MALNUTRITION: Gates' Foundation Backs GM

20 Apr 11 - John Kariuki John Kariuki is vice-president of Slow Food International and currently works in his homeland of Kenya on Slow Food’s projects for biodiversity and food sovereignty.


Efforts to expand the use of genetically modified (GM) crops in Asia and Africa were given a major boost last week with the announcement of a significant investment from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which has pledged $US18.6 million. The grant will fund projects aiming to develop modified varieties of rice and cassava, intending to produce greater quantities of one or more nutrients to tackle malnutrition.
Since its beginnings 30 years ago, GM technology has claimed to be able to feed the world and eradicate malnutrition. However in this time, we have only seen the number of hungry and malnourished grow, along with new problems and ramifications of a technology that we do not yet fully understand. While we can transplant a gene from one species to another for its desired characteristics, we cannot yet know how to predict or contain its results.
In Kenya and many other African countries, more and more people are turning to the traditional knowledge of communities as the key to solving problems of nutrition, and see the spread of GM crops as a new sickness of the land. Traditionally, communities have reduced their vulnerability to the effects of climate change and crop failure by relying on biodiversity in food supply. A dry season might destroy maize one year so instead we survive on cassava. With GM crops, which require large surface areas for planting and an intensive monoculture system, we don't have this safety blanket. Diversity in food choices also ensures that diets are varied enough to contain the required macro and micronutrients for good health, reducing the incidence of malnutrition.
As part of the funding, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will support the BioCassava Plus project in Nigeria and Kenya to manipulate an increased production of beta-carotene, iron and protein in cassava which is an important crop in many parts of the world. Several communities in Kenya depend on cassava as a staple food as it survives in adverse conditions. The introduction of BioCassava will interfere with and wipe out farmers’ extensive and tireless efforts to preserve and exchange traditional varieties of cassava that are well adapted to particular local agro-climatic conditions.
Furthermore, by influencing farmers to grow the same variety, the introduction and proliferation of GM crops also pose a problem of freedom, reducing producers’ autonomy by creating economic dependence on seed suppliers. In most cases, GM crops also require high external inputs such as chemical pesticides and fertilizers, which, as well as generating their own threats to human health and the environment, are often out of the financial reach of poor small-scale farmers. This creates a cycle that further impoverishes the farmers and turns them into slaves who are no longer in control of their own destiny, having to turn to the shops at every planting season.
The funding will also have a massive impact on farming autonomy and sustainability in Asia, where it will support the Philippine Rice Research Institute and the Bangladesh Rice Research Institute to engineer GM strains of “golden rice” to provide high levels of beta-carotene to decrease vitamin A deficiency in the local population.
To solve the problems of our times, we need to support and build on indigenous food systems, not stamp on them and wipe them out. The answers lie in the traditional agricultural knowledge that is held in the hearts, minds and hands of our small-scale farmers.
http://www.slowfood.com/international/food-for-thought/focus/94034/gates-backs-gm/q=89337D?-session=query_session:42F942010a41b1B38FhYj1F718DC

MALNUTRITION: Cash boost should help bring fortified rice and cassava to market

Anjali Nayar : 14 April 2011 : Nature

Golden rice (right) provides more vitamin A than normal rice.International Rice Research Institute

Nearly US$20 million in new grants from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will be spent on getting nutritionally enhanced rice and cassava to market and decreasing malnourishment in Asia and Africa.
The grants will help in the development, testing and marketing of Golden Rice, which is fortified with vitamin A, in the Philippines and Bangladesh, and BioCassava Plus, a tuber fortified with vitamin A, iron and protein in Kenya and Nigeria.
In rich countries, people generally have access to a diverse diet and to foods that have been fortified with various essential nutrients, but these items are often unaffordable or unobtainable in the developing world.
People in poor nations, especially farmers, often only have access to what they grow. In parts of Asia, people rely on rice for 50–80% of their daily calories, and around 70 million Africans rely on cassava. It's no surprise then, that vitamin and mineral deficiencies affect more than two billion people worldwide, and contribute to around 7% of deaths and 10% of the disease burden in low-income countries, according to Juan Pablo Pena-Rosas, coordinator of the Micronutrients Unit at the World Health Organization in Geneva, Switzerland.
Biofortified, or nutritionally enhanced, staple crops could thus greatly reduce the death and disease burden related to nutritional deficiencies, according to Lawrence Kent, head of agricultural development at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in Seattle, Washington. Several research groups are working on fortified varieties of bean, rice, maize, sweet potato, cowpea, peanut, wheat, pumpkin and banana.
"I'm optimistic that biofortification can help to improve people's health and lives because we are using sustainable foods that people already grow," Kent says.

