BIOTECH'S ENDLESS
RACE:
Interview with Miguel
Altieri
Miguel A. Altieri is a professor in the
Department of Environmental Science, Policy
and Management at the University of
California at Berkeley. FoEI's Janice
Wormworth spoke to him at FoE Europe’s
"Sustainable Agriculture in the New
Millennium" conference in May.
One of the panelists at this conference
proposed to mix agroecological (sustainable
agriculture) and organic approaches with
transgenic engineering, to create new
methods of agriculture such as "transgenic
agroecology." Do you think this is
possible?
No, I don’t think there’s any
possibility because, firstly, we’re coming
from two completely different paradigmatic
approaches. The biotechnologists and the
green revolution were influenced heavily by
Liebig (19
th
century German
chemist whose work aided the development of
artificial fertilizers, ed). He said that
when there is a limiting factor you need to
overcome it with some kind of input or some
kind of genetic manipulation. In
agroecology, we believe that those limiting
factors are just symptoms of a much more
systemic disease. When you have a pest
problem, you don’t deal with it with a
hammer-type approach. You try to go to the
real cause: the lack of diversity of plants
doesn’t allow for natural enemies that are
the ones that control the pests naturally,
and so on.
The Liebig approach failed dramatically
because one limiting factor accompanied by
an intervention led to another limiting
factor. For example, you have a nitrogen
deficiency: you add nitrogen, you overcome
that, and then the plant comes up and you
have pests. But why? Well, because it turns
out you increased the nitrate levels in the
plant’s foliage, and that created pest
problems. And you’ve got to put on an
insecticide to deal with the pests. Well,
another pest comes now, a secondary pest.
Why? Because you killed the natural enemies
of a pest that was neutral. It wasn’t a
pest, and now it has no natural enemies and
because of pesticide application it becomes
a pest. It’s an endless race between the
plant geneticists and the limiting
factor.
Whereas in agroecology, once you go to
the root and deal with the real causes of
the problem you don’t have to deal with it
anymore. So there are major differences
between the unilateral and the ecological
approaches: one chemical, one gene, one
pest as opposed to how do you optimize
ecological synergisms.
The second reason has to do with who
controls the technology. No corporation can
capitalize on the natural processes that
happen in nature, like optimizing diversity
and nutrient cycling and natural pest
control. But with GMOs, the technology is
totally controlled by corporations. It’s
patentable and keeps farmers at a distance.
To me, this is totally incompatible.
There’s no way that there will ever be any
possibility of mixing approaches.
We are told that we will need GM foods
to produce enough to feed a soaring world
population. Could the agroecological
approach produce enough to feed the world
in the future?
You cannot just deal with the problem of
hunger without looking at the root causes.
You have to make many changes, not just in
food production, but also for example in
land reform, returning land to the peasants
for production. Then you must also change
the pattern of production in the South that
is mostly devoted to export agriculture.
There is the whole concept of "ghost
acres", which are acres in the South
devoted to producing food for Europe. The
amount of land in the South that is used to
produce the feed just for the pigs that are
eaten on this continent is just amazing. Or
the amount used for golf courses, or that
is being fed to pets in the North. You have
to make a huge transformation. And if you
make that transformation now, and if you
gear production of local food crops to
consumption for people in those countries,
you don’t need any technology, not even
agroecological techniques.
Now, let's say we limit the discussion
to production. In the developing countries,
80 percent of the farmers are poor, small
farmers and the other 20 percent are the
rich ones. The man from Monsanto who spoke
this morning said, "This poor guy’s annual
food production is 1.7 tons of maize, and
in the US they are producing 8." There is
no way you are going to have these poor
farmers go from 1.7 to 8 or 15 tons per
year unless you give them transgenics and
chemicals, and then the environmental costs
are huge. Only the 20 percent that are in
those high input areas might come to about
8 tons with a lot of chemicals. With the
agroecological approach, we can go from 1.7
to 3 tons per year with 80 percent of the
farmers. So lets say you go from 3 to 8
tons with 20 percent of the farmers, and
you go from 1.7 to 3 tons with 80 percent
of the farmers. Who’s going to produce more
food? The small farmers. So we can do it,
with agroecological methods. We can do it
now.
