‘Right you are,’ says the man, ‘and here they are, the very beans themselves,’ he went on, pulling out of his pocket a number of strange-looking beans. ‘As you are so sharp,’ says he, ‘I don’t mind doing a swap with you – your cow for these beans.’
‘Go along,’ says Jack. ‘Wouldn’t you like it?’
‘Ah! You don’t know what these beans are,’ said the man. ‘If you plant them overnight, by morning they grow right up to the sky.’
Jack and the Beanstalk1
The fixation of nitrogen is a question of the not-far-distant future. Unless we can class it as among certainties to come, the great Caucasian race will cease to be foremost in the world, and will be squeezed out of existence by races to whom wheaten bread is not the staff of life.
William Crookes, 18982
This chapter is about the central problem in the food system: hunger. For two decades after the Second World War, hunger was tackled directly through the export of the US food surplus. When the economics of that system began to falter, a new system was ready to take its place, one which broke the links between trade and aid, in which the private sector had an expanded role and, crucially, where breakthroughs in agricultural research made possible the vastly increased output of the staples of wheat, corn and rice in key areas in the Global South. This research created hybrid seed varieties that yielded more than traditional ones. In order to work, the seeds required almost laboratory-perfect growing conditions, which demanded irrigation, fertilizers and pesticides. These, in their turn, depended on fossil fuels for their production. And the entire enterprise required the expunging of native biodiversity, so that rows of the new seed might take its place. It was a transformation of agricultural practice that well deserved the title ‘Green Revolution’. In some places, due in part to Green Revolution technologies, widespread hunger was kept in check. But the social and ecological costs were high. Recently, in places like India, hunger has returned. In response, the companies who were central to the first Green Revolution have proposed a second generation of crops, ones that depend on genetic modification to allow for increased production, under the banner of ‘a new green revolution’.
In 2005, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh visited the United States and, with a version of history tucked into his back pocket, offered his vision of the future: ‘We owe our Green Revolution to America. Now we can herald a second Green Revolution with American assistance.’3 In his 2006 visit to India, President Bush reciprocated in kind:
America and India are … cooperating closely in agriculture. The United States worked with India to help meet its food needs in the 1960s, when pioneering American scientists like Norman Borlaug shared agriculture technology with Indian farmers. Thanks to your hard work, you have nearly tripled your food production over the past half-century. To build on this progress, Prime Minister Singh and I are launching a new Agricultural Knowledge Initiative. This initiative will invest US$100 million to encourage exchanges between American and Indian scientists and promote joint research to improve farming technology. By working together the United States and India will develop better ways to grow crops and get them to market, and lead a second Green Revolution. (Applause) … to promote the ties between American and Indian scientists, we’re establishing a new $30 million science and technology commission that will fund joint research in promising areas like biotechnology. (Applause) … The great Indian poet Tagore once wrote, ‘There’s only one history – the history of man.’ The United States and India go forward with faith in those words. There’s only one history of man – and it leads to freedom.’4
This is something of a misremembering of the Green Revolution, and it’s worth revisiting exactly why. India’s trajectory of agricultural change had everything to do with policy choices made in the United States, but not quite the way the Premiers recall, and with considerably less freedom than President Bush might like to admit.
In the 1950s and 1960s, the US was tremendously keen not to see India fall to Communism. India was a major recipient of food aid as a result. But India’s leaders were contemplating some profound changes to the country’s agricultural production model by tampering with the central capitalist institution – private property. Prime Minister Nehru had observed that the Chinese had been able to boost agricultural yields through the land reform that followed the Chinese revolution.5 He suggested that perhaps ‘cooperative’ land management between landowners and those working the land might increase food yields. It was a suggestion received coldly by the landowners and their representatives in the Indian parliament. A change in land ownership would pit the government (albeit with the majority of its people behind it) against the full political might of landlords and aristocracy. But something needed to be done. Poorer Indians in rural areas were suffering. The imports of cheap wheat put Indian farmers under tremendous strain. They couldn’t compete with the subsidies granted in the US to its large producers (especially when Indian national interest was busy shifting local capital away from rural areas and into the development of urban industry and technical skill). So Indian farmers read the market signals correctly and didn’t increase their output. Wheat production remained more or less static through the early and mid-1960s.6 The effect of foreign food aid was to cause less food to be grown domestically. A food deficit began to loom, and as farmers refused to grow more, India became increasingly dependent on food aid imports, with imports increasing 10 per cent year on year through the 1960s.7
By the time food aid came to an end in the 1970s, the US owned over one-third of the Indian rupee money supply.8 That leverage offered a means to transmit, and treat, anxieties in Washington over national security. It also provided an opportunity for US agribusiness to put down roots in the world’s second most populous country. Fuelled by fears of Communism, there were concerns that the poor, seeing the obvious disparities between their income and that of the rich, would rise up and take their fair share. These concerns were presented as worries about ‘security’. For example President Lyndon Johnson, in a January 1965 address to Congress, could not believe ‘that our island of abundance will be finally secure in a sea of despair and unrest or in a world where even the oppressed may one day have access to the engines of modern destruction’.9
Nehru died of a heart attack in May 1964 and was succeeded by Lal Bahadur Shastri, who inherited a country on the brink of starvation. Food riots flared across the country in 1964 and 1965.10 The protests were explained by the US press not as a symptom of increasing food aid dependency, but as a sign that India ‘doggedly resists change’, as Time magazine put it in 1964.11 This behaviour was more than just stubborn – it could be downright dangerous. In the US, the link was clearly drawn, both in the press and in internal Johnson Administration thinking, between population, hunger, political instability and the spread of Communism. As Orville Freeman, Secretary of Agriculture from 1961 to 1969 in Kennedy’s and Johnson’s administrations, put it at a press club meeting, ‘hopelessness breeds hostility, where the ever-growing gap between the haves and have-nots first provokes riots in the streets … then the insurrection and toppling of governments [and then] the final desperate international aggression.’12 When Shastri voiced his disapproval of the US bombing in Vietnam, the Johnson administration interpreted it as a sign linking India’s intransigence and its slide towards Communism. Johnson sought to instil a little discipline and steer India away from its pro-Communist sympathies. He stalled on the July 1965 renewal of India’s PL-480 food contract, shifting the approval of food aid away from an annual basis to a month-to-month system. By systematically withholding a guarantee of food aid supply, the US held a knife to the Indian government’s throat.
But the US government also offered an inducement. If Shastri didn’t pursue Nehru’s thoughts of land redistribution, and if he proved more amenable to US foreign policy in Asia, the US government would help India out. Not only would the US resume food aid on a more predictable and long-term basis, it would sweeten the pot with new agricultural technologies. These technologies had been developed by a series of foundations, primarily Ford and Rockefeller, and applied with greater and lesser success in Mexico to increase crop yield.13 The New York Times summarized the character of this inducement in 1965:
To prod developing countries in the right direction … India is already being told, for instance, that loans and grants from the Agency for International Development for economic development as well as for Food for Peace shipments will depend in part on the amount of foreign exchange she sets aside each year for fertilizer imports or the equivalent in new fertilizer plants.14
The Green Revolution was the solution that fit the constraints, offering a package of seeds, fertilizer and spatial organization that would allow the poor to eat, without suffering the rich to be parted from their land. Walter Mondale observed in 1966 that ‘in this new concept of food for peace we are attaching strings to it to the recipient country. If they do not do what is best for them, aid can be chopped off overnight’.15
With Orville Freeman pushing the interests of the US fertilizer industry,16 with India being held hostage by US food aid shipments, and with the choices for social reform effectively blocked by an Indian Congress unwilling to entertain them, the Green Revolution began. To the extent that these are the circumstances under which it can be said that ‘We owe our green revolution to America’, Prime Minister Singh did not mis-speak. But the implication, that the Green Revolution was freely and willingly adopted by the government of India, let alone its people, is unwarranted. On the contrary, a good number of peasant movements were fighting for alternative ways of doing things.17 It’s just that the Green Revolution was perceived as the right solution at the right time. Increased yield put a lid on demands for redistribution. A technological solution muffled a political problem.18 This is the history of freedom to which President Bush refers.
