Genetically modified (GM) crops are excellent technology. If Britain and the world had agricultural policies that truly were designed for the benefit of humankind — to feed everybody well, provide employment and look after the environment — they might be useful in many ways; and last week’s Monsanto decision to give up on GM wheat might be regrettable.
But Britain has no such policy. Instead, it has a mantra embraced by the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organisation, and the United States and British governments: ”Agriculture is a business like any other.” This dogma is leading the world in the wrong direction — and within it, GM crops have become key players.
Agriculture as business must seek to maximise profit. It must maximise turnover and output. Scientists and politicians claim this must be good — because there still are famines, and the world population is set to increase by 50% to about nine billion by 2050.
But the recent famines have rarely resulted from inability to produce food. Almost always you find civil war in the background, corruption, or — as in the Ireland of the 1840s or recently in Argentina — starvation in the midst of plenteous crops that are earmarked for export.
In the short term, more production leads to glut — and so world prices for coffee have dropped by nearly 70% in the past five years. The world population is indeed rising but, says the United Nations, it will stabilise by 2050 — and no frenetic increase in food is required.
Besides, by then the world’s livestock will be consuming enough grain to feed four billion people. If we ate less meat we could feed ourselves easily. All that is needed is a switch back to traditional cuisines, which use meat sparingly. But the business dogma requires ever more livestock because that is where the profit lies.
Agriculture as business must then strive to minimise costs. This is dangerous: cheap cattle-feed (made from bits of other cattle) is what caused mad cow disease. Worse: cutting costs means cutting labour, which, traditionally, is the biggest input. After World War II, about 20% of Britain’s workforce was on the land, while now (like the US) it is down to a little over 1%.
The foot-and-mouth epidemic arose from too little care — farming run on a wing and a prayer. But that’s business.
In Britain the rundown of the agrarian workforce is foul, but not quite disastrous. The country is rich and has alternatives. But in the developing world, 60% of people work on the land. In India, that is 600-million. Commercial forces worldwide have been urging India to industrialise its farming as Britain has done. This would increase yields and bring down costs — but would also put at least 500-million out of work. The envisaged alternatives fall short of what would be required by orders of magnitude. IT, India’s great success, employs barely 100 000 people.
The world as a whole needs to remain primarily agrarian — but if agriculture is just a business, the fewer on the land, the better. And if the mantra was applied rigorously, Britain would get rid of farming altogether.
There is nothing it can grow here that could not be grown more cheaply elsewhere. Indeed, beneath the pieties of successive secretaries of state for the past 30 years, the question is implicit: Why doesn’t Britain get rid of agriculture, just as it got rid of mining?
It seems that British agriculture survives (just) only because it is conspicuous and run by influential people, while mining was done out- of-sight by, well, miners. But farming continues to embarrass British governments. It runs entirely against their economic logic.
So what is the actual role of GM crops as things are? They can increase yield. They can help to reduce labour even more. Pest-resistant GM crops make mass, uniform production possible.
This may improve on the now ”conventional” dousing in industrial chemicals, but is nothing quite as good in principle as traditional husbandry, in which pests are contained by mixed-cropping and rotation. So high-tech is not used to abet good husbandry — but to make bad practice possible. That is more profitable.
More broadly, the present world trend on all fronts is to transfer power from the many to the few. If traditional people grow their own crops, they have autonomy. We might reasonably feel this is desirable, but business must seek its share of the action: ”market opportunities”.
If the world embraces GM crops, all agriculture will be controlled by a few high-tech companies and the governments to which they are loosely answerable. All hope of autonomy is wiped out at a stroke. A radical re-think is needed in all agriculture: social, economic, political, scientific, technical. The world may then find roles for GM crops. Until such time, they must be resisted. — Â