Jose Fernandez, Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of Economic, Energy and Business Affairs noted that the State Department was ready to take on the naysayers. In addition to confronting the critics, Fernandez stated they would be building alliances (presumably with the biotech industry and foreign governments), anticipating roadblocks to acceptance and highlighting the science.

To this point the only “science” they can highlight is the fact that nearly 100% of the commercially available genetically modified (GM) crops worldwide are engineered to be insecticidal, resistant to herbicide application, or both.

The State Department and its allies promote GM as a way for the developing world to feed itself, but the four predominant GM crops (corn, soy, cotton and canola) are not specifically human food crops, they are used for animal feed, biofuel, fiber and processed food.

They would like us to believe that the “science” will deliver more nutritious food, higher yielding crops, drought resistant crops and an end to world hunger. These claims however, are not based in science, but only on “the promise”, or “the hope” of GM doing what its supporters claim it can do.

The science, or lack thereof, that we should take note of is the glaring lack of regulation of GM crops and the serious questions about their safety. Nina Fedoroff, Science and Technology Adviser to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton noted “We preach to the world about science-based regulations but really our regulations on crop biotechnology are not yet science-based.”

We should not be surprised that the U.S. State Department is again, on the stump, promoting biotech crops. It would be difficult to say how long the the U.S. government has been aggressively promoting biotechnology, specifically GM crops, but certainly since the commercialization of GM soy in 1996.

In 2004 the State Department launched a website which was part of a State Department initiative to “encourage broader adoption and acceptance of biotechnology in the developing world,” according to Deborah Malac, then chief of the Biotechnology and Textile Trade Policy Division of the State Department.

USDA is also actively promoting biotechnology with a website that supports bringing biotechnology to the “worldwide marketplace.”

Even the U.S. Senate is getting into the act, promoting, even mandating GM technology to the developing world. Senate Bill 384, The Global Food Security Act, would amend the Foreign Assistance act of 1961 to read “Agricultural research carried out under this act shall include research on biotechnological advances appropriate to local ecological conditions, including GM technology.”

While USDA assures us that the products of biotechnology and the chemicals they depend on are safe, scientists within USDA, the State Department and the Administration question that view.

So why does the U.S. government promote the interests of the biotechnology industry over the best interests of peoples health, the environment and the food security of the developing world?

The easy answer is that the biotechnology industry has a high profit margin and they know how to influence government policy.

In the same breath that he criticizes these “Western elites” who support sustainable food production,  Paarlberg espouses the very Western, elitist argument that the only definition of “good,” “modern,” or “improved” agricultural inputs are the ones created, patented and sold by big Western biotech companies such as Monsanto, where Paarlberg serves on the Biotechnology Advisory Council (PDF).

Paarlberg seems to believe that the only two options for global agriculture are dirt poor subsistence farmers barely eking out a living or mass biotech production on the Green Revolution scale. But between these two extremes is a middle ground: A diverse and robust rural sector that includes small and medium farmers serving local communities and nations along with appropriate technologies that help re-balance the mix between locally sourced and imported food options. In my role at American Jewish World Service (AJWS), I see the wisdom of this third way set of approaches every day through initiatives like Lambi Fund of Haiti’s home-grown seed banks.

The insistence that “modernization” only has one meaning and one possible approach puts Paarlberg out of step not only with many of the people on the ground actually living with this issue every day, but also with the current consensus among experts in the field as laid out by the findings of the International Science, Technology and Development (IAASTD) initiative. This process – a three-year intergovernmental research and analysis project on the state of global agriculture conducted under the co-sponsorship of the FAO, GEF, UNDP, UNEP, UNESCO, the World Bank and WHO – came to almost the exact opposite conclusion of Paarlberg’s.

Wherever one stands on the issue of biotech in agriculture – and people of good will can disagree – the notion that all biotech practices are inherently “good” or “modern” whereas all non-biotech practices, such as indigenous seed banking and hybrid cultivation, composting and drip irrigation, are inherently “bad” or “backward” comes across as more ideological than scientific.

The first and biggest proponent of non-biotech food security is Via Campesina, a global social movement that represents millions of peasant and small-scale farmers in hundreds of developing countries. People who suffer from lack of food around the developing world do not need Western ‘eco-foodies’ to tell them that local food sovereignty is the best way to feed their families. They already know it, and knew it long before “locavorism” came to these shores.

