According to weekly SPI data by PBS, national average price of farm eggs breached Rs 260 per dozen in retail markets for the first time last week, with prices closing in on marking a triple century in many urban markets. General inflationary pressures in the macroeconomy notwithstanding, this is the first time when price of farm eggs have increased every week during the month of July, bucking the historic trend of weak demand for table eggs during the summer vacation months.
In fact, the rate of increase in poultry products has outstripped yearly food inflation rate since the beginning of calendar year 2023, soon after the ban on import of genetically modified soybean went into effect. Regular readers will recall that beginning in November 2022, the federal government forbade port and customs authorities from allowing soybean vessels from docking in on ports, on the pretext that the importers had not declared the genetically modified (GMO) nature of their cargo.
It bears emphasis that the reasons offered by officials of the national food security ministry were legally accurate: the government of Pakistan has not approved any events of genetically engineered soybean for commercial or food, feed use. Therefore, on paper, commercial import of GM/GE soybean was taking place in contravention of law of the land. However, it was also true that Pakistan had been importing GE soybean for at least 20 years, with import of GE soybean going into full swing during the last decade, when annual import bill went from negligible to nearly a billion dollars annually.
Genetically engineered oilseeds were primarily being imported by the solvent extraction industry, which crushed the oilseeds to extract soybean edible oil from the seeds and use the residue oilcake for sale to livestock – mainly poultry feed industry.
Although known as an oilseed, soybean in fact has relatively low oil or fat content compared to other oilseeds such as palm kernel, canola, or sunflower, whose oil content ranges between 20 – 60 percent. Instead, soybean seed oil yield averages at 18 percent globally; however, the seed is very high on protein content, and has fast replaced other plants as source of essential amino acids in livestock feed across the globe. In Pakistan, poultry industry claims that soybean diet has helped improve feed conversion ratio of farm birds from nearly 3 times to just under 1.5 times, substantially lowering the cost of production, making farm poultry products as the everyday choice of protein for average Pakistanis over the last decade.
Nevertheless, the murky manner in which soybean oilseeds were being imported into the country could not find legal defense. Between 2015 – 2022, while port, customs, and Plant Protection authorities were busy turning a blind eye to a fast-expanding GMO based value chain, the bureaucracy in Islamabad had other ideas. During the same time when Pakistan became one of the top-10 destinations for GMO soybean imports, food security authorities in Islamabad thwarted several attempts to allow cultivation of GMO maize or corn for food or feed use. Even today, policymaking circle in the capital remains heavily anti-GMO, despite the fact that many attempts have been made to draft rules for licensing of GMO crops for both cultivation and/or import – for consumption in food, feed use.
This column has raised questions over the absolute inanity of Pakistan’s blinkered GMO stance many times, whether it is the fact that the import of GMO based soybean edible oil has increased in the aftermath of ban on GMO oilseed import; or the fact that Pakistani farmers have been cultivating GMO-based cotton for last two decades, which serves at least 10 percent of domestic edible oil needs. Today, however, BR Research looks at the other side of the question: whether Pakistan can ever choose to be a non-GMO country, without jeopardizing its livestock industry altogether.
Consider that just five countries on the American continents are responsible for over 85 percent of global soybean output; all five of which produce genetically modified soybean. Of these, just two countries – Brazil and USA – command 70 percent of global soybean production but more than 90 percent of world trade. In fact, at least 97 percent of global soybean trade is soybean based, with non-GMO certified countries contributing a negligible share to the global trade pie.
It is not as if the world has no non-GMO soybean production. At least five of world’s largest agricultural regions – namely, Russia, China, EU-27, India, and Ukraine – are explicitly non-GMO, that is, these countries do not allow cultivation of GMO soybean. However, together, these only contribute 11 percent to global soybean output. The explanation of course is very basic: non-GMO soybean varieties struggle to reach even one-third of per acre yield managed by GMO soybean, rendering the very proposition uneconomic.
Nevertheless, global certifiable non-GMO soybean production is at least 40 million metric tonnes annually, which is 20 times Pakistan’s current import requirements. However, of the 40MMT non-GMO soybean produced annually, less than 3.5 MMT is traded, as the remainder 90 percent is consumed in home countries. Meanwhile, domestic soybean production in each of these nations (other than Russia and Ukraine) is insufficient to meet local demand, with EU-27, China and India importing between 20 – 50 percent of annual requirement from GMO origin nations. Yes, while China, India and EU-27 are heavily opposed to domestic cultivation of GMO food/feed plants, unlike their doors are wide open to the import of GMO based products.
Even so, if the government of Pakistan were to make an in-principle decision tomorrow to make Pakistan GMO-free, is it even doable? Consider that according to TradeMap data, the average unit price fetched by soybean exporters from China and India was fifty percent higher than the average export price of soybean of US or Brazil origin. That’s not only because of the higher relative cost of production of non-GMO soybean, but also because of the premium attached by consumers in high-income countries with GMO free label.
Can Pakistan be a GMO-free country? Theoretically, yes. For the right price, global markets can and will supply GMO free soybean to Pakistani solvent extractors. Can Pakistan afford to buy it? Maybe, if the IMF provides an additional $500 million annually just to fund our fetish for being organic. Good luck.
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