Food's Frontier by Richard Manning
Zupancic, Margaret L.
CROSS FERTILIZATIONS Food's frontier Richard Maturing North Point Press, $24,225 pp Margaret L. Zupancic The so-called Green Revolution of the 1950s and 1960s, during which most of today's...
...Third, Jesus and the Twelve are inexplicable unless seen in the context of the people of Israel...
...Farmers in Uganda refuse to grow the more nutritious varieties of sweet potato because these are too sweet for the Ugandan palate...
...In his description of the current research, we learn that emerging agricultural methods vary from region to region, and can involve anything from rediscovering ancient Incan farming practices to dissecting mechanisms of pest resistance in a laboratory...
...First, God did call a special people even though (and paradoxically) God's call is universal...
...In short, the community wanted to discern their communal identity as Christians as opposed to their membership in what Germans called the Volkskirche...
...CROSS FERTILIZATIONS Food's frontier Richard Maturing North Point Press, $24,225 pp Margaret L. Zupancic The so-called Green Revolution of the 1950s and 1960s, during which most of today's agricultural techniques were developed, has been largely credited with averting worldwide famine...
...Despite these deficiencies, Food's Frontier has real merit, if only for its willingness to take up the thorny and often neglected question of solving the world hunger problem...
...Readers who want a detailed description of the science behind agricultural development will likely find the book somewhat superficial...
...Lohfink puts the issue bluntly: "It is usually forgotten that what happened in Galilee and af27...
...In Food's Frontier, Richard Manning describes nine agricultural research projects being carried out in the developing world, all with the goal of assuring a secure food supply in a manner that minimizes both environmental degradation and the depletion of natural resources...
...Manning provides ample evidence to illustrate the importance of localized, bottom-up agricultural development...
...Technology involving genetic engineering—or anything else for that matter—has the potential of falling into the same trap...
...Perhaps the book is best thought of as the McKnight Foundation's internal report, written to be accessible to the lay 25 person, as it gives a largely optimistic, though honest, account of the realities of world hunger and malnutrition...
...The venture into the lab setting leads Manning into controversial waters...
...Wheat that is resistant to the scab fungus in Europe and America is devoured by scab in Asia, where wetter climates make life harder for the wheat and easier for scab...
...While most scientists would consider the chickpeas to be the result of genetic engineering, but not the potatoes, Manning argues that the similarities between the two projects outweigh the differences...
...Last, the characteristic signs of the church should include the continuation of the Exodus and the gathering, a function of remembering and articulating faith, and a struggle for wholeness, against which disunity is a scandal...
...He criticizes Westerners whose solution to world hunger is to dump their own unwanted food on hungry people...
...Compare the development in India of pest-resistant chickpeas by inserting a gene from another plant with the development of pest-resistant potatoes in Brazil and Chile by crossing domestic potatoes with their wild relatives—a process which, Manning points out, could never occur in nature because the two potato species have different numbers of chromosomes...
...Second, there are characteristic signs of Israel that perdure (gathering, faith, the Exodus experience, etc...
...Members of the community were determined to rediscover, in the Jewish origins of the Christian faith, the authentic roots of what it means to be Catholic...
...26 In 1986 Gerhard Lohfink resigned his professorship in New Testament at the University of Tubingen, moved to Munich, and put his theological expertise at the service of the Catholic Integrated Community...
...Manning occasionally falls into the trap of romanticizing rural peasant life, a characterization that his own descriptions of poor farmers in Africa and South America seem to contradict...
...Green Revolution techniques, he demonstrates, do not always work as well as they could because they do not take geographical decisions into account...
...By Gerhard Lohfink Liturgical Press (Michael Glazier Book), $39.95, 341 pp...
...These days, it is difficult to discuss modern agriculture without mentioning genetically modified organisms, or GMOs...
...is a work of biblical ecclesiology that advances four arguments...
...Cultural and political influences play a role, too...
...Pest-control methods that work on weevils in the southeastern United States are useless on the same insect in Africa because of differences in the mating habits of the African and American varieties...
...again and again Manning stresses the importance of allowing these countries to develop their own agricultural and scientific infrastructure...
...A crucial step in solving the problem is the education of scientists in countries where better agricultural methods are most needed...
...Lohfink's Does God Need the Church...
...The Chinese government demands wheat in return for farm subsidies, forcing farmers to monocrop wheat rather than rotate it with other crops...
...They strongly opposed the German cultural practice of identifying Catholics or Protestants simply by their birth heritage and enrollment in the government census...
...Although Food's Frontier is not primarily concerned with genetic engineering, three of the nine projects Manning describes do involve transgenic techniques— that is, the manipulation of DNA by modern molecular biological methods...
...Manning thus uses the example of GMOs to argue that agricultural solutions must be decided locally...
...While some readers may be bothered by the fact that the Minneapolis-based McKnight Foundation funded both the scientists' work described in the Food's Frontier and the writing of the book, Manning's message is worth hearing...
...While acknowledging that genetic engineering does pose risks, Manning is right to point out that agriculture is an ecologically risky enterprise and that genetic engineering is only one of many arguably "unnatural" techniques currently in use...
...From the beginning, the Integrated Community invited theologians and other intellectuals to join them...
...Lohfink repeatedly insists that the "newness" of the New Testament does not, and cannot, mean a repudiation of the "Old" Testament...
...And his explanations of the various research projects, while excellent at conveying the diversity present in modern agricultural research, rarely go into as much depth as one might like...
...Both are intended to reduce pesticide use and monocropping by the creation of plants which, while not naturally occurring, are similar to those grown by indigenous farmers in the pre-Green Revolution era...
...Margaret L. Zupancic is a research associate in microbiology at the University of California at Berkeley...
...War, aids, political corruption, and lack of education play their part in preventing food production from working as efficiently as it could...
...tional Socialism...
...The community was founded by a group of young German lay Catholics who, at the end of World War II, met to discuss the meaning of Christian community and to grapple with their country's embrace of NaDoes God Need the Church...
...Certainly, the broad range of techniques Manning describes allows the reader to view genetic engineering as part of a continuum, rather than a quantum leap, and to consider—as the author does—that the distinction between "genetically modified" and "nongenetically modified" may to some degree be arbitrary...
...Unlike the original Green Revolution, in which farmers all over the world adopted only a handful of crops and agricultural techniques, securing the future of the food supply, Manning argues, will require a multiplicity of green revolutions, each tailored to the ecosystem and culture in which it will be applied, and the countries requiring such revolutions must adopt their own methods for change...
...This argument is not so much an antiglobalization invective as an expression of concern over the ecological aspects of agriculture...
...Ultimately Food's Frontier offers a word of advice to well-meaning Westerners on both sides of the GMO debate: the decision of whether and how to use new technology must be made on a regional basis, and tailored to the individual needs of each geographical area...
...Even so, there is a growing consensus that Green Revolution techniques are not only insufficient to feed the projected population increase of the next twenty-five years, but that they may have caused serious environmental damage through pesticide use and "monocropping"—the growing of a single crop over a wide area for a long period of time...
Vol. 128 • June 2001 • No. 11