No one is seriously suggesting that the current system is working. Paarlberg is right that farmers need good inputs (seeds, fertilizer, etc) as well as the existence of basic infrastructure (roads, power, etc) to succeed. But he undercuts his argument by failing to discuss the many factors that led to the current situation, other than a throwaway line about food aid, with which I heartily agree and wish Paarlberg would expound upon.

AJWS is paying particular attention to this aspect of hunger issues in Haiti, where huge influxes of US-subsidized bio-tech produced rice will continue to undercut local farmers’ ability to feed their country if something isn’t done soon. AJWS is asking Congress to support common-sense aid to Haiti – you can make your voice heard by signing our petition.

Most can agree with Paarlberg that food aid has not helped hungry people in the developing world and that we must switch from investing in sending bags of food to the continent to sending real support for agricultural development assistance. AJWS strongly supports US foreign assistance for sustainable agricultural initiatives, but only when they are supported and led by the people on the ground. People who really care about feeding the world’s hungry cannot create situations that just replace the old dependency on foreign food aid with a new dependency on inputs that are wholly controlled by biotech corporations.

One thing we know for sure is that we just don’t know enough about genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and biotechnology to know that in planting their seeds, we aren’t affecting future generations’ ability to feed themselves. For many people, the fact that they’re corporately controlled and thus make for bad social policy, or that they genetically contaminate other species and as such increase claims against farmers, while undermining a farmer’s ability to save seed and be self sufficient, are enough of an argument against their propagation. But in Claire Hope Cummings’ excellent book, Uncertain Peril: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Seeds, she weaves in the stories of the people and places behind a phenomenon that’s gotten a few rich, while farmers struggle with shrinking margins.

Almost all of the foods we eat — including rice, corn, wheat, soy, potatoes, cassava, taro, sugar, coffee, canola, sunflowers and many other fruits and vegetables — have been patented or genetically modified. The genetic modification of which Cummings writes is a novel act, and one that could never be replicated in nature. This is because while traditional breeding has crossed similar species to find the hardiest plants, genetically engineered foods today are jumping the species barrier, so that you might have fish genes in a tomatoes, for example. Unfortunately, this means that there is no precedent for how these novel species could act in our ecosystem in the long term. Cummings explains it this way:

In itself, gene flow is not necessarily harmful. What matters is the kind of molecule that is moving around, where it goes, and how it behaves once it gets there. When transgenes [or genetically modified genes] used to modifying one plant move into another plant, they can become unstable and behave unpredictably. When natural genes do this, they are governed by biological rules that organisms have developed over millennia to deal with gene flow and to keep species separate. When artificially engineered genes do this, however, different rules come into play. Genetic engineering by definition overcomes these rules in order to create new genes and organisms. Genetic engineering is the very essence of invasiveness, by design.

Cummings also looks at how GMOs came to be in regulatory purgatory, where a risk assessment — a concept which requires proof of harm, and was meant to be used for chemical pollution and devised long before the concept of genetic pollution  — has been used for a practice that involved a lot of uncertainty. A risk assessment is used in place of the “precautionary principle,” which argues that where there is uncertainty, government must act first to protect the public. This is the standard in most other countries. Meanwhile the FDA, USDA and EPA do not coordinate their oversight, and these agencies haven’t been taking into account newer science that questions the efficacy and long-term viability of biotechnology in agriculture. Case in point, no new laws regulating GMOs have been put in place since these seeds were given the green light for mass planting in the US. Cummings writes:

The regulatory system we have today is the same one, with some minor exceptions, that was adopted in the early 1990s. It effectively exempted this one industry from our most important environmental and consumer protection laws, which guarantee our right to know what is in the products we consume and our right to sue manufacturers when the government fails to protect our safety.

