Does opposition to GM crops hurt the poor?

People tend to have strong views on genetically modified crops. It's usually a fairly wide divide between the "GM can solve world hunger" camp and the line that "GM could be dangerous and agricultural corporations like Monsanto are evil".

Sakiko Fukuda-Parr, who used to oversee the U.N. Human Development Reports, is somewhere in the middle. She argues that GM technology so far hasn't done much to help the poor, but it could. She says European campaigners against biotechnology are part of the problem. Her view is that heavy opposition from NGOs has demonised the technology so much that it's stopped the public sector researching GM crops. As a result, commercial outfits like Monsanto have developed technology that is profit-friendly rather than beneficial to the poor.

"It's rather perverse that lobbying by the anti-globalization movement results in what they want to stop," she said at a debate in London in March. Fukuda-Parr, now a visiting professor at The New School in New York City, says GM research has focused on four crops - maize, soya, cotton and canola, which is genetically engineered rapeseed produced for its oil. Most of the maize and soya goes to feeding livestock to meet the soaring demand for meat in the booming economies of India and China.

So while a lot of GM research is catering to the appetites of rapidly expanding middle classes, it still does not benefit the world's poor. For that to happen, Fukuda-Parr says GM technology needs to focus on staple foods in developing countries such as rice, wheat, cassava, plantains and sorghum. Plants could then be created with traits that make farming less risky, like tolerance to drought and resistance to disease.

"But that's not what companies are investing in, it's not where the money is," she says, adding the same thing happens with medical research. "It's just like pharmaceuticals, with 90 percent (of research funding) going to diseases of the rich, and very little to malaria..." Fakuda-Parr says she is not against GM technology at all. "I am opposed to corporations controlling this technology," she says, for the record. But, she says, "Sitting in Europe, the attitude has been to stigmatize GM, throwing out the baby with the bath water."

According to the book that Fukuda-Parr has just edited, "The Gene Revolution : GM crops and unequal development," there are just seven mega-corporations operating in the GM market, skewing research towards commercial priorities. The book looks at how GM technology has been handled differently in Argentina, Brazil, China, India, South Africa and the US - the leading players in the GM game. It also looks at how biotechnology could be useful for West and Central Africa. Her main argument is that governments of developing countries need to create incentives for supplying small-scale farmers with quality seeds and encourage locally relevant research.

Michael Lipton of Sussex University goes even further than Fukuda-Parr, saying the presence of NGOs, often with a strong anti-GM stance, in Sub-Saharan Africa makes it very difficult for Africans to embark on research in their own countries. "Some NGOs have bandwaggoned on this in a shameful way," he says. He disagrees with the argument - based on calculations of labour demand per hectare - that says GM crops with built-in pesticides will leave people out of work because they cut the labour needed for weeding. Any job losses, he says, are outweighed by the extra hands needed during the bumper harvests that GM crops create.

Lipton doesn't think there is any scientific basis for a European moratorium on GM research, which the World Trade Organisation has declared illegal. "There's no reason to believe they are any more or less dangerous than the crops they are to replace," he says. But anti-GM campaigners say it's simplistic to argue that biotechnology could end hunger in the developing world. "Small-scale farmers in poor countries aren't currently asking for GM seeds," says Lies Craeynest of environmental organisation WWF, which is cautious about the positive impacts of GM technology. "What they really want is access to land and credit."

British relief and development agency Christian Aid, which has campaigned heavily on the topic, says: "A costly technology such as GM crops, owned by powerful corporations, risks increasing barriers, leading to more inequality, poverty and food insecurity."

Even the debate about higher crop yields isn't straightforward. On the one hand, scientists say studies show small-scale farmers benefit proportionally more from GM crop production than large-scale farmers. But some anti-GM campaigners say that bigger harvests can also lead to
lower prices which reduce the income that farmers receive from their crop.

One of the biggest arguments against GM technology is distrust of corporations controlling the supply of seeds. And anti-GM campaigners say there are not enough safeguards against the unintentional spread of GM crops.

Fukuda-Parr says it's too late to reign in technology that people want. She says India and Brazil were both forced to legalize GM crops after they had already been brought in, in so-called "white bags" and introduced locally. "I don't think you can stop it now," she says. "It's out there and we just have to try to manage it."

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