A simple assessment of the Green Revolution isn’t easy. For those farmers with land able to access Green Revolution technologies in the north of India, to whom irrigation and appropriate assistance was provided, yield increased by as much as five times over twenty years.19 This seems to argue for the spreading of these technologies elsewhere. It’s indisputable that, with Green Revolution technologies, yields are higher than before. This fact of increased yields is appreciated even by those who speak out against the Green Revolution. Jagdish Papra is a farmer in Southern Punjab who has campaigned around the world against Green Revolution technology. Yet he recalls the moment, suffused with magic, when the first announcements of the Green Revolution wafted across the fields:
We had a broadcast from Punjab University. Someone turned up their radio very loud, and the whole village could hear it, even far away in the fields. Young people wouldn’t believe it now, but things were quiet back then. We listened to the programme. We could hear the words of the Punjab Agricultural University, telling us about new seeds, fertilizer and machinery. And people tried it out slowly. The University used to come to our village and they gave out fertilizer. Together with the farmer, they would pick a corner. Many were against it, but they were won over by heavy propaganda. Now I think about it, with the poisons and everything else that they brought, now I realize. But ultimately, they increased profits, and they increased yield.
Despite this, Papra warns farmers against this kind of technology because, as he notes, the ‘miracle seeds came at too high a cost’. The miracle of the seed was that they could, under the right circumstances, provide an unnatural abundance. When those circumstances were right, abundance was almost certain. The problem lay in the fact that circumstances were almost never right. The seeds required irrigation, leading to competition for water, which has resulted in groundwater levels dropping at over a foot a year in some areas.20 Irrigation led to increased salt deposits in the soil, rendering increasing areas of the land unusable. Green Revolution monocultures also expunged indigenous biodiversity. The range of crops, developed over millennia to fit the ecological profile of Punjab, not only provided nutrients unavailable in wheat but also provided ecological harbour for non-Green Revolution varieties of wheat. Further, the cost of fertilizer could only be borne by those farmers who were able to access credit. Farmers who weren’t able to muster the resources or technology to buy irrigation and fertilizer fell by the wayside: the number of smallholdings in the Punjab dropped by a quarter.21 (This was another sign that the technology wasn’t really designed to benefit farmers so much as to provide one crop, cheaply, to urban consumers.) Today, the Indian government’s own data shows that the level of annual debt for Punjabi farmers, at Rs 40,000 (US$ 900, GB£470) is far higher than the national average of Rs13,000 (US$ 300, GB£150).22 The risks of defaulting are higher than ever, as are its costs. Within two decades, over a third of all farmers in the region were, according to the UN, driven to poverty by debt and the spiral of costs associated with needing increased levels of fertilizer to secure the same level of yield.23
Important to note, too, is that the vast state expenditures on the Green Revolution were concentrated in the part of the country with the greatest fertility – Punjab. Food grain production there increased from around 3 million tons over the 1965–6 season to over 25 million tons in the 1999–2000 season. Through Green Revolution technology, over 12 per cent of India’s total food was produced by a state with 24 million people, about 2 per cent of the population.24 But most Indian farmers, those without access to large areas of land and living in poorer states, were ignored by the government’s Green Revolution policies. Three-quarters of all farmers, cultivating one-third of the country’s landmass, continue to be marginalized by the government, despite being the backbone of India’s food system.
By this account, at least, the only thing worse than having the Green Revolution was not having it. A more profound way to understand the Green Revolution, however, is to compare it not to its antecedent circumstances, nor to its absence, but to compare it to a different counterfactual, to what economists call its ‘opportunity cost’, the next best thing that might have been done. Perhaps the best case study is the Indian state of Kerala. Rather than engage in a technological fix, Kerala opted for a political solution, beginning with the 1957 Land Reform Ordinance and Education Bill. This legislation, as the title suggests, understood the dynamics of agrarian change to be bound to broader social concerns. Land redistribution was brought together as a policy package with public food distribution programmes, employment guarantees, education and healthcare systems, under the administration of the state-level Communist government. The package worked and has led today to the highest levels of literacy, health status and social development in the country, even though Kerala’s population of 30 million is on average poorer than the average citizen elsewhere in India. Of course, Kerala isn’t a zone of perfection – there remain tensions not only between left and right in Kerala, but also between, for instance, industrialists and fisherfolk. Yet the Keralan government has made a virtue of conflict, and with the return of the Communist Party to power in 1996 came the ‘People’s Campaign for Decentralized Planning’, a plan which put 30–40 per cent of the state’s budget into the hands of decentralized local committees, in which 2.5 million people are directly involved.25 Through mechanisms of redistribution, integral to its broader political project, and despite the state’s relative poverty, Kerala has literacy rates and life expectancy higher than parts of the United States.26 It achieved this not through an individualizing, atomizing process, not through the politics of the farmer as a lone entrepreneur who lives or dies by the market, but through the social politics of change, by taking seriously the possibility that social problems might be addressed both comprehensively and collectively.
The Keralan solution seems to have had a more enduring impact than the Green Revolution. Twenty years after the Green Revolution, while Kerala’s indicators of health and welfare remained high, an old spectre revisited almost everywhere else in India. Over the course of the 1990s, malnutrition increased in India, and during that period the average calorie intake declined among India’s poorest. Today, 233 million Indians are undernourished, suffering from inadequate intake of calories and micro nutrients.27 Of children under the age of three years, 46 per cent are malnourished. (In China, by contrast, the figure is 8 per cent.)28 Production of some of the most important staples has declined as agricultural land is increasingly used for export crops. As table 6.1 shows, net availability of food grains per person plummeted to levels unheard of since the 1930s economic depression under British colonial rule.29
Table 6.1: Food output and availability in India, selected periods (source: Patnaik 2001, 2004).30
Why the decline? To a limited extent, there’s just less food grain around per person. But the decline in grain available per person is much greater than the decline in the amount grown. Much more of the mystery clears up when observing the simultaneous dismantling, through the 1990s, of the national food lifeline, the Public Distribution System (PDS). The PDS, like food system interventions in the Global North, was initially targeted not at the rural poor but at providing cheap food in urban areas.31 The system began in just seven cities in 1942 but, spurred by the Bengal famine in 1943, grew to 711 cities and towns by 1946. The distribution network allowed the intermittent use of urban food rationing through the 1950s. In the 1960s, the PDS was retooled to distribute US grain. Despite its uneven reach, the PDS, at its height, distributed 18.8 million tons of coarse cereals to more than 80 million people through a network of 40,000 fair-price shops.32 Even during the 1987 drought, one of India’s harshest in the twentieth century, public food stocks and redistribution measures managed to contain the famine.
The period of the decline in welfare for India’s poorest has coincided with the implementation of policies written by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh himself, drafted and brought into effect when he was Finance Minister under the previous Congress (I) government in 1991. The widely acknowledged need to fix the inefficiencies of the PDS became, under his policies, the rationale for systematically dismantling it. Under the Revamped Public Distribution System in 1992, and then under the Targeted Public Distribution System in 1997,33 the amount of grain distributed through the government fell from 17.2 million tons in 1997 to 13.2 million tons in 2001.34 If nothing else, we might wonder whether the drop in the tonnage of grain distributed by the government might not have something to do with the increase in the level of hunger. The amount spent by the government on rural development expenditure as a share of GDP also fell, from 14 per cent in the late 1980s to less than 6 per cent of total GDP in 2000.35
Let’s just say, for a moment, that we’re appalled by rural poverty and believe that efficient markets and new technology will solve hunger for both rural and urban poor. To think this, though, we would ignore one of history’s most wretched lessons in economics. Recall that the Public Distribution System was expanded in the wake of the 1943 Bengal famine, in which over 3 million people died. The paradox is that, at the same time as people died of hunger, there was enough food in Bengal to be able to feed them. In his path-breaking research, economist Amartya Sen observed that modern famines weren’t related so much to the absence of food as the inability to buy it. Looking at the 1943 famine, Sen found not that food had been lacking in Bengal. In fact, there was plenty of it around. It’s just that those who owned it had hoarded it, knowing that less food meant higher food prices. Those who died in the street died because they simply weren’t able to pay enough for the food locked up in the granaries.36 This is a hugely important finding, because it breaks the link between the simple availability of food in the market and the question of whether the poor get to eat it. Merely having the food around doesn’t guarantee that the poor will eat. In fact, if the only way that the poor can get food is through the market – as the British believed when they administered Bengal – then at times when food is perceived to be scarce, the hour-glass shape of the food system is almost certain to deliver not food, but hunger. Those who are in a position to control the distribution of grain will only do so if they’re able to command a sufficiently high price. The only way that famine can be overcome is to guarantee rights to hungry people that trump those of grain-hoarders at the waist of the food system hourglass. And the only way that Sen sees this as possible is through, at a bare minimum, a functioning democracy.
