Wednesday, June 18: In El Salvador recently, sky-high food prices for staples like corn led to women taking to the streets and banging their pots and pans, shouting, “We are hungry!”
In other hotspots around the world, the protests have taken a more violent tact. Clashes between protestors and police in Port au Prince, Haiti, left five people dead. In Pakistan, gun-toting guards guard food warehouses. Some pundits say that expensive food or severe food shortages could topple governments.
All this unrest is opening the door slightly ajar for U.S. exports of genetically modified crops such as “biotech wheat.” Genetically modified crops contain genes from other organisms to make the plants more resistant to insects, herbicides, or disease, which boost per-acre yields. The problem I have with GM crops is that they’re horribly unnatural and we have no idea what kind of health challenges these type of crops could bring over the long haul. For these reasons, I will not knowingly eat any food produced from GM crops like wheat, corn, or soy, which pretty much keeps me away from most commercial brands of cereal you see stocked in supermarkets.
They don’t like GM crops in Europe, where they’re called Frankenfoods. But with soaring food prices and grain shortages in the Far East, food companies in Japan and South Korea are taking more than a second look at GM foods. Some soft drink and snack food firms have been using corn syrup made from GM corn to sweeten their treats because the cost of corn syrup from conventionally grown corn is priced out of reach. It remains to be seen if consumer resistance to GM ingredients, which in the past has been rather stiff against these unnatural foods, waffles in the face of economic realities. As one person put it, “Our hearts may be on the left, but our pockets are on our right.”
Check this statistic out: 75 percent of the corn grown last year in the United States was genetically modified. Just five years ago, that number was 40 percent. Fifteen years ago, there wasn’t any GM corn on the radar screen; that’s how swiftly the equation has changed.
America’s wheat crop could be next to make the switch. Since about half of America’s wheat crop is exported, and because European and Asian customers said they want nothing to do with GM wheat, American farmers have stuck to growing wheat conventionally. But the changing economic equation, along with hotspots of global hunger, is putting pressure on farmers to make the switch.
While I’m hugely sympathetic to areas of the world running out of household staples to eat, I don’t think a blind rush to GM crops is the best solution for a complex problem.