2-5 Genetically modified foods

• Does the world produce enough food to feed everybody?
• Should crops be grown to feed animals, or to feed people?
• Would you only eat food that is grown naturally?
• Would you eat any food that has been changed by a scientist?

Does the writer agree or disagree with genetically modifying food?

1. The question is as simple as this: do you want a few corporations to monopolise the global food supply? If the answer is yes, you should welcome the announcement that the commercial planting of a genetically modified (GM) crop in Britain can go ahead. If the answer is no, you should regret it. The principal promotional effort of the genetic engineering industry is to distract us from this question. GM technology permits companies to ensure that everything we eat is owned by them. They can patent the seeds and the processes that give rise to them. They can make sure that crops can't be grown without their patented chemicals. They can prevent seeds from reproducing themselves. By buying up competing seed companies and closing them down, they can capture the food market, the biggest and most diverse market of all.
2. No one should welcome this, so the corporations must persuade us to focus on something else. At first they talked of enhancing consumer choice, but when the carrot failed, they switched to the stick. Now we are told that, unless we support the deployment of GM crops in Britain, our science base will collapse. And that, by refusing to eat GM products in Europe, we are threatening the developing world with starvation. Both arguments are, shall we say, imaginative, but in public relations all that matters is that you spin the discussion out for long enough to achieve the necessary result. And that means recruiting eminent figures to make the case for you. Last October 114 scientists, many of whom receive funding from the biotech industry, sent an open letter to the prime minister claiming that Britain's lack of enthusiasm for GM crops "will inhibit our ability to contribute to scientific knowledge internationally". Scientists specialising in this field, they claimed, were being forced to leave Britain to find work elsewhere.
3. But GM crops are not science. They are technological products of science. To claim, as Tony Blair has done, that those who oppose GM are "anti-science" is like claiming that those who oppose chemical weapons are anti-chemistry. But the sight of the men in white coats isn't much of a tearjerker. A far more effective form of emotional blackmail is the one deployed in the Guardian recently by Lord Taverne, the founder of the Prima PR consultancy. "The strongest argument in favour of developing GM crops," he wrote, "is the contribution they can make to reducing world poverty, hunger and disease.” There's little doubt that some GM crops produce higher yields than some conventional crops, or that they can be modified to contain more nutrients, though both these developments have been over-hyped. Two projects have been cited everywhere: a sweet potato being engineered in Kenya to resist viruses and vitamin A-enhanced rice. The first scheme has just collapsed. Despite $6m of funding from Monsanto, the World Bank and the US government, and endless hype in the press, it turns out to have produced no improvement in virus resistance, and a decrease in yield. Just over the border in Uganda, a far cheaper conventional breeding programme has almost doubled sweet potato yields. The other project, never more than a concept, now turns out not to work even in theory - malnourished people appear not to be able to absorb vitamin A in this form. However, none of this stops Lord Taverne, or George Bush, or the Nuffield Council on Bioethics, from citing them as miracle cures for global hunger.
4. But some trials of this kind are succeeding. Despite the best efforts of the industry's boosters to confuse the two ideas, however, this does not equate to feeding the world.
5. The world has a surplus of food, but still people go hungry. They go hungry because they cannot afford to buy it. They cannot afford to buy it because the sources of wealth have been captured by landowners and corporations. The purpose of the biotech industry is to capture and monopolise the sources of wealth.
6. Now in some places governments or unselfish private researchers are producing GM crops that are free from patents, and these could well be of benefit to small farmers in the developing world. But Taverne and the other propagandists are seeking to persuade us to approve a corporate model of GM development in the rich world, in the hope that this will somehow encourage the opposite model to develop in the poor world.
7. And here we encounter the perpetually neglected truth about GM crops. The great majority are not being grown to feed local people, but to feed livestock, whose meat, milk and eggs are then sold to the world's richer consumers. The GM maize approved in Britain is no exception. If in the next 30 years there is a global food crisis, it will be because the arable land that should be producing food for humans is instead producing feed for animals.
8. The biotech companies are not interested in whether science is flourishing or whether people are starving. They simply want to make money. The best way to make money is to control the market. But before you can control the market, you must first convince the people that there's something else at stake.