Rather than acknowledge this, though, Manmohan Singh has turned his attention to the rise in malnutrition in quite a different way. His solution isn’t to follow the trail blazed by the Keralans or to increase spending on rural development. As a short-term fix, he has proposed a relief system that will, in the words of journalist and analyst Devinder Sharma, benefit banks more than farmers.37 And, as a longer-term strategy, he has introduced a second Green Revolution. As with the first time around, it’s a means of patching an intractably social problem with technology that promises a surfeit of food, a solution to hunger that rules out of court other kinds of policy. For these other policies to be ruled out completely, however, requires that history be rewritten.
When the President of the United States waxes Hegelian and says ‘there’s only one history and it’s the history of freedom’, we ought to be concerned. The historical revision snuffs out the histories of power politics behind the first Green Revolution, and the alternative choices that were present then and remain today. The second Green Revolution can, however, be ushered in because the relations between India and the United States are more cordial now than they used to be. Gone are the days in which India under Nehru tried to carve a third way through the Cold War with the Non-Aligned Movement. Gone are the days in which the US held the entire state hostage with food aid, calling Prime Minister Indira Gandhi an ‘old witch’, as Nixon did in 1971. Nixon added that Indians in general were ‘slippery, treacherous people … the Pakistanis are straightforward and sometimes extremely stupid … the Indians are more devious’, with Henry Kissinger chiming in that ‘the Indians are bastards anyway’.38 Today, the Indian government isn’t buying Soviet MiGs so much as US Boeings. Today, as in Mexico, the elites of India and the United States share a broadly common set of assumptions about governance and the way the economy should be ordered. This alignment of interests allows India’s economic door to be opened to a ‘second Green Revolution’ based not on fertilizers and improved seed but, this time, biotechnology.
Human history, and its fairy-tale fantasies, are stuffed with ideas about how to get more out of the land. The first recorded version of Jack and the Beanstalk dates from the eighteenth century, but the myth has a longer history than that. Cornucopian fantasies express what farmers have been doing, successfully, since the beginning of cultivation. Farmers, and particularly women farmers,39 are the first natural scientists; they are the custodians of biodiversity, they experiment, they save seed, they exchange and breed new varieties, with the aim of getting more out of the ground and making the plant resistant to pests, easier to harvest and yielding more to eat, burn, weave and build with than before. Until the late twentieth century, all this happened in most parts of the world without anyone owning any of the knowledge behind this breeding. A key feature of the World Trade Organization, however, was a provision for the enforcement of ‘trade-related intellectual property rights’.40 These rights allow for one individual or organization to own ideas, whether those ideas be software, music, trademarks, patents, processes or entertainment, and to charge anyone else for using them.41
Within India, the demands of intellectual property rights have pitted agriculture, the occupation of India’s poorest, against information technology, the domain of India’s richest. Infosys, the first Indian company to be listed on Nasdaq, has a subsidiary that deals exclusively with ‘business process outsourcing’.42 Its CEO, Akshaya Bhargava, is keen on knowledge: ‘The future lies in the knowledge-intensive processes,’ he says. It’s a view with which few scions of the Indian information technology industry would disagree. Their bullish prognoses for the future demand, however, that they be able to charge for the processes, and the ideas behind them. To ensure a revenue stream in this future, they want high-tech knowledge to be protected by law. But the same rules that protect software knowledge at the WTO also govern farming knowledge. The door is open for intellectual property rights to be claimed over virtually any agricultural knowledge. In one widely cited example, the W. R. Grace Company and the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) walked through precisely this door. In 1990, the public/private partnership tried to patent the Indian neem tree because they had discovered that neem was an effective pesticide. The trouble was that Indians had known this for centuries. So common was this knowledge, known within the farming community for over two millennia, that one Indian MP sneered that ‘[patenting] neem is like patenting cow dung’.43 Yet it took fifteen years for the patent to be finally revoked.44 While ultimately unsuccessful in the attempt to patent neem, companies domestic and international are using the cover provided by the WTO’s intellectual property provisions to commit what has come to be known as ‘biopiracy’.
The Indo-American Knowledge Initiative is a fruit from this tree. Its precise details at the time of writing, several months after it was announced, remain unavailable to the public. The secrecy has been justified in the national interest. But even if its exact terms aren’t known, its broad thrust is. The USDA’s senior advisor on biotechnology, Madelyn E. Spirnak, pulled no punches: ‘The US goal is to make sure that the Indian biotechnology markets remain open.’45 Suman Sahai, an Indian geneticist, has observed that: ‘Earlier a private company like Monsanto only had the status of a business entity. Now they can ask the director-general of ICAR [Indian Council of Agricultural Research] to get our vast genetic wealth from any of its more than 200 research establishments. The private companies can develop gene patents and sell them at a much higher price.’46 This access to genetic material is central to the future prosperity of the corporations behind the Knowledge Initiative. Access to Indian biodiversity, and to its DNA in particular, means that they’ve an unfathomable pool of information to mine, analyse, sequester and resell. As one Indian government official has put it, the Initiative will cost the Indian government over US$200 million, and the US won’t have to pay a cent.47 This is how the Indian IT industry and researchers (mainly men working over keyboards), with their deep need for intellectual property rights in the US, succeed in selling agricultural knowledge (mainly generated by women, working over centuries) down the river.
The companies behind the Knowledge Initiative, and in the forefront of the production of genetically modified seed, have a direct connection to the first Green Revolution. They’re chemicals companies. The seeds that they have developed have come not from any deep desire to improve the lot of the rural poor, but as an extension of their pesticide product line. It is for this reason that pesticide companies are now the world’s largest owners of seed companies.
In India, a key crop is Bt Cotton, which has an insecticide produced by a soil bacterium, Bacillus thuringiensis, engineered into the plant itself. Engineering pesticides into plants is one of many routes explored by the industry. Another key group of genetically modified crops, a product of the Monsanto Corporation, is known as ‘RoundUp-ready’. These crops are not engineered to improve taste or nutrition or to grow taller or withstand drought; they’re engineered to survive being sprayed by another product of the Monsanto Corporation – the RoundUp broad-spectrum herbicide. The idea is that farmers won’t have to worry about weeding if they simply spray the soil with RoundUp and forget about it. This is the fire-and-forget school of farming. Of course, with chemical brand-names like Javelin, Bravo, Captain, Ammo and Warrior, the practice of pesticide application has long been portrayed as a military skirmish. It’s just that now, as with the military weaponry, the business of killing undesirables has been reduced to a simple point-and-click.
When farmers buy this seed, which is a great deal more expensive than conventional varieties, they get a packet and a long, densely written legal tract, in a language that would be barely comprehensible to them even if it were written in their native tongue. This is where the money is. The closest that most of us come to an experience like this is when we buy computer software. The disks which contain software costs pennies. The reason we pay substantially more than the cost of a blank CD for it is because of the knowledge encoded onto the disks.
Like the software industry, the pesticide industry has gone to great lengths to prevent its property being stolen. Just as software has ‘copy protection’, the pesticide industry has developed ‘terminator technology’, a series of genetic modifications designed to make the seeds produced by one of its plants sterile. Like the software industry, the pesticide industry is also prepared to track down and sue people who don’t comply with it. Microsoft developed the ‘Windows Genuine Advantage’ tool, which reports back to Microsoft headquarters if its operating system has been copied. The pesticide company equivalent, possibly under development at the moment, is far more futuristic. One informant told me of discussions at the Monsanto Corporation to engineer traits into its plants such that their leaves would reflect light in a characteristic way and be visible from an appropriately positioned low Earth orbit satellite. This wasn’t a trait that would benefit farmers. It would simply make it easier for the company to survey its property rights from space, and chase up farmers who hadn’t paid.
Ultimately, though, the software metaphor doesn’t quite work. Unlike software, which can arguably be said to have been created out of nothing, the bulk of genetic information in the seeds isn’t created by the pesticide company – it’s the product of millennia of common usage. The fractional value added, however, allows the patenting of the entire seed.
It is pesticide companies who will benefit most directly from India’s second Green Revolution, as they benefited from the first. They’ve got the policy architecture in place to make sure it succeeds, and a new history against which to measure their success and vouchsafe their credentials as the monopolists of violence in the ‘war on hunger’. All they want for now is public support. Pesticide companies have come under heavy attack from social movements and civil society organizations around the world for the lack of concern they show to the world’s poor, for the questionable science that supports the crops and for the alternatives that they stifle in bringing their products to market. Unlike the first Green Revolution, which was driven more by governmental concerns from which the private sector benefited, the second Green Revolution is spearheaded by the private sector, with governments acting more as facilitators. This flip in the control of the food system means that the private sector is more exposed to demands of public accountability. And this is why they have gone on an unusually strong offensive to promote their products.
