Flip through the latest issue of Gulf Weekly.
Rising food prices are forcing many countries to embrace genetically modified (GM) foods ignoring the dire warnings of environmental groups.
The GCC countries too are taking a close look at the issue of food security even as their dream of desert-agriculture is fading. One option being tried by GCC countries including Saudi Arabia and the UAE is buying farms in the poorer parts of the world. Saudis are thinking of buying rice farms in Thailand, the world's biggest rice exporter.
The other alternative is allowing more imports of GM foods, which are doing particularly well in the US.
As a first step towards allowing GM foods discreetly, the Gulf nations are drafting rules to govern foods containing GM ingredients.
A GCC subcommittee has set the agenda for the drafting of regulations to control the testing, production and entry into the region of GM foods.
The states are expected to endorse the rules by late 2009, including one that would require supermarkets and grocery shops to label any foods containing GM ingredients.
It has been three decades since the earliest genetically engineered organisms were created amid controversy - the first a bacterium containing a salmonella gene. Scientists have succeeded in genetically modifying everything from fungi to mice but it is genetically engineered plants that perhaps create the greatest controversy.
The health impacts of eating such genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and environmental concerns about the transfer of their genes to wild plants are issues on which experts are sharply divided.
But, what about the argument that GM crops help us to feed the world by making stronger plants with bigger yields?
Detractors say it is only propaganda put out by the GM companies, who have a permanent presence at the European Commission and easy access to ministers and civil servants, who for some reason believe what they're told.
The United National International Assessment of Agriculture, carried out by 400 leading scientists, found no evidence that GM crops increase yields or that they could feed a hungry world.
The US Department of Agriculture reported that some GM crop yields are actually lower. GM is not about feeding starving children. People are hungry not because there's not enough food in the world, but because they haven't got the money to buy it.
GM won't make their pockets any heavier and they won't be able to afford to buy the seed, anti-GM lobbyists say.
And the stakes are high. Farmers who sign up for the promise of GM crops have to agree to use fertiliser and pesticides from the seed supplier and not to save any seed. Some are even 'terminator' seeds that are infertile.
Meanwhile, GM corporations are systematically buying up seed companies and taking varieties off the market. Control the seeds that feed the world, you become 100 times richer than Bill Gates because you can say which country has which seed and you get paid every time someone uses your seed. And once you add green oil - bio-fuel - into the equation you become master of the world, richer than any country.
The eight biggest drug companies are the biggest producers of GM and the biggest pesticide manufacturers. They began with maize and soya, they had the patent last year for wheat in the US and now they're working on rice.
However, proponents of GM foods are optimistic because a confluence of social, commercial and technological forces is boosting the case for the technology.
As India and China grow richer, the world is likely to need much more food, just as arable land, water and energy become scarcer and more expensive. If they fulfil their promise, GM foods offer a way out of this bind, providing higher yields even as they require less water, energy and fertiliser.
And for the GCC countries, which import more than 90 per cent of their food, controversies would have to take a back seat as they strive to feed their swelling populations. They would be better off believing a lot of research that shows GM foods are safe. It must also be borne in mind that there is very little research that argues that people should not be offered food that may carry some degree of risk.
Why so? It is because the only research into the safety of GM food is being done by the companies that produce it. And since 99.9 per cent of GM varieties are designed to resist or absorb pesticides or to produce a toxin that kills any insect that bites it, it's the first time in history that what amounts to a drug or pesticide is not tested before release by anyone other than the company that makes it.
