Normally the GM industry can get its crops into the fields regardless of their merits, but as Wambugu told New Scientist, “[the GM sweet potato] has no commercial value to Monsanto, except as PR”.

Despite early promises of feeding Africa on the cheap, it turns out that this crop has an entirely negative impact on any farmers foolish enough to believe Monsanto’s PR. The sweet potato was claimed to double yields and increase resistance to viral attack. When the results of the field trials were quietly released, they showed that it halved yields and reduced resistance to viral attack. A Ugandan conventionally bred variety, on the other hand, does exactly what the GM variety was supposed to do but couldn’t. Monsanto continued to claim that its crop would feed Africa even as the field trial results showed its performance to be worse than average.

The current GM wonder crop, Syngenta’s “Golden Rice”, promises not only cheap and plentiful food but a cure for the millions of people suffering from vitamin A deficiency. Companies like Syngenta will tell you that the common sense solution to vitamin A deficiency, a balanced diet, is a luxury beyond the reach of the people they are trying to help, conveniently missing out the fact that these people had a balanced diet until companies like Syngenta introduced new agricultural technologies that wiped out everything in their fields except rice. Admittedly, as long as GM can keep the spotlight, the chances of more practical solutions being adopted are slim.

Golden Rice and the drawing board

“Golden Rice” has had to go back to the drawing board numerous times as it was discovered that to get any benefit one would have to eat many times more rice than was healthy, or even possible. Now that the scientists have managed to raise the beta carotene (the vitamin A precursor) content to a more practical level, they are wrestling with the problem that vitamin A is only created in the body through an interaction of beta carotene with zinc and fat, substances that are likely to be lacking in a poor diet.

This ailing research project into an entirely inappropriate techno-fix has been presented for years as a ready-to-go solution. In fact, “Golden Rice” as described in the PR remains a distant hope. To compensate for the failure of the technology, the front groups and think tanks that the GM industry pays to be its cheerleaders have ratcheted up their rhetoric to the point of blaming the anti-GM lobby for world hunger, blindness and infant mortality.

Only the front groups, mind.

The industry itself says things such as “If anyone tells you that GM is going to feed the world, tell them that it is not” (Steve Smith of Novartis Seeds) or “Nobody has ever claimed that GM is the answer to world hunger” (Monsanto UK’s director of corporate affairs, Tony Combes).
When the sales pitch is so overblown that even the biotech firms are careful to maintain plausible deniability, you need a real sucker for a customer. Europe isn’t that sucker. We don’t want to be guinea pigs for untested technology, we don’t want to hand control of what we eat to Bush or the WTO, and we’re fully aware that GM’s mission to feed the world is an immoral fraud.