In response to the range of criticisms laid at the door of pesticides companies, and given their need to secure public consent for their operations, a three-pronged strategy has emerged. The first has been to produce crops that do seem directed precisely at poor people. The second has been to increase the amount of science that justifies their current operations. And, third, corporations have tried to use and shape the ‘culture wars’ in order to make their case. It’s worth examining each in turn, not just because the battles around each of these claims points to broader, and disturbing, social trends, but also because they stand in such contrast with the alternatives that might feed the world without the pesticide companies.
Let’s look first at the attempts to develop crops that will help the poor. If it is true that the profit motive is unconcerned with the needs of the hungry, how can one business school academic assert that ‘there are fortunes being made at the bottom of the pyramid’?48 These are not inconsistent ideas. It is not inconceivable that businesses will invest a great deal in the marketing of goods and services to the poor and treat them as an important market without necessarily being concerned with their needs.49 A good number of food system companies position themselves through a language of care for the world’s hungry. The poster crop for the potential of the private sector to help the poor is ‘Golden Rice’.
Around the world, between a quarter and half a million children go blind each year as a result of a deficiency in vitamin A and within twelve months, half of them die. Golden Rice was created to tackle this problem, by genetically engineering vitamin A into the rice grain. It is golden because its vitamin A comes from beta carotene, which also puts the orange in carrots. One of the areas of the world where Golden Rice is designed to be consumed is Asia, where a high proportion of calories are derived from rice consumption, and where vitamin A deficiency is endemic. Unfortunately, in Asia, rice that isn’t white is widely regarded as inferior. It might become acceptable to eat if there were an education programme aimed at wiping out centuries of habit. But children will have to eat an awful lot. Estimates of quite how much they’d have to eat range from the biotech industry’s two bowls figure to independent assessments of nearer fifty bowls per day to get their daily allowance of vitamin A. And all this to ‘save a million kids’ as Time Magazine put it in 2000, the majority of whom live in countries that already have food surpluses. The technology presents itself as a feel-good solution for politicians who’d rather not face the more profound, persistent and difficult questions of politics and distribution. There’s more than enough vitamin A to go around. Half a carrot contains the recommended dose of vitamin A. The plain fact is that the majority of children in the Global South suffer and die not because there is insufficient food, or because beta-carotene rice is nationally lacking. They are malnourished and undernourished because all their parents can afford to feed them is rice.50
The best that crops such as Golden Rice can do is provide a supplement in diets where nutrients are unavailable. And when a balanced diet is unavailable, the cause has more to do with poverty than with anything that can be engineered into the crop. It is absurd to ask a crop to solve the problems of income and food distribution, of course. But since this is precisely the root cause of vitamin A deficiency, the danger of crops such as Golden Rice is not merely that they are ineffective publicity stunts. They actively prevent the serious discussion of ways to tackle systemic poverty. This is why, secondarily, pesticide companies have taken to arguing that their crops will help farmers shake free of the yoke of poverty. And yet, even here, there’s room for doubt.
In China, Bt crops were introduced in 1997, and farmers found themselves spending less on pesticides because the Bt in the plants fended off the bollworm. By 2004, however, farmers found themselves spraying three times as much as before, almost as much as with conventional seed, because a secondary pest unaffected by the Bt had found a new ecological niche, now that bollworm numbers had been temporarily depressed.51 In India in 2005, the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh (population 75 million) banned Monsanto from licensing its genetically modified cotton seed on the grounds that they had been ineffective. Yields were lower, and more prone to disease, than non-genetically modified crops.52 The experiment had a terrible human cost: 90 per cent of farmers who had committed suicide in Andhra Pradesh and Vidharba had been growing genetically modified cotton.53
The New Green Revolution has already brought revolt. Paramjit Singh, a farmer in Haryana state, was asked by Mahyco Monsanto to rent his land for a trial of what he was told were conventional seeds. When he found out that the company had planted genetically modified crops, his response was: ‘It’s not good for the farm, for the environment, for human life; I’m happy to see it burn.’ Farmers, as one commentator has observed, are increasingly voting with their matches.54 Word about the adverse effects of genetically modified crops is spreading, through farmers movements such as the Via-Campesina-affiliated Bhartiya Khisan Union (BKU). But because farmers are shunning genetically modified crops, they’re increasingly the targets of large marketing campaigns to get them to adopt it. In one such advertisement, the monthly Indraya Velaanmai magazine carried a full-page spread entitled ‘True Stories of Farmers Who Have Grown Bt Cotton’ featuring a picture of a farmer in front of a tractor which, readers were told, the farmer was able to pay for as a result of his use of genetically modified seed. The farmer had, in fact, been told to stand in front of a tractor he’d purchased because of a bank loan, and that if he did he might win a trip to Mumbai.55
The problem is a little more serious than an individual farmer’s travel plans. To be clear, the issue is not with the technology per se. There can be useful agricultural science that involves genetic modification (as we’ll see below). The problem is one of power and control. When Monsanto’s marketing department created a craze for its GM cotton seeds, it led not only led to farmers becoming ‘deskilled’ but, according to one senior anthropologist, who has studied the effects long after the pesticide companies’ marketing departments leave, the collapse of an entire farming system.56
A further problem attends the claim that GM crops will lift farmers out of poverty. For crops designed for human consumption, the argument runs aground if consumers are unprepared to eat them. Consumer associations are worried about a number of things. First, they’re concerned with the safety of the crops. They have reason to be. Sometimes studies aren’t carried out at all. In 2005, Monsanto agreed to pay a US$1.5 million fine to the US Securities and Exchange Commission after it emerged that between 1997 and 2002 Monsanto had paid over US$700,000 in bribes to try to repeal regulation that would have scrutinized its Bt cotton in Indonesia.57 The only way that GM crops were allowed to be commercialized in the US was through the introduction in the early 1990s of red-tape-cutting legislation drafted by Dan Quayle (he of the grammatically modified ‘potatoe’). In the US, the wording of the Food and Drug Administration’s approval statement for new GM crops says that they believe that the corporations have performed all necessary tests to be in compliance with existing safety law. The government doesn’t do any of the testing itself. The safety testing and evaluative science required to ensure the safety of the crop were part of the red tape Quayle cut.58
In the UK, largely because of successful campaigning by activists, but also because of recent food scares around beef and mad cow disease, the government couldn’t grant US-style indulgences to the pesticide manufacturers. The government was cajoled by public pressure instead to oversee a series of Farm Scale Evaluation field trials, the first of their kind in the world. These trials evaluated GM crops on the terrain on which the manufacturers felt they were strongest – the claim that GM crops are better for the environment. The last of these four trials has recently concluded. In only one of the trials, for GM maize, was there evidence that it was beneficial to wildlife. But this conclusion was the result of a comparison between GM maize and conventionally farmed maize sprayed with Atrazine, a pesticide that’s soon to be banned because it’s so toxic.59 The real counter-factual – comparing GM crops with organic, let alone agroecological, farming – was never carried out.60 The UK is lucky, however. In the US consumers eat GM crops without knowing that they are. Between 90 and 95 per cent of consumers in the US want food containing GM crops to be labelled.61 The industry is fighting tooth and claw to prevent that from happening.
Consumer groups are also motivated, however, by worries about farming communities’ ability to benefit from the crop. And these communities have voiced their displeasure in no uncertain terms. In India in 1998, for example, the Karnataka State Farmers’ Association launched its Operation Cremate Monsanto. Following the announcement by the Indian Ministry of Agriculture that three fields in Karnataka were planted with genetically modified seed, the leader of the Karnataka State Farmers Association announced: ‘Dear friends, Monsanto’s field trials in Karnataka will be reduced to ashes, starting this Saturday.’ Under this campaign, fields were burned, and Monsanto’s offices in Bangalore were raided, with files torn up, by well-organized farmers. From Brazil to the UK, fields of GM crops have been torched. Reports of groups who do this often present them as unreconstructed Luddites – a mob fighting against the inevitability of progress. One can perhaps understand these tactics a little better if one sees that every other avenue for challenge and debate has been stitched up, from debate within a government that has already bet the farm on agricultural biotechnology to an academy that, increasingly, is run by the interests of the private sector.
What makes all doctrines plain and clear?
About two hundred pounds a year.
And that which was prov’d true before
Proved false again? Two hundred more.
What makes the breaking of all oaths
A holy duty? – Food and cloaths.
