We'll Reap What We Sow
We'll reap what we sow
Sean McDonagh SSC
THE US Embassy to the Holy See, in cooperation with the Vatican's Academy of Sciences, is hosting a seminar at the Gregorian University in Rome on 23 September under the title "Feeding a Hungry World: The Moral Imperative of Biotechnology".
The flyer promoting the event begins with the United Nations statistic that one person dies from hunger and malnutrition every six seconds. It goes on to state that 1.5 billion people live in poverty. Then it claims that, since human beings have now developed genetically engineered (GE) crops that can resist extreme weather, disease and pests, there is an obligation to promote them in order to banish hunger and starvation. Because many of the I billion Catholics in the world live in developing countries, the GE companies would like to swing the Vatican behind this "moral imperative".
In reality, critics of genetic engineering say, famine and hunger have more to do with the absence of land reform, social inequality, bias against women and a lack of access to cheap credit and basic agricultural technologies, rather than with a scarcity of superseeds. The main causes of hunger, as the World Food Summit in Rome in November 1996 acknowledged, are economic and social. People are hungry either because they do not have access tO food production processes or they do not have enough money to buy food.
At the moment the bulk of the GE corn and soya harvest is fed to animals, not people. In 1990 scientists at the World Food Programme at Brown University calculated that, if the world harvest over the previous few years was distributed equitably to all the people of the world, it could provide an adequate vegetarian diet for 6 billion people; a meat-rich diet, on the other hand, could only manage to feed 2.6 billion. Human society is increasingly going to face the option of getting its protein from animals or plants. If we opt for animals it will mean a more inequitable world with increasing malnutrition.
Many countries, as they become richer, are adopting the Western meat-rich diet. In 1960, Mexico fed only 5 per cent of its grain harvest to animals; by 2004 that figure had climbed to 45 per cent. Similarly, Egypt has gone from 3 per cent to 31 per cent in the same period, while China - home to one-sixth of the world's population - has gone from 8 per cent to 26 per cent. In all of these countries poor people could use this grain to stave off malnutrition, but unfortunately they cannot afford to buy grain. So growing GE grain to feed to animals is, in fact, contributing to world hunger, not solving it.
If the Catholic Church wants to help alleviate world hunger it could do so more efficiently not by pushing GE crops but by promoting abstinence from meat on a number of days each week — a habit which is not, after all, alien to Catholic tradition.
The Church could also try to stem present trends that, if they continue, mean we will lose one third to a half of all the species in the next 40 years. The bio-geographer Chris Park of Lancaster University estimates that there are 75,000 edible plants in the world, many of which are highly nutritious; they could be added to the larder of a much greater proportion of humankind with a minimum of research and funding.
But don't expect the US Embassy to sponsor a seminar on the extinction of species: there is very little money to be made in protecting the biosphere. Washington has signed neither the Convention on Biodiversity (CBD) nor the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety. Yet its ambassador to the Holy See would like people to believe that behind Washington̓s advocacy of GE food is the altruistic desire to feed the world.
Yet there are much cheaper ways. Research at the. University of Sussex has found that the ‘GE crops which biotech companies are developing for Africa - among them maize and sweet potato - could be produced by conventional procedures and good ecological management at a far higher yield and a fraction of the cost. The GE research on sweet potato is now approaching its twelfth year: it has involved 19 scientists and cost $6m., yet has managed to increase yield by just 18 per cent. Conventional sweet-potato breeding, working with a small budget, has produced a virus-resistant variety with a 100 per cent yield increase.
Support for GE crops also means supporting the patenting of living organisms — seeds and animals. Patenting life is a fundamental attack on the understanding of life as a gift from God. That is why it is strange to find the Vatican helping to promote it.
GE crops will give enormous control of the staple foods of the world to a handful of Northern agribusiness companies. It will be a tragedy if the Vatican listens to the corporate voice rather than the voice of countless Christian communities and theft leaders in developing countries.