Increasingly, people want more information about the food they eat. While 80% of processed foods at the supermarket in the US contain GMOs, they are not required to be labeled. Yet public opinion polls regularly show that around 90% of Americans want these products labeled. Meanwhile, in Europe and Japan all GMOs are labeled, and companies have no issues with compliance. GMOs can only either produce pesticides, or express immunity to herbicide. In other words, they have so far had less luck fulfilling promises to add value for consumers, which might mean that adding these traits is harder to pull off than the corporations would like us to believe. Cummings summed up our regulatory failures this way:

The problem is, GMO manufacturers are a chemical industry posing as agriculture. They say they are about creating life. Their ads always show happy faces and healthy plants. But what they are really about is death, the poisoning of weeds and insects. Transgenic plants are created by agrochemical companies and used in the same way that those companies’ chemicals are used: as pest controls. If these plants were treated as chemicals, they might be handled more carefully.

To me, this chapter, “Trespass,” is the most compelling part of the book. Cummings discusses here how contamination is one of the biggest risks we take with the planting of GMOs. Contamination occurs through cross-pollination, but also when GMO seeds are mixed in with conventional seeds — and the wind, animals and human activity are all involved, adding a level of unpredictability. Co-existence of GMO and conventional species is a myth the industry is happy to propagate. This is because they know very well that as they hold patents to their seeds, and those seeds cross-pollinate, they also own the new contaminated seeds — thus it makes good business sense. But does it make ecological sense?

Uncertain Peril is a muckraking journalist’s take on biotechnology written like a thriller. It is also a look at seed-saving historically, along with the agro-ecological solutions arising to combat the so-called inevitability of genetically modified food. While many people have black and white opinions about GMOs, Cummings gives fuel to the fire of those who believe that perhaps this is just a flawed technology, and that there are better ways to combat hunger and to be food secure. Sustainable agriculture has been proven the antidote to corporately dominated and risk-laden food. Here is Cummings again:

It is essential that our solutions be place-based. The issue of place is often neglected in the search for sustainability. Placeless solutions become too focused on the technology and not enough on locality. Place is essential to the sustainability equasion because our solutions have to be locally adapted and locally accepted.

Too often we think the solutions to our problems can always come through technology. Hopefully this book, published in 2008, will be widely read and we can begin to have a more nuanced discussion about the technologies that truly benefit us as a species and those to which we should say “enough.”

As a polarizing subject, biotechnology has no peer.

On the one hand, it has potential to raise crop yields, increase the nutrient value in food and speed up traditional plant breeding through marker-assisted selection, a biotechnology that does not mix genes of different species.

On the other hand, biotechnology is generally funded and controlled by large corporations. The corporations then patent the products produced through the technology and sell them to farmers to make a profit.

In the past, agricultural knowledge and seeds have been owned by everyone for the common good and shared freely among gardeners and farmers. This new system is a departure from how food has traditionally been raised. By turning knowledge into private property, it effectively removes the control over food production from the communities engaged in it.

There are many other problems with biotechnology, as well, including potential loss of biodiversity, environmental degradation caused by indiscriminate spraying of pesticides and herbicides on crops that have been bioengineered to withstand heavy doses of chemicals, and the unknown impacts on our health we may experience from consuming genetically modified organisms.

Another problem is with the companies that develop and promote this technology. Monsanto in particular is known for spying on farmers and suing them if Monsanto-patented crops are found in the farmers’ fields – whether or not the farmers planted these crops or they ended up their via “drift.” Further, Monsanto is known for using strong-armed tactics to gain new markets in countries around the world.

Monsanto has also been devoting significant resources to an advertising campaign aimed at thought leaders who read publications like The New Yorker, or listen to NPR stations. To influence a public that is wary of biotechnology, the campaign asserts that we need biotechnology to “feed the world.” The ads imply that if you care about starving people around the world, you’ll support biotechnology.

This advertising is disingenuous because most crops patented by Monsanto are engineered to withstand the pesticides and herbicides the company also sells. In reality, developing these crops and selling them to farmers is another way to sell more chemicals.

Furthermore, the most widely-planted GMO crops don’t feed the people in the countries where the crops are grown; they are export crops for the global marketplace. Most are not used for food at all.

Soybeans, the most-planted GMO-crop worldwide, go mostly to feed animals or for biofuel; GMO corn is used in animal feed and industrial products; rapeseed is used to make canola oil; cotton, of course, is not even a food crop.

All of these crops favor large landholders, not the people we think of when talking about hunger.

With GMO development being framed as the only way to combat hunger, let’s take a look at some of the global hotspots around the world.

