Starved for Science: How Biotechnology Is Being Kept Out of Africa (Hardcover)

~ Robert Paarlberg (Author), Norman Borlaug (Foreword), Jimmy Carter (Foreword)

Editorial Reviews

Review

Except for South Africa, no African state has legalized the planting of GMOs for production and consumption. While citizens of rich countries have the luxury of deciding what kinds of foods--organic, nonorganic, GMO, non-GMO--to eat, droughts and insect infestations continue to wipe out crops, and rural African children die because they have no choices. Bringing another perspective to the GMO debate [is] Paarlberg's provocative argument.
--Joshua Lambert (Library Journal 20080501)

Condoning the cultivation of genetically modified crops for food is not, Robert Paarlberg concedes, likely to win him friends in academic circles...But in this timely book, Paarlberg, a political scientist, makes a strong argument: Europeans, who have so much food they do not need the help of science to make more, are pushing their prejudices on Africa, which still relies on foreign aid to feed its people. He calls on global policymakers to renew investment in agricultural science and to stop imposing visions of "organic food purity" on a continent that has never had a green revolution. As governments look for ways of tackling what is now commonly called a "global food crisis" with unprecedented price increases in basic foodstuffs, this book offers welcome food for thought.
--Jenny Wiggins (Financial Times 20080627)

[An] illuminating book on the state of science and agriculture in Africa...[It] has much of merit.
--Jules Pretty (Times Higher Education Supplement )

[This] book ends with an alternative perspective on globalization that will inspire open-minded skeptics to rethink the matter...[Paarlberg is] a pragmatic believer in separating babies from bathwater. The fact that current applications of GM technology primarily benefit a handful of corporations does not deter Paarlberg from envisioning a scenario in which nonprofits and private African corporations might employ GM technology to serve the increasingly dire needs of African farmers...An insightful book that deftly balances the benefits and drawbacks of globalization, all within parameters conforming to the real world, the one in which we live...A clarion call for corporations and NGOs alike to revisit issues that have been ideologically polarized rather than rationally examined.
--James E. McWilliams (Texas Observer )

Product Description

Listen to a short interview with Robert Paarlberg
Host: Chris Gondek | Producer: Heron & Crane

Heading upcountry in Africa to visit small farms is absolutely exhilarating given the dramatic beauty of big skies, red soil, and arid vistas, but eventually the two-lane tarmac narrows to rutted dirt, and the journey must continue on foot. The farmers you eventually meet are mostly women, hardworking but visibly poor. They have no improved seeds, no chemical fertilizers, no irrigation, and with their meager crops they earn less than a dollar a day. Many are malnourished.

Nearly two-thirds of Africans are employed in agriculture, yet on a per-capita basis they produce roughly 20 percent less than they did in 1970. Although modern agricultural science was the key to reducing rural poverty in Asia, modern farm science—including biotechnology—has recently been kept out of Africa.

In Starved for Science Robert Paarlberg explains why poor African farmers are denied access to productive technologies, particularly genetically engineered seeds with improved resistance to insects and drought. He traces this obstacle to the current opposition to farm science in prosperous countries. Having embraced agricultural science to become well-fed themselves, those in wealthy countries are now instructing Africans—on the most dubious grounds—not to do the same.

In a book sure to generate intense debate, Paarlberg details how this cultural turn against agricultural science among affluent societies is now being exported, inappropriately, to Africa. Those who are opposed to the use of agricultural technologies are telling African farmers that, in effect, it would be just as well for them to remain poor.

(20080215)

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Harvard University Press (March 31, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0674029739
• ISBN-13: 978-0674029736
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #424,239 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Truths beyond popular culture, June 16, 2008

By	Jennifer M. Wilson - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Friday, June 13, 2008 - Feminist Review.org

As a mom who does what I can to buy organic food for my family, I completely understand the general distaste most of us have for genetically modified (GM) foods. The very thought of vegetables altered by scientists in labs seems creepy and somehow inherently wrong, doesn't it? But when I read Starved for Science, I quickly realized that such a romanticized and emotional standpoint in such a critical debate as starvation is not only uninformed, it is just plain irresponsible. I also realized that, whether we like it or not, most of us are already eating GM foods on a daily basis.

In plain language and with plentiful sources to back up his positions, Paarlberg describes how in first world countries, where food is plentiful and obesity more of a problem than starvation, people can afford to pine for the days of small neighborhood farms - and can turn up their noses at the agribusiness and subsequent science that has allowed us to take for granted having not only enough to eat, but a wide choice in what and where we get our food. In Europe, the negative public opinion toward genetically modified organisms (GMO's) has led to labeling and bans on imports suspected to be "contaminated" by genetically altered seeds. Greenpeace and many NGO's are working actively to keep African farmers on small plots of land using techniques that date back thousands of years, but to the detriment and hardship of those very farmers.

