News: As millions starve, alarmists block famine solutions
In this article, Jay Ambrose criticizes anti-biotechnology activists for their tendency to downplay the potential benefits of genetically modified foods. Jay argues that anti-biotech groups like the Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth deny hunger-stricken populations, mostly in developing countries, from benefiting from genetically modified foods.
By Jay Ambrose
Daily SouthTown
As some of us in this blessed land of ours wonder in the aftermath of Thanksgiving whether we overdid the calories, we might consider that millions in the Third World go to bed hungry every night and that there's an exciting means of assisting them being opposed by anti-modernist environmental alarmists with arguments as shameful as their stance.
The means -- it is not entire or complete, but potentially very, very powerful -- is the technology of implanting genes to enhance an agricultural product in any number of ways, perhaps making it more resistant to pests or disease, maybe even putting selected vitamins into it so those eating it will be more resistant to disease.
As much as has been done with Golden rice, a bunch of journalists were told at an expenses-paid Montana conference sponsored by the Property and Environment Research Center. Bill Dyer, professor of plant sciences and pathology at Montana State University, explained that this rice -- which includes genetically inserted vitamin A -- can help protect the millions of people in Africa and Southeast Asia who die or the hundreds of thousands who are rendered permanently blind by vitamin A deficiency every year.
The professor's further remarks supplemented other things I previously had learned about genetically modified foods through reading and interviews -- there are all kinds of safeguards in place to protect against dangers most scientists consider relatively remote, and millions of Americans consume these foods daily without as much as a burp. For people in the Third World, they could be a godsend -- lifting farmers out of poverty as they get more yield per acre or, more specifically, contain a disease now destroying bananas on which hundreds of millions depend for nourishment and their incomes.
The sad, the reprehensible, fact, however, is that various environmental groups and others have made wild, unsubstantiated claims about the dangers of biotech, and sometimes make it erroneously sound as if the technology's only supporters are right-wing ideologues or paid stooges of money-grubbing corporate interests. They not infrequently have indulged in outright sophistry and have engaged in numerous attempts to obstruct development of these foods.
At the Montana conference, I encountered one of the fallacious arguments sometimes put forth by groups such as Greenpeace and the Sierra Club. I had been going on at the breakfast table about how George McGovern -- former senator, former presidential candidate, former U.N. food ambassador -- had challenged fellow liberals at a hearing, telling them the best science appeared to confirm how biotech could help fill the bellies of millions of children in Africa and elsewhere without risks of unmanageable proportions. Genetically modified foods were crucial for the poor of this world, I asserted. Nonsense, one conference participant said. There is plenty of food in the world right now. The issue is distribution.
Now, I may have been heaping it on some, and it is true in my view that Third World hunger has no long-term fix that leaves out decent government, free trade and market-oriented economies. But to talk about "distribution" as an answer is to talk about accomplishing something that never has been accomplished in the history of humankind and that likely would require coercive measures almost sure to diminish the food supply over time and disrupt agriculture in Third World lands. Even if you are convinced this utopian glory soon will be ours, is it unwise to assist millions of people in the meantime?
Already, alarmist groups have exacted tragedy as the price for their exaggerated fears and peculiar reasoning -- once by persuading the president of Zambia to decline genetically modified corn from the United States during a famine.
"There is something insane about food aid rotting while people starve due to disinformation campaigns," wrote a Tanzanian physician, Michael Mbwille, as quoted in an article on the subject, and, yes, there is, and, yes, it's something worth thinking about in these post-Thanksgiving days.
Jay Ambrose, formerly Washington director of editorial policy for Scripps Howard
newspapers and the editor of dailies in El Paso, Texas, and Denver, is a columnist living in Colorado. He can be reached at speaktojay@aol.com.