Africa

The Bill and Melinda Gates and Rockefeller Foundations are currently funding what’s touted as a Second Green Revolution in Africa. Unlike the first Green Revolution in Asia and South Asia, which promoted a fossil-fuel dependent form of heavy input agriculture, this new, improved Green Revolution is supposed to benefit smallholders, use genetic engineering to reduce the need for pesticides and fertilizers and utilize the extensive knowledge of the farmers on the ground.

According to an article in Seed Magazine, seven out of every 10 Africans make their livelihoods through farming. They produce the majority of Africa’s food but with minimal resources and little support. Agriculture receives, on average, just 4 to 5 percent of national budgets.

This article asserts that the main problem is not lack of technology. It is that national governments have not invested enough in basic programs that will turn smallholder farming into a viable economic enterprise.

The Gates Foundation funding is being distributed to AGRA, Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa. According to AGRA’s website, AGRA “works to achieve a food secure and prosperous Africa through the promotion of rapid, sustainable agricultural growth based on smallholder farmers.”

That all sounds good, but in an article in The Nation this past September, it was revealed that though the Gates Foundation appears to have learned something from the first Green Revolution, much of what is being funded looks like business as usual.

The Gates project is doing some work engaging small farmers and sharing technology with African scientists, but researchers at the Community Alliance for Global Justice have found that a hefty portion of the Gates money is going to organizations connected to Monsanto.

Some farmers that have been working on their own sustainable, ecologically based farming systems to increase yields say they have been ignored. For their part, The Gates Foundation responded to these charges in a letter to the editor in The Nation. That letter (and others) can be read here.

According to Africa Files, “a network of people committed to Africa through its promotion of human rights, economic justice, African perspectives and alternative analyses,” AGRA is a “hoax.”

Africa Files accuses AGRA of promoting monoculture type farming that relies on heavy irrigation and ignoring the possibilities of economic gains when smallholders engage in organic farming.

According to Annie Shattuck, Policy Analyst for Food First, The Institute for Food and Development Policy, and co-author of the article in The Nation cited above,

“The pattern of the Green Revolution is to reduce agriculture systems to a monoculture crop that responds well to a highly limited set of circumstances and inputs. Trying to engineer genetic resistance to one more circumstance is not going to cut it for the agriculture of the future. We need systems that provide resilience to multiple hazards, and to do that we need diverse sustainable systems that also provide a decent living for the people who work them.”

India

The first Green Revolution begun in the 1970s was touted as a success. But today, it looks more like a disaster in India. While yields did go up, hunger did not go down. The reason for this is the high input technologies promoted tended to favor large, already privileged landholders. What it really did was push a lot of rural people into cities to try their luck there.

Today, despite the Green Revolution, there are famine conditions in India caused by drought and extreme weather. Suicide among Indian farmers has been epidemic as farmers find themselves in crushing debt when technological farming fails. Recent stories profile Indian farmers going back to organic methods.

What’s clear from the stories in India is that technological solutions only work for so long. Whether you are talking about chemical fertilizers, or genetic modification, such solutions are a crude fix overlaid across nature’s elegant variability. Currently, the only GM crop grown in India is cotton, but the country recently approved the development of GM eggplant.

“The myth of “one gene, one solution” to complex problems like climate change and poverty, (the root cause of hunger), is a myopic way to look at what is a complex ecological and social problem”, says Annie Shattuck. “So far attempts to engineer drought tolerance have been a miserable failure. The crops do well in drought years, but not in a normal year. We know agriculture will have to use less water and less fossil fuel in the future. It will also have to deal with increasingly wild weather – delays in the rainy season, erratic frosts, more intense storms. Unpredictability is the name of the game.”

China

Due to concerns about food security while agricultural land is being lost to rapid industrialization, China has been engaged in state-sponsored GMO research since the early part of this century. Details of the Chinese program are sketchy but the most interesting aspect of the program is that it is owned by the Chinese government rather than being funded by Monsanto, BayerCropScience, Syngenta or any of the other large agricultural biotech companies.

According to an article in Reuters, a large budget was approved in 2008 for GMO research with a huge portion of that budget earmarked for safety research. A good thing, because unauthorized GM rice has been found in processed foods imported into the EU from China.

With consumers in Europe among the least accepting of GM foods, China would do well to be cautious.

