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The world's population is expected
to almost double by the year 2050, making food security the most
important social issue for the next 30 years. Food production will have
to be doubled or preferably tripled to meet the needs of the expected 6 billion people, 90% of whom will reside in the developing world. The
enormity of this challenge will be further exacerbated by the dwindling availability of water and the fact that this additional food will have
to be produced on existing agricultural land or marginal soils if
forested regions and the environment as a whole are to be preserved.
There are numerous ways by which agricultural productivity may be
increased in a sustainable way, including the use of biological fertilizers, improved pest control, soil and water conservation, and
the use of improved plant varieties, produced by either traditional or
biotechnological means. Of these measures, biotechnological applications, especially transgenic plant varieties and the future products of functional genomic projects, probably hold the most promise
toward augmenting agricultural production and productivity when
properly integrated into traditional systems.
The efficacy of transgenic plant varieties in increasing production and
lowering production costs is already demonstrable. In 1996 and 1997, the cultivation of virus-, insect-, and herbicide-resistant plants
accounted for a 5% to 10% increase in yield as well as for savings on
herbicides of up to 40% and on insecticides of between $60 and $120
(U.S. dollars) per acre (James, 1998
). However, these increases in
productivity, impressive as they are, will probably have a limited
impact on the global food supply because the products currently
available on the market are suitable only for large mechanized farms
practicing intensive agriculture. In fact, most of the transgenic crops
that have been produced to date, especially by the private sector, are
aimed either at reducing production costs in agricultural areas that
already have high productivity levels or at increasing the value of the
final product (e.g. improving the oil quality of seed crops).
In a global sense, a more effective strategy to ensure sufficient
levels of food production would be to increase productivity in
developing countries, especially in areas of subsistence farming, where
an increase in food production is urgently needed and where crop yields
are significantly lower than those obtained in other areas of the
world. In developing countries in the tropics and subtropics, crop
losses due to pests, diseases, and poor soils are made worse by
climatic conditions that favor insect pests and disease vectors, and by
the lack of economic resources to purchase high quality seeds,
insecticides, and fertilizers. In addition to low productivity levels,
post-harvest losses in tropical areas are very high due to the
favorable climate for fungal and insect infestation and to the lack of
appropriate storage facilities. Despite efforts to prevent pre- and
post-harvest crop losses, pests destroy over half of all world crop
production. Postharvest loss due to insects, the majority of which
occurs in the developing world, is estimated to be 15% of the world's
production. It is possible that many of these problems could be
alleviated by plant biotechnology.
A major advantage of plant biotechnology is that it often generates
strategies for crop improvement that can be applied to many different
crops. Genetically engineered virus resistance, insect resistance, and
delayed ripening are good examples of strategies that could potentially
benefit a diversity of crops. Transgenic plants of over 20 plant
species that are resistant to more than 30 different viral diseases
have been produced using variations of the pathogen-derived resistance
strategy. Insect-resistant plant varieties, using the 
-endotoxin of
Bacillus thuringensis, have been produced for several
important plant species, including tobacco, tomato, potato, cotton,
walnut, maize, sugarcane, and rice. Of these, maize, potato, and cotton
are already under commercial production. It is envisaged that these
strategies can be used for many other crops important for tropical
regions and other regions in the developing world. Genetically
engineered delayed ripening, although only tested on a commercial scale
for tomato, has an enormous potential application for tropical fruit
crops, which suffer severe losses in developing countries because they ripen rapidly and because there is a lack of appropriate storage conditions and efficient transport systems for them to reach the final consumer.
A second advantage of plant biotechnology insofar as feeding the
developing world is that in principle it does not require major changes
in the agricultural practices of small farmers. To date, most of the
developments in plant gene transfer technology and the different
strategies to produce improved transgenic plant varieties have been
driven by the economic value of the species or the trait. These
economic values, in turn, are mainly determined by their importance to
agriculture in the developed world, particularly the United States and
western Europe. This is understandable: Substantial investments
are needed to develop, field test, and commercialize new transgenic
plant varieties. However, to increase global food production, it
is necessary to ensure that this technology is effectively transferred
to the developing world and adapted to local crops. Adapting
biotechnology to local crops is an especially important consideration
because indigenous crop species often have deep social and/or religious
meaning to a culture, and simply replacing local crops with another
crop to increase productivity could potentially destroy local cultural
traditions. Moreover, traditional people are more likely to embrace a
known crop with a genetic modification than a strange, foreign crop.
