Sex, Bombs and Burgers (29 page)

For Americans and Canadians, it’s virtually impossible to get around consuming genetically modified organisms even if they want to, because the technology is in just about everything and there are no laws requiring labelling. Indeed, food retailers who have tried to label their foods as GM-free, such as the Ben & Jerry’s ice cream chain, have been sued into silence by the likes of Monsanto, who have argued that identifying foods as such implies their superiority to those containing GMOs. The administrative attitude toward genetically modified foods in North America is unlikely to change under President Barack Obama, even though the new president wasted no time in reversing many of his predecessor’s science policies, including the funding ban on stemcell research. The main backing for GMOs may have come from the two Bush presidents, but Obama continued the trend when he named Iowa attorney and GM supporter Tom Vilsack as his Secretary of Agriculture. The new president, however, has at least indicated he is interested in hearing the other side of the story by appointing organic food expert Kathleen Merrigan as Vilsack’s deputy. That decision was probably influenced by Obama’s wife,
Michelle, who is an avowed fan of organic farming. The First Lady sent the biotech industry into a tizzy in early 2009 when she planted an organic garden at the White House.

In terms of production, worldwide growth is quickly accelerating. In 2008 biotech crops globally accounted for 125 million hectares, up nearly 10 percent from the year before. Total crops planted between 1996 and 2008 reached two billion acres, an impressive feat given that it took a full ten years to reach the first billion, but only three years to get to the second billion. Total acreage is predicted to at least double again by 2015. The number of countries planting GMOs reached twenty-five in 2008, with fifteen of those—including Colombia, Honduras and a pair of African countries in Burkina Faso and Egypt— classified as developing nations.
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The United States leads the way in total production, making up nearly 60 percent of the world’s GMO output, followed by Argentina at 20 percent, Canada and Brazil at 6 percent each, and China at 5 percent.
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The total number of countries growing GM crops is expected to grow to forty by 2015.

Soybeans are the most popular crop grown, accounting for more than half of the area currently planted with GM foods worldwide, followed by corn, cotton and canola. A few countries recently added new crops to that cohort, with the United States now growing GM squash, papaya, alfalfa and sugar beets, while China is farming tomatoes and sweet peppers. Genetically modified versions of the world’s two biggest crops, wheat and rice, have been created and are in various states of regulatory review. Scientists have also successfully tested drought-resistant crops, as well as seeds that “stack” genetically modified traits. SmartStax corn, which Monsanto expects will become available
in 2010, combines the abilities of its Roundup Ready and Bt products in that the plants will be resistant to the company’s herbicide and secrete their own pesticides.

Despite the spread, resistance is still firm—and entrenched in parts of Europe. In 2000 the European Union believed it had won a victory with an international agreement that allowed signatory countries to monitor and test GMOs for potential environmental effects before they approved them for commercial use. The Cartagena Protocol, which came into force in 2003, was flawed, however, in that it could be trumped by World Trade Organization agreements. The United States wasted no time in taking its case to the WTO, and won a historic ruling against the EU in 2006. Under the decision, European countries could not obstruct the entry of genetically modified products if there was demand for them within their borders.

GM foods have begun to creep into Europe, but the fight continues as individual countries have recently resorted to the old European standby argument of sovereign rights. Austria, Hungary, Greece, France and Germany have all declared GMO bans of various levels, as have non–EU members Switzerland and Albania. American interests quickly responded with that old American standby, the lawsuit. Monsanto jumped on Germany in April 2009, just days after the government announced a ban on the company’s corn. “They are in conflict with EU rules,” a company spokesperson said.
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The anti-GMO rhetoric also continues. In 2008 Prince Charles reiterated the concerns he voiced nearly a decade earlier. Companies such as Monsanto are conducting “a gigantic experiment, I think, with nature and the whole of humanity which has gone seriously wrong,” he told
The Daily Telegraph
.
Relying on large corporations for food would result in “absolute disaster” and the “destruction of everything.”

“If they think it’s somehow going to work because they are going to have one form of clever genetic engineering after another then again, count me out because that will be guaranteed to cause the biggest disaster environmentally of all time.”
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Kill Your Enemy, Fill Your Belly

The rhetoric on the other side of the argument is also ratcheting up. While American corporate interests have been and continue to be a big driver of GMOs, an increasing number of scientists, both social and biological, are voicing their support as well. While GMO critics argue that the world has enough food and that it simply isn’t being distributed correctly to the people who need it, many social scientists disagree. The world may actually be heading for disaster because of rampant population growth. Over the past half-century, the world’s population has grown more than it did during the previous
four million
years and is expected to double again over the next fifty years.
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Just about all of that growth is expected to happen in the developing world, where eight hundred million people already have insufficient food.
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At the same time, arable land is decreasing at the rate of about 1.5 percent a year because of the three deadly “ations”— desertification, salinization and urbanization.
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China and India, the world’s two most populous nations, are already near a crisis point, each using about three-quarters of its available farmland.
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These facts set the stage for what indeed could be, to use Prince Charles’s words in a different context, “absolute disaster.” There’s a concept, called the population-national security
theory, that was postulated by social scientists during the Green Revolution and that neatly sums the situation up. It goes like this: a growing population results in overcrowding and exhaustion of resources, which in turn leads to hunger and political instability. Political instability then leads to communist insurrection, which is a danger to American interests. And what’s the ultimate result of threatening American interests? In many cases, it’s been war. President Harry Truman vouched for this theory in his inaugural address in 1949. “More than half the people of the world are living in conditions approaching misery. Their food is inadequate ... Their poverty is a handicap and a threat both to them and to more prosperous areas,” he said. “Greater production is the key to prosperity and peace. And the key to greater production is a wider and more vigorous application of modern scientific and technical knowledge.”
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The theory has been repurposed for modern times, with the word “terrorist” replacing “communist,” and it has many supporters within government and the scientific community. Right up until his death in 2009, Norman Borlaug backed the use of genetically modified crops as a tool to boost food production levels and fight the conditions that create war and terrorism in developing countries. “This is the most fertile ground for planting all kinds of extremism, including terrorism. And the people of the developed nations won’t live in peace and tranquility with that pot boiling over,” he said. “First, it’s internal conflict in a country, civil war. Then other countries get involved and here we go again. Those are the dangers.”