According to Chinese officials, the Chinese program “aims to obtain genes with great potential commercial value whose intellectual property rights belong to China, and to develop high-quality, high-yield and pest-resistant genetically modified new species.” Currently China grows large amounts of transgenic cotton. Rice, wheat, corn, soybeans, and a few food crops like peppers and papaya are in the development phase.

Mexico

In October, Mexico issued the first permits to grow GM corn. Despite assurances that the corn will not be planted in the same areas as native corn, native corn in Mexico is already contaminated. In a study published in the journal Nature, in 2001, scientists reported that corn in remote fields in Oaxaca was contaminated with GM genes.

This report set off an ugly industry effort to discredit the scientists who published the study. But in spring 2009, the controversy was finally put to rest when another study confirmed the findings of the first study. At any rate, according to the story in Reuters, some Mexican farmers in the north have been planting GM corn illegally.

Turkey

In a surprising and controversial move in October, Turkey (which doesn’t grow any GM crops) put restrictions on the import of GM foods into the country. Some say the move did not go far enough toward an outright ban and will endanger Turkey’s chances in its bid to join the EU. The regulation does not restrict or ban the import or use of GMOs but rather introduced some criteria for their import. Because Turkey does not yet set rules and regulations for GMOs, the government sees this as a stopgap measure until a comprehensive law comes into effect.

Ireland

Also in October, Ireland joined a growing number of countries with an outright ban on growing GM crops or using GM feed for livestock.

The battle lines are sharply drawn.

As Europe, Japan, and some Middle Eastern countries increasingly reject GM foods, look for more action in developing countries as agricultural biotech companies muscle in. Just last week, President Obama nominated Dr. Rajiv Shah as Administrator of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).

Most recently, Dr. Shah served as undersecretary and Chief Scientist at the Department of Agriculture under Tom Vilsack and before that was the Director for Agricultural Development at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, where he promoted the technological farming solutions of the organization.

As we debate how to feed the world, we would do well to remember that the problem is not so much lack of food. The problem is lack of food sovereignty. When control of the food system is in corporate hands rather than local ones, people who have no money to buy food on the open market starve.

For more information on the GMOs in the developing world, and other battles for food sovereignty, sign up for the Food First newsletter or check out their publications section. If you want to help, donations are always welcome.

Originally published on EcoSalon

In the next sentences, she gives a clue about what “tools” she might be referring to by praising the Green Revolution — without noting the depleted water table, reduced soil fertility, massive farmer debts and increased rates of farmer suicides left in the wake of the failed experiment in India.

The Green Revolution was a product of a biotechnological approach to feeding people, the thinking being that we could create ways of tricking nature in a lab: ridding ourselves of pests and weeds, increasing yields and efficiency. Unfortunately pests and weeds have become more virulent in these systems, as they evolve to withstand higher and higher doses of chemicals. These “monocultures” — field plantings of a single crop, usually corn, cotton or soy — have relied heavily on oil and resource inputs the third world can’t afford. Furthermore, these systems have yet to actually improve yields. Efficiency has been the greatest achievement of biotechnology; however, as Michael Pollan and others point out, redundancy, though counter-intuitive, is the only way to ensure food safety. But biotechnology companies like Monsanto have a huge lobbying presence in Washington, and corporate shills like Nina Federoff have the ear of Secretary Clinton. So its no surprise that in the name of philanthropy, the US has begun to adopt the “feeding the world” mantra of Big Ag.

The focus has been mostly on Africa, where a third of the population is malnourished, and where groups like the Gates Foundation are among the newcomers trying to renew the idea of creating a “Green Revolution for Africa,” using many of the same methods that have been so bad for India.

Meanwhile, here in the US, 36 million people are food insecure, and yet we are one of the biggest agricultural producers in the world. Given the fact that these commodity crops cannot be eaten until processed, it turns out that what Big Ag is feeding us is not nourishing us. So it seems that hunger is not just a function of yield, but involves distribution, concentrations of power, and policy.

At the end of the day, do we actually seek to feed these hungry people, or to feed our bottom line? Because in this instance, we can’t do both.

