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

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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

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.

I read the same book as everyone else here and I read it from cover to cover. Do not be misled, Paarlberg deals with more than GMOs. The puzzle is why Africa has been starved (or, in many cases, more accurately stated, has starved itself) not just for GMO science but for all aspects of agricultural science for the last couple decades. GMOs are the most prominently controversial aspect of this, but not the only one. Paarlberg's analysis of the non-embrace of GMOs by advanced Western countries is an interesting one and seems the best explanation I have yet seen. Essentially, he states that advanced Western countries have rejected GMOs because they do not deliver a compelling benefit to these countries. After all, we are far from starving; if anything, agricultural OVERPRODUCTON is more of an issue in the developed West. Consequently, GMOs, no matter how much increased productivity they might bring to Western agriculture, are solving a problem that does not exist. On the other hand, Western countries have wholeheartedly embraced medicines manufactured by genetically modified organisms. We recognize the benefit delivered in the form of better and cheaper medicines so we don't even notice that GMOs are a critical component in the production chain of these same medicines. We accept it. The problem is that African agriculture is not facing the same problems that Western agriculture faces. There IS a need for increased productivity in African agriculture, and, perhaps, GMOs is one technology - not the only one - that would help. The truth is that Europe, to a great degree, and America, to a lesser degree, are pressuring Africa to follow their old traditional agriculture rather than incorporating technologies that would improve agricultural productivity. Isn't it a bit hypocritical for those of us who have too much to deny others who have too little the technology that might help even the balance? That is Paarlberg's argument and it is one worth considering. And, oh, by the way, Paarlberg does mention the corruption in African governments and their lack of support for agricultural science. These issues are not ignored, not at all. I am one of those who sits on the fence when it comes to GMOs. I know that Western agriculture does not NEED them. We have the luxury of indulging in the "precautionary principle"; but, perhaps Africa does not have the same luxury. The truth is Africa needs SOMETHING and it is not more of the same old traditional agriculture that has brought a continent to the brink of starvation. Do you have a better idea? One that is not based on pastoral nostalgia but on science and facts.

I though this was an interesting and informed look at topical issues with real consequences. The fact that both Norman Borlaug and President Carter (both generally agreed to have been decent guys, not evil corporate stooges) saw fit to recommend it by writing an introduction each, further recommended the book to me.

But i understand that others may have a different opinion. I respect that.

But PLEASE, people - can we leave the conspiracy theories out of the reviews? I'm interest in what you thought of this or any other book, but not in your theory that a big bio-tech company, in association with multi-national Oil and under the protection of the lizard men, acting through the Royal Family are secretly introducing GM food to Africa to control the world, or whatever the latest story doing the rounds of the conspiracy fringe is.

Reviews - good, bad and indifferent. Yes. Paranoid mutterings about bio-tech companies planning to rule the world - no thanks.
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As a high school history teacher, I picked up Dr. Paarlberg's book with the intention of reading the first chapter to supplement my knowledge on contemporary Africa to use in my classroom. What I found was that this book was engagingly written and each chapter proceeded to answer the question posed by the title which spurred me on to read the entire book. Some of the major points with which I agreed were the ideas that African elite are more connected with Europeans than they are with rural citizens in their own countries, agricultural production per capita has decreased throughout the African continent since the 1950s and this demands radical investment in agricultural stations and research in not only genetically modified seeds but also hybrid seeds and that the economic connections between European and African nations are still an integral part of Africa's economy. It is still a struggle for African peoples to create their own local economies when they are so interwoven with European economies and European values regarding GM foods. America spends less than 1% of its money on development in other nations and the amount of funds that are devoted to agricultural research in both our country and African countries has dropped to new lows. Africa is a region of many climates and within each of those climates, the African peoples need to be supported as they develop agricultural seeds reflective of their regions and not the regions of others. Paarlberg's book raised many questions as to why this has been allowed to continue for so long, why the lack of investment in agricultural research stations in Africa, why do American farmers get subsidized with the potential of disrupting local African economies, etc. As one who had no opinion regarding GM foods, but knowing that human beings have continually impacted and modified all plants, animals and environments wherever we have existed, GM foods and hybrid, drought resistant seeds are just a continuation of a process that has existed for millennia.

