Liberate science to tackle world hunger

Growing enough food to feed the world’s population is already achieved, though poor people often can’t access or afford it and rich countries waste as much as 30%.

The fact that population growth will peak in around 2050 means that it should be possible to produce sufficient food, provided there is a transformation to more sustainable farming and land use. And provided, of course, that there is a dramatic reduction in carbon emissions and global warming is capped and then reversed.

The scientific journal Nature, in a special issue on food and farming, concludes: “Producing enough food for the world's population in 2050 will be easy. But doing it at an acceptable cost to the planet will depend on research into everything from high-tech seeds to low-tech farming practices.” Nature calls for a “second green revolution” and says:

Such a revolution will require a wholesale realignment of priorities in agricultural research. There is an urgent need for new crop varieties that offer higher yields but use less water, fertilizers or other inputs — created, for example, through long-neglected research on modifying roots — and for crops that are more resistant to drought, heat, submersion and pests. Equally crucial is lower-tech research into basics such as crop rotation, mixed farming of animals and plants on smallholder farms, soil management and curbing waste. (Between one-quarter and one-third of the food produced worldwide is lost or spoiled.)

But the call for “a wholesale realignment of priorities in agricultural research” is a big demand. Public investment in agricultural research has collapsed and the only investors are profit-driven corporations like Monsanto and Du Pont. It is certainly not possible to feed the world with the current profit-driven, smash-and-grab approach of global agri-business.

Far from transforming the way land is used, transnationals are buying it up for intensive industrialised use. Even marginal land that will be entirely destroyed by two or three seasons of chemical-driven agriculture is being grabbed. Genetic modification in the hands of corporations continues to produce unforeseen outcomes that leave the profits of the transnationals intact but leave farmers duped – or forced – into planting GM seed – bankrupt.

The Chinese government is investing in research, but in a reckless and uncontrolled way. From “cloud-seeding” to GM seeds, China is carrying out a massive experiment on its land and people. It has emerged that companies that are part-owned by the state agriculture research institutes where the seeds were developed, have sold genetically modified rice seed to Chinese farming corporations. The relevant safety certificates were never issued.

The reality is that capitalism’s only response to this contemporary set of challenges has been a dramatic increase in market speculation in food and land. New investment funds are being established to profit from the global land grab, with Morgan Stanley to the fore.

And a further devastating price spike is on the horizon as thousands of hectares of grain crops in Punjab – Pakistan’s “bread basket” –have been swept away by the floods, whilst the wheat crop in Russia and Ukraine has been devastated by unprecedented drought. The UN has called for calm, as the world market price for wheat surged – by 7% on one day last week – on forecasts that 25m tonnes has been lost from the global harvest.

It is often said that people have lost confidence in science and its ability to make the world a better place. But it is the economic and political system within which science functions that is untrustworthy. Already thousands of scientists are working on responses to global warming, often in institutions that receive little or no funding.

Released from the need to focus on increased profits by their funding masters, science could contribute not only to feeding the world, but also to transforming agriculture into an activity that works in harmony with the evolutionary biology of plants and people.

Penny Cole
Environment editor

Science and profit are the wrong mix

Disasters like the Mexican Gulf oil well leak shine a spotlight on capitalism’s everyday disregard for safety and its short-term approach to scientific data and knowledge.

For example, chemicals used to disperse oil pouring into the sea from the exploded Deepwater Horizon platform will do almost as much damage as the oil. Dispersal simply spreads the exposure of marine life to toxic chemicals over a greater period of time.

Riki Ott, a leading toxicologist who has written extensively about the Exxon Valdez oil tanker disaster in 1989, said in an interview: "This dispersed oil is extremely toxic to young life forms [which] are a lot more sensitive to toxic chemicals than adults. What we have in the open Gulf is a continuous exposure.”

The announcement this week of a new “life form” created in a laboratory at the J. Craig Venter Institute is another example. This self-reproducing organism made from “off-the-shelf” genes by a computer, has been labelled “extreme genetic engineering” by the ETC Group, which has been monitoring developments in synthetic biology for the past five years .

Dubbed Synthia, the organism was developed in a joint venture between geneticist Craig Venter and Synthetic Genomics Inc. This profit-driven initiative is targeted for use in agro-fuels, pollution clean-ups and industrial agriculture.

