Can GMO ensure food security amid the population growth?

Can GMO ensure food security amid the population growth?

C. Any Sulistyowati, Institute of Development Studies
and Technological Assistance, Bandung, anyapd@lead.or.id

Food security has been a major issue throughout history. It
has been debated since the famous essay of Thomas Malthus in
1798, Essay on the Principles of Population. He argued that
population would grow exponentially while food production will
grow only arithmetically, which would lead to scarcity and
famine.

His premise carries two major implications on world policies.
The first is on how to reduce population growth and the second is
on how to increase food production. For the first, much effort
has been placed on family planning programs; while for the
second, efforts resulting in new technology ranged from the Green
Revolution in the 1970s to the most recent, genetically modified
organisms (GMOs). Both try to meet the challenges of producing
more food and increasing productivity to ensure global food
security. We already know the implications of the Green
Revolution, such as environmental degradation, health problems
and an increasing social gap among farmers, and how it failed to
meet all its promises. It is also possible that the promise of
GMOs will also fail.

The main arguments leading to the above methods are that the
world's food security does not merely lie in food production, but
more on its distribution and our consumption patterns.

The world today has more food per capita than ever before in
history. It is enough to provide everyone with 4.3 pounds of food
everyday; 2.5 pounds of grains, beans and nuts; about a pound of
meat, milk and eggs and another of fruits and vegetables. World
Bank data shows us that the average calories per capita available
in developing countries had increased from 1,925 calorie per
capita (1961) to 2,540 cal/capita (1992); which is higher than
the requirement of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of
2,200 cal/capita to 2,300 cal/capita.

The United Nations figures show there are more than 800
million hungry people in the world today, with 36 million in the
United States, the world's foremost food exporter. This shows, as
experts have observed, that the problem is not in food production
but more in its distribution.

Why does this happen? The recent food production and
distribution system responds to money or profit instead of real
needs. Throughout history, we have seen that in many places,
people go hungry in the countries that produce a lot of food for
export; e.g. Ireland in the 19th century when they exported
cattle to England and now the U.S. as the main food exporter in
the world.

In many countries, there are also rapid land use changes from
producing staple food to something else more profitable. Because
the price of land is so high, it is no longer economically viable
for staple food production. Therefore, less land is devoted to
food crops and the best agricultural land changes to other more
profitable businesses, such as growing cut flowers for export in
Kenya. This will endanger us, because such land change endangers
the potential supply of our food, our basic need.

The two facts above show that consumption patterns, in the
form of demand associated with higher prices, determines how and
where food is produced.

The consumption pattern of the wealthy caused, for example,
the need to produce more salmon than nature can produce. Although
the expense and energy needed to produce salmon is very high, as
long as people prefer to eat salmon and can pay, salmon
production will continue.

In order to do that, we need more sardines to feed salmon
rather than to feed children, because the salmon producers can
buy sardines which are more expensive. This reveals two problems.
Firstly, it reduces the total potential supply of protein for the
whole world and secondly, it places the priority on the
willingness to pay, not on the need. The same phenomenon happened
in feeding grain to cattle. Thirty years ago, one third of the
world's grain went to livestock; today it is closer to one-half
(www.iht.com/articles/25037.htm).

Another related problem is a change in diet to a lesser known
staple food. For example, from tapioca and sweet potato to rice
in Papua. This was influenced by the Indonesian government policy
of rice self-sufficiency. Now they depend on rice even though
they cannot produce rice in their area, while at the same time
because they now eat less sago and sweet potato, there is less
effort to plant them. This reduces their food supply potential
and makes their food security more vulnerable; dependent on the
outside.

The same phenomenon happened in Japan and most big cities in
developing countries that changed their food consumption pattern
to bread, made from wheat produced by the big farmers and
corporations mainly in the U.S. We have made ourselves more
vulnerable by eating less variety of food and our food security
has become dependent on other countries that control the world's
food availability in the world market, like the U.S.

The problem of world food security is therefore not the
farmers' demand for new technology to increase productivity or
food production, but on distribution and our consumption
patterns. It would be preferable to ensure better food prices for
farmers and ensure enough land for food production.

We need new policies to regulate this, although it seems to be
impossible under trade liberalization where everything is market-
driven. As individuals, we also can contribute, for example by
having a more diverse diet, especially from food produced locally
by small farmers. Instead of putting ourselves in a vulnerable
situation by making our food security dependent on fewer kinds of
food and genes through GMOs produced by multinational firms,
wouldn't it be better to have more diverse sources of local food?