Thursday, May 8, 2008

NGO-bashing and Private Sector Positioning at Crop Life Side Event Yesterday

By: Tomislav Tomasevic, ANPED, and Neth Dano, Third World Network

Half of the US$4 billion spent on agricultural research every year goes to plant biotechnology (read: GMOs). At last night’s side event on the topic, Antonio Galindez of CropLife International declared that spending on plant biotechnology research is constantly increasing, and pleaded for more public and private money for agricultural research. One might ask, with that amount of money for research annually, if there is any single GMO that has made an impact in addressing hunger and alleviating the plight of the poor?

With major agricultural biotech and fertilizers companies as organizers, it came as no surprise that the key message that reverberated in the room focused on how agribusiness has to respond to the challenge of meeting escalating food demands and rising population growth through increased use of chemical fertilizers and agricultural biotechnology (again, read: GMOs).

The discussions provided a very good picture of how the biotech and fertilizers industries are positioning themselves to cash in on the current global food crisis by peddling their products, namely GMOs and synthetic fertilizers, as solutions to dwindling food production and rising hunger. The wonders of modern plant breeding and biotechnology (read: genetic engineering) resonated in the room, with some reminders of realism from the audience about focusing instead on the potentials of marker-assisted breeding for orphan crops in poor countries.

Interestingly, the side event became an occasion for NGO-bashing by some distinguished scientists in the audience. NGOs were lumped as anti-capitalists when they questioned public-private partnerships in agricultural research while trillions of dollars ooze out of the ears of rich countries for waging their profit-raking wars in sovereign states.

NGOs were again pictured as villains responsible for ruining the messianic ambitions of the Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) in saving humanity from hunger, forgetting that many NGOs chose to work with national agricultural research centers whose researches are much more relevant, cost efficient and grounded to farmers’ needs. Good that somebody from the audience (not from an NGO) reminded those present that the CGIAR spent half of the billions of dollars that went its way since 1971 to Sub-Saharan Africa, without making any impact up to now on saving the continent from hunger and malnutrition.