No surprise then to discover that one of Synthetic Genomics key investors is – BP. And the other? Exxon! And the third? The US government.

Jim Thomas of the environmental watchdog ETC Group calls synthetic biology a “high-risk profit-driven field” that threatens existing natural bio-diversity with no benefit to humanity as a whole.

But corporations and their client governments love bio and gene science because they smell profits. Supporters are right at the heart of governments. Steven Chu, Obama’s Energy Secretary, was formerly head of an institute which ran a synthetic genome project funded by – you’ve got it, BP.

There may be enthusiasm, and investment of taxpayers money, but there’s little regulation or oversight. Just as in the existing dirty old oil business, these new “clean” industries are left to chase the money, regardless of safety concerns.

In the UN year of bio-diversity, capitalism is engaged in an orgy of destruction, leading to extinctions on a scale greater than the era of the dinosaurs. And as a recent study in the UK found, the rate of emergence of new species is at a standstill.

But new species created recklessly in the laboratory, are being released into the eco-system with little concern for the impact on other species – including human beings.

In China, the introduction of GM cotton has led to an explosion in pests destroying fruit, vegetable and maize crops grown nearby. The GM cotton has its own insecticide built in, allowing unrelated pests to thrive – so nearby farmers are overwhelmed, and even by spraying can’t get the pests under control.

Such unintended consequences are characteristic of the application of science in the capitalist era. The corporation’s use of scientific knowledge has only one intended consequence – the expansion of profit. Leaving science in the dirty hands of the corporations is a recipe for disaster.

Penny Cole

Environment editor

The fault lies within the system itself

The recall of fault-ridden products, which is spreading throughout industrial manufacturing, tells us much about the acute contradictions that permeate the global corporations within the capitalist drive to maximise profits.

Yesterday Nissan announced a recall of just over half a million vehicles, mostly in the US, because of problems with brake pedals and fuel gauges. Toyota leads the field with 8.5 million cars, trucks and sports utility vehicles recalled in the last few months. Toyota’s recalls are for faulty accelerator pedals, jamming floor mats, and braking problems. The pedals are supplied by CTS a US corporation.

General Motors has blamed the supplier JTEKT, a joint venture between Toyoda Machine Works and Koyo Seiko with five manufacturing plants in the US, for a faulty car part that led to the recall of 1.3m Chevrolet and Pontiac cars in North America. The fault in the cars’ power steering has been linked with 14 crashes. Last month Honda recalled 438,000 cars with faulty airbags.

The problem isn’t restricted to cars. On Monday, Sony told millions of PlayStation 3 users not to use their games consoles as it rushed to fix a bug. The warning appeared to be another blow to one of the biggest names in the electronics industry.

Last week Akio Toyoda, the Toyota chief executive whose family name appears on every one of the company’s products, appeared before the US House of Representatives Oversight Committee to explain and apologise. His simple explanation gets right to the heart of the problem. “I fear the pace at which we have grown may have been too quick,” he said.

Though it didn’t come out in the questioning, unpicking Toyoda’s simple statement gets us to the real cause of the crisis which has engulfed the interdependent worlds of finance and production. After World War II, US occupation forces introduced modern production control methods into Japan. These had been developed by it’s the US War Department.

Toyota adopted these as the basis for its development of the “kaizen” philosophy of continuous improvement. Kaizen is a process that, when done correctly, humanises the workplace, eliminates overly hard work ("muri"), teaches people how to perform experiments on their work using scientific methods and how to learn to spot and eliminate waste in business processes.

And it worked. Over the decades, Toyota grew to lead the world in quality, building cars with a reputation for durability and reliability. Other companies followed Toyota in their competition over quality and price.

So what went wrong? Akio Toyoda’s simple statement encompasses the consequences of decades of the fierce competition for profit which obliged Toyota, like all corporations, to globalise, to export production volumes to cheaper labour regions to cut costs. At the same time, the company led built highly-sophisticated vehicles dependent on ever more complex software and computer chips.

In the process it was obliged to outsource production of its components to companies over which it has little control, whilst all the time driving up productivity at a faster rate than its competitors. In the end, the complex, globalised supply chain was Toyota’s undoing and it engaged in a cover-up of mounting problems.