Samuel Butler, Hudibras62
The second tactic in the industry’s attempts to legitimize its practices lies in the control of knowledge itself. While advertising companies buff the image of the pesticides industry, a far more effective mechanism for preventing image tarnish has been to head straight for the place where its science might be put to the test – the academy. For those critical of the direction in which the food system is heading, particularly in the scientific community, the academy is a place of vanishing freedoms. Ignacio Chapela, a professor of soil science at UC Berkeley, ought to know. When he and a Berkeley graduate student, David Quist, published an article in the journal Nature in 2001 describing their finding that corn in Oaxaca showed traces of contamination from genetically modified maize (illegal in Mexico since 1998), the magazine did something that it had never done in its 133-year history. It retracted the article, saying that it no longer had faith in the original.63 This was an unusual step. Normally, science proceeds on the basis that, after successfully passing a peer review, an article stands so that the community of scientists can either seek to build on it or tear strips off it or both.
This, it is agreed, is the practice of scientific enquiry. Quist and Chapela’s article cleared the hurdle of Nature’s peer review process and was published. Following a number of letters to the editor, the journal commissioned three independent reviews, after which the editor made the announcement to withdraw the article. The BBC show Newsnight obtained copies of the reviews. Although all contained criticisms, only one report dissented from the key finding of the paper. Yet it was pulled. ‘The evidence available is not sufficient to justify the original paper’, said Nature.
Chapela’s luck didn’t get any better. Soon after the publication of the article, he was subjected to a broad front of character assassination on the internet, by an ‘Andura Smetacek’ and a ‘Mary Murphy’, who carped that the paper hadn’t been peer reviewed (it had) and that Ignacio Chapela was more an activist than a scientist (it is possible, as Einstein was, to be both). In the end, emails from these names were traced back to servers named ‘gatekeeper2.monsanto.com’ and ‘bw6.bivwood.com’, Bivwood belonging to the Bivings Group, Monsanto’s digital PR firm. Emboldened, other pro-biotech researchers took up the smear campaign authored at Monsanto’s headquarters.64 They called for Chapela’s resignation.
Chapela was scheduled to make the transition from assistant to associate professor, a rite of passage in the North American academy in which the university decides whether, on the basis of a person’s scholarly work, teaching and conduct, they are fit to be tenured at the university. Given the resulting perks, and given the university, it’s not surprising that, in the words of George A. Straight Jr, UC Berkeley’s Assistant Vice-Chancellor for Public Affairs, Berkeley’s tenure process ‘is among the most strenuous, the most fair, and the toughest in the country … No one person, no one institution, no one group has any undue influence.’65
Chapela was recommended for tenure unanimously by his department. An ad hoc committee was formed to evaluate his position which recommended, again, unanimously, that he be granted tenure. But then the Senate committee asked the ad hoc committee to review Chapela again, the chair of the ad hoc committee resigned without telling the other committee members, and the Senate then recommended to the Chancellor that Chapela be denied tenure, which he was.66 It wasn’t until a new Chancellor arrived, along with the threat of legal action, that Chapela finally got the position his peers felt he deserved. And even now, as an associate professor, he is paid at his former, assistant professor rate.
In both these cases, in the denial of tenure and the suppression of Chapela’s article, we see similarities: the hijacking of due process, the machinations behind closed doors, the unusual fervour with which seemingly dispassionate organizations scramble to rid themselves of a single person. It warrants an explanation. It has one.
‘One of the reasons I needed to be kicked out is that I opposed a $50 million donation to the university by Novartis.’67 Chapela is a former employee of Sandoz, which merged with Ciba-Geigy to become Novartis. Novartis is a 90,000-employee ‘life sciences’ business with US$32 billion in sales in 2005.68 They wanted to make a donation, reduced to US$25 million after the scandal, to Berkeley’s Department of Plant and Microbial Biology. In exchange, they’d get a first look at all research papers published by scholars at the university, two seats on the five-person research committee and rights to negotiate licences on one-third of all the department’s research output (whether funded by Novartis or through the public purse).69 Given the falling public commitment to higher education, this might not seem such a bad deal for a cash-strapped university. Surrender some academic freedom, but get US$25 million.
There are two big reasons to worry, argues Chapela, because universities are in a position to provide resources unavailable elsewhere. The first is what might be called a demonstration effect. The amount of return that Novartis gets from its investment is much higher than its outlay. The effect comes not from direct spending on research, but through the competition to qualify for spending. Chapela again:
It might be that you’re not directly getting the money from corporations. But you wish you did. If you can think of something that they might want to fund, you’ll do it. If they don’t fund it, they’ve lost nothing. And they’ve gained a huge pool of potential projects. All by dangling this little carrot. Think of the smallest community college – all the people are looking for something that will make them viable. They will put a huge amount of their budget, they will go into debt, into something that will make them attractive.
The hope of Novartis’ money makes everyone’s research Novartis-friendly. The university also concentrates the pool of possible projects. Chapela continues:
I remember a viva where I was the external examiner. This woman was explaining what she’d discovered, and she’d found something that was commercial. The people from her department were sitting around the table and they said, ‘That’s what you don’t want to put in your thesis, that’s what you want for Novartis.’ So you put in your thesis everything that isn’t commercially useful and the company creams off the top, without any financial exposure, the best thing.
A second resource that a university offers is, perhaps unexpectedly, liability protection. The university is an establishment that in most countries has, through common usage, attracted a range of exemptions from laws applied to other social institutions. They are, for instance rarely answerable to elected officials, for the good reason that academic freedom should not be conditioned by the demands of the state. ‘But today,’ says Chapela, ‘academic freedom means “We should be free to sell ourselves to whoever we want,” and nobody can say: “What are you doing with our public resources? You were chartered to do research in the public interest for the betterment of society.” The net outcome is that there’s a legal bubble around the university that protects everyone from litigation.’
Even legislators find it hard to disentangle the miasma of clauses and codes around the university. A series of State Legislature hearings in Sacramento in May 2000 demonstrated the length to which the University of California, a public institution, was prepared to go to avoid public disclosure around its dealings with biotech companies.70 Senator Peace, chair of the finance committee, was quoted as saying, ‘You have created a system of payment and transfer that is, basically, unauditable.’ Senator Tom Hayden, at the end of an inconclusive and frustrating session of cross-examination, attempting to get to the bottom of the university’s precise arrangements with the private sector, said, ‘Let no-one think that today’s session will change anything. All we’re doing here is leaving fingernail marks on the wall, for future generations to know that at least we tried to do something.’
There’s a wide discrepancy in the costs associated with what Chapela calls ‘promotional’ work – research that serves, across disciplines, to advance a particular research agenda – in this case, that of the biotechnology companies in the food system. The money to do promotional research is being scooped out of funding for other, more precautionary, science. ‘People are asking, “How can I get this to be that?”, “How do I change the flower to red?”, not, “What would happen if I did?” ’ The questions that get asked are determined by the profit motive – a force that rarely meets the needs of the hungry. The questions are ‘How do we get the vitamin A in the rice?’ or ‘How do we get the poor to stop breeding?’ but never ‘Why have the poor remained hungry?’ And there is a mounting pile of questions that remain unasked. They could be both asked and answered, were there the will. Chapela’s paper on the contamination of corn, since corroborated by Mexican researchers, cost US$2,000 for the initial research, and less than US$10,000 in total. Novartis gave the university US$25 million. ‘That’s an indicative figure of the proportion of promotional to precautionary research,’ he notes.71
Chapela isn’t the only scientist flayed by the biotechnology industry’s PR firms: Tyrone Hayes and Arpad Pusztai are other names to note.72 The tragedy is that, soon, the academy won’t need to expose itself to the awkward spectacle of censorship. Today’s successful graduate students are being forged in this environment. Their success is guaranteed by the extent to which they’re content to remain in an academy run along business lines. That means that Chapela, Pusztai, Hayes and others may be a breed on the verge of extinction; and that, soon, questions of academic freedom won’t be an issue – those asking the industry’s questions will have long forgotten how to ask anyone else’s.
For the sake of a continent threatened by famine, I urge the European governments to end their opposition to biotechnology. We should encourage the spread of safe, effective biotechnology to win the fight against global hunger.
George W. Bush73
In their 1997 campaign, Monsanto tried to counter this perception with the slogan ‘Let the Harvest Begin!’ When a number of predominantly European campaigners took issue with Monsanto, successfully characterizing agricultural biotechnology as ‘franken-food’, the biotech industry took a different tack. It mobilized racial politics. This is part of its third tactic in the industry’s approach to legitimate its crops. The tactic involves the presentation of the needs of people in the Global South, who want GM crops, but who are being stopped by white middle-class environmentalists in the EU and US who scaremonger among consumer groups. There is no shortage of organizations in the South that campaign against GM crops.75 That this is a tactic nonetheless speaks volumes about its audience. It is not an argument intended, in the first instance, to persuade farmers in the Global South at all, but people in the Global North. For it is in the North, and in Europe in particular, that consumers have put up the most effective resistance to GM food.