Lab or field?
Plants can be fortified either through conventional plant breeding or using biotechnology to alter its genome and increase its nutritional yield, explains Pena-Rosas.
The firm HarvestPlus in Washington DC, which released orange sweet potato containing 50% of the daily vitamin A requirement in Uganda and Mozambique in 2007, uses traditional breeding techniques. Both Golden Rice and BioCassava Plus are genetically modified organisms (GMOs), and have attracted their fair share of negative attention from the anti-GMO lobby. "Anything that involves biotechnology involves a level of controversy," explains Kent. "But we need to be open and data-focused."
The Gates Foundation grants will help to generate the data needed for Golden Rice and BioCassava Plus to meet food safety and environmental regulations. "These crops will not be used by farmers or consumers until they pass tests for biosafety in each country," says Gerard Barry, who coordinates the Golden Rice Network at the International Rice Research Institute in Los Baños in the Philippines.
Golden Rice is expected to receive regulatory approval in the Philippines in 2013 and in Bangladesh in 2015, according to Ingo Potrykus, a retired geneticist at the Institute of Plant Sciences in Zurich, Switzerland, and one of the rice's inventors. BioCassava Plus should follow a few years later — the team hopes to obtain approvals by 2017, according to Martin Fregene, a plant geneticist and the director of the BioCassava Plus Program, based in St Louis, Missouri.
"As long as we can show that [these products] add value and are safe, there is no mother who would not want to use them to increase the health of her kids," says Fregene.
http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110414/full/news.2011.233.html

MALNUTRITION: GM crops continue spread, passing 'billion hectares'

22 February 2011
 By Richard Black: Environment correspondent, BBC News


Most European societies remain opposed to GM agriculture, despite advances elsewhere

The area of the world's farmland used for growing genetically modified crops increased by about 10% last year.
GM use grew fastest in Brazil but fell in the EU, says the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications (ISAAA).
Virtually all GM strains used were engineered for just two traits, disease resistance and herbicide tolerance.
ISAAA is an organisation partly funded by industry that promotes biotechnology as a path to sustainability.
It calculates that more than a billion hectares have been cultivated with GM crops since their introduction in 1996 - the figure derived by adding together the areas cultivated with these varieties in all of the intervening years.
ISAAA estimates that more than 15 million farmers are involved in GM agriculture.
"We can recount a momentous year of progress in biotech crop adoption," said Clive James, the organisation's chairman and founder.
"During 2010, the accumulated commercial biotech plantation exceeded one billion hectares - that's an area larger than the US or China.
"And biotech crops registered double-digit growth over 2009, bringing the total global plantings to 148 million hectares. Biotech crops are here to stay."
However, critics point out that this is still just 10% of the world's arable land area as defined by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
About half of the global GM total is accounted for by the US - although overall, the developing world is adopting the technology faster than industrialised countries.
If current trends continue, developing countries will be growing more than half of the global total within a few years.

Potatoes are among the GM crops starting to become more widespread

During 2010, Pakistan and Burma took their initial steps into the GM world by growing cotton modified to be resistant to insect pests.
The EU, however, continues to buck the global trend, registering a slight fall in the land area under GM cultivation.
Germany and Sweden both supported small areas of a new potato variety grown not for food, but to produce high-quality starch for industrial use.
Greenpeace, meanwhile, has presented a petition bearing more than a million signatures to the European Commission, demanding that the executive stop approving new GM varieties.
Recently, the EU introduced the "European citizen's initiative", which allows more than a million citizens jointly to ask for a change in the law.
"Today's European data shows that GM crops are failing in the field and on the market; farmers and consumers are not falling for biotech industry propaganda," said Greenpeace EU agriculture policy adviser Stefanie Hundsdorfer.
"GM crops are not more productive and are less resistant to extreme climate conditions than normal crops. They do however present a serious risk for our environment."

Golden future
One of the principal criticisms of the biotech industry down the years is that companies have not commercialised crops that produce direct benefits to the public, such as those with improved nutritional content, or that allow farmers in poor countries to grow crops in land that is currently too hot, too dry or too salty.
Virtually all of the crops grown in 2010 were either engineered to be resistant to insect pests - typically, through insertion of a Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) gene that produces a toxin - or tolerant to proprietary herbicides.
A significant and growing proportion - about 20% - carried both traits, reflecting the trend for companies to market varieties containing a number of introduced genes "stacked" on top of each other.
Up to eight genes are stacked in a single variety.
Another criticism is that just four crops - soya bean, cotton, maize and canola (a relative of rape) - dominate the market, with little attention paid to other important foods of the developing world poor, such as rice, millet or sorghum.
Dr James suggested this situation was about to change, with crops due to come into commercial use over the next five years, including many with enhanced nutrition, notably "Golden Rice" enhanced in Vitamin A.
"Golden rice is expected to be available in 2013 in the Philippines and thereafter in Bangladesh, Indonesia and Vietnam," he said.
"Also [we will soon see] potatoes modified to resist late blight - the disease that caused the Irish potato famine - as well as sugar cane, bananas, eggplant, tomato, cassava. sweet potato, pulses and groundnuts."
He claimed that the introduction of Golden Rice could save the lives of thousands of people afflicted with Vitamin A deficiency.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-12541465

