the solution to the world's food needs. However, his choice, the 'Brazilian model' of industrial agriculture, is not exactly one that would elicit enthusiasm, being a model identified with having placed tremendous stresses on the environment. Moreover, the Brazilian agro-enterprise is part of a larger system of global industrial agriculture, marked by large agribusiness that combines, monopolistic trading companies, long-distance transportation of food, and supermarkets, catering largely to the global elite and upper middle class.
This globalised system of production has created severe strains on the environment, effectively marginalised large numbers of people from the market, and contributed to greater poverty and greater income disparities within countries and globally. The Brazilian model is part of the problem but Collier's awareness of the model's systemic flaws only comes when he notes that some 'have criticised the Brazilian model for displacing peoples and destroying the rain forest, which has indeed happened in places where commercialism has gone unregulated.'[7]
But what is most astounding in Collier's account is the absence of any reference to externally imposed policies that severely weakened agricultural capacity in a wide swath of developing countries and transitional economies. He notes that part of the problem in Africa has been the breaking down of publicly funded research stations that was part of a 'more widespread malfunctioning of the public sector.' But he fails to point out that this breakdown was due to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank's structural adjustment policies (SAPs) that systematically starved agriculture of state support. In October 2008, a report by an independent evaluation team of the World Bank simply confirmed what others had pointed out for two decades:
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