I am puzzled that The Japan Times would have an economist comment on agricultural science and the natural environment, as in Takamitsu Sawa's Aug. 18 article, "Natural enemy of warming." Sawa argues that drought in Australia, spiraling food prices, biofuels and their consequences are driving companies to develop genetically modified organisms (GMO).
The reason these companies are developing GMOs is that they stand to make huge profits by tying farmers into long-term contracts for the purchase of proprietary seeds and accompanying branded fertilizers and pesticides. Moreover, these companies hope that the introduction of these seeds into the food system will irrevocably break the chain that binds farmers to the rate of reproduction in nature, but that GMOs will be so expensive to farm over the long term that governments will be compelled to extend huge agricultural subsidies to maintain food production. These subsidies will be transferred, via farmers, to the likes of Monsanto, Cargill and Wal-Mart.
The present world food crisis is not born of quantitative insufficiency, but of inefficient distribution, the result of agricultural and retail mega-corporations' capturing world food markets. Current agricultural practices based on intensive mass production of energy-rich but nutrient-poor cereals are rendering entire ecosystems into desert-like conditions.
While a few people in the developed world may experience a temporary increase in their financial wealth as a consequence of GMO development, these products are not a suitable answer to the world's food supply problems. The scale and intensity of production required for GMOs to be profitable for farmers means that over the long term they will further impoverish the world of the nutrients necessary for sustainable life on Earth.
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