For your consideration

[weaktwos]

Shiva's article on Globalization and Poverty.

I'm not sure where I stand on this yet.

A class did a simulation on the Green Revolution and the effects on its people. This simulation did not give us information about the nature of hunger of the people before the use of the Green Revolution package. Overall wealth went up, but commercial farmers took a higher percentage of the wealth over the subsistance farmers. This simulation does not address diversity of food crops, however.

And I'm reading this article by Borlaug...

Comments

[imlac.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the links. This is a seriously important issue that isn't getting the profile it deserves.

My thoughts on the Shiva article are these: she definitely points to some seriously negative effects of the current mileu, but the support for her argument seems largely anecdotal, rather than statistical or systematic. No intervention is without cost. Any programs to help as many people as are at stake here will inevitablly harm others. It's not enough to just tell tales of particular harms that are done, one needs to demonstrate that the harms are widespread, and that they on balance outweigh any goods that those harms purchase.

Also, many of the problems she points to are not problems with bioengineering itself, but rather with aspects of the economic/political substructure surrounding it. There are legitimate concerns surrounding availability of crops and seeds, as well as ownership of genes, but these are distinct (though related) issues to the central issues of GM foods and the proliferation thereof.

[weaktwos.livejournal.com]

I agree, it's not the scientists or the technology that is bad, per se. In fact, I think there are other uses for it.(especially the work about growing food in space). However, though our intentions are good, we could inadvertently be causing more harm than good. Pending more data:
-are we minimizing hunger but creating other problems by virtue of placing policies that prevent subsistance farmers from making a possibly healthier yet not as advanced product? Are we increasing production of food, but at a lesser quality?
-how important is biodiversity?
-GM foods are clearly more expensive to produce given all the research dollars, as well as production costs. In the long run, will the benefits exceed the costs involved in making GM foods (testing Shifa's assertion of 10:1 cost:benefit ratio)?

These costs show up outside of the hunger issue, so have thus far not really be addressed by GM foods advocates. That is my gripe for those who support GM foods. They make an emotional plea that those who are against gm foods are well fed and rich, while the ones who need GM foods are starving. They don't seem to consider or address that there can be negative side effects outside of the "people are hungry!" line of argumentation.