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?