Food security remains an unfulfilled dream for more than 800 million people unable to lead healthy and active lives because they lack access to safe and nutritious food. The fight to achieve food security for this growing population has to take place on many fronts. Technology is one such front and genetic engineering and biotechnology one interdependent option within that front. Biotechnology clearly can solve agricultural problems that traditional technology either cannot solve or can solve in a far more costly manner. But confusion surrounds the perception of risk associated with biotechnology. Whether this new technology promises to be the key technological paradigm in the fight for food security depends on how its risks are perceived, disentangled, and addressed.
Current public debate about the “gene revolution” often suffers from a failure to differentiate between risks inherent in a technology and those that transcend it. This differentiation is of utmost importance in any attempt to reason out the risks arising from biotechnology.
Although modern biotechnology has demonstrated its utility, concerns exist about the potential risks posed by genetically modified organisms. Most countries with biotechnological industries have sophisticated legislation in place intended to ensure the safe transfer, handling, use, and disposal of such organisms and their products. Risks disallowed in industrial countries should not be exported to developing countries. If biotechnological procedures are used in developing countries, state-of-the-art quality management that takes local ecological conditions into account must be put into effect along with the well-documented principles and practices of proper risk assessment. Such risk assessments allow governments, communities, and businesses to make informed decisions about the benefits and risks inherent in using a particular technology to solve a specific problem.
Unfortunately, discussion of inherent risk has become mixed up as biologists, legal experts, and ethicists poach on each other's turf. An orderly discussion would keep these voices to their areas of expertise. Decisionmaking and quality management issues should also be kept distinct: The scientific project level (laboratory safety, measurement standards, assessment of technological alternatives, and so on) should remain separate from the national policy level (accountability issues, legal frameworks, and intellectual property rights, for example), which, in turn, should be disentangled from the international level (vulnerability to substitution, international assistance, and so on). The best minds should work on each level and find ways to achieve overall consensus about how to deal with risk.
Technology-transcending risks emanate from the political and social context in which a technology is used. In developing countries these risks spring from both the course the global economy takes and country-specific political and social circumstances. The most critical risks have to do with three issues: aggravation of the prosperity gap between North and South, growth in the disparity in income and wealth distribution within societies, and loss of biodiversity.
Aggravation of the Prosperity Gap
Biotechnology makes it possible to produce tropical agricultural goods in the laboratory at a more competitive price than under traditional developing-country conditions. Vanilla, cocoa, sugar, and tropical vegetable oils are examples of tropical export commodities under the potential threat of being replaced by products produced more cheaply elsewhere. If genetically engineered products do substitute for tropical agricultural exports, the wide gap in prosperity between North and South may well grow. The solution to the problem lies in a concerted international endeavor to diversify the production structure in vulnerable countries and not in interventions against the market. Governments of the countries in danger should improve governance and undertake more appropriate long-term structural planning. The international development community should support diversification efforts.
The prosperity gap may also grow if the North does not adequately compensate the South for exploiting its indigenous genetic resources. Private enterprise and research institutes could gain unremunerated control of the genes of plants native to the developing world, use them to produce superior varieties, and then sell the new varieties back to developing countries at high prices. The basic question of whether the owners of biodiversity should be remunerated has been clearly and positively answered by Article 19 of the Rio Convention on Biological Diversity and by the virtually unanimous consensus of institutions engaged in biotechnological development. But the technical details of how compensation should operate for specific nations remains unclear. Who should compensate whom for what and for how much needs unequivocal regulation.
Income and Wealth Disparities in Developing Countries
The growing disparities in the distribution of income and wealth in poor societies serve to undermine the substantial contribution biotechnology can make to the welfare of farmers and to national agricultural development. Disease-resistant cassava, millet richer in protein, and rice enriched with vitamin A and tolerant to stress can contribute to prosperity and thus enhance food security only if these technologies, along with social advances, come within the reach of the broad mass of the population, male and female. Whether this happens and how long it takes to happen depend on the political will to create the appropriate national development framework.