In 2003, the Congress of Racial Equality, a once-mighty organization that had marched with Martin Luther King76 but had, through the 1980s and 1990s, found itself in difficulties with the Internal Revenue Service and drifting far from Martin Luther King’s original politics,77 burst back onto the stage. Roy Innis, its founder, and Niger Innis, Roy’s son, Republican consultant and commentator on MSNBC, began to campaign for biotechnology. In a film entitled Voices from Africa, Roy Innis summoned the ghost of Thomas Malthus to declare:
I am concerned that Africa will not be able to feed its rapidly growing population. Yet half the countries rely on food aid. Africa needs an agricultural revolution. Because of my concern, I came to Africa to see for myself. I came to see … the potential for biotechnology.78
It’s an odd thing for Innis to say because, first, ‘Africa’s rapidly growing population’ is growing far less rapidly now than its peak in the early 1980s. Second, it seems as if Africa has managed, however poorly, to increase the aggregate amount of food consumed by its population since the 1970s.79 The continent’s ongoing need for food aid seems to Innis to be due to a straightforward failure of production. In offering this as an explanation for hunger in Africa, he and his corporate sponsors fly in the face of a great deal of thinking about the causes of hunger in Africa. In Africa, as table 6.2 suggests, recent starvation, mass-scale hunger and hunger-related deaths have not been triggered by an absence of appropriate crops. The truth is more complicated. Hunger is the result of a cluster of factors, including armed conflict, resource shortages, blood diamonds, recovery from the Cold War, and the dismantling of existing social mechanisms (so-called ‘moral economies’) designed to mitigate food emergencies, whether caused by the climate or by human factors.80 Do we hear Innis coming to Africa proposing arms control, resource redistribution or political change? We do not.
Table 6.2: Mortality from twentieth-century famines in Africa (source: Devereux 2000).
In many of the countries where food aid has been sent, just as in the Bengal famine of 1943, sufficient food to feed the population has been present. What have failed have been the channels of distribution. Does Innis or Monsanto propose to address these? They do not, because that is not what they sell.
Yet this is the deeper story behind hunger on the continent. When flies buzz around the eyes of starving Africans on screens in the Global North, it is when they have officially been declared to be in a state of emergency. In 2002, for example, rampant Southern African hunger was tipped over the official ‘famine’ threshold by two years of bad harvests. What is rarely reported when the tragic pictures are beamed is that getting to the tipping point takes time. The reason that people in Southern Africa were starving in 2002 was that they had been starving for over a decade. The Southern African Development Community reported that, in Zambia in 1991, the chronic malnutrition (stunting) rate of children between the ages of six and fifty-nine months was 39 per cent. After then it increased to (and levelled off at) about 55 per cent. At the same time, acute malnutrition (wasting) rates remained stable at 4.4 per cent in Zambia. In Malawi, the rate of chronic malnutrition has remained at 49 per cent since 1990.81 It is only acute malnutrition that has slightly increased over the same period, by 1 per cent for a total rate of 6 per cent. The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) estimated in 2000 that 35 per cent of the people in the famine region were undernourished, with 54 per cent of Mozambique’s population undernourished.82 Among those most vulnerable to chronic hunger are women, children and the elderly. The UNDP reported in 2000 that 20 per cent of children in the region under the age of five were underweight.83 And yet there were no shortages of food products in the markets in Lesotho. Two-thirds of the population live below the poverty line, and half are classified as destitute. Purchased cereals comprise three-quarters of annual food needs for Lesotho’s poor, and over 70 per cent of the households classified ‘very poor’ in Lesotho have no cereal in reserve.84 Again, the reason they are hungry is that many in Lesotho simply cannot afford to buy the food that is available.85
The situation is similar in Malawi where, in 2001, the International Monetary Fund told the government to slash its strategic grain reserve from 165,000 metric tons to between 30,000 and 60,000 metric tons. The IMF advocated this on cost grounds, and because erroneous data persuaded them that the coming year’s harvest would increase stocks. A year later, when people were already beginning to die of starvation, the IMF denied disbursement of a US$47 million tranche of loans to the Malawian government, amid accusations of impropriety in the government’s efforts to mitigate the famine.86 The government accused the IMF of causing the famine, while the IMF blamed the government for corruption before admitting that it had, perhaps, behaved insensitively. Horst Koehler, managing director of the IMF, said at a British parliamentary hearing:
[I]n the past we [the IMF] have not given enough attention to poverty and social safety nets when proposing structural changes. But structural changes are always accompanied by dislocation. We must live with permanent change in order to achieve economic growth in developing countries … [developing countries] should be able to produce food for themselves – and we should help them strengthen capacity to produce food.87
Meanwhile, thousands were starving, and grain was being stockpiled by speculators betting that the famine would drive up maize prices – behaving, in short, precisely as they ought in a free market with high demand and a tight supply.
So how did it come to this? At the beginning of the 1980s, African states had a very clear idea of what their economies and societies needed in order to flourish. In the Lagos Plan of Action,88 heads of state called for a type of economic growth disconnected from the vicissitudes of the world market, relying on import-substitution policies, food sovereignty and trade within Africa, and, critically, a reduction in the level of external indebtedness that was systematically siphoning value out of Africa. The World Bank disagreed, insisting in its 1981 Berg Report89 that state interference in the smooth functioning of the market was precisely the cause of low levels of growth.90 Most African governments were buried in debt, their futures mortgaged on declining commodity prices. The Bank had lent them money. The Bank’s plan prevailed.91
The recent food crisis in Southern Africa, a product of these kinds of policies, was an opportunity for the pesticide industry. Promoting pro-GM African Americans like Innis père et fils to opine about the continent was one tactic. But there were others. Since 2000, when a Southern African Catholic Bishops’ Conference had called for a moratorium of GM crops on the continent, the pro-GM lobby had tried unsuccessfully to persuade any country other than South Africa to accept the crops. The food crisis offered just such an opportunity, and the Church was once again to be a vector. At the end of September 2002, Colin Powell requested an altogether earthly intercession from Archbishop Jean-Louis Tauran, the Vatican foreign minister. The Secretary of State wanted the Vatican to persuade the Zambian government to accept US-supplied genetically modified (GM) food aid. ‘Beggars can’t be choosers’ has been the response of one USAID official, in similar circumstances.92 Despite the howls from the US media,93 Zambia refused to accept US GM corn because they hadn’t been able to subject it to their own independent scientific scrutiny and were concerned that it might contaminate their own supplies. Instead, the country dealt with its famine by sourcing grain from within the region and weathering the storm, successfully, without US genetically modified food aid.
Again, these complexities have left the Congress of Racial Equality unmoved. Referring to Greenpeace’s ongoing campaign against agricultural biotechnology, Niger Innis said, ‘It’s time to hold these zealots accountable for the misery and death they cause … because they serve their own ideological agenda, and want to keep the Third World permanently mired in poverty, disease and death. So far, it has succeeded.’94 At the same WTO ministerial gathering in Mexico at which Lee Kyung Hae killed himself, Innis presented Green Power–Black Death awards to groups including Greenpeace, with an accompanying puff piece explaining that the award was being given to the organization
‘[f]or leading million-dollar campaigns against energy, pesticides, biotechnology, trade and economic development that could improve or save millions of lives,’ … As black-garbed Grim Reapers looked on, Innis presented the first prize – Academy Awards style – to a colleague co-ed [sic] representing Greenpeace. ‘I want to thank the mosquitoes for bringing malaria to less-developed countries,’ she bubbled. ‘But most of all I’d like to thank the millions of children who died to make this award possible.’95
Again, these theatrics are aimed not at Africans, but at Europeans and North Americans. The use of the Congress of Racial Equality is part of a strategy aimed at delegitimizing organizations that have successfully raised concerns about GM in Africa, Europe and North America and have persuaded the majority of consumers there that there are reasons to be suspicious of the pesticide industry. The strategy involves using the anxieties of race politics in the Global North to have ‘representatives’ from Africa, whether African-American or African, to present the authentic voice of what people in Africa want, and to imply that any action to the contrary is tainted with racism. But what actually happens in Africa? In his film, Roy Innis continues: ‘In South Africa, transgenics are already in growing the fields. These are the voices of Africa.’ What happens in the fields, however, has nothing to do with Innis’ fantasies. In northern KwaZulu-Natal, a couple of thousand South African farmers were introduced to Monsanto’s genetically modified cotton. It hasn’t worked out as either Innis, Monsanto or the South African government might think.
