Opinion Sur
The National State must design a plan based on Bioeconomy and Bioethics whose pillars are economic development and social justice.
HB4 technology for wheat cultivation is the product of the public-private work carried out for 15 years by the BIOCERES Group and the national State, through a research group of Conicet and the National University of the Litoral led by Dr. Raquel Chan. The discovery of the gene from the sunflower, which is incorporated by the technique of transgenesis into wheat seeds, provides greater resistance to droughts. The results of field trials show a 20 percent improvement in the yield of HB4 wheat varieties in drought situations compared to conventional wheats.
“From the public scientific system and with a low budget compared to that of multinationals like Monsanto (now Bayer), we developed a technology that others could not. We get plants to produce more with less water,” Dr. Chan said. Of the more than sixty GMOs (genetically modified organisms) that are planted in the Argentine territory, only three are national: the virus-resistant potato, wheat, and HB4 soybeans. The others were produced by multinationals.
Specialists from Rosario Stock Exchange, Córdoba Grain Exchange, and the Buenos Aires Grain Exchange made estimates on the impact of the water deficit on the lots implanted with wheat in the center and north of the national agricultural area during the 2019/20 campaign, during which in some sectors they reached four months without significant rainfall. They estimated a loss of between four and five million tons, which at the time meant almost a billion dollars lost to the drought.
Markets and agroecology
Actors linked to agroecology and environmentalism base part of their rejection on the possible use of glufosinate as the main agrochemical, for which THB4 is resistant, whose potential environmental impact is comparable to the pollution caused by the use of glyphosate in GM soybeans. It is worth clarifying that glufosinate is already in use for conventional wheats, behind 2,4D, the most widely used herbicide in winter cereal.
The other point of rejection that these sectors wield is the use of GMOs in the direct consumption of human beings and the possible impact on health. This aspect has been discussed by science on other occasions, as is the case of the biotechnological event developed on rice genetically modified to reduce vitamin A deficiencies (golden rice), which Greenpeace opposed.
In resolution 41/2020, the Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and Fisheries authorizes the marketing of HB4 wheat seed, products, and derived by-products, based mainly on the opinions of CONABIA (National Advisory Commission on Agricultural Biotechnology) and SENASA (National Service for Agri-Food Health and Quality). The first ruled that the risks arising from the release of this genetically modified organism (GMO) to the agroecosystem “do not differ from those inherent in conventional wheat cultivation;” the second was issued as to the fact that there are no scientific objections from the point of view of human and animal food suitability.
Although the issue is still polemical and arousing controversy, it must be considered that human intervention in genetic evolution is not new. Many favorable genotypic features have been introduced to plants and animals, either using sexual reproduction methods or tissue culture procedures, on a routine basis. Recombinant DNA techniques applied to an organism do not cause new risks or higher risks compared to modifying organisms using traditional methods. It is not in technique or technology that the danger lies, but in who controls, dominates, and exploits it.
Local Responses
On March 16, 1972, Juan Perón wrote the letter entitled “Mensaje a los Pueblos y Gobiernos del Mundo (Message to the Peoples and Governments of the World),” in which he established social justice, political sovereignty, and economic independence as central facing the advance of squandering, “social selection,” and the “international selection” to which the dominant countries subjected the rest of the world. He already predicted the environmental crisis and the famine to which a capitalist system that put making money first and foremost was heading.
“To preserve the environment and live in harmony with nature, there is no need to abandon technological advances,” Perón says in his letter. “On the other hand, despite the so-called green revolution, the Third World has not yet managed to produce the amount of food it consumes, and to reach its self-sufficiency, it needs industrial development, structural reforms, and the validity of a social justice that is still far from being achieved. To make matters worse, the development of substitute food production is held back by financial insufficiency and technical difficulties,” he continues. Clearly the leader of the national Justicialist movement understood that without social justice technology only benefited the market, and environmentalism did not solve hunger. The State was to be the guarantor of the care of the biosphere and the development of the community.
Almost 50 years later, the development of strategic knowledge and science are profoundly transforming the foundations of the global system, where the dispute over the imposition of the rules of the game is centrally based on the control of 5G, robotics, the Internet of Things (IoT), Big Data, Blockchain, among other cutting-edge technologies applied to production. This leap in scale, however, is being carried out without solving the hunger and inequalities generated by those who dominate the system. While majorities continue to be impoverished, a few accumulate the wealth generated by those who produce and work, although the UN itself strives to show its concern about the prophecy of the apocalypse of a planet destroyed in 2050.
What seems a paradox is that the challenge of producing sustainably also appears hand in hand with scientific-technological development. The problem is, again, who controls it. Such development is currently driven by investment in new means of production, with the aim of reducing social production times and thus maximizing profits, the behind the scenes of the “green revolution”.
It is no coincidence that the “Agricultural Innovation Mission for Climate (AIM4C)” presented at the UN Conference on Climate Change (COP26) held in November 2021, is promoted by the United States, with its president Joe Biden at the head, together with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, among other transnational companies such as Bayer, Basf, Syngenta, PepsiCo, Croplife, among others.
They call it “climate-smart agriculture” and propose public, private, and philanthropic investments in new technologies controlled by companies. Here the big tech companies and the big financial funds make their appearance to dispute the control of “digital agriculture”.
Given this scenario, it is essential in an agricultural country like Argentina to design from the National State a plan based on the Bioeconomy and Bioethics for the care and protection of the Biosphere and its Biodiversity, whose pillars are the sovereign development of strategic knowledge and social justice. This implies the challenge of deploying throughout the country a network of Agri-food Technology Poles that link the public with the private in order to find answers to local needs and promoting productive and sustainable, integral, agro-bio-industrial, federal and inclusive development. With centrality in the organized community, with the men and women who produce and work as protagonists.
A plan in which agro-industrial production is not opposed to environmental sustainability, but above all, that finally guarantees the economic and political conditions that allow attacking “at the root” the scourges of misery and hunger of the Argentine people.
Published in CASH December 5th, 2021
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