Contemporary reviews of the effects of the Green Revolution show that in countries where small farmers had access to agricultural extension services, land, inputs, and credit, they were able to benefit much more and earlier than smallholders producing without the aid of a favorable agricultural development framework. Like the Green Revolution, genetically engineered crop varieties are a land-saving technology. As such they can be of particular importance to those who have little or only marginal land. Whether the potential benefits become reality for small farmers is not a question of technology but of the social quality of development policy. The economic and social impact of biotechnology can only be as good as the sociopolitical soil in which new varieties are planted. Solutions to food insecurity, therefore, ultimately have to be found in the domain of good governance.
But the private sector, which has taken over more and more of biotechnology research, also has to do its share. As important aspects of plant research continue to be patented, they will become too expensive for poor farmers in developing countries. In order to avoid preventing or disturbing research for the poor, the private sector should make the results of its research available for free or on favorable conditions. In this way cutting-edge research can be used to aid those who, for reasons of poverty, do not yet participate in markets.
Loss of Biodiversity
The reduction of biodiversity is the third key technology-transcending risk. Diversity diminishes not because farmers grow genetically modified foods, but because the political will to conserve diversity does not always exist. It is precisely because farmers find new varieties more remunerative that the number of food crop varieties has diminished over the last 100 years. But the fact that farmers replace inferior varieties with superior varieties does not at all have to translate into a loss of biodiversity. Varieties that are under pressure of substitution can be preserved from extinction through in vivo and in vitro strategies. Improved governance and international support can also limit loss of biodiversity.
The immense reduction of biological diversity due to the destruction of tropical forests, conversion of native land to agriculture, replacement of wild lands with monocultures, overfishing, and the other practices used to feed a growing world population is far more significant than the loss of biodiversity due to the adoption of genetically modified crop varieties. To slow down the continuing loss of biodiversity, the main battlefield must be the preservation of land and water resources.
Assessing the contribution that genetic engineering can make toward fighting hunger in developing countries is not “simply” an academic task involving facts and figures and rational evaluation. The interpretation of data is subject to the interests and value judgments of a variety of stakeholders. Identical information can lead some to consider agricultural biotechnologies to be among the most powerful and economically promising means of ensuring food security, and others to perceive them as a threat to development in poor countries. The notion that there is no such thing as one reality seems prevalent in discussions of biotechnology, as it does in discussions of all major social issues.
Apart from the issue of plurality of opinion is the issue of balance. The media are more likely to take up wild stories about the creation of monsters and scientists who lack morals than to dwell on stories about slow but steady progress toward the creation of pest-tolerant rice. When the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich recently informed the world that it was possible to genetically modify rice so that it contain vitamin A and iron, an achievement of potentially immense benefit to poor, malnourished people, no media echo occurred. But when news broke that larvae of the Monarch butterfly were damaged in a genetically modified crop experiment not representative of natural conditions, the story was taken as clear evidence that genetic engineering causes incalculable harm to biodiversity.
Because we live in a world of heterogeneous social systems, with a multitude of value judgments and interests, we should expect differing evaluations. On the one hand, the use of biotechnology leads to obvious and significant benefits in the form of increased production and productivity, enhanced environmental sustainability, and improved food safety and quality. On the other hand, biotechnology involves a number of economic, social, and ecological risks. But it should be emphasized that these risks are not a consequence of the technology per se. They arise from particular social settings, transcending the nature of the technology employed within those settings.
Because food insecurity stems from the combined effects of a number of factors, the challenge lies in strategies that tackle all problems comprehensively. Policies must ensure that a development-friendly environment exists and that biotechnology is oriented toward the needs of the poor, particularly smallholders. These small farmers could thereby become indispensable to an overall development effort. New agricultural technologies can only contribute one stone to the complex mosaic of development. But without the yield-increasing innovations of biotechnology, world food security will remain elusive.
For further information, see Klaus M. Leisinger, “Ethical and Ecological Aspects of Industrial Property Rights in the Context of Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology,” paper prepared for a 1997 conference in Interlaken, Switzerland; and Klaus M. Leisinger, Sociopolitical Effects of New Biotechnologies in Devel-oping Countries, 2020 Vision Discussion Paper 2 (Washington, D.C.: IFPRI, 1995).
Klaus M. Leisinger is the executive director of the Novartis Foundation for Sustainable Development (e-mail: klaus_m.leisinger@group.Novartis.com).