The Blind Leading The Blind - By Steven L. Hopp

Critics of local food suggest that it's naive or elitist, whereas industrial agriculture is for everybody: it's what's for dinner, all about feeding the world. "Genetically modified, industrially produced monocultural corn," wrote Steven Shapin in the New Yorker, "is what feeds the victims of an African famine, not the gorgeous organic technicolor Swiss chard from your local farmers' market."
The big guys have so completely taken over the rules of the game, it's hard to see how food systems really work, but this criticism hits the nail right on the pointy end: it's perfectly backward. One of industrial agriculture's latest feed-the-hungry schemes offers a good example of why that's so. Exhibit A: "golden rice." It's a genetically modified variety of rice that contains beta-carotene in the kernel. (All other parts of the rice plant already contain it, but not the grain after it is milled.) The developers of this biotechnology say they will donate the seeds-with some strings attached-to Third World farmers. It's an important public relations point because the human body converts beta-carotene to vitamin A; a deficiency of that vitamin affects millions of children, especially in Asia, causing half a million of them every year to go blind. GM rice is the food industry's proposed solution.
But most of the wold's malnourished children live in countries that already produce surplus food. We have no reason to believe they would have better access to this special new grain. Golden rice is one more attempt at a monoculture solution to nutritional problems that have been caused by monocultures and disappearing diversity. In India alone, farmers have traditionally grown over 200 types of greens, and gathered many more wild ones from the countryside. Every single one is a good source of beta-carotene. So are fruits and vegetables. Further, vitamin A delivered in a rice kernel may not even help a malnourished child, because it can't be absorbed well in isolation from other nutrients. Throwing more rice at the problem of disappearing dietary diversity is a blind approach to the problem of blindness. "Naive" might describe a person who believes agribusinesses develop their heavily patented commodity crops in order to feed the poor. (Golden rice, alone, has seventy patents on it.) Technicolor chard and its relatives growing in village gardens-that's a solution for realists.

Stephen L Hopp
http://www.animalvegetablemiracle.com/