By Anne Casey
A large part of our food today comes from multinational corporations, which are increasingly taking over all aspects of food production. They supply uniform seed varieties to growers along with the pesticide and fertiliser which the crop requires. Months later the same companies buy the harvest.
These uniform crop varieties are touted as having higher yields but there are a multitude of problems associated with factory-style of farming.
Industrialised, "scientific" agriculture has increased output by replacing naturally pollinated seeds with "high yielding" varieties (hybrids or monocultures). The new crops are all genetically similar and have had traits bred into them that increase their economic value — uniform height for mechanised harvesting, optimal tolerance to soil and temperature conditions, resistance to certain diseases and a high responsiveness to synthetic fertilisers.
However, because their genetic variation has been largely bred out, these monoculture crops are highly vulnerable to any new strain of pest or disease. To make matters worse, hybrids now use much of their energy, formerly used for disease and insect resistance, to increase their yields. The high dosages of fertilisers used also stimulate the number and volume of weeds. Heavy and continual applications of pesticides, herbicides, fungicides and insecticides are needed to compensate for these vulnerabilities.
Genetic diversity is essential to the survival of crops. If the genetic base of a crop is too narrow, it can be wiped out by a single plague. This is what happened in the Irish potato famine in 1846, when 2 million people died. Disastrous plagues hit the Indian rice harvest in 1943, causing the Great Bengal Famine.
Not only is the genetic base within each crop narrow but so is the crop base. Australia, Europe and North America have become dependent upon a core group of only 20. Worldwide, 75% of the human diet is derived from just eight crops.
These modern plant breeding practices are reducing the natural genetic diversity of crops. Geneticists now believe that four to 10 years after they have introduced a new form of resistance into a crop strain, that resistance collapses in the face of a newly evolved form of disease or pest. There is a the genetic composition of monoculture plants from a large natural "reserve" gene pool. But this gene pool is being reduced.
Countries such as North America and Australia are totally dependent on external sources of genetic resources for their major crops. Agricultural centres of diversity are in the third world, and that is where gene pools are shrinking. One notable cause has been the "Green Revolution" — the spread of industrialised agriculture into the third world.
The Green Revolution was launched in the 1960s as the strategy to solve the food problems of the world. New wonder seeds of wheat and rice carried the promise of bumper harvests. But they came with an associated package of high water, pesticide and fertiliser use and were controlled by big companies.
In the decade since, debate has raged over whether the revolution "succeeded". Those who argue in favour cite the fact that average yields of Asian and Latin American wheat have increased by more in the past 25 years than in the previous 250 years.
On the other side, people point to the environmental costs of growing one crop year in and year out, to the use of large doses of chemicals, to the loss of species diversity and to the social costs of this increased production as vast fields of wheat cover land previously used for traditional crops and plants.
Above all, they criticise the architects of the Green Revolution for concentrating on the technical side — how to boost output — while ignoring how to get that larger harvest to the people who need it most. India is a case in point. Since the new strains have been introduced, food output nationally has kept ahead of population growth. Yet the incidence and severity of hunger have hardly changed.
The new biotechnological gene revolution is promoted as producing pest-resistant crop varieties. This claim was also made of plant varieties developed during the Green Revolution. Yet since the release of new rice varieties in the Punjab (India) in 1966, 40 new insects and 12 new diseases have appeared.
The main thrust of agricultural biotechnology is in fact to produce herbicide-tolerant crops so that increased amounts of herbicides can be sprayed on them.
This makes commercial sense for the seed-chemical lly in the short term, since it is cheaper to adapt the plant to the chemical than to adapt the chemical to the plant. The cost of developing a new crop variety rarely reaches US$2 million whereas the cost of a new herbicide exceeds US$40 million.
The same interest groups that profited from the Green Revolution now stand to benefit from biotechnology, and they heavily fund and promote its development. These interest groups are the petrochemical and agrochemical industries. Conglomerates like Shell, ICI, Ciba-Geigy, Du Pont and Australasian companies like Elders-IXL and Nufarm have billions of dollars tied up in researching, producing and marketing agrochemicals. The worldwide market for agrochemicals is now over US$20 billion a year and hybrid seed about US$25 billion.
Herbicide and pesticide resistance will increase this integration of seeds and chemicals and the control of the multinational companies in agriculture. Major agrochemical companies are developing plants with resistance to their brands of herbicides. Soybeans have been made resistant to Ciba-Geigy's Straxine herbicides, and this has increased annual sales of the herbicide by US$120 million.
The genetically engineered organisms being produced are not found in nature. Knowledge of genetics and ecological processes is still too weak to predict with any certainty how they will "behave" once released into the open environment. There are risks of severely disrupting natural ecosystems.
The new generation of pesticides is not chemically based but derived from existing micro-organisms which have had their gene base artificially reorganised. This approach is advertised as being environmentally cleaner and more effective than applying increasing dosages of synthetic pesticides. But like chemical pesticides, these transgenic biopesticides can also be expected to create strong selection pressure for "indestructible" pests which have a resistance to the natural insect toxins used.
Biotechnology is increasing the control of corporations over the food industry, from seeds through to processing, from the farm through to the factory. Today in the United States only 12 of the 2000 varieties of potatoes are being cultivated. Forty per cent of all potato cultivation is of a single variety — the Russet Burbank; in 1970 it covered only 28% of US potato acreage. The spread of the Russet-Burbank within the US is directly attributable nsiders the variety perfect for its fries.
From the point of view of the food processing industry, the heavy emphasis on processed varieties of potato is an improvement from an earlier emphasis on table varieties. But for the consumer, it is a loss because the shift transforms the food into raw material, to be consumed only through processing, not directly.
Just as the Green Revolution has meant huge benefits for the multinationals, so does the gene revolution currently tend in that direction. At a time when the world's biodiversity is under such severe threat, leaving control in the hands of these companies is courting disaster.