Paarlberg describes how rich countries have come to fear and dislike GMO's, stopping funding and support easily where food is in no shortage, and yet when it is convenient, still continue to fund their use in the pharmaceutical industry where a longevity benefit can be gained. And governments in African countries situated in urban areas that are highly influenced by European bias, both in cultural influence and monetary flow, follow suit. Therefore, they are not developing their own programs to find strains of seeds that could resist drought, and it isn't worth enough money to anyone else to do so for them.

The majority of small farms in Africa are currently run by women, as men often leave to find other jobs in mines or more urban areas to supplement family incomes. Children stay out of school to help with the farming, and they do it all with wooden tools and poorly fed animal labor. Green movements in China and India have brought these countries to a position where starvation in no longer such a pressing issue; however, in Africa the problem is worse than ever.

Paarlberg admits to having kept his research a bit under wraps until now, knowing the reaction he would get from his own circle of friends and colleagues. It could be said that being `socially conscious' has taken on certain assumptions (and presumptions) among the wealthier strata of our urban world with a borg-like uniformity, and in the case of poverty in Africa, maintaining a position of being purely organic could easily be likened to saying "let them eat cake."

Review by Jennifer M. Wilson

15 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Feels like half of the story, July 19, 2008

By	A. J. Sutter (Tokyo, Japan) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Robert Paarlberg (RP) seems sincere in his desire to help solve the problem of African hunger. Even though he advocates doing so using technologies owned by Monsanto, Synergen or Du Pont/Pioneer, he's candid that these companies aren't likely to win popularity contests. If, as some might suspect, the book is propaganda for those companies, it's unusually sophisticated. Nonetheless, I'm troubled by some of the book's argumentative techniques, and especially by its failure to engage with some pertinent issues. Even if sincerely motivated, it comes across less like a balanced book about policy and more like a legal brief, a style of writing in which you skate over or even ignore the weak points of your argument rather than confront them.

1. RP's argument focuses on the health and environmental aspects of using genetically modified organisms (GMOs) for food. Europeans consumers don't see much benefit for those foods, and, according to surveys, are even more ignorant than Americans about the science behind them. Moreover, the EU has adopted an unusually rigorous precautionary approach to regulating the foods, contrasted with the American one, which is more welcoming. Europe is much closer in psychological as well as physical distance to Africa than is the US, is more commercially connected to African agriculture, and also supplies 3x as much aid as the US. Consequently, the European approach to impeding the spread of GMOs by regulation has been the role model for African governments -- even though, in RP's view, African countries (i) need GMOs to feed their people and (ii) are pretty lax in regulating everything else. NGOs that are opposed to Green Revolution-style agriculture, which uses a lot of fertilizers, make things worse. So does the World Bank, which has cut back drastically on agricultural aid. Nonetheless, African governments themselves must shoulder much of the blame, for their "curious failure" to invest in science-based agriculture (e.g., @84).

2. Here's where some odd omissions begin. (A) RP alludes in passing to the World Bank's shift to structural reform in lieu of direct aid. He also mentions that many African countries export crops grown for European consumers. And he mentions the "curious failure" to invest. But he doesn't connect the dots. For many years, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund forced debtor governments to prioritize debt repayment. Exports were necessary to earn dollars and other foreign currencies to pay off Western lenders. Payments to farmers, and investment in agricultural and transportation infrastructure fell precipitously as a result. (See, e.g., Walden Bello's article in The Nation, 2008/05/15.) The "curious failure" was due at least in part to pressure from Western financial institutions. Nor does RP mention the impact of the WTO and other regional trade treaties on local agriculture in poorer countries, which had to open their economies to imports esp. from the US. To say nothing of the civil wars, government corruption and other problems in Africa that might distract governments from agricultural policy. I don't understand why he omits these subjects, since they don't necessarily detract from his theory of EU influence.

