Presidential Lecture Biotechnology and Food Systems in Developing Countries

Even in a world with adequate food supplies in global markets, which is the situation today, biotechnology offers important opportunities to developing countries in four domains. First, many agronomically hostile or degraded environments require major scientific breakthroughs to become productive agricultural systems. Few of these breakthroughs are likely to be achieved through traditional breeding approaches. Second, biofortification offers the promise of greater quantities and human availabilities of micronutrients from traditional staple foods, with obvious nutritional gains for poor consumers, especially their children. Third, many high yielding agricultural systems are approaching their agronomic potential. Radically new technologies will be required to sustain productivity growth in these systems, and only modern genetic technology offers this hope. Finally, many cropping systems use large quantities of chemical inputs, such as herbicides, pesticides and fertilizers that can be unhealthy for people and soils alike. Biotechnology offers the potential to reduce the need for these inputs in economically and environmentally sustainable ways. Applying these new technologies to society’s basic foods raises obvious concerns for both human and ecological health. For some, these concerns have become outright fear, and this has mobilized a backlash against genetically modified foods in any form. These concerns (and fears) must be addressed carefully and rationally so that the public understands the risks (which are not zero) and benefits (which might be enormous). Only the scientific community has the expertise and credibility to build this public understanding. J. Nutr. 133: 3319–3322, 2003. Biotechnology and Food Systems in Developing Countries The genetic revolution is altering the way agricultural scientists think about even traditional crop breeding, as new knowledge about genomic structure and function sharply improve understanding of where to seek desirable food traits and how to incorporate them into commercial plants. The more controversial side of this revolution, inserting genes from different species into food crops as a way to incorporate attributes not feasible with traditional breeding, is the focus of this paper, but the “genetic revolution” will continue no matter what the result of the biotechnology debate. The challenge to “business as usual” for agricultural technology is first described, followed by a brief discussion of the first Green Revolution and its problems. Biotechnology can address many of these problems as well as push the yield frontier to new levels. This potential, and the problems standing in its way, are explained, with a concluding plea that the nutrition community become more actively engaged in explaining both potential and problems to the public. I. The Challenge The Millennium Development Goals (MDG) agreed to by all Heads of State at the Millennium Summit Conference in 2000 seek to reduce levels of hunger, malnutrition and poverty by half by the year 2015, from their 1990 levels. Everyone agrees that these are very ambitious goals; reaching them will require sharp improvements in the rate of progress seen over the past half-century. Critical will be increasing the rate of economic growth in the poorest countries. In this task, agriculture plays at least three roles. Growth in agricultural productivity can stimulate faster economic growth, it tends to make this growth more “pro-poor” and it can provide the food supplies needed to reduce hunger. Biotechnology, through genetically modified (GM) food, can help agriculture play these roles. But the train of logic is long and filled with caveats: biotechnology is not a magic bullet for ending hunger and malnutrition. Especially in a world in which markets are awash in food commodities, and rich countries spend roughly $1 billion per day in subsidies to keep their farmers in business, the problems faced by farmers and consumers in poor countries are not going to be solved by technology alone. How can biotechnology help? To answer this simple question, we need to understand the problems we are trying to solve. For this, a bit of history is in order, especially a review of the successes and failures of the first green revolution. If the promise of biotechnology is, in Gordon Conway’s title, a “dou1 This is a written version of a speech presented as the “Invited Presidential Lecture” to the American Society for Nutritional Sciences (ASNS) at the annual meeting in San Diego, CA on April 14, 2003. I would like to thank President Jean-Pierre Habicht for inviting me and Dr. Maureen Mackey of Monsanto for supporting the event. At the time of the address, the author was Professor of Development Studies in the Graduate School of International Relations and Pacific Studies at the University of California, San Diego. E-mail: [email protected]. 2 Two especially useful books provide extensive background to the debate reviewed here: Richard Manning, Food’s Frontier: The Next Green Revolution, University of California Press, 2000; and Per Pinstrup-Anderson and Ebbe Schioler, Seeds of Contention: World Hunger and the Global Controversy over GM Crops, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. 3 Abbreviations used: GM, genetically modified; MDG, Millennium Development Goals; NGO, nongovernment organization; WTO, World Trade Organization. 0022-3166/03 $3.00 © 2003 American Society for Nutritional Sciences.