Publication - 1 September, 2003
Not since the hunger crisis of 1984 in Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa has the issue of "feeding the hungry" been so prominent in the global news agenda. In the year between the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg and the WTO Ministerial Meeting in Cancun, the already overblown rhetoric claiming that Genetic Engineering (GE) would solve the problem of world hunger has reached even more outrageous proportions. This is particularly true in the United States. Most parts of the US Government, from Congressional legislation on aid to Africa, to the US Trade Representative, to President Bush himself addressing the graduating class of the US Coast Guard Academy have acted as enthusiastic cheerleaders for the GM industry. Yet despite the enthusiasm for high tech solutions to the problems of world hunger, the fundamental truth about food and hunger remains unacknowledged by the GM advocates: people go hungry because they are poor, powerless, both or have no land upon which to grow food. Genetic engineering and GM crops will do nothing to solve these problems, and show every likelihood of making them worse.