IRRI @50: Does it ensure food security or food insecurity?
Last October 30, 2009 at Iloilo Grand Hotel, Iloilo City, Philippines, a whole-day MASIPAG Visayas key members and partner organizations from the NGOs, POs, academe and farmers’ forum-consultation was conducted to have unity and common framework in launching and implementing a network-wide anti-IRRI campaign activities that will conclude in a synchronized activity in April 2010 as IRRI celebrates its 50th Anniversary.
Organized by MASIPAG-Visayas (Magsasaka at Siyentipiko para sa Pag-unlad ng Agrikultura – Visayas), the consultation-meeting seeks to discuss the region’s intensified campaign in promoting food security and denouncement of current agricultural trends such as genetically modified (GM) rice and seek for the support and commitment to the campaign against the IRRI’s continued influence in the direction of a chemical-based agricultural research and development in many agricultural countries particularly in the Philippines. IRRI has introduced the high yielding varieties in the 1960’s which turned out to be a failure. Nowadays, IRRI is involved in hybrid rice and GM rice research, two modern varieties of seeds that will certainly not help in achieving food security. In 2011, IRRI is planning to release the Golden Rice, or rice fortified through genetic engineering with genes from corn to exhibit more beta-carotene. This, in spite of the unresolved health and safety issues surrounding GMOs.
50 years of IRRI is enough! It will celebrate its 50th anniversary in the midst of a global food crisis. The UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food says the number of the world’s hungry will reach 1 billion people (and counting) have already died of hunger as of today and there is ample reason to believe that another rice crises like the one of 2008 will soon strike again. IRRI cannot escape some responsibility to this situation. It played a critical role in the development and expansion of a model of agriculture that has left farmers and the poor at the mercy of a transnational agribusiness industry which is reaping obscene profits as people starve. Moreover, pesticide poisonings (estimated at 25 million occurrences involving agricultural workers per year), environmental and health calamities, soil degradation and major pest outbreaks (take the case of tungro infestations in Antique recently), continue to haunt farming communities, not only in the Philippines but across Asia because of the increasing use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides that IRRI’s modern rice varieties require. After 50 years of IRRI, with poverty and food crises as rampant as ever in Asia, it is time to take a hard look at how this institution lives up to its mission “to reduce poverty and hunger, improve the health of rice farmers and consumers, and ensure that rice production is environmentally sustainable”.
The collaboration among farmers, scientists and NGOs started with the BIGAS Conference when disgruntled farmers called for alternatives to the chemical-based farming. Since then, MASIPAG has stood for a farmer-led, farmer-centered approached to increasing productivity and conserving our genetic resources – everything that IRRI has not. MASIPAG farmers and partners should therefore continue to be critical to IRRI’s approach to food productivity and security, as it continue to threaten the poor farmers’ and consumers rights to a safe and healthy food, livelihood and environment.
Their call: 50 years of IRRI is enough! 50 years of Green Revolution, yet our food systems are in crisis with poverty and hunger rising across Asia. New technologies and modern varieties are clearly not the answer. The best thing IRRI can do for rice is to close down and give the seeds it has collected back to the farmers.
“We need food systems based on small farmers’ control over seeds, land, water and energy. We need them now. Not another year of IRRI”.