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.
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Joel Fox
Good book. It does get a bit repetitive with ...
Reviewed in Canada on February 26, 2017
