Making a profit out of the food crisis: From brave new World Bank to Monsanto

In reality, this strategy is using the misery of millions to push an unpopular, ineffective and potentially disastrous technology upon the world's farmers and food consumers. As Bill Freese of the Washington-based Center for Food Safety told me, at present GM technology is totally inappropriate for African farmers. "GM techonology has been developed for big farmers in industrialized countries, and therefore we've seen most GM crops grown in the U.S." Freese explained. Round-up ready products have been developed for application on large arable farms, to save labor, a consideration that "is not relevant to small farmers in developing countries" who are more interested in effective farming techniques and the ability to market their crop than saving labor on small plots.

So far, crops grown in African soils and climates have not been genetically modified successfully. GM varieties of the sweet potato have been heavily promoted in the past, and then found to be a failure. A similar fate is befalling Bt Cotton, a Monsanto mainstay that was adopted in large numbers by Indian farmers, lured by the promise of high yields and lower labor. But a few seasons later, state governments in Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh are suing for compensation for farmers who have seen no benefits from Monsanto's seeds.

Farmers adopting GM crops in the U.S. have also seen their orders for pesticide rising, as weeds have developed resistance to Round-up - increasing the health risks associated with using Round-up Ready seeds and consuming the food that results. Some farmers have moved from Round-up to more potent brews such as Atrazine, a nerve agent banned in the EU, and 2,4-D which is linked to cancer and is acutely toxic to humans.

In fact, Freese told me that GM crops have proved to be "the definition of unsustainable agriculture," encouraging "massive reliance on a single chemical to contain weeds" and ensuring reliance on oil to power agricultural machinery and to produce the pesticides that it interacts with. What Freese calls "off the shelf technology" – agro-ecological principles such as intercropping to protect against insect pests and weeds - which is tailored around local biodiversity and knowledge of ecological processes, could boost yields and strengthen biodiversity without the attendant risks and failures associated with GMOs.

Yet GMOs are seeing a renaissance in the public eye as a result of this food crisis, and the Rome FAO summit gave them a springboard. The EU, U.S. and Monsanto have since run with the ball, but they have found very little interest from the governments and peoples of developing nations to join them. That is probably because GM as an agricultural technology has proven itself a failure. It is receiving support from governments in the developed world because it holds out the potential for almost limitless profits. For small farmers in the developing world, and for many farmers in the U.S. too, its promise has all too often proven to be nothing more than a sleekly packaged lie.

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Small farmers will continue to be swamped by heavily subsidized American and European crops, fall prey to land grabs to service the biofuel industry and become indentured to biotech corporations as the global seed supply becomes ever more consolidated. Biodiversity will continue to suffer assault from pesticides, stray genetic information, monoculture plantations and the search of poor peasants for firewood and food. Carbon emissions from grain shipment, farm equipment and deforestation will not abate. The recipe is, in short, one for catastrophe.