- Copyright © 2000 American Society of Plant Physiologists
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 δ-endotoxin ofBacillus 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 trendy—than 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
