The Revenge of Athena Science, Exploitation and the Third World The Revenge of Athena

Who Should Control the Seeds of the Future?

When the powerless say there is a problem and the powerful say there is not   as is the case in the genetic resources debate at FAO   the only thing absolutely certain is that there is a problem.

Pat Mooney'

It has long been realized that the breadbaskets of the North depend entirely on imported species of plants. By the beginning of the Second World War northern agronomists realized the 'breadbasket' of nations may be grain rich but it is gene poor and that western agriculture is wholly dependent upon the Third World. Over the decades Third World scientists and agricultural officials had been watching plant germplasm leave their countries. Recently, however, there has been the 'formation of an international programme intended to system­atically remove this material as the threat of loss through erosion became better understood. This collection drive was led by IBPGR   an amorphous semi­UN, mostly autonomous organization that appeared both technocratic and aloof. Agricultural ministeries were becoming aware that the material they were donating had considerable value   and that it was disappearing. 16 At the same time, as Pat Mooney notes, 'the nature of the seed industry seemed to be chang­ing. Some of the old familiar names, Sutton's, Ohlsen's, Burpees, etc., had either vanished or been transformed by their absorption into the corporate world of transnational enterprises. The new seedsmen were tougher, more aggressive; they wanted more money for their seeds, and they were reluctant to share breeding information'. In this background, as Pat Mooney further points out, 'a sense of growing discomfort was ignited by the information that plant genetic resources were becoming a political weapon and that the outward flow of germplasm was almost entirely to the North, to the advantage of that region's high tech genetics supply industry. 97

Describing these developments the New Scientist (6 June 1986) wrote that, 'The history of the world's plant species has leapt off the pages of botanical texts into the political spotlight' and went on to call it the germplasm war between North and South.

The struggle for the collection and conservation of plant genetic resources   and the political and commercial control of these resources is now taking place across the globe. The political debate is centred at FAO. Global responsibility for germplasm collection and conservation has been ceded to IBPGR. While there is much uncertainty about the work and effectiveness of both organizations, there is widespread agreement that time is running out.'

The countries of the South which have contributed most of the valuable food species, insist that plant germplasm is the world's common heritage and free to all. This communal gene bank in the view of the South would include the seed of hybrids and supercrops created in the laboratories of the North along with the developing world's own wealth of wild species. However, the industrialized countries which were so averse to the concept of the 'common heritage of mankind' in the context of the Law of the Sea work in the UN, have found 'the common heritage' concept in the context of the PGRs very accept­able. But the common heritage in the view of the North was to be applied only to the South's wild genetic resources, which the North's seed industry needs but not to the hybrids created out of these wild genetic resources. These could be got by the South if it were willing to pay the price. This willingness to pay of course ironically involves the pawning of the future of the South's food security to the North.

Both in order to protect its wild genetic resources as well as to preserve the diversity of earth's remaining genetic resources, the South has been fighting for an international gene bank and an international convention on genetic resources. The fight has also been over IBPGR, an organization over which member states have no control and which functions like a 'traffic cop directing South's genetic heritage to the North'.9 It has hitherto remained a board 'with­out any membership or any legal identity, IBPGR has always donned the mantle of FAO in order to launch germplasm collection programmes in the Third World. Only because of its identification with FAO has IBPGR been permitted into many countries. '10 The North, particularly countries with pow­erful profitable agribusinesses and seed enterprises, such as the US, most of Europe, Scandinavia and Australia, has all along resisted these attempts. Inspite of these attempts and the concerted efforts of private industry and agribusiness to push for plant breeder rights and the patenting of hybrids, the countries of the South have managed to make some modest gains on their FAO political battleground. In 1983 they wrested an International Undertaking on Plant Genetic Resources and the establishment of a high level Commission on Plant Genetic Resources. According to Pat Mooney, who has been working on the issue of PGRs as well as monitoring the FAO debate quite closely, 'both the Commission and Undertaking are unassailable'. He sees the following propos­als as those which Third World governments may wish to implement in the years to come. They are:

1. 
   Expansion of the Commission and Undertaking to all forms of genetic material including animals and micro organisms important to food and agriculture;
   
2. 
   Strengthening FAO's financial support for genetic resources through the development of a World Gene Fund of US$100 million along the general lines raised by the Netherlands and Norway;
   
3. 
   Renewed discussion on the development of an International Gene Bank
   

and a revised network under the auspices or jurisdiction of FAO and the commission;

4. 
   A study of the opportunity for Genetic Co operation among Developing Countries (GCDC) in the context of the expanding role of genetic raw materials in genetic engineering.
   

