A Letter from Phil
Kirk
Analyzing the
politics of food
 Last
month we discussed the phenomenal improvement in our environment over
the past 30 years contrasted with rhetoric of the so-called
environmentalists. Read that column.
Now let’s look at one of the challenges — world hunger. Today
there are six billion people on the planet, and 800 million of them
are malnourished. Worse yet, by 2020, the number of undernourished
people may top one billion. And these hungry people don’t all live
in poor, third world countries. We have millions of hungry people
right here at home.
Creating an environment that can sustain a rapidly growing global
population will be a significant test in the future.
Business innovation has led to technology that can multiply the
world’s food supply using less land, incurring less cost and
providing more benefit.
American business has developed methods to improve crop yields, grow
plants and vegetables that are richer in nutrients and resistant to
disease, and reduce reliance on pesticides.
These scientifically proven advances fall under the term
“biotechnology,” and it’s biotechnology that will provide
nourishment and improved health for billions of people in the poorest
countries.
Take, for instance, “golden rice,” a special rice containing
beta-carotene that can prevent Vitamin A deficiency, a major cause of
blindness. It’s estimated that the diets of 124 million children are
deficient in Vitamin A. Improved Vitamin A nutrition — easily
achievable through the distribution of golden rice — could be
expected to prevent one to two million deaths a year among children
between the ages of 1 and 4, and an additional 250,000 to a
half-million deaths during later childhood. What’s more, improved
Vitamin A nutrition would prevent 500,000 cases of irreversible
blindness every year. Biotechnology can also increase crop output
while reducing costs and cutting down on environmental contamination.
We’ve only scratched the surface of what biotechnology can do for
the advancement of our society. But radical groups stirring up
anti-technology hysteria have managed to stall the introduction of
many biotechnology products. The same folks who rioted and broke the
law in Seattle in 1999 at the World Trade Organization meetings are
using paranoia and false information to prevent the growth and
distribution of foods that will feed the world’s hungry mouths.
There is a role for the legitimate study and oversight of
biotechnology. The business community supports a regulatory system
that ensures safety.
But when there are almost one billion malnourished people in the
world, we cannot allow plain and simple fear and ignorance to prevail.
We must prevent radical environmentalists from manipulating
governments, the media, the courts, and public opinion here in
America-and from further distorting the issues abroad.
We must expose their hollow arguments, which are politically
motivated and not based on sound science.
Opponents of biotech say it is new, untested, and
never-before-seen science, which makes it dangerous. But biotech
pharmaceuticals are already widely used, with more than 150 products
on the market.
Since 1978, thanks to biotechnology, bacteria have been
producing human insulin, which is used by 3.3 million people with
diabetes.
When it comes to food, biotech products have been stocked on
supermarket shelves since the mid-1990s.
As I mentioned earlier, people safely consume foods containing
biotech soybeans, canola and corn. In fact, biotech foods have been
proven — twice — by the prestigious National Academies of Science
to be just as safe as conventional foods, which do not undergo any
formal testing or regulation.
A vast majority of Americans (70 percent) supports biotechnology
in food and agriculture, despite the negative media coverage its
opponents whip up.
The bottom line is that we must take food off the political table and
put it on the dining room table. We need to convince the American
public and policy makers in Washington that with a pro-technology,
sensible regulatory environment, we can feed the world’s hungry,
eliminate illnesses, clean up the environment, reduce the cost of
food, and increase the incomes of hard-working farmers.
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