U.S. bio-tech ingenuity can ease hunger, provide better jobs in the world
September 2, 2001
CHURCHVILLE, Va - As Americans looked forward to their Labor Day celebrations, a college-student friend returned from her summer project in the highlands of Honduras. There, the biggest problem is a lack of jobs.
Phyllis says the only work available near her project village of Buenos Aires is in the coffee plantations, hacking weeds with machetes and spraying fungicides on the coffee trees. There are more workers available than coffee jobs, so little of the prosperity from Starbucks and other coffee boutiques trickles down.
Half of the children in the village are physically stunted, wasted or both. Four-year-olds look like American 2-year-olds, except for their open sores. Virtually every family has lost a child to the diseases of malnutrition.
The village can’t grow its own food crops. Red ants eat the plant shoots, fungus thrives in the misty climate, and the villagers can’t afford pesticides. Their diet is corn tortillas and little else.
There’s not enough feed for cows or pigs. A few chickens feed themselves on insects and weed seeds. Toddlers play on the dirt floors of the doorless mud-brick huts, amid the chicken droppings. The smoky wood cookfires discourage malaria mosquitoes, but cause lots of respiratory ailments.
Phyllis and her health team are trying to introduce rabbits. They hope the kids will gather enough vegetation to nourish the rabbits and their offspring. Even a little meat would make a big difference to the health of the kids. The team also brought a solar generator to power the school’s little transistor radio, and the whole village marveled.
The new hope of this Honduran village is the rise of maquiladoras near the cities, the duty-free industries that bring in raw materials hire Hondurans to assemble them, and ship the finished goods to richer countries for sale. The maquiladoras paid for Buenos Aires’ new dirt road.
Maquiladoras helped Mexico get started on economic growth, too. Now Mexican industries are recruiting Mexicans in the United Sates to come back and fill their expanding need for skilled workers — even as U.S. exports to Mexico are soaring.
The outlook for Honduran villages is still bleak in the short term. The mountains are steep, the roads primitive and the hurricanes bring massive mud slides.
In the years ahead, however, new export industries should help raise incomes broadly. Wireless cell phones could connect the village without the huge expense of stringing wires through the mountains. Biotechnology could add protein and Vitamin A to the white corn and build fungus resistance into fruits and vegetables sharply reducing poor-country fungus problems.
Half a world away from Honduras, equally malnourished children play in the dusty streets of an Iraqi town. The government has oil money, but it’s a dictatorship — which, much more often than not, is typical of poor, illiterate countries. Like the coffee, little of the oil money trickles down. Here, too, most of the typical income goes for food.
This town was once the site of an agricultural miracle — the famed Hanging Gardens of Babylon. It was history’s first big success with irrigation. But centuries of irrigation built up salt levels in the soil. Most crops won’t grow at all now. Much of Iraq’s food must be imported. Flushing the salts would take huge amounts of water, and expensive engineering projects.
Recently, however, researchers at the University of California, Davis genetically engineered tomatoes that not only grow in salty soil, but actually remove the contaminating salt. The genetically engineered plants collect salt in their leaves, but not in their fruit. After the tomatoes are harvested, the farmer can gather up the plant stems and leaves, haul them away and have better soil for growing grain and other foods. Is it too much to imagine that the Iraqi people, suddenly able to produce more food at less cost, able to improve their kids’ diets and generate enough money for better schools, might also eventually topple their dictators in favor of democracy? They might even buy some irrigation pumps from America.
Isn’t it fabulous to celebrate Labor Day in a country where hard work, trade, technology and democracy have already brought history’s most pleasant lifestyle choices? And to know the same forces are also at work for people who are not yet affluent?
Dennis T. Avery is based in Churchville, Va., and is director of global food issues for the Hudson Institute of Indianapolis.
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