Cross Fertilizations. - Review - book review

Food's Frontier
Richard Manning
North Point Press, $24, 225 pp.

The so-called Green Revolution of the 1950s and 1960s, during which most of today's agricultural techniques were developed, has been largely credited with averting worldwide famine. Even so, there is a growing consensus that Green Revolution techniques are not only insufficient to feed the projected population increase of the next twenty-five years, but that they may have caused serious environmental damage through pesticide use and "monocropping"--the growing of a single crop over a wide area for a long period of time. In Food's Frontier, Richard Manning describes nine agricultural research projects being carried out in the developing world, all with the goal of assuring a secure food supply in a manner that minimizes both environmental degradation and the depletion of natural resources. Unlike the original Green Revolution, in which farmers all over the world adopted only a handful of crops and agricultural techniques, securing the future of the food supply, Manning argues, will require a multiplicity of green revolutions, each tailored to the ecosystem and culture in which it will be applied, and the countries requiring such revolutions must adopt their own methods for change.

Manning provides ample evidence to illustrate the importance of localized, bottom-up agricultural development. Pest-control methods that work on weevils in the southeastern United States are useless on the same insect in Africa because of differences in the mating habits of the African and American varieties. Wheat that is resistant to the scab fungus in Europe and America is devoured by scab in Asia, where wetter climates make life harder for the wheat and easier for scab. Cultural and political influences play a role, too. Farmers in Uganda refuse to grow the more nutritious varieties of sweet potato because these are too sweet for the Ugandan palate. The Chinese government demands wheat in return for farm subsidies, forcing farmers to monocrop wheat rather than rotate it with other crops. War, aids, political corruption, and lack of education play their part in preventing food production from working as efficiently as it could.

While some readers may be bothered by the fact that the Minneapolis-based McKnight Foundation funded both the scientists' work described in the Food's Frontier and the writing of the book, Manning's message is worth hearing. Perhaps the book is best thought of as the McKnight Foundation's internal report, written to be accessible to the lay person, as it gives a largely optimistic, though honest, account of the realities of world hunger and malnutrition.

A crucial step in solving the problem is the education of scientists in countries where better agricultural methods are most needed; again and again Manning stresses the importance of allowing these countries to develop their own agricultural and scientific infrastructure. He criticizes Westerners whose solution to world hunger is to dump their own unwanted food on hungry people. In his description of the current research, we learn that emerging agricultural methods vary from region to region, and can involve anything from rediscovering ancient Incan farming practices to dissecting mechanisms of pest resistance in a laboratory.

The venture into the lab setting leads Manning into controversial waters. These days, it is difficult to discuss modern agriculture without mentioning genetically modified organisms, or GMOs. Although Food's Frontier is not primarily concerned with genetic engineering, three of the nine projects Manning describes do involve transgenic techniques--that is, the manipulation of DNA by modern molecular biological methods. While acknowledging that genetic engineering does pose risks, Manning is right to point out that agriculture is an ecologically risky enterprise and that genetic engineering is only one of many arguably "unnatural" techniques currently in use.

Certainly, the broad range of techniques Manning describes allows the reader to view genetic engineering as part of a continuum, rather than a quantum leap, and to consider--as the author does--that the distinction between "genetically modified" and "nongenetically modified" may to some degree be arbitrary. Compare the development in India of pest-resistant chickpeas by inserting a gene from another plant with the development of pest-resistant potatoes in Brazil and Chile by crossing domestic potatoes with their wild relatives--a process which, Manning points out, could never occur in nature because the two potato species have different numbers of chromosomes. While most scientists would consider the chickpeas to be the result of genetic engineering, but not the potatoes, Manning argues that the similarities between the two projects outweigh the differences. Both are intended to reduce pesticide use and monocropping by the creation of plants which, while not naturally occurring, are similar to those grown by indigenous farmers in the pre-Green Revolution era.

Manning thus uses the example of GMOs to argue that agricultural solutions must be decided locally. This argument is not so much an antiglobalization invective as an expression of concern over the ecological aspects of agriculture. Green Revolution techniques, he demonstrates, do not always work as well as they could because they do not take geographical decisions into account. Technology involving genetic engineering--or anything else for that matter--has the potential of falling into the same trap. Ultimately Food's Frontier offers a word of advice to well-meaning Westerners on both sides of the GMO debate: the decision of whether and how to use new technology must be made on a regional basis, and tailored to the individual needs of each geographical area.

Manning occasionally falls into the trap of romanticizing rural peasant life, a characterization that his own descriptions of poor farmers in Africa and South America seem to contradict. And his explanations of the various research projects, while excellent at conveying the diversity present in modern agricultural research, rarely go into as much depth as one might like. Readers who want a detailed description of the science behind agricultural development will likely find the book somewhat superficial.

Despite these deficiencies, Food's Frontier has real merit, if only for its willingness to take up the thorny and often neglected question of solving the world hunger problem.

Margaret L. Zupancic is a research associate in microbiology at the University of California at Berkeley.

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