In the Makhathini Flats area of South Africa’s northern KwaZulu-Natal province is a hub of Monsanto’s operations. Robert Horsch, the Vice-President for Product and Technology Cooperation at Monsanto Inc., gave evidence about it at the US House Science Committee’s Subcommittee on Research on 12 June 2003:
T. J. Buthelezi, one of the first farmers to plant biotech cotton in South Africa, says higher yields from biotech cotton have helped him invest for the future in more land and better equipment. T. J. recently told me, ‘For the first time I’m making money. I can pay my debts.’ The successful adoption of biotech cotton clearly shows the power and relevance of biotechnology for Africa.97
Why is this small patch of land, with a handful of farmers, worthy of mention in a congressional briefing? Recall that the companies behind genetically modified crops want for legitimacy, above all, from a Northern audience. With this in mind, we can put the pieces together. The innovation in genetically modified crops lies in ‘making the seed an all-in-one’ package – something so simple you need few skills in order to be able to grow it. Monsanto sells its crops worldwide, to large-scale farmers. But they can’t sell their crops if countries refuse to accept them. Because of the place of Africa in the Northern imagination, if African farmers can do well with GM crops, anyone can.98 And if African farmers want to do it with GM, who are white Europeans to stop them? Nobody wants to be accused of racism, after all.99 For these reasons, Makhathini was a PR godsend.
Although some have access to irrigation, most in the Makhathini Flats are dryland farmers. That the majority here own small plots of land, few more than ten hectares, also helps. They’re not rich, and any intervention that promises to improve their lives will be well received. From its introduction in the 1998–9 growing season it took only four years for nearly everyone to adopt the cotton.100 The data, it seems, would speak for itself. Farmers had chosen to grow RoundUp-ready seed, and that, it would seem, is that. The market has decided, the environmentalists were wrong.
Except that the market has been a little distorted. In 2001–2, the company offering the genetically modified seed was offering loans to anyone who promised to use it to buy genetically modified cotton seed. People were queuing up at the gate, swearing blind that they were cotton farmers and could they have a loan please? As one might expect, as we would have ourselves done if we were in a similar position, the crop loans went to pay off existing debt, the ‘cotton farmers’ disappeared, and the cotton crop was significantly lower than the loan data would have led anyone to expect.
The local cotton firm dispensing the loans went out of business, replaced by a more prudent company, the Makhathini Cotton Company (MCC). Determined to clamp down on poor people asking for free money, the MCC instituted a new system. Rather than hand out money to all takers, the new cotton company stepped back from the loan market and instead offered concessions only to those people whom it knew to be farmers. It did this by providing free bags for farmers to put the cotton in, free transportation of those bags, and a guaranteed market for the cotton. In exchange for the bags, the company requires proof that the cotton seed has been bought legitimately, proof that the bag recipients are indeed the farmers they claim to be. The proof they demand to see is a valid Monsanto GM seed licence.
The net effect of this, of course, is to offer farmers the following choice: choose GM seed, or don’t grow cotton at all. Since there are no other cash crops with a local market, farmers choose GM cotton.
Now, that said, it could be that GM seed is actually better if you want to grow cotton on dryland. The jury is still out on that: initial yield increases seem to have declined, and adoption rates can be explained for a range of reasons other than crop performance. Less money is spent on pesticides by people who buy GM seed, partly because the seed is much more expensive, and partly because farmers who buy the more expensive GM seed ignore Monsanto’s instructions and choose not to spray at all. Given the history of the crop elsewhere in the world, though, it seems unlikely that GM cotton will prove a substantial improvement on its predecessor for small farmers. But there’s a bigger picture here. Choices about choosing or not choosing what to grow happen in a context. What happens on that stage is shaped by its most powerful actors. And, in Makhathini, the most powerful actor is the Makhathini Cotton Company.
For cotton-ginning companies, there are economies of scale. The more cotton they receive, the greater their profit per unit of cotton. A cotton gin, even the mid-twentieth century model imported from the US that roars in Makhathini, is an expensive bit of kit. One look reveals why. It’s a tangle of drums, saws and dryers, the size of several houses. Its job is to take seed cotton fresh from the fields, remove the impurities, clean it and draw the strands of cotton out. The economics of a cotton gin depend on receiving a bare minimum to keep the machine running. And in Makhathini, the gin doesn’t receive enough. In an attempt to secure more cotton, the company has offered inducements to farmers in order to increase its supply. Farmers can choose to work as contractors for the company or even to accept a lump sum, while the company takes care of the cotton growing on their land. As a result of a series of events – the location of the mill, the financial disaster of the previous company, the mechanisms of farmer verification – the consequence of the new seed experiment in Makhathini has been that some farmers don’t even have to farm.
There’s a further consequence of the cotton gin’s hunger for cotton: the company’s hunger for land on which to grow it. In order for large-scale farming operations to work, the land on which it happens needs to be contiguous. Small, disconnected plots aren’t well suited to industrial farming machinery the length of several football fields. The Makhathini Cotton Company approached local community leaders to ask them to sell their land. Local headmen agreed on behalf of ‘their people’, and the deal was signed. Except that not everyone wanted to move.
‘They’ll shoot me for talking to you.’ Mrs X (her name for herself) was terrified. ‘Please speak to all the other women here otherwise they’ll know it was me.’ This was the response when our research team tried to start a conversation about the local cotton project. Mrs X didn’t want to move from her land. She was forced out. Of course, the local cotton company didn’t come around with the bailiffs. The company hadn’t a clue that it had caused her to live in fear of her life. She was intimidated out of her home by the recipients of development, the local village headmen. Mrs X was evicted. The cotton company got its land. The seed was planted. But problems remain.
The seed itself is doing poorly. Without irrigation, and with increasingly unpredictable rain, it has been impossible to plant the cotton. In 2005 T. J. Buthelezi, the man whose progress was hymned by Monsanto’s vice-president not three years before, had this to say: ‘My head is full – I don’t know what I’m going to do. I haven’t planted a single seed this season. I have paid Rand 6,000 (US$820, GB£420) for ploughing, and I’m now in deep debt.’
T. J. is one of the faces trucked around the world by Monsanto to prove that African farmers are benefiting from GM technology. He’s in a difficult position – he has twenty-seven children and needs to support them. He lives in a small house without electricity, and although he’s one of the larger landowners in the Makhathini Flats area of northern Zululand, with over 30 hectares, and although he’s doing much better than the workers on his fields, he’s not a rich man. I’m not in a position to blame him for being Monsanto’s Man in Africa. When the seasons turn against him, he suffers along with everyone else in Makhathini, albeit a little less.
Under scrutiny here, though, is Monsanto’s use of T. J., and farmers like him. Africa has been a particular zone of engagement over GM crops. Although it’s never officially admitted, it’s hard not to think that the racially tainted images of permanent hunger, bestial violence and or prelapsarian incompetence with which most people outside the continent associate Africa don’t play a role in its choice as the place in the world primed to benefit from biotechnology.
If we’re taking the idea of choice seriously, then what would these selfsame, allegedly lousy African farmers choose? In a range of conversations with men and women in Makhathini, one thing becomes abundantly clear. No-one, it turns out, would choose cotton if there were anything else to farm. This is a problem that the Makhathini Cotton Company can’t do anything about, for it too is hostage to forces larger than itself. An official from CottonSA, the South African cotton industry’s own federation, sums it up: ‘Yes, Bt cotton is a technology for a crop that’s on the way out. It’ll help postpone the problem for a little while.’ The problem is that cotton is itself not an economically viable crop in South Africa. The South African Rand is strong, and cotton produced elsewhere in the world is cheaper. The South African cotton industry is in terminal decline, and it will take much more than magic seeds to make it better. The structural problems facing rural communities can only be addressed by concerted public action. The intervention of genetically modified seed, however, postpones the need for this action, delaying the imagination and creation of more robust alternatives.
The farmers in Makhathini are desperate to grow something else, whether it be sugar cane – which has a local market – or preferably food. There isn’t, however, a market for food. The local Spar supermarket doesn’t buy locally, but trucks its food in from hundreds of kilometres away. Farmers in Makhathini aren’t being given the choices they really want. Just the ones that are most profitable to those who control the food system.101
And this is something that the Congress of Racial Equality doesn’t seem to want to acknowledge. Of course, CORE isn’t a major player on the international scene. But the questions they fail to ask, the interests that they represent, the solutions they peddle and the strategies through which CORE are used demonstrate the forces prevalent within the food system.