Toyota’s rush to expand simply added to a global saturation of the market, which is another inescapable feature of the capitalist system of production, one which is driving the present recession towards outright slump. Car sales are dropping off the cliff. In Europe they are expected to fall by 10-15% this year. GM is cutting European production by 20%. Europe has a production overcapacity of 6.5m vehicles.

The whole saga demonstrates beyond all argument that capitalism is simply not sustainable. Intense competition has meant the building of cars that are increasingly unsafe to drive, that add to carbon emissions and then lead to over-production with the consequent loss of jobs and pensions.

Gerry Gold
Economics editor

Lies, damned lies and statistics

Apparently the number of people imagining that there will be more jobs available in the next six months in the United States has increased. This measure of “confidence” sent markets soaring yesterday. But these are the kinds of reports that sustain the now-fading springtime images of economic green shoots. Those who believe them should be warned about too much optimism.

The real story can be found in a variety of statistics and stark lines charting the continuing relentless descent of every part of the global economy. The latest chapter in the slow, drawn-out death of the US car industry sees Chrysler already officially bankrupt, and GM in its last days. The Union of Auto Workers is busy signing cost-cutting deals they hope will save some jobs. Canadian GM employees have accepted pay cuts of 30% in an attempt to keep plants open in Ontario.

With falling incomes for those in work and increasing unemployment there won’t be much spare cash around to sustain spending in North America. Japanese parts and machine tool suppliers are getting worried. According to Ikuo Mori, CEO of Fuji Heavy Industries. “Whatever happens to GM, the impact on the overall (U.S.) economy is going to be huge and it's going to hurt demand."

Standard and Poor’s Case-Shiller index of US home prices since the peak in 2006 – when the effects of the crisis first began to be felt – shows that the deterioration is accelerating. US home prices fell a record 19.1% in the first three months of this year. From the peak, they are down 32.2%. "We see no evidence that that a recovery in home prices has begun," said David Blitzer, chairman of the committee which compiles the index.

No green shoots there, then.


How about Japan and Germany? These two countries hosting major manufacturing corporations became heavily dependent on exports to the rest of the world as a consequence of globalisation. This chart shows Japan’s production, domestic consumption and exports since 2004. It’s been pretty much downhill all the way, and catastrophically so since the end of 2007.





The next one zooms in on Japan’s exports and capital investment over the last year, quarter by quarter.


Note the steady decline in capital investment approaching -40% as exports shrink by more than 70%. Measured by the market value of all final goods and services, Japan was the world’s second biggest producer in 2008 after the US and China, so it’s very important as an indicator of the health of the global economy.


Green shoots? Where? Germany, perhaps? The rest of Europe?

Germany was in fourth position in 2008. In the first quarter of this year, German exports and investment were in free fall, dropping by 9.7 per cent and 7.9 per cent compared with the previous three months. Industrial orders in the Eurozone in March were almost 27 per cent lower than a year before.

These are all quantitative indicators of a deepening crisis with no bottom in sight. At a certain point, quantitative limits are reached and qualitative changes must occur. This is a universal law of nature.

There are two possibilities contained within the contradictory, fast approaching historical moment. In its strange, insane way, retaining capitalist production as the organising principle of society requires the destruction of productive capacity on a scale to match the surplus built up by decades of ballooning credit-led investment.

The other choice is for social ownership and democratic control of the world’s productive resources, creating the things we need to survive in a sustainable way that protects the environment. When you think about it, the choice is obvious.

Gerry Gold
Economics editor

The audacity of hype

As Barack Obama comes up to his 100th day in office, the limitations of his power to determine the course of events are cruelly exposed, nowhere more so than in relation to the economy.

Yesterday, the once mighty car corporation General Motors put forward a plan to hand over its shares to the government and to the trade unions because it is broke. Thousands of jobs are being shed at plants all over the world but it is not enough to save GM from collapse. There’s a similar story over at Chrysler, where demand for its cars has collapsed.

Unemployment in the US is soaring by over 625,000 a month and the Obama administration is unable to stop the jobs haemorrhage. His “stimulus package” is bogged down at local level, thwarted by Republicans if it is not mired in bureaucracy.