There are also problems that limit food production that are more or
less specific to tropical and subtropical agriculture, but
unfortunately these problems have not been deemed important enough to
be studied intensively in developed countries. Because many of these
problems are common to many countries and affect the productivity of a
wide spectrum of crops, transgenic strategies that can be applied to
different plant species to solve these problems are urgently needed. It
is unfortunate that little is currently being done to address these
problems. For instance, one of the major problems that affects plant
productivity in tropical regions is soil acidity. Acidic soils comprise
about 3.95 billion ha of the ice-free land or approximately 40% of the
world's arable land, comprising about 68% of tropical America, 38%
of tropical Asia, and 27% of tropical Africa (Pandey et al., 1994;
Eswaran et al., 1997). In spite of its global importance, metal
toxicity and nutrient deficiency problems that affect acid soils are
investigated by only a handful of scientists in developed
countries, and this topic has been largely neglected by large
agrochemical companies.
It is a shame that in today's world, in which global food production
should suffice to feed everyone, regardless of their religious,
political, or geographical situation, many thousands of people starve
to death and up to 800 million people are malnourished. How will we
cope, then, with the increasing demand for food if technology is
controlled by a few major companies, and the small farmers in
developing countries, for want of economic resources, do not fall into
the category of a potential consumer? In spite of what they might say,
companies are not concerned with feeding the poor and arguably should
not be. Companies are not charitable organizations: Their survival
depends on the returns to their shareholders.
The fact that research and development in the private sector is
driven by market considerations and not by philanthropic ideals is
obvious in the case of tropical diseases. These diseases kill hundreds
of thousands of people every year and, for many of them, vaccines
have not yet been developed and current research is only done in public
institutions. In many instances curing people is more profitable
and
trendythan preventing a disease. The power, but also the inhumane
side, of research and development has perhaps been most clearly
seen in the case of AIDS, for which new medicines that prevent the
symptoms of this syndrome were developed in a few years of intense
research after the first cases were reported in the United States.
However, it is distressing to know that many thousands of people die
every year from this terrible disease without having received the
benefits of this research, simply because they have no money. Because
people in rich countries are no longer seeing their friends die of AIDS
and transmission of the disease is pretty much under control, the
activism seen in the United States and Europe to force governments to
increase the research and development budget to find AIDS cures
or vaccines has to a large extent disappeared when, in reality, more
people die of AIDS than ever before and the number of infected people increases daily.
In the case of food, a similar but more dramatic scenario can be
foreseen. Hundreds or even thousands of millions of people in the
coming decades will have an urgent need for food, but the technology
needed to produce their supplies locally might not reach them. Not only
will food availability be a major problem in the next few decades, but
the world's environment will become increasingly at risk. In spite of
the fact that tropical forests are invaluable to local, regional, and
global ecosystems and critical to maintaining biodiversity (over 90%
of plant and animal species live in forest ecosystems), approximately
11 million ha of forest are cleared every year by farmers searching for
more productive land. Indiscriminate conversion of tropical forest into
agricultural land will have more far-reaching ecological consequences
than the use of genetically modified (GM) crops.
To ensure the transfer of technology that will maximize food production
and preserve the environment, several economic, political, and social
issues must be dealt with. It is my personal opinion that an ultimate
failure to end hunger in developing countries will arise not from
technological limitations but from political and/or economic decisions
and the disinterest of governments and corporations. In this regard,
perhaps an international body could be created to facilitate the
transfer of the necessary technology to places where it would prove
most useful. United Nations Education has already established a
precedent for such a body when it agreed that certain designated
regions and cities of the world should be preserved not just for the
benefit of the local people but for all of humanity. Perhaps a similar
concept could be applied in terms of new technology. Technology that
addresses fundamental problems of human well-being should be given a
special status to ensure that it reaches everyone.
The transfer of this technology to developing nations will, of course,
engender problems. For instance, under what circumstances can royalties
be waived? One approach, perhaps naive, would be to reach agreements in
which the technology is donated on a royalty-free basis if it will only
be used for production aimed at the internal markets of developing
countries. In these cases, when export is possible, royalties should,
of course, be paid; if the farmers can export their products, they
should share the extra profits with the providers of the technology.
It is very unfortunate that the decision of whether this technology is
going to be further developed and transferred to the small farmer is
not in the hands of people in the developing world but in those of
large multinational companies and the consumers and governments
of developed countries. Consumer groups in Europe claim their right to
choose whether they want GM food or not. They also raise the question:
Why do we bother at all with GM food if we have more than enough food
already? The remaining questions are: Will the poor have the choice to
use genetic engineering? Will they have the opportunity to decide
whether they want to eat or not? Will political and economic interests,
with or without GM food, allow us to reach the levels of food
production necessary to feed the growing world population?
It is unfortunate that most developing countries do not have sufficient
resources to implement the necessary biotechnological solutions to the
major problems that limit agricultural productivity, at least not in
the required time frame. It is in the developing world, however,
especially in the areas of the world where yields are low due to the
lack of technology, that biotechnology could have its greatest impact.
It is very promising that several multinational companies are starting
to takes steps to facilitate GM technology transfer.
Luis Herrera Estrella Cinvestav
Irapuato Irapuato, Gto, 36500 Mexico E-mail:
Lherrera{at}ira.cinvestav.mx
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