The propaganda, facts and the grey areas on GM foods

The debate on genetically modified food, which was once just scientific, has assumed powerful political overtones.

Naivasha MP John Mututho, the chair of the Parliamentary Select Committee on Agriculture, is Kenya’s most energetic critic of GM foods. And now he has found an ally in Public Health minister Beth Mugo.

In the coming week, Agriculture minister Dr Sally Kosgei is expected to make a statement in Parliament on the subject.

A fortnight ago, the Cabinet approved the import of GM maize but directed millers to clearly label the flour made from it as GM to distinguish it from ordinary maize flour.

A Presidential Press Service (PPS) dispatch to newsrooms directed that the GM maize could be milled but could not be sold as an unprocessed raw product. Critics have questioned why the government would permit GM mize flour but not GM maize kernels.

The debate in government and political circles underscores the heat, rather than the light, generated by the differences over GM foods around the world.

Prof Calestous Juma, one of the foremost authorities on the subject, is Kenyan. His title is long: professor of the Practice of International Development; Director, Science, Technology, and Globalization Project; Principal Investigator, Agricultural Innovation in Africa.

The Sunday Nation picked up his contributions to the debate from comments he made on the Facebook page of a local anti-GMO group, No to GMO Products in Kenya!

In his posts, Prof Juma, a former head of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, takes the middle ground, acting more like an informed moderator.

But in recent written testimony to the US House of Representatives’ sub-committee on rural development, research, biotechnology, and foreign agriculture Prof Juma appears to suggest he supports the adoption of new technologies to guarantee food security, especially in developing nations.

Food security

“Biotechnology—technology applied to biological systems—has the promise of leading to increased food security and sustainable forestry practices, as well as improving health in developing countries by enhancing food nutrition,” he writes. “In agriculture, biotechnology has enabled the genetic alteration of crops, improved soil productivity, and enhanced weed and pest control.

Unfortunately, such potential has largely been left untapped by African countries.”

The eminent professor has nonetheless regretted that politics has clouded the debate in Kenya and elsewhere in the world.

“Many of the people who debate or write about this issue around the world have certain ideological goals, and so they select or amplify facts to fit their positions. This happens on both sides of the issue.”

“This is a very complex issue that cannot be resolved easily. I have seen countries take positions and then change them soon after because new information has emerged. We all have to keep an open mind and make adaptive decisions as we move forward,” he says in one of his posts.

More often than not, debate on both sides of the GM divide borders on the bizarre. For example, the failure of GM crops was blamed for a spate of mass suicides in India in 2008. Apparently, farmers there, as the Daily Mail of London reported, had been promised previously unheard of harvests and income if they switched from organic seeds to the genetically modified variety.

Encouraged by the promise of future riches, farmers are said to have borrowed huge sums of money in order to buy the GM seeds. But when the harvests failed, many were left deep in debt instead of reaping mega incomes.

The crisis, branded the “GM Genocide” by campaigners, was highlighted when Prince Charles of England claimed that the issue of GM had become a “global moral question” – and the time had come to end its unstoppable march.

GMO proponents across the globe were furious. But in defence of Prince Charles, Indian scientist Dr Vandana Shiva faulted the claim that has often been used to buttress the pro-GMO debate: that it increases yields and reduces dependency on pesticides.
Global food crisis

In an article in the Daily Telegraph, Dr Shiva said current global food crisis “is a result of speculation and diversion of food crops to biofuels, it is not a crisis of production”. Dr Shiva said genetically modified cotton in India has not produced higher yields.
Instead, he said, boll worms, which the technology was supposed to eradicate, have developed greater resistance to herbicides, therefore necessitating greater use of more toxic herbicides to contain them.

This point of view is supported by Anne Wanjiku Maina, the advocacy coordinator at the African Biodiversity Network, who writes that “some of the problematic environmental consequences of GMOs include the development of insect resistance to the pesticides engineered into crops as well as the emergence of new and secondary pests destroying farmers’ crops forcing them to buy and use highly toxic pesticides”.
“Further, the development of herbicide- tolerant weeds is choking farmers’ fields. These weeds can no longer be controlled by modern herbicides, forcing farmers to spray high doses of older more toxic chemicals in an effort to control them. This has disastrous consequences for environmental and human health,” she said.

Another bizarre anti-GMO campaign has given the whole debate a racial slant. According to critics, the GMO issue is nothing but a plot by the industrialised nations to cut rising populations in developing countries.

And some of the richest men in the world have been dragged into this alleged nefarious scheme. For example, critics have wondered about the close relationship between the world’s second-richest man Bill Gates and Monsato, the US-based company that has publicly declared its interest in being the world’s sole producer of GM foods.

Conspiracy theorists have pounced on on Mr Gates’ comments in February 2010 in which he suggested that new vaccines ought to be used to control the world’s ballooning population.

“The world today has 6.8 billion people. That’s heading up to about nine billion. Now if we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services, we could lower that by perhaps 10 or 15 per cent,” he told a conference on how to reduce carbon footprints.

Critics questioned why Mr Gates, the founder of technology giant Microsoft and a leading philanthropist, was hoping that vaccines would decrease population growth when vaccines are supposed to save lives which necessarily means higher population growth.

Nefarious plan

Activists quickly latched on to that comment as proof that Mr Gates and other influential people around the globe have hatched a nefarious plan to control the population of the developing world through illegal means, one of them being through contraceptive concealed in crops meant for human consumption.

But such sensationalist allegations are acknowledged as part of the sideshow in a debate punctuated by deep passions. Nonetheless, they do not obfuscate or cheapen the issues that have been raised.

Although the GMO iassue in Kenya has stirred considerable debate, it is not the first time such products are entering the country. In fact, a local project funded by Monsanto to develop virus-resistant sweet potato failed in 2004.