News | August '08 | The alliance for abundant spin
In all
our recent 'conspiracy theory' articles (see SPLURGE OF SPIN
– News,
August 2008), biotech industry pressure has been very little in
evidence. In fact, apart from twisting our Environment Minister's arm
(behind closed doors until the newspapers got wind of it), and
Syngenta giving a pep talk to farmers courtesy of the BBC, there's
been nothing to report.
Perhaps that was because, having distanced itself from the research of the International Assessment on Agricultural Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) when it realised things weren't going its way, the biotech industry has been planning an answer to the inevitable, embarrassingly GM-unfriendly, final outcome. ADM, DuPont, Deere and Monsanto have been busy liaising with their ethanol-producing trade body, the Renewable Fuel Association (RFA), to create a multi-million dollar answer to the IAASTD.
This expensive answer has come in the form of the 'Alliance for Abundant Food and Energy' (AAFE). The motto of the new organisation is “innovation creates abundance”, and it has lots of 'beliefs': it believes “both food and energy are fundamental human needs”, it believes an either-or choice between food and fuel is false, and it “believes that agricultural innovation, such as genetically modified crops, is the best way to address global hunger, not reducing biofuel production”.
The AAFE's website is revealing.
Three key areas are immediately drawn to our attention on the site's home page: irrigation, methods of ploughing, and the green revolution. We are told, first, that more efficient irrigation and ploughing increase crop yields, and then that, historically, the green revolution was hugely successful. All of these are true, but are they relevant? High-tech irrigation and ploughing which themselves depend on fuel won't help extract more food from the food-or-fuel agricultural equation, and low-tech innovations are small scale, local, and don't fit into the globalised scheme at all. The green revolution is totally dependent on energy-input at all stages from soil to store. Any reference to the role of GM crops in the site's introductory page is conspicuous by its absence.
In support of the continued production of bio-ethanol fuel from food crops, the AAFE's executive director asserts “Most credible studies say the high price of food right now can be attributed to the high price of oil” (Question: the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, and a leading World Bank economist aren't 'credible'? (see BIOFUELS: SIMPLE NEAT AND WRONG – News, July 2008). In fact, the director goes on to say that “To get your Idaho potatoes to Massachusetts or Florida, you have to have them shipped” (Question: does he think that the only reason we need energy for our modern food supply is for transporting it to the store?).
What, of course, the AAFE doesn't mention are the non-agricultural innovations which promise other solutions and which avoid the choice between food or fuel completely. For example, hydo-electric power, wind-power, wave-power, tidal power, photovoltaic power (the raw materials for this can be sand, cadmium waste from zinc production, and tellurium waste from copper production), concentrating solar power (which uses parabolic arrays of mirrors), organic solar collectors (which use organic dyes), algal bio-diesel, and organic waste biofermenters, to name but a few. All of these are being progressively miniaturised and made more efficient. They are all essentially local: selected, as appropriate, to suit local conditions. Each has the potential to generate abundant, sustainable power without using up good agricultural land or using GM crops.
OUR COMMENT
The outrageous absurdity of the spin coming from the AAFE is obvious from its 'beliefs'.
Human need of food is hardly a matter of 'belief'. But what does he mean by 'food'? In the words of nutritionist, Joan Gussow: “I have watched real food disappear from large areas of the supermarket and from much of the rest of the eating world” replaced by an unending stream of food-like substitutes, “products constructed largely around commerce and hope, supported by frighteningly little actual knowledge”. Is it these food-like offerings, the ones being boosted by GM crops, that the director was believing in?
Human need of fuel is not a matter of belief either, but the need for it in the form of ethanol from (patented) food crops certainly is.
Indeed, most of what the AAFE has to say, like its beliefs and its suggestion that it can deliver another green revolution, is cleverly-worded ballyhoo designed to avoid sustainable answers and distract from the real issues.
At least now we know why the biotech industry withdrew from the IAASTD initiative. It had to make sure it didn't 'know' what those 400 scientists were finding out. It had to cling to its beliefs in economies of scale and GM miracles in agriculture, so that even if we refuse to eat its novel foods, it can still make us dependent on its patented crops for fuel.
Syngenta's chairman let the biotech cat out of the bag recently when he told an agricultural conference that “industry has been forced to focus on a few lucrative “blockbuster” varieties (of GM crops)” He was trying to claim that the paucity of GM varieties developed was due to the expense of winning regulatory approval, (and not, as we suspect, to the inefficiency of the GM technique), but these “blockbuster” varieties of GM maize and GM soya, now grown for biofuel production, are clearly the industry's bread and butter. They will not be given up without a fight. We suggest you fight for your bread and butter (the real version that is) too.
You can read more intriguing information on real food vs. food-like substance in Michael Pollan's informative and amusing 'In Defence of Food', 2008, ISBN 978-1-846-14096-9.
Finally, please try to prevent our regulators get distracted by fancy-sounding organisations with even fancier budgets.
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