295
CHAPTER
27
PEOPLE AND PLENTY
IN THE TWENTY-FIRST
CENTURY
There is no more intriguing problem in the history of food than that
of how cultural barriers to the transmission of foods and foodways
have been traversed or broken.
Felipe Fernández–Armesto
1
ANOTHER LARGE and daunting twenty-fi rst century problem involves
equal access to food. Today, fertility rates in third-world countries have
decreased sharply even as global per capita calorie consumption has risen,
the twin phenomena casting doubt on predictions of swelling populations
outstripping the globe’s food supply.
2
Such predictions were routinely
generated by that alarming increase in the number of people occupying
planet Earth between 1900 and 1990, which was the equal of four times
the sum of all previous increases in the whole of human history.
3
But
although we are now 6 billion, with predictions of an increase to 9 billion
by 2050, it would seem that agricultural advances have probably resolved
concerns about food quantity. There are enough calories for everyone. Yet
fully three- quarters of the world’s population derive their calories from
a diet that is low in high-quality protein compared to the other quarter
who consume too much of it in diets that are defi nitely not tailored for
a small planet. And the problem is, as Tony McMichael points out, that if
food consumption was somehow made equal in terms of quality, the globe

can support some 3,000 persons on 10 square kilometers.
7
The Green Revolution and genetically modifi ed ( GM) foods may, there-
fore, be regarded as the latest manifestations of an ongoing Neolithic Revo-
lution. The Green Revolution, with its roots already growing during World
War II, was aimed at increasing the productivity of developing world agri-
culture. Not surprisingly, in view of the hemispheric interest of the U.S.
government and the Rockefeller Foundation (who might be considered
Green Revolution founders), the focus fell fi rst on maize as a revolution-
ary crop and Mexico as the place to launch the revolution.
8
By the 1960s,
high yielding wheat strains were also under development in Mexico and
these, too, subsequently colonized the world.
9
Advances in wheat were
paralleled by a Green Revolution in tropical rice, thanks to the efforts of
the International Rice Research Institute located in the Philippines, which
concentrated on high-yielding semi-dwarf varieties.
10
People and Plenty in the Twenty-First Century
297
Truly sensational yields of rice and wheat and maize followed, but
unintended consequences took the edge off the excitement that such
yields generated. Technological improvements tend to benefi t developed
countries most, and the United States managed to double its wheat pro-
duction in just a quarter of a century.
11
In large part this was because
Green Revolution cultivars were heavily dependent on the petrochemical

signifi cantly. Much of the thanks for this was due the rediscovery of Men-
delian Genetics in 1900 that gave rise to food biotechnology a half-century
later, which means the use of recombinant deoxyribonucleic acid (rDNA)
and cell fusion techniques to introduce new traits into plants, animals,
298
A Movable Feast
and microorganisms. Such gene transfers between different species have
occurred often enough in nature. But it was only in the aftermath of the
mid-century discovery of the roadmap of life (the double helix structure of
DNA) by James Watson and Francis Crick that humans have been able to
control the process. This has been heralded as the greatest breakthrough in
agriculture since its invention – even the beginning of a second Neolithic
Revolution – and one that promises even more agricultural transformation
and an array of other sparkling possibilities.
14
As was learned from the Green Revolution, however, its management
will require the imposition of some sort of analytic framework – a care-
fully drawn map if you will.
15
Critics say that this sort of management is
impossible but, managed or not, biotechnology is not going to go away.
With the prediction of a global population increase from 6 to 9 billion by
2050, technology and science have their work cut out for them, and bio-
technology promises a food supply capable of feeding the extra 3 billion
of us – even on the poor soils and in the poor climates that characterize
many of the developing countries.
16
GM events have moved at blinding speed since 1994 when the “Flavr
Savr” tomato became the fi rst genetically engineered food product
approved by the FDA for human consumption in America. Two decades

be sorted out from the traditionally grown varieties – a costly procedure.
Nonetheless, in the late 1990s the European Union ( EU) responded to con-
sumers’ fears about the safety of GM foods (85 to 90 percent of Europeans
wanted GM foods to be labeled) by enacting a moratorium on their sale.
18
Such fears of GM foods are as disparate as the groups that voice them.
Some object to scientists “playing God.” Others worry that consumer ill-
health will be the chief harvest of GM foods, and still others are anxious
about unintended environmental consequences – GM crops, for example,
escaping and crossing with wild relatives to touch off an epidemic of
“super weeds.”
19
In addition there is the very real possibility that the bugs
and weeds GM foods are built to discourage may instead build their own
defenses against such efforts. Many, with little confi dence in the ethics of
GM producers, suspect that the new plants will be outfi tted with “termi-
nator” genes to kill them before seed can be collected for planting, thereby
chaining developing world farmers to Western agrochemical fi rms. Still
others just don’t like big business, or have specifi c objections to companies
like Monsanto with its “seed police” who nose around small towns looking
for tips on who might be saving Monsanto seed. Those caught are sued and
one poor farmer actually went to prison for the offense.
20
The food and biotechnology industries denounced the European mora-
torium as a “knee-jerk” reaction or a “frankenfoods” phobia. Washington
(backed by Canada and Australia) claimed that it constituted an illegal
trade barrier that would cost U.S. farmers hundreds of millions of dol-
lars annually, and fi led a complaint with the World Trade Organization.
By the middle of 2003 the smoke was clearing. The European Parliament
had passed tough new laws regulating GM foods, to replace the biotech