Commentary: The need to feed

When the subject of biotech development of new varieties of food and fiber crops, the debate typically rages around the issues of commercial control, patent rights, food safety and potential damage to the identity preservation efforts of organic farmers and growers.

Those are all legitimate concerns, certainly not peripheral to the discussion, but they’re also divorced from the real reason that genetic engineering needs to be more widely utilized. Both the public and the policymakers in North America tend to evaluate agricultural biotech as an option, one that the developed countries of the world can either embrace or discard.

The only question is whether the (alleged) environmental risks outweigh the potential benefits.

The discussion is entirely different—or at least it ought to be—elsewhere in the world. In Africa, in Asia, in many parts of Latin America the debate isn’t merely a matter of weighing the pros and cons of GM crops, as if the decision were akin to selecting which brand of luxury automobile is most suited to improve transportation efficiency. The urgency of increasing agricultural productivity as the only reliable means to ensure food security for fully one-third of the world’s population should be the driver behind widespread adoption of genetically engineered crops.

This could be one globally critical issue where the developing world outpaces the West in adopting a technological solution to what is arguably the world’s most pressing problem.

That reversal of the norm, whereby developed countries develop and deploy technology that is then exported to developing countries, may already be happening.

Third World leadership

Since biotech crops were first widely introduced in the mid-1990s, they have been adopted at an unprecedented rate, according to the 2011 annual report of the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications, which was released earlier this year.

Biotech crop acreage increased from 1.7 million hectares in 1996 to 160 million hectares in 2011, making GM crops“the fastest-adopted agricultural technology in the history of modern agriculture,” wrote Clive James, chair of the Philippines-based ISAAA and author of the report.

The ISAAA report also noted the rapid adoption of biotech crops in certain key developing countries—Argentina, Brazil, China, India, the Philippines and South Africa—which have adopted such crops twice as quickly as developed nations. Together, those countries now cultivate more than 40 percent of the world’s genetically engineered crops, according to ISAAA data.

The potential benefits of biotech crops—tolerance to salinity, resistance to pests, and enhanced nutritional value—cannot be overstated. Nutritionally enhanced foods may not be a merely another choice for affluent populations, but in developing nations, they are crucial to mitigating malnutrition.

Currently,adoption of GM crops is helping address the challenges of productivity and improved nutrition—the original rationale underlying biotechnology, let’s not forget—including such key developments as:

• The expected commercial approval in 2013 of the International Rice Research Institute’s nutritionally enriched Golden Rice in the rice-producing Asian nations of Bangladesh, China, the Philippines and Vietnam. Each country is currently evaluating the GM rice strains with plans to adopt it.
• A genetically engineered corn variety developed in the Philippines that looms as a possibility for wider adoption in neighboring Southeast Asian countries, with field trials underway in Bangladesh, Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam.
• The adoption by the Philippines of a regulatory framework to codify issues of biosafety liability, unapproved genetic changes (unique DNA recombinations) to proprietary biotech products and labeling requirements.

Closer to home, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has committed about $2 billion to support agricultural development and nutrition programs, a sum that including significant support for biotech crop research. That latter funding has been the subject of controversy among certain segments of the activist community, but given the growing populations across Asia and Africa, it seems only a matter of time before the need to feed supplants the ethical barriers or ecological fears that have so far stymied the potential of biotech.

Dan Murphy is a food-industry journalist and commentator

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