That there are different ways of doing things, ways that might be better for the people concerned, though less profitable for the GM industry, is rarely noted. Bill and Melinda Gates’ Gates Foundation has got itself stuck in this rut, with a recent US$100 million donation to fund a ‘new Green Revolution for Africa’.102 They’ve even hired Robert Horsch, the man from Monsanto who championed, and then dumped, T. J. Buthelezi in South Africa.103 Yet there are alternatives to the pesticide industry. The Via Campesina farmers movement in Africa has its own set of solutions, developed by farmers, the landless and the rural poor themselves.104 And, less than a hundred miles from the United States, a technologically sophisticated, environmentally and socially sustainable farming system is gathering momentum. Consider the country that in 1988 used one of the highest levels of chemicals on its soil, with one of the highest rates of mechanization.
That country was Cuba. Its economy was largely based on trade with the Soviet Union, with nearly 90 per cent of its goods going to the Warsaw Pact. In exchange for sugar, Cuba received oil at vastly below-market rates. The subsidy from the Soviet Union helped Cuba’s economy to grow. It also made it deeply vulnerable. When the Soviet Union imploded, the price of almost everything which Cuba had previously received from the socialist bloc and on which it depended soared. Indeed, prices were higher than its Caribbean neighbours because of the US embargo. Goods that might have been bought 200 miles away had to be sourced and shipped from halfway around the world. Cuba’s economy collapsed. There was acute hunger, as the economy grappled with the need to refoot itself. From a time in the 1980s when the country was so overrun with tractors that they were left unclaimed at the docks, the 1990s saw tractors rusting in the fields, for want of oil. Between 1990 and 1994, the average Cuban lost 40 lbs.105 The ‘special period’, a euphemism for the trials of this harsh adjustment, spawned a great deal of dissatisfaction, hunger and dark comedy.106
The Cuban government found its industrial agricultural model unsustainable. In 1994, in the teeth of broad-based hunger, the government announced a comprehensive agrarian reform, once again in the national interest. The state had previously owned and run 79 per cent of all land. Through its reform, it decentralized this management to a range of privately run cooperatives. Today, 75 per cent of all land in Cuba is run privately, but 79 per cent is still owned by the government. The land can be passed on to the owners’ children, but the rights to use it cannot be sold to a third party, merely returned back to the state. The state still has a major hand in the distribution of goods, guaranteeing food packages for all and ensuring that markets and prices are set fairly. It has also supported urban food-gardens, which began as a local movement within Havana, to provide for the capital city’s needs and reduce the distance food has to travel to sate those needs.107
There is also room in Cuba for agricultural biotechnology, and the human infrastructure to make it work too. Although Cuba has only 2 per cent of Latin America’s population, it has 11 per cent of its scientists.108 Luddism isn’t on the cards – there’s plenty of science and technology. But the role that scientists play in the production of food in Cuba is shaped explicitly by public, rather than by private, ends. Genetic engineering has been severely restricted, allowed only if it can be proven that it is safe and, radically, that there is no other way of achieving the same goals through other means.109 Such criteria force Cuban scientists, reluctantly it must be noted, to address the questions of context and need from which their counterparts elsewhere have been relieved.110 And yet biotechnology there is. Bacillus thuringiensis, the very same active ingredient used in Monsanto’s Bt cotton, along with a range of other biocontrol agents, is produced and distributed by the Cuban government.111 The difference in this approach is that, instead of engineering pesticides directly into the seed (where it is available at doses sufficient to kill a few of its intended victims, and foster immunity in many others), the Cuban model uses it as a selective and high-dose insecticide applied if and only if required. The onus on the farmer is to become an expert in the use of the chemical not as a matter of course, but as a matter of last resort.
Cuban pesticides are produced to a limited extent by central government, but also by a range of almost artisanal cooperatively owned labs, which the government help to set up around the country, and which place scientists next to the consequences of their actions in the fields. The restrictions on energy available for farming have also pushed farmers, and the scientists who support them, to embrace ecosystemic levels of complexity. The problem with industrial agricultural methods of pest control is that they’re based on a scorched-earth philosophy. Pesticides wipe out not only the insects that eat into plants, but also the insects that prey on the pests. It’s a treadmill that, once embarked upon, is hard to step off, because each new invasion of unwanted insects prompts a further spraying. The solution, one Cuban soil scientist has observed, is this: ‘to control insects, you have to give up controlling them’.112 In other words, acknowledge that there are insects and learn ways to live with them, and minimize their negative impacts. Sophisticated systems of pest management have been developed in Cuba with this in mind, ranging from the cultivation of Bt insecticide to patterns of intercropping where, for instance, maize and sweet potato are grown together, and where the harmful insects attracted to one crop are driven away by those attracted to another.
Its strides in agro-ecology notwithstanding, Cuba isn’t by any means an ecological paradise. Much of its rice is still grown using intensive agricultural methods.113 Beef and milk production haven’t recovered since the end of the Soviet Union. The energy-intensive feedlot systems that produce milk and beef aren’t an environmentally viable form of agriculture: they produce waste and consume inputs at extraordinarily unsustainable levels.114 The Cuban government has made choices, in the national interest, about what suits the country, and the needs of the people, best. They are choices that seem to be paying off, at least in terms of education and health indicators, which match or exceed countries with many more times the level of income.115
It’s instructive to revisit the play of ‘national interest’ in the Cuban and US models. Within the US model, under which most of us live no matter where we are, decisions over the food system have been turned over, in one way or another, from the state to the private sector. This is not to say that there is no central planning under capitalism – there’s plenty. State funding, which in the US goes under the misleading moniker of the ‘Farm Bill’, demonstrates this amply. Large sums are redistributed, largely to the rich, under the aegis of legislation directed at the farmers of ‘the heartland’. The private sector, as Dwayne Andreas observes, has learned this well and profited from it enormously. Under the dominant system, then, decisions of national interest are either hidden in pork-barrels or presented as scientific fact, authorized by men and women in white coats. Cuba’s model is perhaps more honest – the national interest remains, in profound ways, part of a communal project, its contours decided by functionaries rather than entrepreneurs. The role of the scientist in Cuba is a developer of public rather than private knowledge. The spread of this knowledge spills over Cuba’s borders. Cuban expertise in alternative agriculture is being applied across a range of countries in Latin American, Africa and even as far away as Laos.116
Governments are by no means the only mechanism for the transmission of these ideas. In India, the Centre for Sustainable Agriculture, under the banner of ‘no pesticides, no pests’, is working with farmers’ movements to develop alternative means of building and sustaining livelihoods. Japan’s Masanobu Fukuoka has systematized a philosophy of organic and scientific farming which has spread worldwide.117 In Latin America, the Campesino a Campesino – farmer to farmer – movement offers perhaps the most profound example of decentralized learning and sharing, involving farmers travelling and sharing their ideas, seed, culture and history across countries and across the continent, circumventing the state and building their own independent networks as a result.118 Eric Holt-Gimenez, director of Food First and a long-time scholar of the Campesino a Campesino movement explains how farmers themselves describe the movement: ‘They say it “walks” on the legs of innovation and solidarity and “works” with one hand for food production and one for environmental protection. It “sees” a sustainable, rural future based on a vibrant campesino culture.’ Indeed, the rise of agro-ecological approaches in Cuba were driven not by the state, but through Campesino a Campesino exchanges. In rejecting the privatization of knowledge, of land, of space, of memory, of expertise, the Campesino a Campesino movement shows the ongoing possibilities and lived experience of alternative agricultural systems, in particular places. It relies on precisely the opposite of the Indo-US knowledge initiative. Instead of the privatization of knowledge, its publication. Instead of wisdom handed down by experts, knowledge shared by peers. Instead of adapting the land to the crops, the farming is adapted to the land.
Instead of a public told about it after the fact, the development project is the public’s own knowledge initiative.
At the moment, the alternatives to industrial agriculture, whether state or non-state directed, are in the minority. But they have always been part of the agricultural landscape, and have survived even as the sucking weeds of industrial agriculture have blossomed. They offer hope, the seeds for a better agricultural system. Of course, what works in one part of Latin America needn’t work elsewhere. Systems, like seeds, flourish in a context, and future agricultural systems will surely fail if they are insensitive to the biology, geography, history and democracy into which they are introduced. The urgency of these systems couldn’t, however, be greater. To see why, it’s important to look at the country that has, in many ways, not only fallen most for the seductions of agribusiness, but also offers one of the greatest hopes against it – Brazil.