Many of the reviewers who give this book a three star or below rating seem to be obsessed with how Paarlberg omits certain factors or accusing him of being paternalistic. But they all miss his primary point: the persistent hunger and poverty of Africa could be solved if Africans had relatively easy access to Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) and other agricultural technologies to improve the productions on their farms. This is because their agronomy development level is behind the rest of the world and need the help of modern science to meet the challenges of a nutrition-poor earth and lack of modern farming tools and technologies that the West and Asia have enjoyed for many decades.

The problem facing average Africans, who are mostly small farmers, is that their lands, animals, labor and tools are incapapble of producing enough crops to ensure that they can live above the poverty line set by the UN and to sustain the nutritional needs of their societies (Paarlberg 5-6). Patents and distortions in the international markets may be part of the reason for why GMOs and other life-changing technologies haven't reached Africa, but they are not the sole causes (Ibid 4-5). Paarlberg notes that the African farmer is already operating and maximum efficiency without the aid of modern science, but he remains unable to produce enough crops to reduce poverty and malnutrition in his society at a comparable level to an OECD country or most other developming regions (Ibid 6). The lack of modern agronomy technologies is what's holding Africa back in terms of food production, which the African governments are partially responsible for in their agricultural policies - which are influenced by activist NGOs who don't understand the African farmer's plight and have no evidence for their overly cautious position on GMOs (Ibid 16-18).

There is no scientific proof that suggest that there are any drawbacks to GMOs and other biotechnologies, beside the ones we've already found (i.e. Mad Cow Disease). This has been proven time after time by government and independent scientific studies done by European and US institutions (Ibid 26-32). The African governments reject GMOs and GM crops because they feel that they can't control its long-term effects on the environment (Ibid 12-16). In fact, the currently approved GMOs in the US have not been any more harmful than exisitng organic crops engineered by cross-breeding and naturally engineered crops (Ibid 28-31). In short, there are no risks that the scientific community doesn't already know about and the side-effects are really no worse than what actually happens without genetic egineering in labs.

Intellectual property rights may be a roadblock for some critics, but ultimately this barrier could be overcome if the African politicians worked out a mutually beneficial deal with Western biotechnology companies to introduce GMOs to their local economy so that their people can be fed. The purpose of Paarlberg's book is not to help African states to build viable and independent biotechnology firms, rather it's about making sure that the people are properly fed and live above the poverty line. These problems do make the African people dependent on the West, but they can't be addressed when the people are dying. GMOs may contribute to the economic destruction of some farmers' economic fortunes in the developing world, as it has in the West during recent and past times, but the greater good must be prioritized when it comes to agricultural policy. Uneven economic growth happens throughout human history. Progress doesn't come without a price. These things are a fact of life in the real world.

If one wishes to refute this review and Paarlberg effectively, please research all the reports and articles cited by Paarlberg to prove that they are indeed inadmissible as a basis for supporting Paarlberg's claims.

The bottom line is this: there are tens if not hundreds of thousands of Africans starving to death every year due to malnutrition and the policy to keep GMOs and other biotechnologies out of Africa is exacerbating the problem.

Ideas about political, social, and economical self-determination are meaningful only if there are people alive to enjoy them. Dying for no tangible reason or benefit is a foolish and a narrowminded mindset that comes from being unable to see the consequences of well-meaning people from abroad, who see it fit to tell Africans how to live.

"Starved for science" is a disturbing book. The author, Robert Paarlberg, documents how Africa is being kept in poverty by an unholy alliance of neo-liberal "free market" advocates, left-wing/Green activists, sated Western middle class consumers, the European Union and corrupted African elites. The book has a foreword written by two Nobel Peace Prize winners, Norman E. Borlaug (the father of the Green Revolution) and Jimmy Carter (the former U.S. president).

Paarlberg begins by pointing out that sub-Saharan Africa lags behind both Asia and Latin America in terms of development, including agricultural development. While Asia in particular benefited from the Green Revolution, African agriculture has experienced something that could even be described as negative growth. Paarlberg rejects the standard explanations for this sad state of affairs. For instance, both landlocked African nations and nations with splendid ports have lagged behind the rest of the "Third World" (not to mention the rich countries). Likewise, the situation is almost as bad in stabile, peaceful nations as in those torn apart by civil war. Nor are cash crops to blame, since *both* cash crops and food crops are in crisis, and the worst areas are those which are still "self-reliant" on food, and hence don't grow cash crops at all. Skewed land ownership patterns á la Latin America can't be the explanation either, since most African peasants own their own land. The author reaches the conclusion that the real culprit is the lack of investments in modern agricultural science. This brings him to the main issue of the book: how genetically modified organisms (GMO's) are being kept out of Africa, despite the benefits they could give to the poor farmers.

