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Feeding the world?

In Tangail, Bangladesh, the comminity is using their own adopted rice seed, rejecting the high- yeilding patented GE seeds offered to them by first world food industry.

A Bangladesh community uses its own adopted rice seed instead of the GE seeds they were offered.

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Rather than growing food to meet a local community’s needs of a healthy, diverse diet, industrial agriculture produces crops to sell on world markets.

Under the industrial agricultural model, small family farmers are driven off their land. Local people cannot afford to buy what is grown in their own area. The result can be a downward spiral of environmental destruction, poverty and hunger.

Technological 'solutions' like genetic engineering (GE) overshadow the real social and environmental problems that cause hunger. These issues include who grows our food, how and where it is grown, how it is distributed, and who has access to it.

The argument that GE is vital to feed the world and can enhance agricultural productivity is based on the assumption that hunger is the result of too little food. GE proponents ignore the fact that most starving people live in countries that have food surpluses, not deficits.

The concept of ‘Food Aid’ is frequently used to dump unwanted GE crops onto starving nations in order to stabilise the American cereal and oilseed industry. In August 2002, Zambia rejected a US food aid shipment of GE maize due to concerns about human health and the environment, sparking international debate about the right of a starving nation to choose the GE status of their food.

Food security and sustainable livelihoods can be achieved across the globe by innovative and environmentally responsible farming systems offered by ecologically and socially sustainable agriculture.