Agriculture is now about 10,000 years old, but has been constantly improved to make it more productive and easier through human intervention. So agriculture is a hundred per cent human-created enterprise and there is nothing natural about it. If agriculture had not developed the way it has, the human race would probably have been wiped out from the surface of this planet a long time ago.
Agriculture is also the most environmentally disturbing activity that humans have developed. The question that arises is: can we now turn the clock back on agriculture because it is environmentally destructive considering that today the world’s population is around seven billion, out of which more than eight hundred million people are food-insecure. It is predicted that the world’s population will surpass 10 billion by 2050. The greatest challenge that is looming on us is how to feed such a huge population when the land mass available for agriculture is shrinking.
This profound question is being debated all over the world. But there has not been a single idea on which there has been a consensus to start implementing it across the planet. There cannot be one single idea for the world as the agro-climatic conditions vary vastly. Moreover, global warming is already hugely impacting agriculture in many countries of the south with India hurting the most. Not only are the temperatures rising in India, but fresh water for agriculture is rapidly vanishing, and in more than one sense, water wars have started in different communities and regions of India.
Under these circumstances, Indian agriculture needs more science and technology and not less. However, there are many voices in India, particularly western-funded NGOs and rural activists, who are strongly campaigning for Indian farmers to revert to ancient agricultural practices by abandoning modern agriculture as we know it since the mid 1960s. Indian farmers are unsure about whom to listen to: the NGOs or the agricultural scientists. As always, governments of the day, to avoid public conflict, support both arguments and make concessions for those who want to stop modern agricultural technologies. Most decision makers avoid decision making by postponing, just to avoid unresolvable conflicts, another tactic that they are famous for. Commercialisation of one of the most successful biotechnologies, namely GM crops, have been in limbo for more than six years, and nobody in the government seems to be bothered about it. The result is total confusion.
Most modern biotechnologies are highly regulated by the Ministry of Environment, and the Ministry of Agriculture which really understands the problems of country’s agriculture has no role to play in regulation and there is no real good communication between the two. On top of it, certain NGOs who are opposed to biotechnology have filed a case in the Supreme Court that never ends. This is a time-tested tactic of environmental activists to tie up technologies in litigation from here to eternity so that technology developers get frustrated and abandon the arena.
Biotechnology is not the only modern technology that has impacted agriculture all over the world, but it has impacted human health and environmental protection in a huge way. The latest genome editing technology that was invented just a few years ago, has already started to roll out new products hitherto unheard of in animals and crop plants. It is also impacting the area of the human genome, but is being slowed down somewhat because of discussions related to bioethics.
The US National Academy of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine just rolled out a report which describes the new types of biotechnology products likely to emerge over the next five to 10 years and assesses whether future products could pose different types of risks relative to existing products. It also identifies the scientific capabilities, tools, and expertise needed to support the oversight of these products by the US regulatory system.
When there is a revolution in modern biotechnology going on in the west, India, home to the largest national agricultural research system, is lagging behind because there is no political support to move aggressively to help boost Indian agriculture with the most modern technologies. If one talks of developing country agriculture, especially in India, one gets an imagery of a thin, dark-skinned, half-naked farmer using a 17th century instrument called yoke either tied to a couple of bulls or himself. Some of them do use modern chemicals and fertilisers in a dangerous way, but there stops the so called modernisation of Indian agriculture.
In the 10,000 years of agriculture, modern science impacted it only in the last 100 years with the discovery of genes by an Austrian monk called Gregor John Mendel and hybridisation technology in the 1930s. These were together responsible for the Green Revolution since the mid-1960s. But the Green Revolution has fatigued and has leveled off in terms of increasing crop productivity. Then came the GM crops in the late 1980s. This latest technology has been held back in India by the government without a firm decision. This regulatory limbo has already put Indian agriculture in jeopardy and it will take decades before it can catch up, that is if catch-up is really possible. This is a governance issue that is the bane of developing countries because of bureaucratic and political lethargy.