Raj Patel put it succinctly in a recent email exchange:

Everyone agrees that African farmers need support. But this story is like the vacuum cleaner salesman who dumps dirt on your floor to show you how his product can pick some of it up. In Africa’s case, the dirt was dumped in the 1980s, when US-led economic policy from the World Bank actively prevented African governments from investing in their farmers. The results were, the Bank now admits, a disaster. Into this disaster now steps biotechnology, offering to fix the problem. Actually, it’s a bad metaphor. This makes it sound as if GE crops can actually increase yields. The problem of hunger in Africa today has very little to do with seed quality, and a great deal to do with poverty, chronic underinvestment in agriculture, and an active stamping-out of the agroecological alternatives that have proved so successful in fighting hunger. Why are these alternatives being suppressed in US government policy? Because they’re not profitable for the US biotech industry, and the US government has, since Vice President Dan Quayle shepherded legislation in the US to support the industry, been an aggressive supporter of genetic engineering.

Patel is co-author, with Eric Holt-Giménez, of the forthcoming book, Food Rebellions: Crisis and the Hunger for Justice, which outlines the conditions which led to the global food crisis of 2008, and some of the many steps we can take to solve hunger. The book ties the issue of hunger to a growing dependence on our imports:

The profits and concentration of market power in the industrial North mirror the import dependence, food deficits and the loss of control over food systems in the global South. Fifty years ago, developing countries had yearly agricultural trade surpluses of $1 billion. Today, after decades of development and the global expansion of the industrial agrifoods complex, the Southern food deficit has ballooned to U.S.$11 billion/year (FAO 2004). The cereal import bill for Low Income Food Deficit Countries reaching over U.S.$ 38 billion in 2007/2008 (De Schutter 2008). The FAO predicts it will grow to $50 billion by 2030.

Instead of teaching poor countries to fish, so to speak, we are selling them the fish with the hook still in its mouth.

That hook infers dependence, but there is also another catch: depleted resources. Biotechnology as it is used right now cannot be sustainable. It relies heavily on three things that are waning: surplus water, cheap oil and a stable climate. As much as biotech proponents claim their technologies could be used for sustainable aims, we don’t have decades to wait while the technology is perfected. And what if it is never perfected? In addition, in putting all of our eggs in one basket with biotech, the problem is misrepresented, and solutions that are already out there are being ignored.

It seems, therefore, that the only real solution to hunger is to transform the food system from the ground up. In Africa, 80% of the population is rural, and there are 33 million small farms (those farming less than 2 hectares), which produce 90% of the continent’s food (Patel and Giménez, 2009). Why don’t we, then, instead of promoting an intensive agriculture that is ruining our environment, our health and is lining the pockets of a few corporations, increase aid to agriculture? There is plenty of fertile land in Africa, much of which is being snatched up in massive land grabs by the Chinese and other countries foreseeing their own imminent food insecurity. Perhaps its time to invest in agriculture for Africans, before it’s too late.

This was the recommendation of the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge Science, and Technology for Development, or IAASTD, which was a joint project of the World Bank, FAO and UNDP that determined in 2008 that a complete overhaul of the food system was necessary. 61 countries signed onto the findings of the panel. Patel and Gimenez sum up the IAASTD thusly:

IAASTD’s four-year analytical exercise started with a collective framing of the core problems of hunger and environmental destruction. Scientists then identified and evaluated the most appropriate actions and solutions to these problems, locally, nationally and internationally.

The IAASTD team found that the limiting factors to production, equitable distribution and environmental sustainability were overwhelmingly social, rather than technological in nature. Further, many proven agroecological practices for sustainable production increases were already widespread across the global South, but unable to scale up because they lacked a supportive trade, policy, and institutional environment. This is why IAASTD recommends improving the conditions for sustainable agriculture, rather than just coming up with technological fixes.

Somehow this gets swept under the rug of policy in the US. But if we are committed to actually helping, it would behoove Secretary Clinton, and others in this administration, to read the findings of the IAASTD and consider it before making policy.

Again, from Patel and Giménez:

Who improves African agriculture, how, under what agreements and by what means, will determine whether the efforts to end hunger in Africa succeed or fail. Lack of attention to these issues runs the risk that the long-overdue support to African agriculture will be used as prop for a flawed global food system when what is needed is a thorough transformation of agriculture.

Will Africans be a cog in our capitalist machine, or will we follow through with our promises to end hunger?