If we mobilize right now using what we
know is working with poor farmers, we could
double or triple production, and the
problems that they are predicting for
future famines are not going to happen.
That Monsanto representative also
pointed out the role of GM crops in
producing high yields for markets and
export, which provide valuable income for
farmers. Does the agroecological approach
allow for this?
The way that we approach this with the
farmers is that they must, as a
prerequisite to enter markets, be
empowered. And to be empowered, they must
not only be socially organized but they
also have to attain food security and
conserve the ecological integrity of their
farms. That’s a prerequisite. If you don’t
empower them in this way and go right into
export agriculture, like many small farmers
have done with coffee in Latin America,
they become subject to the vagaries of
markets. So when the Germans get tired of
buying from this community and switch to
another that has forest-friendly coffee or
whatever coffee they want, what do these
people do? They are totally dependent on
external markets. It doesn’t matter if they
are organic markets or conventional
markets, the same problems are there.
So what we say is this. If you can
devote one third of your crop to food
security, then you always have something to
rely on if everything else fails in the
market. What we have observed is that
farmers who are empowered, who have
attained self sufficiency and taken care of
the ecological integrity of their farms,
are in a better position to negotiate with
the external forces which are totally
biased against them. So a farmer who is
food secure can say, "Well, I don’t accept
your price", and he’s not going to starve.
Whereas a guy who’s not food secure, what
alternative does he have? It’s an
integrative approach.
What are the motives of big
transnational corporations like Monsanto in
the developing world right now?
There’s no doubt that Monsanto’s main
purpose is to make profit. And in order to
make profit in this very competitive world,
you basically have to have a monopoly. So
they’re trying to monopolize the food
system, there’s no doubt about that.
The way they’re doing it is with this
humanitarian type of approach. And they are
also penetrating national agricultural
research systems. So they’re not only going
to buy the seed companies, as they did in
Brazil, but now in addition they’re going
to start directing research in national
agricultural research systems. They see
that penetrating this system is the perfect
way to put the whole scientific apparatus,
which is very weak, to work for their
interests. And that’s a perfect way -- they
don’t have to invest in labs and
scientists, they just train the scientists
for money, and they need the money. They
give scholarships to the scientists and put
them to work on what is of interest to
them. In the beginning it’s going to be
humanitarian, that’s what’s called
segmenting the market. They say, "You guys
have this for free, but as soon as its
getting into the international markets,
then you’re going to pay." As soon as they
get into markets, the royalty system starts
working, as do patent controls. They’re
doing it not only in Africa but in the
United States, in Europe, everywhere. My
university has a huge grant from Novartis,
US$50 million, and now the research is
totally in the direction of Novartis’
interests.
I think that what we need to do is to
declare war. There has to be an
acknowledgement of two very different
points of view. And there is going to be a
group of people who are going to wage war
against these corporations that are trying
to control the food system and that are
trying to set the agenda in the Third
World. And the Third World should get up
and say, "We don’t need this crap." This is
going to be a big battle. And we hope that
we can count on the support of people in
the North in this battle of freedom,
sovereignty and self-determination. I think
we’re going to win.
What would you say to someone from the
developing world who still has an open mind
about GM foods?
You have to analyze the possibilities of
biotech in the context of what biotech is.
It’s corporate science, it’s an instrument.
Forget about this notion of public domain
science, that doesn’t exist anymore.
Science has been privatized, and
biotechnology is the Trojan horse. If this
person wants that for his people, there
will be a price. And do his people want to
pay the price for that?
Or is this person willing to challenge
all the assumptions -- you know that
biotechnology is going to feed the world,
increase biodiversity and so forth. They’re
all assumptions that have no scientific
basis, they are all hypotheses, there is no
data to demonstrate them. So why doesn’t he
look at the real options? His people have
been farming for centuries, there are
possibilities of reviving traditional
knowledge, there are possibilities of
learning from others, and that type of
knowledge doesn’t chain them to
corporations. These possibilities will
allow local innovation to emerge, and will
provide freedom. That’s what I would tell
him.
