The United Nations Food Systems Summit held last September was eclipsed by a powerful effort led by farmers and scientists, as well as civil society groups allied with Indigenous communities and small-scale food producers across the world. These are the very people critical to achieving the summit’s stated goals of ending hunger and promoting sustainable agriculture. The scientists and advocates accused summit organizers of compromising on food security, democratic accountability, sustainability, and the human rights of producers and workers in favor of transnational agribusinesses.
Opposition to the summit had been mounting since July, when hundreds of grassroots organizations challenged the organizers for framing the problem of food systems in narrow, technocratic ways and offering “false solutions” such as biotechnological interventions instead of promoting more sustainable, just and people-first ways of farming. Also in July the Philippines approved commercial cultivation of BT eggplant, a genetically modified (GM) food that produces a protein that kills eggplant fruit and shoot borers, and “Golden Rice” altered to produce beta-carotene, the precursor of vitamin A. The Philippines thus became the first country in South and Southeast Asia to approve GM rice and the second in the world after Bangladesh to approve GM eggplant.
Advocates of GM crops hailed the Philippines’ move as a triumph of science. Since the U.N.’s food summit was announced two years ago, different groups have steadily reduced applications of science to global problems to a limited set of investor-oriented innovations. Within this orbit, agricultural biotechnology and digitalization are touted as vital to achieving the U.N.’s sustainable development goals.
As governments now debate the way forward from the summit, it is critical to recognize that a narrow focus on technology to address the complex structural problems of farming and food has an astonishingly poor track record. In more than two decades of GM crops’ cultivation, nearly every aspect of GM crop research, development and application has stoked scientific controversy.
At its base, GM crops are rooted in a colonial-capitalist model of agriculture based on theft of Indigenous land and on exploiting farmers’ and food workers’ labor, women’s bodies, Indigenous knowledge and the web of life itself. The green revolution of the 1960s exported this paradigm to ex-colonial countries in South and Southeast Asia. Today this agricultural model is responsible not only for soaring farm debt, depleted soils, and threats to native seeds and biodiversity but also the erosion of farmers’ knowledge and skills. The same model stands implicated in the emergence of novel pathogens and our increased vulnerability to pandemics. For the world to achieve sustainability, this colonial model of agriculture must be dismantled, and promising agro-ecological approaches premised on working with biodiversity and farmers’ knowledge and skills should be brought center stage.
Maize and soy, along with cotton and canola, dominate the GM market. Most GM crops are engineered with resistance to herbicides and insects, which has not only contributed to the emergence of super weeds and soaring pesticide use but has driven the global consolidation of seed and chemical industries. These kinds of crops have principally benefited large-scale farmers, grain traders and multinational behemoths involved in selling seeds and pesticides.
Despite these problems, multinational agribusinesses have latched onto Golden Rice and BT eggplant as ostensibly pro-poor technologies to win over smallholder farmers and consumers in the Global South. Since 2008 the International Rice Research Institute, based in the Philippines, has led Golden Rice’s development with support from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. And in partnership with Synge (which owns rights to the rice) to address vitamin A deficiency (BAD) among the poor, especially children and pregnant women.
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