Achieving these proposals is going to take some years and in relation to PGRs we are fast losing time. International seed company lobbies like the Inter­national Association of Plant Breeders for the Protection of Plant Varieties (ASSINSEL) are doing all they can to promote and protect plant breeder rights (PBRs), or basically the rights of private corporate institutions involved in seed hybridization and marketing. Their stake is increasing, considering that some of the world's leading chemical concerns are also becoming the world's seeds­men. This is because seeds, fertilizers, pesticides and pharmaceuticals have a common ground in intensive research related to genetics and chemicals. Add to this the smuggling of genetic resources from the South and the commerciogenic erosion continues. The point about commerciogenic erosion needs to be strongly underscored. As Pat Mooney says, 'This point needs strong emphasis: companies have no choice but to regard traditional cultivars as "competition" to their hybrid or otherwise proprietary (via PBR) varieties. 1' 2 The elimination of this competition by the elimination of traditional cultivars results in commer­ciogenic erosion.

Further, 'between 40 and 50 per cent of all types of living things   as many as five million species of plants, animals and insects   live in tropical rain­forests, though they cover less than 2 per cent of the globe'." At the same time, 'it has been estimated that 0.6 per cent of forest lands are being deforested every year: a phenomenon which is worrying in itself, since by the year 2000 a further 10 per cent of forest capital will have been eaten away'. 14 Modern science has so far managed to study only I per cent of the species of this fast eroding world's largest genetic reservoir. I I We are equally aware that 'few scientists ever become as expert as the natives of the forest in distinguishing between the many hun­dreds of forest species'.16 At the same time in terms of modern science and our dependency on it the situation particularly in the developing world is as follows.

According to the National Science Foundation, there are at most four thou­sand scientists in the whole world who are primarily concerned with tropical ecosystems. About half of these are taxonomists, whose concern is simply to name new species.One half of all tropical American and European (17 per cent in Europe, the rest in North America). Latin America has 22 per cent, as do Asia ecologists and taxonomists are North and Australia together; Africa has 6 per cent. The total number of scientific papers published each year on the environmental biology of the United States alone is greater than the total published on all aspects of tropical biology worldwide. 17

It is in the light of such a situation, that the views of scientists like Plucknett and Swaminathan who would have us believe that all is safe in the hands of modern science and its handmaidens, the scientists, must be viewed. As Mooney comments in the context of the work of the IBPGR:

Linnaeus would have been amazed. A science which can guesstimate the number of higher order plant species to the nearest 50,000; a science that concedes that at least 65 per cent of the material in genebanks has not even basic passport data; a science that admits that between half and two thirds of the genetic diversity placed in storage may have already been destroyed can still bravely tell the world that farmers and nature have produced (more or less) 110,000 wheat varieties (including landraces) and between 12,000 and 12,500 wild wheat types ... and that 90 per cent of the cultivars and at least 75 per cent of the wild wheats are safely housed in genebanks. On the seventh day when God rested, IBPGR was obviously out counting! 11

In the face of this bewildering situation, it seems as if social scientists have also felt obliged to come to the rescue of modern science. In the June 1986 New Scientist article referred to earlier, Jack Kloppenburg, assistant professor of rural sociology at the University of Wisconsin, in putting forward the tired old argument that no region is genetically independent has said that no region can afford to isolate itself through 'a genetic OPEC'. He then goes on to argue that both sides in the battle over plant genetic resources are wrong. According to him, plant breeders never give away what cost them dear to perfect while at the same time wild species and those cultivated by the world's peasant farmers have intrinsic value, and like minerals or oil, should be paid for.