The picture painted by Professor Paarlberg isn't a pretty one. He points out that consumers in both the United States and Europe are dead against genetically modified foods, despite their being no proven health risks whatsoever, but readily approve of genetically modified medicines, even when these are risky or only benefit very narrow groups of patients. Thus, the opposition to "GMO's" is completely hypocritical. People fear "Frankenfoods" but have nothing against, say, human insulin produced by genetically modified bacteria. Western nations don't really need GM foods, and it's therefore cheap to oppose them. GM medicine is something else again!

Further, affluent middle class consumers in the Western nations demand "natural", "organic" foods from "traditional" farms, and are ready to pay extra to get such (or food items perceived to be such). This had led to a widespread hostility in the West to industrial farming and advanced agricultural science - the very things that lifted Europe and North America out of poverty a century ago. Since the Western nations have a food surplus and can afford heavy farm subsidies, it's easy to wax romantic about "organic farming" in these nations.

In itself, the attitude of affluent, middle class consumers in the West would simply be an irrational, Romantic, populist outburst of little consequence. But what happens when the United States, the European Union, Western-dominated international institutions or left-leaning NGOs attempt to stop GMO's in the Third World? In Asia, not much. The Asian nations have their own resources and can approve of GMO's whether the Western interests like it or not. But in Africa the consequences can be downright lethal. The poor African peasants, indeed all of sub-Saharan Africa, are being sacrificed at the altar of Western anti-GMO fears. Sometimes almost literally: both Zambia and other nations in southern Africa actually refused food aid from the United States during a famine, since the food was genetically modified!

There are many culprits in this story. One is neo-liberalism. Poor African peasants are uninteresting as costumers for the multi-national seed companies. Investments in agricultural science must therefore come from the public sector or private foundations. The public sector in Africa, however, is being slashed as part of IMF's structural adjustment programs. The World Bank, in a neo-liberal move, demands tangible results from loans within 3 to 5 years. This makes loans to agri-science unviable, since these usually don't show results until after 10 years.

But neo-liberalism isn't the only culprit. The most disturbing sections of "Starved for science" document the bizarre anti-GMO activities of Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and other NGOs. The author has even managed to find a front group for the Anthroposophists working somewhere in Uganda, teaching the (presumably bewildered) peasants the occult-mystical "biodynamic" farming techniques developed by Rudolf Steiner! While that's almost fun (I'm a bit obsessed with Steiner and his rants - see my other reviews), the rest of the information is not. Perhaps I reacted so strongly because of my "liberal" political views? I even toyed with the idea of "going Green" for a while. No more. It's obvious that Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, groups with thousands of paid staffers, aren't really rank-and-file organizations but powerful, international apparatuses hell-bent on destroying modern agriculture. They can't and won't succeed in the rich contries, of course, but they have certainly created havoc in Africa. NGO activists warned the starving nations in southern Africa to stay away from GM-"contaminated" food aid, organized "mock trials" against GMO's in several poor nations, and created a hysterical atmosphere at a summit in Johannesburg. They have also recruited "scientists" and government officials in a number of African nations, including Zambia and Ethiopia.

Other culprits pinpointed by Paarlberg include the European Union, which more or less have exported its tight anti-GMO regulations to Africa, and the private commodity markets, where the European buyers refuse to accept GM crops from Africa (of course, this is due to consumer pressure, so the real culprit here is really the average European). Urbanized, corrupted African elites who feel more affinity with the former colonial powers than with their own rural hinterlands, is a final contributing factor. Of the sub-Saharan African nations, only South Africa has been able to stem the tide and approve widespread use of GM crops, obviously because of South Africa's greater economic clout. But what on earth can Zambia do?

One salient aspect of the situation not discussed in "Starved for science" is China's role in Africa in relation to the GMO issue. China is apparently buying large tracts of land in various African countries to grow food for its own ever-expanding population. How do the Chinese view GMO's? Will the food exported to China be GMO? If so, how will that affect the policy of the African elites, who today look rather to the anti-GMO European Union? And so on. These are surely interesting questions!

To sum up, Robert Paarlberg's "Starved for science" is a necessary and important read for those who want to know what's *really* going on in the world, and how the "good guys" (neo-liberals if you're conservative, radical-liberal NGOs if you're liberal, *you* if you're a so-called concerned consumer) are simply continuing centuries-old colonial patterns under new garbs.