Seed and chemical giant Monsanto and friends have lately been conducting all-out re-branding campaigns, seeking to present themselves as the answer to world hunger and the actualization of sustainability.  As an extension of this tight message control, Oxfam is hosting a panel discussion at the Asia Society in New York tomorrow at 8:30 am called “The Global Food Crisis – Time for Another Green Revolution?“  But the discussion seems like it will be rather one-sided.

Taking part are Kevin L. Eblen, Vice President, Public Policy and “Sustainability Lead” at Monsanto, as well as Rajiv Shah, Director of Agricultural Development at the Gates Foundation and Dr. Robert Zeigler, Director General, International Rice Research Institute (The institute that conducted the research for the original Green Revolution).

Perhaps this group is convening to pat each other on the back for their role in bringing forth a similar Green Revolution to what we have seen before.  In any case it is clear there will not be a considered critique of the role genetically modified seeds have played in increased farmer debt, and by extension, farmer suicides worldwide; the increase dependence on international food aid due to a reliance on monocropping (growing one single, usually inedible-before-processed crop — or worse, growing something like BT Cotton, which is totally inedible); and not to mention, a stripping of the fertility of the land, contributing to desertification and climate change; and waning GM crop yields that have resulted in the face of proven increased productivity of organics over time.

Tom Philpott pointed out the lopsided nature of the panel on Comfood:

If Oxfam wants a real debate or even a robust discussion, where are the agro-ecologists, the organic ag folks on this panel? Has Oxfam never heard of the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD), which — under the aegis of the World Bank, of all institutions — took an extremely skeptical position viz. patented transgenics as a solution to climate change-related ag problems in the global south? Or the recent UN report finding vast potential for low-tech organic ag in Africa?

The debate is on for whether we actually need a new Green Revolution, and if so, what that should look like.  I spoke with Raj Patel a few months back for a piece about our perceptions of GM seed.  He spoke then about his discussion with panelist Rajiv Shah that was quoted in the New York Times Magazine, and he had this to say:

“I absolutely think we need a sustainable Green Revolution.  But it has to be with the kind of technology that Vandana [Shiva]‘s working with, or Via Campesina is working with.  An agroecological revolution is one that isn’t just about what chemicals and what genes to use in the fields, but changing our relationship with the earth. That’s not something that the Gates folk are ready to hear (we’ve tried). Moreover, though, there’s something very wrong about a private foundation doing something that should be government policy – and the only reason it isn’t government policy is because governments have been prevented in the past 30 years from doing this sort of agricultural work and research. I’d say if something is to be sustainable in Africa, shouldn’t Africans be involved, rather than the passive recipients for US largesse (which hasn’t worked out very well).”

Apparently, we are not the only ones scratching our heads about plans for the new Green Revolution.  Seemingly preemptive to the meeting at the Asia Society tomorrow, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) released a study on Tuesday called the “Environmental Food Crisis: Environment’s Role in Averting Future Food Crises,” which suggests that we begin to think more ecologically about food waste and infrastructure.  UN Under-Secretary-General and UNEP Executive Director Achim Steiner: “We need to deal with not only the way the world produces food but the way it is distributed, sold and consumed, and we need a revolution that can boost yields by working with rather than against nature.”

They suggest “managing and better harvesting extreme rainfall on continents such as Africa, alongside [giving] support to farmers for adopting more diversified and ecologically-friendly farming systems – ones that enhance the ‘nature-based’ inputs from pollinators such as bees as well as water supplies and genetic diversity.”  The report also speaks rationally about water scarcity, organic production capacity, re-organizing the food market structure and removing crop subsidies.  Check out this great article from Inter Press Service about the report for more perspective.

Needless to say, I will be present at the discussion in the morning, looking forward to (and a bit freaked out about) standing up for all of those voices who have no say in how their land is developed under the auspices of philanthropy, by those whose pockets have the potential to be lined by this little experiment.  Please join me at th Asia Society, I will be outside at 8:00am, somehow making myself known (Late twenties with an iPhone addiction, and I won’t be bothered if you approach me — unless you are a Monsanto exec), and will be livetweeting the event on my twitter feed, featured in the right-hand side panel on Civil Eats.

UPDATE: Doug Gurian-Sherman, a Senior Scientist of the Food & Environment Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) is speaking tomorrow at the Asia Society panel, instead of Rajiv Shah.

Image: Monsanto’s recent ad campaign