Bill Gates Enchanted by the GMO Idol

by Katherine Gustafson · 2009-10-27 06:00:00 UTC
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I wrote last week about the Gates Foundation's efforts to help improve agricultural systems in the developing world. Gates's conclusion: the Foundation's investment should empower poor farmers to grow more crops and get them to market, which will help them pull themselves out of poverty.

Sounds like a plan, right? Not so fast, says alert reader and fellow blogger Greg Plotkin, who pointed out an important thread underlying the story: "Gates is hoping to prompt a second Green Revolution and has shown very little concern about the potential negative impacts that [genetically modified (GM)] crops could bring."

This is a crucial point to bring to light, not least because the architect of the Gates Foundation's plans, Rajiv Shah, is now a part of the Obama Adminstration. In April, he became Under Secretary of Research, Education and Economics and Chief Scientist at the USDA, a position in which he can work to entrench this particular "green revolution" agenda into national policy priorities.

So what's the big deal? Grist food editor Tom Philpott, in a thorough examination of the Gates-GMO issue, describes how the original Green Revolution was an unmitigated disaster for smallholder farmers in India. He goes on to list several problems with Gates's seeming enchantment with GM as a solution:

a) GM agriculture’s much-hyped ability to boost yields, taken as a given by Gates, has thus far proven purely spectral; b) there’s serious evidence, despite a paucity of cash for critical research and heavy-handed control of research by seed companies, that GMOs cause health problems; and c) GMOs have so far proven quite proficient at generating unintended ecological consequences, such as the rise of “superweeds.”

Significantly, Philpott believes Bil Gates understands that there's "no zero-sum tradeoff between productivity and sustainability" in agriculture. Unfortunately, however, Gates is too busy gazing at the GM idol to notice that the healthy soils created by organic agriculture tend to boost productivity at the same time as increasing sustainability.

Stay tuned; Philpott is trying to get in touch with someone at Gates and will report back to readers.

Photo courtesy of OliBac via flickr

Katherine Gustafson is a freelance writer and editor with a background in international nonprofit organizations.
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