Robert Paarlberg provides his panacea for global poverty and hunger in his latest book Starved for Science: How Biotechnology is Being Kept out of Africa. Through the book, Paarlberg constructs a well supported and polarizing argument describing how genetically modified (GM) agriculture can alleviate Africa's widespread hunger, yet the technology is being denied to those that most need it. He provides extensive support for his points, sometimes at the expense of being redundant in order to fully back his claims, yet the writing in general is captivating and better attention retaining than most scientific writing.

Paarlberg characterizes the global great skepticism and even fear of GM agriculture, in part due to the fact that western countries are rich and do not need further agricultural science to ensure sufficient food supplies (which has contributed to a decrease in public sector agricultural research and foreign assistance overall#. Paarlberg goes on to describe how the general aversion has been projected onto African leaders causing them to reject the food their countrymen need so badly. Paarlberg cites unfounded propaganda of the dangers of genetically modified organisms #GMOs), international trade standards, and the threat of rescindment of financial assistance by European governments and NGOs as the leverage used to exert their influence on African leaders, vilifying the governments, lobbyists, and NGOs alike in the process.

Yet the debate is not so clear cut. Paarlberg dramatically reproaches an unsubstantiated global opposition towards GMOs, saying that there has yet to be any evidence presented to suggest their potential dangers and thus no scientific justification for their rejection. However, while some have agreed with Paarlberg that GM foods are safe, it is not due to lack of evidence to the contrary. If anything, the reality is that there is far from a clear conclusion on the matter. Paarlberg also neglects any mention of the substantial political support for GM agriculture. He asserts that genetic engineering is the `all or nothing' solution excluding several non-GM approaches and grossly generalizing the African continent.

Paarlberg's book brings a great deal of awareness to a situation many would otherwise know nothing about, and one which may hold the key to Africa's future. Genetic modification is a subject that is in general plagued by stigma and politics and it is important that the debate be brought to light in order to make well informed progress. Thus, this book is an important read for anyone concerned with African development and relations, foreign policy, or agriculture, and furthermore for the population in general hoping to become more informed of the world around them.

It is equally important, however, that dogmatic stance and vilification of the opposition do more than sensationalizing the situation and instead provide a well balanced case. Readers should be aware that Paarlberg's book provides an excellent summary, but only of one side of the argument. Further reading is necessary to gain a full understanding of the situation.

Starved for Science: How Biotechnology is Being Kept Out of Africa was one of the most riveting works of fiction I have read all year! Oh wait... non-fiction, you say? Well, then it sucked.

Paarlberg has a talent at blending cleverly selected facts, weasel-y statements that are technically true, and complete bull-pucky to construct his arguments. I cannot say why he does this, whether he's funded by agribusiness, or owns a factory farm somewhere, or perhaps he's just a really poor researcher who got it into his head that he knows what he's talking about and ran with it without getting all of the information. Or maybe this is all just a way to win himself prestige within the academic world. He's a political science professor, not an agronomist or ecologist.

He begins by explaining why the populations rich countries do not like genetic engineering. This is part of a larger argument of his that the same populations are made up of "food purists, environmentalists, populists, and agrarian romantics" who don't like agricultural science (p. 77). And they do not like for a very specific reason: it gives them no tangible benefit. Having never experienced hunger (his statistics for the number of hungry in the U.S. are suspiciously low), they have no concept of what the starving farmers of Africa are going through. These elitists (although he doesn't use that word) want lovely countrysides where they can see cows grazing and maybe take their children to let them experience collecting eggs from a henhouse. They want better quality food. And they foolishly buy organic to avoid pesticide residues, even though the government has set limits for pesticide residues in produce and the vast majority of food does not exceed those limits.

While he doesn't use the word elitist, he does use the word "blue blood," referring to Prince Charles, as he says:

"His Royal Highness is today an avid organic farmer, a leading patron of the Soil Association, and the most prominent current exemplar of this blue-blood attachment in England to preindustrial, chemical-free agriculture." - p. 72

Paarlberg describes J.I. Rodale as an accountant from the Lower East Side, and says that Sir Albert Howard came to his ideas about the importance of healthy, living soil from Eastern spiritual concepts he learned in India. Yet he writes that organic agriculture requires more land to be devoted to agriculture and makes no-till impossible, when he would find the very opposite if he visited the Manhattan accountant's Rodale Institute in rural Pennsylvania and saw the research now conducted there on organic and no-till.

