Robert Fraley, CEO of Monsanto, has said that there are 7.2 billion people on the planet and will be 9.6 billion by 2050. 

He argues that the demand for food will double and GM food will enable us to feed the planet without encroaching on the forests and wetlands. Fraley said that this represented a business opportunity.

US Republican Senator Charles Grassley once claimed that it is shameful that the leaders of some southern African countries who are apparently well-fed would rather see their populations go hungry than eat the same food people consume daily in the United States. 

Grassley was criticising leaders who rejected GMO technology. His attitude is indicative of the pro-GMO lobby’s use of emotional blackmail when promoting its cause and the smearing of anyone who rejects GM crops as being an enemy of the poor and a hypocrite. 

Such statements are based on spurious claims about the efficacy of GMO technology and divert attention away from the true nature and causes of hunger and food poverty.  

Proponents of GM crops claim that we need such technology to address hunger and to feed a growing global population. 

We are told by the GM biotech sector that GM crops are essential, are better for the environment and will provide the tools that farmers need in a time of climate chaos. 

It claims that GM crops provide higher yields and higher incomes for farmers around the world.

The Canadian Biotechnology Action Network (CBAN) has just released a fully referenced report that dissects each of these claims and dismisses them one by one.

The report concludes that hunger is caused by poverty and inequality. People are generally hungry not because of insufficient agricultural production but because they do not have money to buy food, access to land to grow food or because of complex problems like food spoilage, poor food distribution systems and a lack of reliable water and infrastructure for irrigation, storage, transport and financing.

If these deeper problems are not addressed and as long as food is not reaching those who are hungry and poor, increased agricultural production will not help reduce food insecurity. It is revealing that we already produce enough food to feed the world’s population and did so even at the peak of the world food crisis in 2008. 

The report by CBAN states current global food production provides enough to feed 10 billion people. 

In fact, the world produces 17 per cent more food per person than it did 30 years ago and yet the number of food insecure people is still very high. The recent food price crises of 2008 and 2011 both took place in years of record global harvests, clearly showing that these crises were not the result of scarcity.

The GM crops that are on the market today are not designed to address hunger. Four GM crops account for almost 100 per cent of worldwide GM crop acreage — corn, canola, cotton and soy. 

All four have been developed for large-scale industrial farming systems and are used as cash crops for export, to produce fuel or for processed food and animal feed.

The report argues that GM crops have not increased yields and do not increase farmers’ incomes. Moreover, GM crops lead to an increase in pesticide use and cause further harm to the environment. 

For example, according to CBAN, pesticide reduction was the primary selling point for the adoption of Bt cotton — a genetically modified variety of cotton — in India, but overall pesticide use has not decreased in any state that grows Bt cotton, with the exception of Andhra Pradesh.

GM crops are patented and owned by large corporations, which profit from the sale of GM crops and royalties on GM traits, while small-scale farmers around the world bear the increased cost of buying seeds and the risks that come with using GM crops. 

GM crops reduce choice but increase risk for farmers, while the likes of Monsanto dominate the agritech sector and rake in huge profits. Hunger, food security and “feeding the world” is a political, social and economic problem and no amount of gene splicing is capable of surmounting obstacles like poor roads, inadequate rural credit systems and insufficient irrigation.

The answer to food security, food democracy and local/national food sovereignty does not lie with making farmers dependent on a few large corporations whose bottom line is exploiting agriculture to maximise profit.

As with other reports, the CBAN report concludes that we need to support diverse, vibrant and sustainable agroecological methods of farming and develop locally based food economies. 

After all, according to a recent review by international food NGO Grain, it is small farms and peasant farmers, more often than not serving local communities, that are more productive than giant industrial (export-oriented) farms and which produce most of the world’s food on much less land.

In line with previous findings, not least those of researcher and writer Helena Paul’s analysis of the destruction of traditional agriculture and livelihoods in South America, the report states that the application of GM technology is more likely to enhance and entrench the social, economic and environmental problems created by industrial agriculture and corporate control.

GM is nothing like the panacea to hunger that Fraley claims it is.