POVERTY: Bringing agriculture and health back together

Jeff Waage
24 August 2010
Involving health experts in agricultural development projects can help to foresee health threats and improve project design
Agriculture and health experts must work together to tackle disease, poverty and malnutrition, says development expert Jeff Waage.
The relationship between agriculture and health may seem intuitive and simple — grow more crops and people will have more food and live healthier lives. But because agriculture and health policies are rarely coordinated, the reality is far more complex.
The truth is that despite a huge increase in agricultural productivity and food availability over the past 50 years, and falling food prices, about a billion people remain chronically undernourished.
At the same time, production of cheap refined cereals, sugars and fats is contributing to urban diets that are energy dense and nutrient poor, leading to rapidly growing rates of obesity and diabetes, and associated chronic diseases. This dietary transition is now being seen in countries like China, India and Mexico.
A burden on the poor
Health problems related to agriculture are particularly acute in low and middle income countries. Governments there may face both chronic rural undernutrition and worsening urban diets — a 'double burden' of diet-related disease.
Developing nations also have the greatest food safety threats from chemical and biological contamination in the food chain, such as pesticides, mycotoxins and zoonotic disease, as well as threats from wildlife and livestock, such as the Ebola virus and avian flu.
Most of the poor in these countries are farmers and farm workers, who depend on agriculture for their livelihoods, including the income needed to buy health services. Threats to agriculture become threats to health.
The reverse is also true. Diseases such as HIV/AIDS not only exacerbate malnutrition but can devastate labour, farm productivity and livelihoods. A study in Kenya has shown that the death of male household heads can slash per capita household food production by two thirds. These health and agriculture interactions create a downward spiral of declining health and resources.
Health and agriculture together
The key to tackling these problems lies in better integration of health and agricultural interventions and policy. To start, this means identifying negative interactions and working together to address them.
For example, irrigation projects that increase yields may unintentionally encourage diseases such as malaria or schistosomiasis. In Sri Lanka, intensification projects that have introduced both irrigation and pig production have created ideal conditions for Japanese encephalitis, whose mosquito vectors breed in ditches and use pigs as alternative hosts.
Involving health experts in agricultural development projects can help to foresee such threats and improve project design.
More generally, the focus of agricultural development on increasing the supply and reducing the cost of food energy — that is, carbohydrates and fats — has helped to imbalance human diets. Agriculture and health experts must work together to re-establish the balance by making foods with essential micronutrients cheaper and easier to access.
Barriers to integration
What stands in the way of integrating agriculture and health research for development?
In part, it is a language barrier: agriculturalists, for example, may talk of improving health in terms of food energy, while health specialists deal in disability adjusted life years (DALYs).
And most of our estimates of food consumption and dietary health — from which we estimate undernutrition — come from extrapolating agricultural production statistics, not from real measures of what people eat and how this affects their health.
Common metrics and methods would underpin an integrated approach. For instance, a recent study on 'golden rice' — rice engineered for high vitamin A content — in the Philippines, expresses the benefits of agricultural innovation in terms of DALYs, while a study in Mongolia on the zoonotic disease, brucellosis, integrates animal production and human health metrics in predicting the cost effectiveness of control.
But the most important barrier to integration is the longstanding isolation of agriculture and health, and their research and policy processes. We see these 'silos' in the UN's intergovernmental bodies, in national ministries and in universities.
A fragmented development landscape can reduce the efficiency and effectiveness of policy interventions.
Take strategies for improving basic nutrition. There are four proven ways of doing this: supplementing diets of the poor, fortifying processed foods, breeding more nutritious crops (biofortification) and encouraging greater agricultural and dietary diversity.
In principle, these methods comprise an excellent and flexible toolbox that, in the right combination, offers one of the best ways of halting malnutrition. But each method is 'owned' and promoted by different communities of health or agricultural specialists, making a joined-up approach difficult.
Joined-up action
The solution is for researchers from both backgrounds to work better together towards common goals. The new Leverhulme Centre for Integrative Research on Agricultural and Health (LCIRAH) is a step in this direction.
It brings together academics from health, agriculture and other disciplines across the social and natural sciences to define and build agri-health research for international development. The agency is an initiative of the London International Development Centre, a University of London consortium that applies interdisciplinary approaches to complex development problems.
Besides LCIRAH, there are other hopeful signs that silos are crumbling. For example, the Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) is preparing a programme for agriculture and health research.
And concepts of 'one health' and 'eco-health' — which link animal systems, human health and environment — are being incorporated into practical programmes in the UN and elsewhere.
Two development sectors that should never have been separated are slowly coming together again.

Professor Jeff Waage is director of the London International Development Centre and chair of the Leverhulme Centre for Integrative Research on Agriculture and Health.
http://www.scidev.net/en/opinions/bringing-agriculture-and-health-back-together.html