Borlaug, who in addition to the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded a litany of accolades, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Congressional Gold Medal, the National Medal
of Science and the Padma Vibhushan (India’s highest honour to non-citizens), carried considerable weight in the debate. Having already been credited with saving more than 240 million people from starvation, he continued to campaign on into his nineties for the cause of using technology to solve hunger.
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He even appeared in Monsanto promotional videos to defend the company’s genetically engineered crops. “What we need is courage by the leaders of those countries where farmers still have no choice but to use older and less effective methods,” he said in one video. “The Green Revolution and now plant biotechnology are helping meet the growing demand for food production while preserving our environment for future generations.”
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But how much of a factor is hunger in driving people to take up arms? While a number of inputs, including politics, religion and simple aggression all contribute, social scientists and war historians agree that poverty, hunger and the hopelessness they create are among the biggest motivators. Peter Singer, a social scientist at the Brookings Institution in Washington D.C. and author of several books on war, says it’s no different from why people turn to crime. “You have people go into crime because of desperation or they go into it because of the context of how they were raised where poverty was a driver. You have people go into crime because they’re greedy or they’re downright evil and they were born that way. Much of the same parallel can be made as to why conflicts and wars start.” Poverty and desperation tend to hollow out the social and political institutions that are needed for good governance and for stability and prosperity, he says. “Conflict entrepreneurs take advantage of that absence of good governance.”
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Food and the escape from poverty are among the key drivers of recruitment for conflicts in Africa, particularly among
children. As many as 250 million children live on the street, more than 210 million must work to feed themselves and their families and one-third of all children suffer from severe hunger. In
Children at War
, which looks at the horrific rise of child soldiers over the past few decades, Singer found that such hopelessness presents a huge pool of labour for the illegal economy, be it organized crime or armed conflicts.
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The children themselves point to food as a major reason for why they enlisted as soldiers. Fighting may be a dangerous choice of profession, but in many cases it’s better than the alternative. “I don’t know where my father and mother are. I had nothing to eat. I joined the gunmen to get food,” said one twelve-year-old soldier in the Congo.
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“If I left the village I would get killed by the rebels who would think I was a spy. On the other hand if I stayed in the village and refused to join the army, I wouldn’t be given food and would eventually be thrown out, which was as good as being dead,” said another, aged fourteen. “I heard that the rebels at least were eating, so I joined them,” said yet another.
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The story is similar in parts of the Middle East. In Afghanistan, where decades of war have destroyed virtually every institution, hunger is rampant. A pair of Afghan boys told Singer they had the choice of following a cow around to scoop up its excrement to sell as fuel or joining one of the armed factions. Enlisting provided them with clothes, food and a shred of self-respect.
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Graeme Smith, a Canadian journalist who covered the recent war for three years for
The Globe and Mail
and a former colleague of mine, says such stories are numerous. The reasons Afghans enlist with al Qaeda and the Taliban are usually not political or religious, as the Western media would have us
believe. “They’re inextricably linked, hunger and war. Right now, hunger is absolutely one of the big factors driving the conflict,” he says.
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Since the American invasion in 2001, fighting and the resultant deaths have followed weather and agricultural patterns. Fighting usually kicks off after the country’s main cash crop, the poppies from which opium is derived, is harvested in the spring months and continues until it gets cold in December. Day labourers tend to get paid well during the poppy harvest, Smith says, but after that they are at a loss for ways to buy food. For many—like the cow poop boys—enlisting is the only option. As Charles Stith, the former U.S. ambassador to Tanzania, puts it, this is fertile ground for terrorist organizations on recruiting drives. “The foot soldiers of terrorist groups tend to be on the lower rungs of the socio-economic ladder,” he says. “People who have hope tend not to be inclined to strap 100 pounds of explosives on their bodies and go into a crowd and blow themselves up. People who have hope are not inclined to lie in wait outside an airport with a missile looking for a plane full of tourists to shoot down.”
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Recruiting the poor, hungry and hopeless isn’t a tactic reserved for terrorists and African warlords. It’s also a longstanding practice in developed nations, although the idea of poverty is relative in such places. Since food—especially the unhealthy, heavily processed kind—is plentiful and cheap in prosperous countries, recruitment of the poor usually takes advantage of a person’s lack of education or job prospects. The U.S. government, for one, has had to deal with charges of using a “poverty draft” for its forces ever since the end of mandatory conscription following the Vietnam War, despite pitching
military service as a good way for recruits to earn college tuition. During the first Gulf War, African-American leaders criticized the disproportionate numbers of blacks in the military compared to whites and the population in general. African-Americans, usually from economically depressed areas of the country, made up a quarter of all troops in Iraq in 1991, but only 12 percent of the population. One study found that 33 to 35 percent of all qualified black men at the time had served in the military, more than double the percentage for white men. “This nation ought to be ashamed that the best and brightest of our youth don’t volunteer because they love it so well, but because this nation can’t provide them jobs,” said Benjamin Hooks, the president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
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