Ruaridh Nicoll
The Himba chief stared at the anthropologist who had just asked him to describe what he did. A moment passed before he answered: “I attend meetings and I make love to my three wives.”
The Himba wander the vastness of Namibia’s skeleton coast. They drink milk, wear calf- skins, and style their hair with cow-dung. They are also among the most successful subsistence cattle farmers in the world.
The chief has never heard of genetically engineered crops or of giant firms making an injectable growth hormone which increases the yield from cattle. What he really wants is better medical care and education for his young. The cattle, he knows, should be left to him.
The same story can be heard around the world, where small farmers are the backbone of most economies and communities. Here the question of genetically modified crops and animals carries the smack of insult, causing outrage and fear.
Nanjunda Swamy, of the Karnataka State Farmers Association in Bangalore, India, is adamant. “Genetically modified food is of no benefit to farmers or humanity.
“They are trying to expand into India with their genetically modified soya beans and the bovine hormone,” he says. “But Indian farmers do not think of competition. They think of the health of the consumer. We do not know what will happen. Genetics is a science we cannot play with.
“We cannot rely on the government to do anything to stop it. We will have to take direct action.” When asked what sort, Swamy replied: “Have you ever heard of Mahatma Gandhi?”
Clive Bishop, chief executive of the Windward Islands Farmers Association in the Caribbean, is worried that his farmers’ crops, some of them specialised, could be genetically altered so that they could be mass produced overseas. “We are not against scientific advance, but the advance has to benefit us.”
The farmers he worked with were already seeing negative effects. “There is great pressure [from biotech companies] in terms of the vegetable species. The farmers have to buy new seeds every time they sow.” In the past, they would replant using seeds from the previous harvest.
In Kenya, where most farmers grow food for themselves, only selling a small amount on to nearby villages, there is widespread caution about new technologies.
Thomas Barasa, head of Kenya’s National Farmers Union, is not inspired by modern science. “We are extremely worried about local biodiversity. We have an important ecology in Kenya and we don’t know what will happen if we introduced these plants.
“But the farmers know exactly what they do need, and that is more fertiliser and more credit to invest in machinery.”