If one scans the media, particularly western media writing, on the PGR issue, one finds increasingly similar comparisons made between PGRs and oil. On one level, it is not quite accidental. Modern reductionist knowledge does not see an unextracted resource as a resource. There is no such thing as a resource that is a resource by not being extracted, used or made into economic value.Though such an approach has created problems in relation to resources such as oil. Oil must be explored, extracted to become a resource, but it is better to keep it below the earth or the seas for the more that is found the lower the price. Inspite of this contradictory fact even about oil as a resource, comparisons are made between oil and PGRs, though it is a well known fact that with the destruction of plant species, each disappearing plant kind can take with it anything from ten to thirty animal or insect species directly or indirectly dependent on it. PGRs are part of a complex ecosystem and are not just another resource like oil or coal. Yet, the kind of facile comparisons to oil and 'genetic OPEC' goes on, and involves a certain degree of mischief. I used the word 'mischief' deliberately, because it is mischief to suggest that all governments or scientific bodies in the Third World know the full extent of their PGRs and their economic value and are trying to form a cartel. Anyone knows this is not true and only creates many

misleading conclusions. It is totally impossible to give any economic value that would have any meaning now or in the future to a very important and basic part of the ecosystem that we live in, like genetic resources.

In this complex background at a global level of the struggle to prevent the privatization and corporatization of PGRs and the controversy as to who should control the genetic richness and diversity in the Third World, we have to turn our attention to the issue of HYVs or hybrid seeds and their implications for growing more food, alleviation of rural poverty and related concerns in the Third World.

Introduction of New Seeds and Varieties

The controversy around the preservation of PGRs and who should have the right to exploit them is of course linked to the production of hybrid seeds. Not only is seed business becoming big money, but the growth in use of these hybrid seeds is also linked to the growth of the fertilizer and pesticides industry. As Lester Brown, once president of the Rockefeller Foundation has noted, 'Fertil­isers is one item in the package of new inputs which farmers need in order to realize the full potential of the new seeds. Once it becomes profitable to use modern technology, the demand for all kinds of farm inputs increases rapidly. And only agribusiness firms can supply these new inputs efficiently. "I

Even though Third World Countries, particularly those in Asia, enthusias­tically embraced the Green Revolution, especially to ease social tension caused by widespread food shortages, it was clear whom the Green Revolution was intended to benefit. Pat Mooney identifies them: 'The Green Revolution has been undeniably profitable for agribusiness. By the sixties, agricultural enter­prises were in need of a new market to maintain their growth. Bilateral and multi lateral aid program made expansion into the Third World financially possible. Twenty years later, major agrichemical firms have achieved a world­wide distribution system able to market successfully in Asia, Africa and Latin America. The Green Revolution was the vehicle that made all this possible. 120 And the Green Revolution was launched on the promise of the miracle new seeds, the superior hybrids that modern science has created to replace the traditional variety of seeds.

The biggest implication in the use of the new seeds of HYVs has been the growth in fertilizer and pesticide production and consumption and the corre­sponding dependence of food production on them. Clarence Dias notes that:

By 1967 India was already paying out 20 per cent of its export earnings on fertilizers. When cheap energy vanished in the 1970s, the Third World found itself saddled with an energy dependent agricultural system. Fertilizer short­ ages in 1974 resulted in a loss of 15 million tons of grain, enough to feed 90 million people. Ninety seven per cent of the world's pesticides comes from the industrialized countries, but thanks to the Green Revolution, Third

World consumption is up 20 per cent and rising. Third World countries are increasingly finding that serious environmental problems are being imported along with their imports of fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides and at an ever escalating cost in foreign exchange at that. The price of the seed itself has more than doubled since the early days of the Green Revolution.21

One could even go on to say that it was the Green Revolution and the HYVs that brought 'Bhopal' to India and very likely one cannot speak of 'No More Bhopals' without talking of putting a halt to this perverse revolution.

Apart from the fact that the Green Revolution emerged as a project of powerful corporate institutions as part of their planning for the future, what prompted the ruling elites of the Third World countries to adopt this technol­ogy? A major reason was that it initially came heavily subsidized by international, UN and other multilateral agencies.

The previously insurmountable obstacle of successfully selling a new variety to millions of smallholders   a hugely expensive marketing proposition among customers who could not afford to pay   now seemed solved as the World Bank, UNDP, FAO, and a host of bilateral aid programmes began to accord a high priority to the distribution of HYV seed. The companies could sell to their own governments or to a Third World government agency and let them bear the burden of distribution. Third World governments were pre­pared to heavily subsidize prices and also to force peasant farmers to buy new seed by attaching the use of 'improved' varieties to access to agricultural credit and other inputs including irrigation. From being a needful but uneconomic market, the Third World loomed as a vast and highly profitable one .22

All this notwithstanding,what were the internal pressures or rationale within a country for allowing these developments? The reasons were socio structural and political. In the 1950s in almost all the newly independent countries of Asia, there was an urgent need to provide food, particularly cheap food in the cities; this was both out of a political consideration, vis a vis maintaining support for the government in the cities and an economic one of keeping wages low. The latter objective of low wages was to be achieved by ensuring cheap food prices, so that with low wages there could be higher margins on profitability to allow higher re investments in industry. Of course this was part of the logic of indus­trialization and growth, a vicious cycle into which developing countries locked themselves. There exists much writing and discussion on it and this is not the place to go into it.