The great paradox is the magnitude of benefits reaped by humanity in the 20th century in terms of life expectancy, health, and increase in per capita food supply. A lot of experts felt that agriculture could not feed a large population, but scientific interventions helped greatly to increase food security. The world still has slightly more than 800 million underfed or food-insecure people who need help, but international politics, poor governance, and internecine wars have ravaged many parts of Africa and some parts of Southeast Asia. However, many developmental and environmental activists deny the progress achieved by agricultural science that has been under attack for almost the entire last century. Thomas DeGregori, a professor of economics at the Houston University, says that this global movement is a manifestation of anti-technology elitism. According to him, human beings are inherently progressive-minded and technology-friendly people due to which the entire evolution of human beings and their culture has become intertwined with science and technology. Anti-technology elitism has a lineage from the West going back to the Greeks and has raised its head in China and now all over the world.
The so-called civil society activists find it alluring to lead a cozy lifestyle by getting sumptuous funding from rich benefactors in Europe and North America. Once having got the money, they have no option but to keep the anti-technology pot boiling. So there is a well-orchestrated global conspiracy to deny scientific and technological developments from the West to Third World countries. The real paradox here is that the scientific and technological solutions are ready for implementation, but are not being allowed because of the activism. On the contrary, Indian farm activists and other NGOs are championing the cause of organic agriculture, natural agriculture and biodynamic farming. Their campaigning has been so successful that the state of Mizoram declared itself to be a 100 per cent organic agriculture state and within a short span of three years, customers are avoiding organic produce because they are three times more expensive. It remains to be seen how long Mizoram will remain 100 per cent organic.
Another state that has totally banned GMOs is Kerala. India is an agrarian economy in which almost 60 per cent of the population depends on agriculture that is neither productive nor remunerative. Without increasing productivity by using the latest technologies, there will be no hope for India to become a powerful economy. Indian agriculture is a huge drag on India’s progress. Everything can wait, but not agriculture was what the first prime minister of India Jawaharlal Nehru was heard saying.
The conundrum here is that when agricultural scientists are struggling to promote modern science and technology, there is a bunch of highly organised and coordinated activists campaigning with farmers for them to go back to old-style agriculture and avoid all things modern. Many technophobic and anti-western, and swadeshi type of politicians succumb to this kind of anti-technology campaign and support them wherever they can. Once there is political support, then the game is over in favour of those who are anti-technology. This clash between scientists and activist philosophies seems never to come to a resolution and in the meantime, governments are completely happy with not taking any decision. They are damned if they did and are damned for not taking any decision.
The unsubstantiated belief among the opponents of technology is that modern science and technology are uniquely life-threatening. Then how is it that humankind has achieved so much of life longevity and prosperity just in the past century? Everyone must realise that human life without science and technology is impossible and scientific progress cannot be stopped, and progressive science and technologies will prevail in the end, no matter how long it takes. In the meanwhile, many deserving populations will have to pay the price of not having the benefits of modern science and technology.
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The United Nations has shaped so much of global co-operation and regulation that we wouldn’t recognise our world today without the UN’s pervasive role in it. So many small details of our lives – such as postage and copyright laws – are subject to international co-operation nurtured by the UN.
In its 75th year, however, the UN is in a difficult moment as the world faces climate crisis, a global pandemic, great power competition, trade wars, economic depression and a wider breakdown in international co-operation.
Still, the UN has faced tough times before – over many decades during the Cold War, the Security Council was crippled by deep tensions between the US and the Soviet Union. The UN is not as sidelined or divided today as it was then. However, as the relationship between China and the US sours, the achievements of global co-operation are being eroded.
The way in which people speak about the UN often implies a level of coherence and bureaucratic independence that the UN rarely possesses. A failure of the UN is normally better understood as a failure of international co-operation.
We see this recently in the UN’s inability to deal with crises from the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, to civil conflict in Syria, and the failure of the Security Council to adopt a COVID-19 resolution calling for ceasefires in conflict zones and a co-operative international response to the pandemic.
The UN administration is not primarily to blame for these failures; rather, the problem is the great powers – in the case of COVID-19, China and the US – refusing to co-operate.
Where states fail to agree, the UN is powerless to act.
Marking the 75th anniversary of the official formation of the UN, when 50 founding nations signed the UN Charter on June 26, 1945, we look at some of its key triumphs and resounding failures.
