The GMO myth — cheaper food, deeper hunger, greater corporate power

In his Daily Maverick article of 1 August 2026, Ed Stoddard argues that genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and precision farming have helped bring South Africa’s food inflation to a 16-year low.

At a time when households across the country are being crushed by the cost of living, any easing of food price pressure matters. But we should be deeply wary of a narrative that presents GM crops and hi-tech, capital-intensive farming as a solution to hunger in one of the most unequal countries in the world.

This is not simply a debate about yields. It is a debate about power: who controls seed, land, knowledge, technology, markets and the terms on which people eat.

For 23 years, the African Centre for Biodiversity (ACB) has monitored, challenged and exposed South Africa’s GMO regime – not because we oppose science, but because we reject the capture of science by corporate interests and the use of technology to entrench an unjust food system.

Science and innovation must serve people, biodiversity, public accountability, farmer autonomy and the constitutional right to food. The South African experience with GMOs shows that higher yields in parts of the commercial grain sector have not translated into food justice, food sovereignty, or democratic control over the food system.

Confirmed by the courts

ACB’s concerns about South Africa’s GMO regime have also been tested in the courts. In the litigation against Monsanto (now Bayer) and the South African government over GM maize approvals, the courts confirmed the importance of proper risk assessment, the precautionary approach and lawful biosafety decision-making.

The high court victory underscored a central point that remains urgent today: decisions about GMOs cannot be rushed through on the basis of corporate assurances or narrow technical claims. They must be grounded in rigorous, independent assessment of health, environmental, and socioeconomic risks, and must be subject to public scrutiny, democratic participation and the constitutional duties to protect health, the environment, and the public interest.

South Africa has grown GM maize, soya, and cotton for more than two decades. During this same period, hunger, malnutrition, child stunting, precarious livelihoods, and diet-related disease have remained profound.

This is the clearest indictment of the GMO promise. A country can produce enough maize and still fail to feed its people adequately because hunger is not simply a production problem. It is produced by poverty, land dispossession, unemployment, low wages, racialised inequality, corporate concentration, supermarket and agro-processing power, inability to afford nutritious food, and weak public systems for realising the right to food.

Affordability

Stoddard’s central claim also risks turning a complex political economy into a simple technology success story. A lower rate of food inflation does not mean food has become affordable.

It means prices are rising more slowly, often after years of steep increases that have already pushed basic foods beyond the reach of poor and working-class households. Nor do headline inflation figures capture the deeply unequal way food prices are experienced: wealthier households absorb price increases more easily, while poor households are forced to cut meals, reduce dietary diversity, buy cheaper, less nutritious foods, or go without.

A bumper harvest may reflect favourable rainfall, soil moisture, agronomic management, public and private investment, commodity dynamics, and many other factors. It cannot simply be attributed to GMOs and precision farming.

To present lower food inflation as evidence of the success of GMOs is to ignore the wider food price chain – processing, storage, transport, retail concentration, fuel prices, exchange rates, corporate margins and household income. Food may be inflating more slowly, but that does not mean it is affordable, nutritious, culturally appropriate, or fairly distributed.

GMOs part of a corporate food regime

GMOs are not neutral tools floating outside the economy. They are embedded in a corporate food regime in which a small number of transnational corporations control patented traits, commercial seed markets, herbicide-tolerant technologies, chemical packages, research agendas and the language of “innovation”.

In South Africa, the dominant GMO model has gone hand in hand with herbicide-dependent monocultures and the expanded use of glyphosate and other toxic pesticides, with risks carried by farm workers, rural communities, consumers, soil life, water systems and biodiversity.

Farmers are pushed into expensive input systems, while biosafety decisions are too often made with limited transparency, weak liability provisions and inadequate public participation. This is why ACB has consistently called for precaution, independent assessment, access to information, democratic oversight, and accountability for harm.

This matters because the health and ecological burdens of herbicides and hazardous pesticides are borne disproportionately by farm workers, women, children, rural communities, and poor consumers, while the profits accrue to seed and agrochemical corporations.

Misleading picture

Any discussion of GMOs and food prices that ignores pesticide exposure, residues in food, occupational health risks, ecological contamination, and the long-term costs of chemical dependency gives an incomplete and politically misleading picture of the food system.

Precision farming must also be placed in its political context. Technologies that improve soil analysis, water management or input application may be useful in particular situations. But when precision agriculture is driven by capital-intensive machinery, proprietary platforms, drones, sensors, satellite systems and data extraction, it can deepen exclusion and dependency.

It risks creating a future in which those with access to capital, data infrastructure and corporate partnerships farm, while small-scale producers, farm workers and rural communities are further marginalised. The question is not whether technology can be useful, but who owns it, who profits from it, who controls the data, who carries the risk, and whether it strengthens or undermines farmer autonomy and food sovereignty.

New strategy

South Africa urgently needs a food-system strategy that breaks with the logic of yield-at-any-cost, corporate enclosure, chemical dependency, and technological dependence.

That means:

• Real land and agrarian reform;
• Support for small-scale and black farmers;
• Public investment in local food economies;
• Protection of farmer-managed seed systems;
• Agroecology;
• Biodiversity;
• The phasing out of highly hazardous pesticides;
• Reduced dependence on herbicides and other toxic chemicals;
• Strong regulation of corporate concentration; and
• Concrete measures to make nutritious food affordable and accessible to all.

Agroecology is not nostalgia. It is a scientifically grounded, rights-based, feminist, farmer-centred and climate-resilient pathway for rebuilding food systems from the ground up while reducing reliance on toxic inputs and restoring ecological health.

The debate South Africa needs is not a simplistic choice between “GMOs feed the nation” and “technology is bad”.

The real question is whether our food system is democratic, equitable, ecologically sustainable and accountable to the people who produce and consume food. On that test, the GMO industrial model has failed. It has entrenched dependence on corporate-controlled technologies, narrowed public imagination about alternatives and left the structural violence of the food system intact.

South Africa needs a fuller public debate on the future of food and farming – one that starts from the lived realities of poor households, farm workers, small-scale farmers, rural women and communities whose lives are shaped by hunger, dispossession and ecological crisis.

That debate must place the right to food, biodiversity, agroecology, farmer-managed seed systems and food sovereignty at the centre of agricultural policy, rather than treating corporate biotechnology and digital agriculture as inevitable or apolitical solutions. DM