Crops With Attitude

The United Nations' International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) published a very different vision for the future of farming in 2008. The report recommended fundamental changes in agricultural practices and systems to deal with soaring food prices, hunger, social inequities and environmental catastrophe. The 400 scientists involved in the three-year project recommended a global shift from industrial agribusiness to sustainable farming systems, with targeted research and development augmenting local traditional knowledge to help farmers optimise their use of soil and water resources. IAASTD also concluded that GM crops could not play a useful role in solving climate change, biodiversity loss, hunger or poverty.

The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) claims it will ???feed the world??? with a Gene Revolution - industrial monocultures of Genetically Manipulated (GM) crops, animals and microbes. The Ford, Rockefeller and Gates Foundations, the World Bank, USAID, Monsanto and first world governments (including Australia) back AGRA. These are the same vested interests that conceived, funded and deployed the Green Revolution in the 1950s and 60s, to maintain Western influence over newly independent Asian nations.

A billion people suffer chronic starvation and malnutrition while another billion are obese. Western institutions only intervene as civil unrest over food shortages and price hikes now threatens national stability. The main causes of hunger are global food trade, unfair terms of trade, poverty and debt, environmental degradation, US and EU farm subsidies and social upheaval. Yet these first world interests will prescribe more of their own technology and chemical inputs as the radical cure for third world hunger - particularly GM crops, animals and microbes.

Like the Green Revolution technologies, GM crops have already failed to deliver on their empty promises. Despite GM industry hype, industry figures show that GM crops stalled in 1996 when Monsanto first launched commercial GM soy, corn, cotton and canola in the USA with two GM traits - Roundup herbicide tolerance and built in insect killer. Just the same four crops with two GM traits are for sale now.

In 2008, the USA grew 50% of all GM crops, while Argentina, Brazil, Canada and Paraguay grew 80% of the rest - mainly exported for animal feed and biofuel production. The 125 million hectares of GM crops were grown on just 1.5% of the world's productive land area. Twenty-five nations grew some GM crops but most were on a trial scale and another 170 countries (plus 60 occupied territories) remain GM-free. Less than 1% of the world???s 1.4 billion farmers grow GM crops as they are designed to fit into broad-acre farming systems that require a levelling of the landscape and the alienation of community lands.