Graeme Hamilton | Oct 19, 2012 4:55 PM ET | Last Updated: Oct 20, 2012 4:03 PM ET
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Graham Hughes for National PostHarvard Professor Robert Paarlberg following a conference at McGill University in Montreal on Oct. 17, 2012. “It strikes me that what [food activists] oppose is the next forward step in science-based farming, whatever it is, because of their vision of some more traditional, indigenous, agro-ecological approach.”
- MONTREAL – One floor up from the McGill University conference centre where international experts gathered this week to discuss global food security, posters in a student cafeteria trumpeted the facility’s green credentials.
“I choose local. I eat organic,” the signs read. “Make every day Earth Day,” students were urged. “Support environmentally responsible farming.”
The slogans may reflect conventional wisdom on North American campuses and in European grocery aisles. But when imposed on the impoverished farmers of Africa, agriculture expert Robert Paarlberg argues, this mindset spells disaster, thwarting efforts to achieve the food security sought by conference-goers.
A professor of political science at Wellesley College in Massachusetts, Mr. Paarlberg argued in his 2008 book Starved for Science that a growing distaste for agricultural science — manifested in the embrace of organic farming and rejection of genetically modified crops — is keeping Africans hungry.
Speaking to the National Post after addressing the conference, Mr. Paarlberg said little has changed four years later. The only tropical African country that has approved farmers’ use of a genetically modified organism, or GMO, is Burkina Faso, he said, and that was not for a food crop but for cotton.
Field trials in Kenya and Uganda of a maize seed genetically modified to resist drought are viewed more with suspicion than with excitement about the potential to increase farm productivity. “They have to burn the crop after the trial, as though it’s going to somehow contaminate or pollute the countryside,” he said.
The skepticism of African governments is fuelled by what Mr. Paarlberg has called “an imperialism of rich tastes;” in other words, Africa’s urban political elite mimic positions taken by their counterparts in European capitals, hanging their own “science-starved farmers” out to dry.
And there is a crying need for more science, he said. Few African farmers use any fertilizer, irrigation is almost non-existent and most of the seeds planted have not been improved through breeding.
“What fascinates me is that so many of the people who are opposed to GMOs are also opposed to nitrogen fertilizers and the improved seeds of the Green Revolution, which weren’t GMOs,” Mr. Paarlberg said. “It strikes me that what they oppose is the next forward step in science-based farming, whatever it is, because of their vision of some more traditional, indigenous, agro-ecological approach that doesn’t borrow from Western science.”
He said food activists may think they are helping the planet but too often they limit their view to “the kind of food system we should have in the San Francisco Bay Area,” or dietary changes needed to fight obesity.
“They don’t think first about the circumstances of low-resource farmers in rural Africa where people are underweight rather than overweight, where they use too little fertilizer rather than too much fertilizer, where they have no access to markets,” he said. “They’re not victims of globalization. There are no multi-national corporations anywhere to be seen. They live in remote areas that aren’t even connected by road systems to market towns.”
Philimon Bulawayo / Reuters FilesMartha Mafa, a subsistence farmer, stacks her crop of maize in Chivi, about 378km south-east of Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe.
His call for a second Green Revolution, bringing to Africa the kind of gains Asian farmers made in the 1960s and ’70s, has made him something of a lightning rod for opponents of biotechnology. One reviewer of his most recent book, Food Politics, predicted it would “drive food activists half nuts” and he was proven correct.
The book sparked an online campaign by author and activist Frances Moore Lappé and a complaint this year to Oxford University Press that the work did not meet scholarly standards.
The critics called Food Politics “strongly partisan,” complained that Mr. Paarlberg did not provide references for his claims and said he failed to disclose in the book that he once sat on a biotechnology advisory council for the agriculture giant Monsanto.
The publisher stood behind Mr. Paarlberg, noting that Food Politics was part of a series of books aimed at a general readership, most of which did not feature footnotes. Mr. Paarlberg said he was not paid for his work on the Monsanto advisory council, whose other members included people of “visible stature and independence,” including a vice-president of the World Wildlife Federation, the dean of Tufts University’s school of nutrition and Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs.
In a letter to The Chronicle of Higher Education last April, Mr. Paarlberg showed he is not afraid to get down in the trenches. He accused Ms. Lappé of spreading falsehoods through a back-door campaign. “As an academic, I am not accustomed to getting this much attention from anybody,” he wrote. “Colleagues who question my judgments usually register their views by publishing scholarly work of their own, or by speaking at professional meetings, or through direct correspondence with me.” By engaging in “unscholarly conduct,” he concluded, Ms. Lappé had forfeited her right to be taken seriously.
Recently, Mr. Paarlberg has found himself at the centre of another sort of controversy after it came to light thatGlobe and Mail columnist Margaret Wente had borrowed liberally from his writing – as well as the work of Ottawa Citizen columnist Dan Gardner — in a 2009 column about the environmental movement’s efforts to keep biotechnology out of African agriculture. Mr. Paarlberg said he learned of the controversy from a friend in Toronto, but he opted for the high road when asked to comment. “I prefer not to insert myself into a discussion among Canadians that I don’t know enough about,” he said.
At the McGill conference, he spoke on the issue of food and political stability, arguing that what were widely described as “food riots” in 2007-08 and 2010-11 in fact had little to do with hunger. Protests in poor countries were fuelled by anger among city-dwellers over inflation and corrupt regimes, he said. The more than 800 million malnourished people in the world “seldom present a threat to their governments,” he said, because they tend to live in rural areas far from political centres and are disproportionately children or women of childbearing age.
In the interview, he said a common thread joins his advocacy of biotechnology for poor farmers and his debunking of the food-riot narrative: An insistence that attention be focused on the world’s genuinely hungry people. “And these are not the urban dwellers who take to the streets when food prices go up. They aren’t people in the San Francisco Bay Area interested in developing a local organic and slow-food system,” he said.
The people who concern me are the hundreds of millions of chronically under-nourished, underweight and stunted people
“The people who concern me are the hundreds of millions of chronically under-nourished, underweight and stunted people, especially infants under the age of two — but also pregnant and nursing women — who are caught in a poverty trap because the productivity of their labour in farming is so low. Their productivity of labour is low, not because they don’t work hard – they work from dawn to dusk – but they don’t have access to things that farmers in the rest of the world have used to escape poverty.”
They lack decent roads to get produce to markets. They lack electricity and machinery. They lack access to health clinics and schools.
“Most of all they don’t have access to on-farm technologies they need,” he said. “They need access to nitrogen fertilizer, they need access to seeds that have been improved either by conventional breeding or by genetic engineering or by both.”
They need, he said, publicly funded irrigation and foreign aid that supports research on crops they use – millet, sorghum and cassava, not wheat and rice.
What they don’t need are the Eat Organic slogans. Those, he said, can remain in the wealthy countries that can afford the luxury.
National Post
National Post
nice work
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