Repossessions of people’s homes rose by 9% in the first quarter of 2009 to over 341,000, despite Obama’s promise to help those unable to pay mortgages. One in every 27 Nevada housing units and one in every 54 California housing units received a foreclosure notice in the quarter. Cook County, Illinois, the second most populous county in the US which includes the city of Chicago, has had to suspend hearings because of a backlog of tens of thousands of cases.

Meanwhile, plans for the greatest redistribution of wealth from the public to the private sector – from taxpayers to the banks – remain the president’s preferred way of trying to end the credit crunch. Relying on discredited advisers from the Bush administration like Timothy Geithner, his treasury secretary, the White House is into yet another bank bail-out after the failure of the previous one.

The Public-Private Investment Programme (P-PIP) is aimed at buying up toxic debts (know renamed legacy assets!) by providing purchasers with a subsidy at an amazing 85 cents per dollar. It allows the banks with the debts to participate in the scheme and to retain any future profits while the state guarantees them against losses on transactions. No wonder critics have dubbed it “cash for trash”. Popular anger continues to mount against the US banks, with the focus now on the Bank of America’s CEO Ken Lewis. A service workers’ union has mounted a campaign to remove Lewis, whose bank has taken $200 billion in taxpayer funds, in a series of actions planned for today.

Supporters of Obama seemed surprised by what has happened and warn that the president risks losing the goodwill that swept him into office. Robert Kuttner, co-editor of The American Prospect, writes, more in sorrow than anger: “The White House seems to view popular backlash against financial abuses as a dangerous force to be bottled up, rather than one to be mobilized to offset the concentrated power of elites.”

Fighting the “power of elites” has, however, never been on Obama’s agenda so he can hardly be accused of betrayal. The Democratic Party historically is a capitalist party, ruling over America in a division of labour with its Republican opponents. It is, therefore, not capable of much more than tinkering around the edges, as Obama’s first 100 days have demonstrated.

Obama rode a tiger of public support to get to Washington as the country’s first African-American president on the promise of change. Yet his administration is being overwhelmed by the impact of the deepest global economic and financial crisis in history and its commitment to restoring capitalism to some kind of health.

The political implications of this are considerable, not to say revolutionary. As the audacity of hope turns into the audacity of hype, the American people will surely have no choice but to take action themselves and create a politics that replaces, rather than offsets, the elites that have wrecked the economy.

Paul Feldman
AWTW communications editor

India's farmers resist GM

The Coalition for a GM-free India, representing hundreds of farmers’ unions, environmental and women’s organisations and organic farming groups from 15 Indian states, this week marched in Delhi against the sale and distribution of genetically-modified (GM) crops and seeds. In particular, they are opposed to an experimental type of Bt brinjal (aubergine) recently approved for large-scale field trials.

Bt - Bacillus thuringiensis - is a naturally occurring bacteria that produces a protein toxic to certain types of insects. The gene that produces the toxin - the Bt gene - can be transferred to seeds, making them more resistant to that insect. There are two major problems with this approach. Firstly, whilst it may reduce the impact of one pest, it can open the door to others. Instead of reducing reliance on fertilisers, farmers will have to pay for the expensive GM seed AND for insecticides to tackle other pests.

Secondly, experts worry that such crops may evoke natural selection and a proliferation of mutant insects resistant to Bt. The natural Bt bacterium is a crucial insecticide in organic farming. Insects with resistance would threaten the future of organic farming. GM crops can also have indirect environmental effects, by changing traditional land management practices that are in reality more sustainable.

When Indian farmers were coerced into using GM cotton, they were plagued by different, and increased numbers, of pests and diseases; deaths of livestock grazed on cotton fields and reports of allergic reactions in humans – and all with no increase in yields whatsoever. In spite of these disasters, the government continues to allow the agri-corporations to use India as a testing ground. Now Mahyco, the Indian branch of Monsanto, plans to start large-scale trials of Bt brinjal from June this year. Also being tested is a Bt okra plant which campaigners claim was planted in breach of environmental regulations for the oversight of trials.