Efforts to achieve increased food production met with a serious structural bottle neck. This was the highly unequal land holding and social, hierarchical structures in the countryside which were an obstacle to more rationalized pro­duction and increase of yields both through productivity and increase in extent

of land cultivated. A more basic fundamental approach would have involved a restructuring of land holdings, a more equitable land holding structure. How­ever, restructuring of social class relations in the countryside has historically happened only during wars or through social movements. In newly independent countries trying to compress into three or four decades economic developments and levels of economic achievements that took almost a century in the indus­trialized countries, there was no political space for allowing social movements to bring more distributive justice and correct the lopsided nature of land­holdings and access to other natural resources in the rural areas. On the other hand, where such movements existed in the rural areas as in the case of the Huks in the Philippines or the Telengana movement in India there was no choice for the ruling elites but to crush them. This they did but the task of implementing land reforms remained. In India it was done partially, and it is in these areas that later Green Revolution technology was selectively targeted and introduced, and viewed from that limited perspective it was a success. Technology was seen as a way of circumventing the inherent problems and characteristics of the social structure and thus increasing food production. It was not meant to alleviate poverty and it is no accident that it accelerated and aggravated inequalities in the rural areas. This new miracle technology in agriculture seemed to hold all the answers, particularly since it came at a point in the 1960s when many countries in Asia were facing escalating social tensions, food riots and disillusionment among the populace with the general direction of economic Development. The Green Revolution was embraced enthusiastically and pro­moted with great vigour, subsidies and all. Furthermore, the technology also provided space for top down political 'mobilization' for its introduction and use, thus also having initially a depoliticization aspect to its introduction, in a situation (more often authoritarian and hierarchical) when all bottom up, par­ticipatory mobilization was seen as suspect or not desirable. This was the socio­political background   at least in the Asian region   in which the adoption of the new seeds and HYV technology took place.

In terms of economics and increased food production, what is the record? Grain production did go up but at the same time required massive inputs such as fertilizers and pesticides that were getting more and more costly. So almost two decades later, independent rice scientists and economists who looked at the figures for the yields from the HYVs together with the inputs they needed, found them not as spectacular as they had been made out to be.

In relation to India for example, one analyst reports the following:

Starting from just five million hectares in 1970 71, over 18 million hectares or nearly half the area of rice has now been brought under the HYVs programme till 1982 83 . . . Therefore, this crop must have received a substan­tial share of the benefit of the overall increase in irrigation and the increase in the overall consumption of NPIC fertilisers. However, compared to the increase in the area under HYVs and the increase in fertilisers and irrigation,

the production of rice has increased to a lesser extent. During the period mentioned above [1970 71 to 1982 831, the production of rice has gone up from 42.23 million tonnes to 46.48 million tonnes. Assuming the production of non HYVs did not experience any increase at all and all the difference in rice production was on HYVs land, we got an increase in production of about 4 million tonnes as a result of extension of HYVs programme to nearly 13 million hectares of land. In other words, an increase of 0.31 tonnes was achieved with HYV per hectare. This is a relatively small accomplishment which could have been easily achieved even without the expensive HYV programme and its infrastructure by making better use of village based resources. 23

Claude Alvares writes with regard to India again, that, 'A 33 number official working group headed by K. C. S. Acharya, Additional Secretary in the Ministry of Agriculture, has determined that the growth rate of rice production after the Green Revolution has been less when compared with the pre Green Revolution period.' He goes on to add that, 'Millions of hectares of rice are now routinely devastated by BPH [brown plant hopper] and other pests   and no compensa­tion is available to farmers who are induced to take to such  modernized" agriculture. Such pest infestations have been introduced into the Indian envi­ronment. The IRRI officials knew what they were doing, and they did it for the cheap objective of wanting to assert IRRI primacy. 124

