The only recent book that deals with the effect of agricultural biotechnology in the third world and embeds it in a more general discussion of agricultural technology in general is Vandana Shiva's Stolen Harvest. [Note: 4 The classic work on the effects of biotechnology in the third world is Calestous Juma's The Gene Hunters (Princeton University Press, 1989), which remains the basic source for an economic and historical analysis of the effect of agricultural technology in Africa and Asia. Because the work is a dozen years old, it antedates most of the actual development of GMOs and the immense growth of public discourse and anxiety about the subject.] Shiva is what is called a "cult figure" for opponents of GMOs, but her book will give a detached observer more the impression of a cheerleader. She might have used her knowledge of Indian agriculture and her immense prestige among environmentalists to provide a credible up-to-date analysis of the effects of agricultural technology and market structures on third-world economies. Instead, she has produced a conjunction of religious morality, undeveloped assertions about the cultural implications of Indian farming, unexplained claims about the nature of the farm economy in India and how biotechnology destroys it, and unanalyzed or distorted scientific findings. Stolen Harvest is an opportunity squandered.
So with no further elucidation we are told that seeds and biodiversity are "gifts from nature and their ancestors" that Indian farmers have received; that "food security is not just having access to adequate food. It is also having access to culturally appropriate food"; that "the smoke from the mustard oil used to light the deepavali lamp acts as an environmental purifier." While Shiva makes the undoubtedly correct claim that conversion to high-yield Green Revolution varieties has resulted in less fodder for cattle and less green manure for fields and has displaced the culture of legumes, other vegetables, and fruits, she nowhere explains why Indian farmers have engaged in this self-destructive activity and how the global structuring of agricultural trade in combination with the internal economy of India has driven them to it. Indeed, she never shows that Indian farmers are worse off than before the introduction of agricultural technology.
Most disheartening of all, Shiva's reports of facts are not always as complete as they need to be. In a discussion of genetically engineered soybeans she writes that "infants fed with soy-based formula are daily ingesting a dose of estrogens equivalent to that of 8 to 12 contraceptive pills." It turns out, however, that the soybeans contain a nonsteroidal estrogen whose physiological activity is less than one thousandth the activity of the standard hormone. I learned this fact, not mentioned by Shiva, by consulting the very article from which she says her dosage figure was calculated.
The real present danger to third-world agriculture from transgenics is elsewhere. Much of the agricultural economy of these countries depends on growing specialty commodities like lauric acid oils used in soaps and detergents, once found only in tropical species. Now, with recombinant DNA, these are produced by canola. Why buy palm oils from the politically unstable Philippines, where 30 percent of the population depends on it economically, when we can grow it in Saskatchewan? Caffeine genes have been put into soybeans. Why not Nescafé from Minnesota?