Historically, the introduction of Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) in the US and other countries has primarily profited patent-holding companies, while creating farmer dependence on the chemical fertilizers and pesticides produced by a few US corporations, used to the detriment of human health, soil quality and the environment. The failed sweet potato project at the KARI lab was a product of a public-private partnership between Monsanto, KARI and United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the federal organization responsible for most US non-military foreign aid. USAID is not shy about their desire to promote biotechnology, and have been working towards furthering a GMO agenda abroad since 1991, when it launched the Agricultural Biotechnology Support Project (ABSP). According to this in-depth research article by the organization GRAIN, the ABSP sought to “identify suitable crops in various countries and use them as Trojan Horses to provide a solid platform for the introduction of other GM crops.”

In Kenya, that crop was the sweet potato — the focus of the USAID-funded Kenya Agricultural Biotechnology Support Program, which sought for fourteen years at KARI, at a cost of $6 million dollars, to create and bring it to market before the partnering groups abandoned the project.

ABSP shifted its operations in 1998 (four years after GMOs became legal to plant and sell to the US public in food products without a label) by branching out into more specific focus groups seeking the promotion of biotech abroad. This included the Collaborative Agricultural Biotechnology Initiative (CABIO), and its subsidiary, a public relations arm focused on promoting policy friendly to biotechnology called the Program for Biosafety Systems (PBS). PBS is noted for its aggressive push against various governments’ use of the Precautionary Principle, a moral and political principle that protects society from risk in the face of a lack of scientific consensus, in decisions not to plant GMOs.

USAID’s support for biotechnology also extends to its personnel. For example, Judith Chambers was one of the main forces behind the strategies pursued to further the biotech agenda at the ABSP. After working as a senior advisor to USAID, she later served as Director of International Government Affairs at Monsanto, and is now head of PBS.

The point of all these acronyms and associations is to show how a tangled consortium (these are just some of the groups), funded by taxpayer dollars via USAID, seeks to further the aims of biotech abroad, especially in Africa, where Kenya, Mali, Nigeria, South Africa, Uganda and Zambia were singled out and have been the testing grounds for this strategy.

The obvious beneficiaries of such international development are the handful of corporations which own the patents and the technology, and which produce the herbicides and pesticides required by the use of such seeds. Josephat Ngonyo, head of the Kenya Biodiversity Coalition, a network of 60 community groups, small farmers and food security organizations in Kenya, stated in a teleconference yesterday organized by the US Working Group on the Food Crisis that he didn’t feel that farmers were considered when governments made agricultural policies. He sited building infrastructure, like roads, as well as a need for markets as real ways to help farmers. Africans like Ngonyo have a right to be worried — they can look to India to see what a future relying solely on biotech seeds could look like, where a depleted water table, poisoned waterways and farmer suicides have been the result of the first Green Revolution.

The bottom line is that biotechnology requires a spin campaign because it is a marginal approach to the very big and very real problems we face in agriculture. Indeed, there is no one-fits all solution to food security. Yet the US government still pursues the same stubborn, limited policy.

Secretary Clinton continued the mis-guided rhetoric yesterday, despite the fact that hunger is not a yield problem, while speaking at KARI:

“Farmers in Africa have also faced the lack of investment from the private sector as well as governments and the global community, while technologies that have helped farmers in other parts of the world haven’t yet been adapted to the extent necessary to Africa’s needs. Together, these challenges have eroded the foundation of African agriculture. But that foundation is being rebuilt. The scientists here at KARI are taking the lead. I’ve just met with researchers who are cultivating hardier crops that can feed more people and thrive in harsher conditions, disease-resistant cassava plants, sweet potatoes enriched with Vitamin A to prevent blindness, maize that can flourish in times of drought.

The breakthroughs achieved in these labs and others throughout Africa can go a long way toward making sure that farmers who work from sunup to sundown can grow enough to support their families and so people aren’t forced to pull their children from school or sell their livestock to survive a food shortage.”

It is noteworthy that we are even having this discussion, and I commend the administration for talking about food security. (It is also noteworthy that it has taken many months to find a head of USAID — which could be a sign of a real effort to change the direction of that organization.)

But instead of tired solutions that are not working, we need a paradigm shift, says Dr. Hans Herren, who has worked in Nairobi for 27 years and was co-chair of the International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) report. The IAASTD report [pdf] was sponsored by the World Bank, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the World Health Organization (WHO), and represented four years of work by 400 scientists. “We can do better and more using a broader set of tools [than biotechnology],” Herren continued. The report, which came out in 2008, stated unequivocally that business as usual in agricultural production was not an option, pushing for a more broad-based approach to answering the question:

What must we do differently to overcome persistent poverty and hunger, achieve equitable and sustainable development and sustain productive and resilient farming in the face of environmental crises?

Biotechnology is a reductionist pipe dream which is overly dependent on waning resources. By contrast, the IAASTD looked a agro-ecological solutions that focused on agricultural resilience. Agriculture according to the IAASTD requires multifaceted, local solutions. While biotechnology has been promising drought tolerance and higher yields for years without delivering, there are real answers available now — like drought tolerant varieties, suited to certain areas, which are naturally bred; science that focuses on building the quality of the soil and the capacity for that soil to hold more water; or push and pull solutions that deal with pests naturally by attracting beneficial insects or planting compatible species that act as decoys for those pests.

So now what are we going to do with the 20 billion in aid pledged by the G-8 last month to promote food security in Africa? In light of what we now know about USAID, and the fact that there are biotech friendly advisers like Technology and Science Advisor to Secretary Clinton Nina Fedoroff and Chief Scientist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture Rajiv Shah in the administration, it is not hard to assume how those monies might be used. But President Obama should significantly change our policy if he wants to truly help the continent he says he cares so much about.

Obama administration: Study the IAASTD. If there is any hope for a better food system in Africa and the U.S., we must first accept that what is being practiced now is not sustainable, and begin to start the process of making it so.

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?