In the case of the Philippines, home of the IRRI, the Rice Sufficiency Pro­gramme Campaign was launched by Marcos in 1967. Through various govern­ment information and dissemination campaigns, farmers were asked to adopt the 'miracle' rice. By 1970, 43.5 per cent of the total rice area was already being planted to HYVs and by 1968 rice imports were eliminated. But beginning already in 1971, rice production began to fall by an annual 5.3 per cent yearly resulting in rice importations again. Efforts were made again in 1974 through loans made available without collaterals to help in buying fertilizers, and in other schemes, to boost production. This was achieved till 1980, then rice production began declining again from 1981 to 1983 leading to the importation of 210,000 metric tonnes of rice in 1984 and another 100,000 just for the first quarter of 1985. Inspite of being the first recipient of advances in rice technol­ogy (or is it because it is the first recipient?) Philippines has one of the lowest per hectare yields in Asia .25

The picture is more or less the same for other developing countries in Asia and including other HYV crops such as wheat in countries like Pakistan. It is true that countries like Thailand, Indonesia and even the Philippines and India have or anticipate a rice surplus. But these surpluses have not entirely been due to dramatic increase in yields due to the adoption of HYV technology. The real picture in terms of production increases is similar to what we pointed out in the case of India and the Philippines. But we are not talking only about increased food production, we have to relate these figures for increased food production

to other more important objectives like alleviation of hunger and poverty. The latter two

objectives, especially the removal of hunger, is also the claim or stated raison d'etre of the specialized agricultural and crop research institu­tions, like IRRI and others who are part of the CGIAR. When one questions their actual records or whether there are any positive implications resulting from the introduction of new seed varieties, the evidence in relation to the new technology or modernization of agriculture is really damning.

First of all, the production of food grains by this new technology which Filippino scientists refer to as the 'Cadillac' style of development (to emphasize how incongruous it is to the rural environment and to the socio economic conditions and rice farming practices of Filippinos), has led to decreased pro­duction of other crops which are sources of proteins, such as legumes. Clarence Dias estimates that 'half the Third World's protein comes from legumes. These legumes are being displaced both because of inability to companion planting and also because of pressure on cultivable land. Thus, for example, per capita legume production in India dropped by 38 per cent between 1961 and 1972 because grain varieties were highly subsidized, making legumes less attractive and less profitable. 126

Apart from the actual physical displacement of crops as a result of HYVs, the decreased availability or even non availability of crops other than food grains such as rice or wheat, the ability to buy even these food grains was further severely restricted due to increased pauperization caused by the new technol­ogy. Increasing poverty was simply the cause of hunger. This was true for almost all the countries of Asia. For example in the Philippines, malnutrition remains one of the top ten causes of child deaths and 'ironically enough the worst off children are those in regions which figure prominently as the coun­try's food baskets: Southern Mindanao, where most banana and pineapple exports are grown; Central Luzon, the country's rice granary and Metro Manila the food manufacturing center'." This was also the case in Pakistan, 'where agricultural growth was accompanied by increased poverty and unemployment, because of the nature of the agrarian situation into which the Green Revolution technology was introduced. It was a situation where there was a high degree of concentration of land ownership (30 per cent of farm area being owned by less than 0. 5 per cent of landowners)."' A significant proportion of the poor peas­antry suffered a decline in its level and quality of food consumption precisely during a period when overall food output was rising rapidly. One could cite one example after another in Asia.

In looking at the implications of the introduction of new kinds of seeds, plant varieties and chemical intensive agriculture, the list of negative, long term implications seem endless. Particularly in looking at the impact in terms of costs and alleviation of hunger, we cannot escape the conclusion that in the final analysis it was a technical solution, a technological fix, to deal with problems that arose from other circumstances of social and political structures. The manner of introduction of this technological fix of course coincided with the

vested interests of both internal/ national actors and the external /trans national actors. In a way,this being the only consideration of those responsible for the introduction of the new HYVs and its technology, all other aspects became secondary or were not considered at all. We have already dealt with some of the consequences these HYVs have wrought upon the societies in which they were introduced. The devastating health, ecological and environmental damages caused by the chemical intensive agriculture that HYVs necessitate is yet another area. The studies and examples are so numerous and are becoming such commonplace knowledge that it is not necessary to catalogue them here. What needs to be further discussed is how to deal with the Green Revolution, how to block and reverse its effects. Doing so is the only way to do away with mass hunger and poverty in the developing world.