(B) On the other hand, his discussion of issues relating to intellectual property rights (IPR) is less forthright. He dismisses the issue by claiming that most companies are willing to license royalty-free in the poorest countries since the money they could make is so small (@115). But in fact this wasn't Monsanto's plan for a bigger-market product, GMO drought-tolerant maize; their generosity manifested itself instead in their lobbying to get paid from the deep pockets of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (see @174). (Even if markets in Africa are small, the IPR issue is especially sensitive in countries that have huge poor populations, like China and India. RP points out that multinationals have licensed GMO technologies to local joint ventures in those countries; that isn't the same thing as letting farmers off the hook from buying seeds plus Monsanto fertilizer each year. He also doesn't mention the increasing number of suicides by small farmers in India associated with the spread of GMO cotton cultivation, which has been documented by V. Shiva and others.)

RP omits any mention of the WTO's highly controversial TRIPS agreement, which requires member countries to recognize GMO patents. He also omits any mention of the UPOV agreement on plant varieties, and the pressures the US and other OECD countries bring to bear for "TRIPS+" provisions (i.e., provisons that provide even stronger IPR protection than TRIPS -- thereby benefiting the "1st World" country) when negotiating bilateral treaties. See e.g. the outstanding volume edited by G. Tansey and T. Rajotte, "The Future Control of Food" (Earthscan 2008). See also the work of John Barton at Stanford Law School, who has shown that these treaty provisions tend to benefit only multinationals, and not local biotech industries. RP himself supplies the astonishing figures that while US farmers get 20% of the "economic surplus" from GMO soybeans, Monsanto itself gets 45% of this surplus (@34). That's a recommendation?

3. Some of RP's other arguments amount to little more than name-calling. Those who oppose GMO crops because of the involvement of multinationals are labeled "agrarian romantics and populists" (@79). The ranks of the proponents of organic food and opponents of chemical use also include a "former hippie" (@62), an "accountant who grew up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan" (@72), a "thorough mystic" who believed in Atlantis (@id.), a "graduate of a Quaker college in Indiana" (@104), and an "aquatic biologist [and] literary celebrity" who just happened to be Rachel Carson. Credible critics like Carson and Jim Hightower (whom RP does at least call "talented" @69) are inserted into a parade of putative amateurs and loonies, for a kind of guilt by association. The notion that hunger is not caused by a shortage of food is called "the Greenpeace line" (@105); you won't find any mention in this book of the first person to put forward this idea and to provide evidence to support it, 1998 Nobel laureate Amartya Sen (see, e.g., Sen's classic "Poverty and Famines" (Oxford UP 1981)). On the other side of the divide is rational science, as represented by "innovators" Monsanto & al.(@33), and by a "scientific consensus" evidenced by citations to just 2 articles (@29-30).

4. RP's argument that European attitudes have influenced policy in Africa is quite plausible. But it's also only part of the story. RP quotes an African activist as saying "Yes, we are starving, but we are saying no to the food the Americans are forcing on our throats" (@142). RP's response to this seems to be to shout "But that's not rational!," coupled with a kind of Freedom Fries discourse about the bad Europeans. By skating over the political issues related to trade and financial policy, he misses a chance to understand the African view as a rational political response to a history of US heavy-handedness. Nor does he offer any recommendations for how the US can reclaim influence in Africa, beyond a wistful "if only" sort of sentiment: If only those African governments would respect science and buy the great new stuff from our American corporate innovators... An interesting but ultimately frustrating book.

3 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Very narrow and pro-corporate view of science, June 2, 2009

By	David Kennedy (Big Hill, KY) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Starved for Science: How Biotechnology Is Being Kept Out of Africa (Paperback)

The central premise of this book is that those who oppose the wholesale conversion of the world's vast agricultural biodiversity to a small handful of genetically modified commercial crop varieties are somehow anti-science.

Ecology is a science. It offers us numerous cautionary tales about simplistic interventions in complex systems. It suggests that a stable long term food system will utilize more rather than fewer species and varieties of plants. Greatly increasing the use of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer would likely increase African yields in the short term, but it requires fossil fuel imputs that are clearly not sustainable and likely contributing to climate destabilization (a serious problem facing future Africans).

Ecology demonstrates why simplistic poisons, like Monsanto's RoundUp, don't offer long lasting control because weeds and insect pests evolve quickly in response to the extreme environmental pressures the poisons supply. In the brief history of GMO agriculture there is already considerable evidence of genetic adaptation by several important weed species.

Agriculture is a craft that has been developed in real world conditions over ten thousand years. In the phrase of British biologist Colin Tudge, what we need is 'science assisted craft', not the replacement of that essentially biological craft by a crude industrial technology.

The precautionary principle argues for testing new ideas more thoroughly and on a small scale because of the likelihood of unintended consequences. To think that growing our food with synthetic fertilizers and patented GMOs is more scientific than a broad based organic agriculture is akin to arguing that amphetamines provide more energy than bread.