Five successes
1. Peacekeeping
The United Nations was created with the goal of being a collective security organisation. The UN Charter establishes that the use of force is only lawful either in self-defence or if authorised by the UN Security Council. The Security Council’s five permanent members, being China, US, UK, Russia and France, can veto any such resolution.
The UN’s consistent role in seeking to manage conflict is one of its greatest successes.
A key component of this role is peacekeeping. The UN under its second secretary-general, the Swedish statesman Dag Hammarskjöld – who was posthumously awarded the Nobel Peace prize after he died in a suspicious plane crash – created the concept of peacekeeping. Hammarskjöld was responding to the 1956 Suez Crisis, in which the US opposed the invasion of Egypt by its allies Israel, France and the UK.
UN peacekeeping missions involve the use of impartial and armed UN forces, drawn from member states, to stabilise fragile situations. “The essence of peacekeeping is the use of soldiers as a catalyst for peace rather than as the instruments of war,” said then UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, when the forces won the 1988 Nobel Peace Prize following missions in conflict zones in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Central America and Europe.
However, peacekeeping also counts among the UN’s major failures.
2. Law of the Sea
Negotiated between 1973 and 1982, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) set up the current international law of the seas. It defines states’ rights and creates concepts such as exclusive economic zones, as well as procedures for the settling of disputes, new arrangements for governing deep sea bed mining, and importantly, new provisions for the protection of marine resources and ocean conservation.
Mostly, countries have abided by the convention. There are various disputes that China has over the East and South China Seas which present a conflict between power and law, in that although UNCLOS creates mechanisms for resolving disputes, a powerful state isn’t necessarily going to submit to those mechanisms.
Secondly, on the conservation front, although UNCLOS is a huge step forward, it has failed to adequately protect oceans that are outside any state’s control. Ocean ecosystems have been dramatically transformed through overfishing. This is an ecological catastrophe that UNCLOS has slowed, but failed to address comprehensively.
3. Decolonisation
The idea of racial equality and of a people’s right to self-determination was discussed in the wake of World War I and rejected. After World War II, however, those principles were endorsed within the UN system, and the Trusteeship Council, which monitored the process of decolonisation, was one of the initial bodies of the UN.
Although many national independence movements only won liberation through bloody conflicts, the UN has overseen a process of decolonisation that has transformed international politics. In 1945, around one third of the world’s population lived under colonial rule. Today, there are less than 2 million people living in colonies.
When it comes to the world’s First Nations, however, the UN generally has done little to address their concerns, aside from the non-binding UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples of 2007.
4. Human rights
The Human Rights Declaration of 1948 for the first time set out fundamental human rights to be universally protected, recognising that the “inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”.
Since 1948, 10 human rights treaties have been adopted – including conventions on the rights of children and migrant workers, and against torture and discrimination based on gender and race – each monitored by its own committee of independent experts.
The language of human rights has created a new framework for thinking about the relationship between the individual, the state and the international system. Although some people would prefer that political movements focus on ‘liberation’ rather than ‘rights’, the idea of human rights has made the individual person a focus of national and international attention.
5. Free trade
Depending on your politics, you might view the World Trade Organisation as a huge success, or a huge failure.
The WTO creates a near-binding system of international trade law with a clear and efficient dispute resolution process.
The majority Australian consensus is that the WTO is a success because it has been good for Australian famers especially, through its winding back of subsidies and tariffs.
However, the WTO enabled an era of globalisation which is now politically controversial.
Recently, the US has sought to disrupt the system. In addition to the trade war with China, the Trump Administration has also refused to appoint tribunal members to the WTO’s Appellate Body, so it has crippled the dispute resolution process. Of course, the Trump Administration is not the first to take issue with China’s trade strategies, which include subsidises for ‘State Owned Enterprises’ and demands that foreign firms transfer intellectual property in exchange for market access.
The existence of the UN has created a forum where nations can discuss new problems, and climate change is one of them. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was set up in 1988 to assess climate science and provide policymakers with assessments and options. In 1992, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change created a permanent forum for negotiations.
