[p2p-research] GM food -> buggy reasoning.

[Kevin Carson]

> On Thu, May 21, 2009 at 6:25 PM, Hervé Le Crosnier
> wrote:

> >        First of all, we have to understand what really genetic food is.
> >        the way seed are industrially produced from the 30's of the
> >        preceeding century is two fold:
> >        - one to have the only yield in focus : no matter the taste,
> >          nutrition quality, social quality of plants... If so, nature
> >          and farmers, from milleniums are doing their best to
> >          get an equilibrium between yield and nature preservation
> >          (in all senses : between plants and animals, and between
> >          men and women living on rural area, with their social
> >          environment).

I think many of the same criticisms Frances Moore Lappe made of "Green
Revolution" seeds a generation or two ago hold up against GMOs today
as well.  They are designed primarily for the needs of monoculture
agribusiness--namely, to work best in large-scale cash crop
agriculture with access to large amounts of subsidized irrigation
water and other inputs.

In places like Africa, GM crops are a solution to an artificially
created problem.  A comparable (at least) increase in productivity
could be achieved by putting peasant small holders on the land they
and their parents and grandparents have been evicted from over the
past few generations, and teaching them soil-intensive techniques
(like green manuring with leguminous cover crops), rainwater
conservation, etc.  And absent special state subsidies to irrigation
water, and absent the wealth for affording high overhead inputs like
chemical fertilizers, what Lappe called "locally improved varieties"
(hardy varieties adapted to harsh local landscapes) would be far
better as a cost-effective way to boost production for people without
any money to put up front.

There is no such thing as generic "efficiency" without regard to the
interests of the person adopting a technique.  And the techniques
currently being developed in the state-agribusiness complex are those
suited to the needs of those who evicted peasants from land that was
rightfully theirs and put the stolen land to use for cash crop
agribusiness.

-- 
Kevin Carson
Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org
Mutualist Blog:  Free Market Anti-Capitalism
http://mutualist.blogspot.com
Studies in Mutualist Political Economy
http://www.mutualist.org/id47.html
Organization Theory:  A Libertarian Perspective
http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html