By NGIN (Norfolk Genetic Information Services)

Reactions to the recent UNDP report http://www.undp.org/hdr2001/, with its imagery of the affluent in the industrialised north denying the starving south the biotech lifeline it so badly needs, have been nothing if not predictable.

The UN's courage in pushing biotech and globalisation has been saluted from the Times to the Economist, from the Financial Times to the Wall Street Journal, with a heady blend of ecstasy and inaccuracy:

"Developing countries will suffer without continued globalisation", ran the headline in The Times.

While according to the Wall Street Journal:
"the U.N. has blown the whistle on the nutty fears over genetically modified foods, saying that the developing world can ill afford such self-indulgent hysteria... Mark Malloch Brown of the United Nations Development Program, which issued the survey, insists on the need to plant genetically modified staple crops-rice, millet, cassava-throughout the developing world... "These varieties have 50% higher yields, mature 30 to 50 days earlier, are substantially richer in protein, are far more disease- and drought-tolerant, resist insect pests and can even outcompete weeds," says Mr. Malloch Brown. "This initiative shows the enormous potential of biotech to improve food security in Africa, Asia and Latin America." (Wall Street Journal, July 12, 2001 www.junkscience.com/july01/wsj-UN.htm)

With an equal delight the content and urls of such articles have been posted onto pro-biotech lists and contrarian websites around the globe.

Tellingly, however, the news that "UN Official Urges Rich Nations Not To Block Life-Saving Modified Crops" appears to have been greeted somewhat less euphorically in the developing world.

Consider the editorial below, for example, from India's 'The Hindu' (item 2). This carefully dissects what the UNDP report has to say and points up the obvious limitations in its analysis:

"Unfortunately, the understanding of technology is a very restrictive one ... there is little that the HDR offers beyond a few historical examples to suggest that these new technologies by themselves will do much more for development than innumerable other technological advances of the past."

"A more explicit and potentially more dangerous argument contained in the HDR is that the standards of risk and safety are different in rich and poor countries... It cannot be that there must be lax standards for poor societies and another set of stricter standards for the rich societies."

Hundreds of grassroots groups in the south have also reacted critically. Obviously, as Anuradha Mittal notes below (item 3), "the UNDP and Mark Malloch Brown have done only part of their homework. While they have read up on the genetic engineering debate in the U.S. and Europe, they have ignored the even louder debate going on in the Third World."

After all, when the Cartagena Biosafety Protocol was being negotiated it was the countries of the south who pushed the hardest for firm regulation of the international trade and movement of GMOs. In doing so they faced fierce resistance from such major industrialised countries as the US, Canada and Australia. Where does any of this fit into Mark Malloch Brown's simplistic caricature of the debate?

There is, of course, an evident absurdity in the author of the UNDP report, Mark Malloch Brown, claiming to speak up for the south.

Prior to his move to the UN Mark Malloch Brown was Vice President for External Affairs at the World Bank. The World Bank's President predicted that Mark would "do a wonderful job as head of the UNDP... I am certain that his appointment will further strengthen the partnership between the Bank and the U.N. system."

The World Bank is, of course, an institution long mired in controversy over its avidly pro-globalisation agenda and its failure to listen to the poor:

"We need to question all reports and documents and data coming from the World Bank which the media and others use as their source of truth about the South." - Michael Goldman, editor Privatising Nature, Political Struggles for the Global Commons "... there are forces inside and outside the World Bank hostile to even a modest modification of the dominant paradigm on development. The Bank may want to signal that it is turning into a caring organization but, like a leopard and its spots, it cannot change even if it wants to." -

The Hindu, 26 June, 2000
"it is essential that the Bank's policies and public pronouncements do not err too far from its main shareholder and political protector, the US Treasury." - Focus on Trade, Number 51, June 2000 "I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest-wage country is impeccable, and we should face up to that. Under-populated countries in Africa are vastly under-polluted." - Lawrence Summers, then chief economist for the World Bank (1991) and later U.S. secretary of the Treasury A World Bank proposal to support the widescale introduction of highly industrialised "hi-tech" farming into the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh -- exactly the kind of development move championed by the UNDP report-was recently presented over a five-day period to a jury whose members were drawn from the very communities the plan claimed to benefit. The jury decisively rejected the plan, including the use of GMOs, not excepting Vitamin A rice & Bt cotton
http://members.tripod.com/~ngin/indfarm.htm
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4217682,00.html

Interestingly, the World Bank refused to allow a single one of their staff to attend that citizen's jury in Andhra Pradesh, despite being given several months notice. Yet only this year Milan Brahmbhatt of the World Bank claimed, "China and India are globalizing not because anyone can tell these proud fiercely independent countries what to do - but because this is what THEY have figured out is good for THEMSELVES". And Brahmbhatt went on to dismiss critics of globalisation as heirs to the Nazis.
http://www.panos.org.uk/environment/globalisation_and_poverty_online.htm
"One can see who is going to be laughing all the way to the bank, using this report!", Ashish Kothari commented this week. "Certainly not the poor and disprivileged millions, in whose name UNDP derives its credibility."

Back to UNDP's Report 2001 or GE Activities in 2001