However, despite an international scientific body in the IPCC, and 165 signatory nations to the climate treaty, global greenhouse gas emissions have continued to increase.
Under the Paris Agreement, even if every country meets its greenhouse gas emission targets we are still on track for ‘dangerous warming’. Yet, no major country is even on track to meet its targets; while emissions will probably decline this year as a result of COVID-19, atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases will still increase.
This illustrates a core conundrum of the UN in that it opens the possibility of global cooperation, but is unable to constrain states from pursuing their narrowly conceived self-interests. Deep co-operation remains challenging.
Five failures of the UN
1. Peacekeeping
During the Bosnian War, Dutch peacekeeping forces stationed in the town of Srebrenica, declared a ‘safe area’ by the UN in 1993, failed in 1995 to stop the massacre of more than 8000 Muslim men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces. This is one of the most widely discussed examples of the failures of international peacekeeping operations.
On the massacre’s 10th anniversary, then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan wrote that the UN had “made serious errors of judgement, rooted in a philosophy of impartiality”, contributing to a mass murder that would “haunt our history forever”.
If you look at some of the other infamous failures of peacekeeping missions – in places such as Rwanda, Somalia and Angola – it is the limited powers given to peacekeeping operations that have resulted in those failures.
2. The invasion of Iraq
The invasion of Iraq by the US in 2003, which was unlawful and without Security Council authorisation, reflects the fact that the UN is has very limited capacity to constrain the actions of great powers.
The Security Council designers created the veto power so that any of the five permanent members could reject a Council resolution, so in that way it is programmed to fail when a great power really wants to do something that the international community generally condemns.
In the case of the Iraq invasion, the US didn’t veto a resolution, but rather sought authorisation that it did not get. The UN, if you go by the idea of collective security, should have responded by defending Iraq against this unlawful use of force.
The invasion proved a humanitarian disaster with the loss of more than 400,000 lives, and many believe that it led to the emergence of the terrorist Islamic State.
3. Refugee crises
The UN brokered the 1951 Refugee Convention to address the plight of people displaced in Europe due to World War II; years later, the 1967 Protocol removed time and geographical restrictions so that the Convention can now apply universally (although many countries in Asia have refused to sign it, owing in part to its Eurocentric origins).
Despite these treaties, and the work of the UN High Commission for Refugees, there is somewhere between 30 and 40 million refugees, many of them, such as many Palestinians, living for decades outside their homelands. This is in addition to more than 40 million people displaced within their own countries.
While for a long time refugee numbers were reducing, in recent years, particularly driven by the Syrian conflict, there have been increases in the number of people being displaced.
During the COVID-19 crisis, boatloads of Rohingya refugees were turned away by port after port. This tragedy has echoes of pre-World War II when ships of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany were refused entry by multiple countries.
And as a catastrophe of a different kind looms, there is no international framework in place for responding to people who will be displaced by rising seas and other effects of climate change.
4. Conflicts without end
Across the world, there is a shopping list of unresolved civil conflicts and disputed territories.
Palestine and Kashmir are two of the longest-running failures of the UN to resolve disputed lands. More recent, ongoing conflicts include the civil wars in Syria and Yemen.
The common denominator of unresolved conflicts is either division among the great powers, or a lack of international interest due to the geopolitical stakes not being sufficiently high. For instance, the inaction during the Rwandan civil war in the 1990s was not due to a division among great powers, but rather a lack of political will to engage.
In Syria, by contrast, Russia and the US have opposing interests and back opposing sides: Russia backs the government of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, whereas the US does not.
5. Acting like it’s 1945
The UN is increasingly out of step with the reality of geopolitics today.
The permanent members of the Security Council reflect the division of power internationally at the end of World War II. The continuing exclusion of Germany, Japan, and rising powers such as India and Indonesia, reflects the failure to reflect the changing balance of power.
Also, bodies such as the IMF and the World Bank, which are part of the UN system, continue to be dominated by the West. In response, China has created potential rival institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.
Western domination of UN institutions undermines their credibility. However, a more fundamental problem is that institutions designed in 1945 are a poor fit with the systemic global challenges – of which climate change is foremost – that we face today.