Alongside their activities in India, the agri-corporations are tied in with the aid arm of the US government (USAid) in a project to transform Africa into the biggest GM testing ground of all. Tempting governments with “Trojan horse crops” such as a GM sweet potato in Kenya and a GM potato in Egypt, the corporations have enticed African governments to drop their opposition. As in India, it is ordinary farmers – for example in Mali – who are leading the resistance, unimpressed by claims that GM is the answer to hunger in Africa.

And these claims – now rising to a clamour in response to the capitalist-engineered food crisis – persist, even though new studies clearly show that GM crops actually CUT productivity. A three-year research project by the University of Kansas found that GM soya produces about 10% less food than its conventional equivalent. The outcomes with GM cotton are the same, with lower yields not only in India and China but also in the US.

Last month, the results of a painstaking examination of global agriculture gave no support to GM crops. In a 110-page report released by the International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD), 400 of the world’s leading scientist explored how agriculture can be reinvented to meet population growth, climate change and the growing food crisis. They conclude that industrial, large-scale agriculture is unsustainable, and that traditional systems that produce food whilst sustaining clean water and preserving biodiversity are more likely to improve the lives of poor people. Not surprisingly, Syngenta and other biotech and pesticide companies pulled out of this assessment process.

A recent report highlighted on the AWTW website says that about 200,000 small farmers in India have killed themselves in the last 12 years and the highest number of suicides were in the state of Maharashtra. The report calls it “the graveyard of farmers today”. And that is where the Bt brinjal trials will be located.

Penny Cole
Environment editor

GM is now a global battlefield

The struggle between the biotechnology companies who try to ram genetically-modified (GM) crops and food down the throats of farmers and consumers is now being fought out on a global scale. And biotech corporations like Monsanto are not having it all their way own way. A summary of global reaction against GM in 2006, released by Greenpeace International, provides evidence of growing resistance in many countries. "There is irrefutable evidence that governments, farmers and consumers throughout the world recognise that genetic engineering is unreliable, unviable or downright dangerous," said Jeremy Tager of Greenpeace International. Some countries are banning GM altogether. Rumania, for instance, which had 85,000 hectares planted with GM soy in 2005, will drop to zero this year, in keeping with a new government policy banning its cultivation. Farmers in India, France and the Philippines have led the way with protests, uprooting crops and holding demonstrations. There is even a backlash in the United States, where most GM crops are concentrated, following the Bayer LL601 rice contamination scandal. Californian rice producers and a major rice mill in the state, Sunwest Foods, have called for a ban on any cultivation of GM rice, including field trials. Producers and traders lost out massively when the contamination was exposed. Meanwhile, in 2006, the number of regions in the EU declaring themselves GM-free zones went up to 172 and 4,500 local authorities say they want to avoid using GM products.

Herbicide-tolerant crops are engineered to survive the application of a powerful herbicide that would kill a non-engineered crop, making it easier for farmers to use more herbicide to control nearby weeds. Or so the claim goes. The reality is different. Studies by independent scientists demonstrate that GM crop yields are lower than, or at best equivalent to, yields from non-GM varieties. Reduced yields have in particular been found with Roundup Ready (RR) soy. An independent study of US government statistics shows that the three major GM crops have led to a 122 million pound increase in pesticide use since 1996. Until the widespread adoption of RR crops, there were just two confirmed cases of glyphosate-resistant weeds. But by 2005, many different weeds had become resistant in the United States. The International Service for the Acquisition of Agribiotech Applications (ISAAA), an industry-funded body, ignores all this and paints a rosy picture of inevitable success. In its January 2006 report, ISAAA claimed that "the continuing rapid adoption of biotech crops reflects the substantial and consistent improvements in productivity, the environment, economics, and social benefits realised by both large and small farmers, consumers and society". This kind of nonsense is par for the course and is constantly exposed by organisations like GM Watch. This organisation reveals how the biotech industry funds spurious "scientific" research and underhand lobbying to promote GM as absolutely safe and the answer to world hunger (GM Watch also includes a revealing dossier on the dubious ex-Living Marxism group, whose members have with amazing ease penetrated top levels in the media to promote right-wing, libertarian views that often coincide with those of the biotech corporations). Curiously enough, The GM Watch site has been down recently and its staff think it might have been the victim of a malicious attack. Working out a list of suspects shouldn’t take too long. Send your suggestions to info@gmwatch.org.


Paul Feldman, communications editor