Paarlberg does give some credit to Rachel Carson, who exposed the danger of certain pesticides (notably chlorinated hydrocarbons and organophosphates, with the latter still being widely used today), but he says that farmers solved those problems with more science, not less, by finding better pesticides:

"Carson's charge against excessive chemical use in agriculture was powerful and irrefutable, and eventually persuasive even to most commercial farmers, who had an interest in reducing toxic chemical use for pocketbook reasons (the chemicals are expensive), for occupational safety reasons (farmers are those most exposed to risk), and also for compelling agronomic reasons (insect populations can become resistant to the chemicals). Yet the technical strategy farmers preferred wasn't to abandon science in crop protection, but instead to use still more science. Industry developed newer chemicals with fewer harmful side effects and high-precision application equipment that reduced excessive or unwanted exposure. Farmers also cut chemical use by purchasing crop varieties bred scientifically for increased resistance to disease or insects." - p. 66

I must give some credit to the idea here of finding or developing resistant crop varieties - that's a practice I even employ in my own garden. What he did not mention in this quote was the move to IPM, integrated pest management, that was also a wonderful change in agriculture in the last several decades. Under IPM, instead of spraying according to the calendar, farmers would wait to see if a pest infestation actually occurred and only spray as a last resort. IPM - as employed in the U.S. - sure ain't organic, but it's an improvement.

Paarlberg goes through study after study that proves the safety of genetic engineering, but fails to mention other studies that hint at the possibility of - or actually prove - there are problems associated with them or that they do not provide the benefits claimed. He does not mention the implication that there is no way to contain genetic engineered crops (which, at this point, is pretty well established). He also does not note the lack of independent studies of genetically engineered crops, which has been reported on in the New York Times, or the backlash in the scientific community against any scientist who makes even remotely anti-biotech findings, which was reported on in Nature.

All in all, he concludes that:

"This reification of what is "natural" is in part a cultural reaction to the hegemonic expansion of modern science. Advances in modern science tend to diminish both unspoiled nature and unquestioned faith, prompting those with a strong romantic or spiritual side to register their objections by seeking foods that incorporate less modern science." - p. 71

There are several problems with Paarlberg's arguments here, and we haven't even gotten to Africa yet. First, he completely discounts that there is any science whatsoever behind organic or, as I would prefer, agroecological agriculture. There is. Crop rotation and mulches may be ancient techniques but that does not make them unscientific. Try comparing them in a controlled scientific experiment against your favorite "scientific" herbicides, pesticides, and GMOs sometime. And there is scientific research showing that these techniques, when selected and used properly, often provide better results than conventional agriculture, PARTICULARLY for resource-poor farmers in the Global South.

So what about Africa? Well, here's proof that organic won't work:

"In Africa, in other words, farmers today are not engaged in specialized factory farming. They are planting heirloom varieties in polycultures rather than scientifically improved varieties in monoculture. They have a food system that is traditional, local, non-industrial, and very slow. Using few purchased inputs, they are de facto organic. And as a consequence they remain poor and poorly fed." - p. 82

There you go. And those who advocate organics are saying "Let them eat cake." Africa needs some GMOs, baby!

With so many easily debunkable statements in the first section of the book, it is hard to take seriously the points advocated by Paarlberg in the latter half of the book, where he specifically addresses Africa.

Paarlberg nails it when he calls for any approach to aid to be pro-poor, and then defines pro-poor as follows:

"A new farming technology will be pro-poor as well as pro-growth only if it raises the total factor productivity of small as well as large farms... New farming technologies will also be more likely to deliver productivity gains to the poor on small farms if they reduce rather than increase weather risks, if they target disadvantaged areas where the poorest small farms operate, and if they target the staple food crops currently grown by such farmers" - p. 85

Quite frankly, he is outlining some of the core principles of agroecology here. However, what he fails to mention is that organic agriculture is more resilient to weather extremes than industrial agriculture. I think what's important to note is that this book is not entirely worthless. There are sections that make excellent points. But there's no way for an uneducated reader to know the difference between what's true and what's false. Which ideas will help Africa's poorest farmers, and which ideas will hurt them?

Paarlberg makes it abundantly clear upfront that he does not have very good judgment, and that unfortunately wipes out any value that a reader may find in this book, once he or she realizes that the author is not trustworthy.

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.