Any day now, a hundred Bangladeshi smallholder farmers will be planting their annual aubergine crop. But this year this select band will not be planting their usual seeds of the crop they call brinjal and many know as the eggplant.
These family farmers, chosen by the country’s agricultural researchers, will be growing a genetically modified (GM) variety. Bt brinjal has been developed by crop scientists in Bangladesh and neighbouring India to fight off insects that often halve yields and force farmers into daily spraying with dangerous pesticides. If all goes well, in a few months the harvest will be on sale in local markets across Bangladesh.
Some will be appalled. They will decry it as the latest manifestation of an alien technology taking over farming, wrecking the natural environment. But I suggest that, with World Food Day approaching, we should celebrate this new weapon in the war to help smallholders feed their families safely, and on limited land. Ecosystem services may be protected rather than squandered.
This is not a Western technology imposed on unwilling farmers. It is actually a great example of crop scientists from the South harnessing GM technology for the benefit of small farmers and their families. By raising yields and cutting the use of pesticides by this most disadvantaged group, it will further the aims of the slogan adopted for this year’s World Food Day on the theme of family farming: “Feeding the world, caring for the earth.”
There are three reasons to fear GMs. They might, in a word coined by Greenpeace campaigners some years ago, create “Frankenfoods” that are dangerous for us all. They might contaminate wild relatives of the crops with rogue genes spliced into the crops. And they might further the domination of agribusiness over world food supplies and the lives of hundreds of millions of smallholder farmers.
Well, the fear of Frankenfoods looks like a busted flush. GM crops have been in the food chain in some places for a couple of decades now without obvious problems.
Read full original article: “Franken-brinjal” or a new deal for poor Asian farmers?
