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On May 25, 2013, tens of thousands of people in 36 countries participated in a global “March Against Monsanto.” But according to Monsanto CEO Hugh Grant, those who protest against agricultural genetic engineering — including the farmers, students, academics, and more who turned out in March — are “elitists,” fomenting distrust of technology that could save the lives of millions of hungry people.

For years, industry leaders like Monsanto have been pushing this myth. At a biotechnology industry trade conference I attended in 2005, one participant even claimed that those fighting against GMOs “should be tried for crimes against humanity.” A charge, I tend to think, usually reserved for serious attacks on human rights.

This particular mythmaking is a powerful PR tactic. Who among us wants to feel that our attitude toward a technology could be causing hunger here or abroad? Or, worse, that our opposition to Monsanto could be putting us among the ranks of Yugoslavia’s Miloševi? or Guatemala’s Rios Montt? Not me.

In his recent interview with Bloomberg News, Grant was hyping this myth again, claiming challengers of genetically engineered foods, “are guilty of elitism.” (An interesting choice of words for someone who pulled in $12.84 million last year — and averaged $26.3 million in annual earnings over the past six years, according to
Forbes.)

Grant says critics of GMOs, “fail to consider the needs of the rest of the world.”

Is he right?

We have nearly 20 years of commercialized GMO use under our belt. We can learn a lot from this global experiment. What we know is that not only do GMOs fail to address the roots of hunger, but the technology can also actually worsen hunger as it maintains and, in some cases, worsens, farmers’ dependency on costly seeds, chemicals, and fertilizer — all at volatile and rising prices.

Today nearly 870 million people on the planet suffer from extreme, long-term undernourishment, according to the United Nations, and nearly as many are overfed, consuming too many of the wrong calories. These twin crises have many root causes, including poverty, inequality, and a lack of choice over how food is grown, where it’s grown, and who has access to it — a deficit of democracy. A technology like genetic engineering, which has been developed and is controlled by a handful of companies, does nothing to transform this dynamic. Indeed, the technology serves to further concentrate power over our food system: An estimated 90 percent of U.S.-grown soybeans and 80 percent of corn and cotton crops are grown from Monsanto’s seeds.