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Plant
genetic resources
Disentangling risk issues
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By Klaus M. Leisinger
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.
1 Technology-inherent
risks
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 business 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. Decision-making 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.
2
Technology-transcending risks
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 poor 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 establishment 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 smallholder's 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 lenient 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.
3
Conclusions
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 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 trial 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 smallholder's. 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," and "Biotechnology
and Food Security".
Klaus M. Leisinger is the executive director of the Novartis
Foundation for Sustainable Development as well as former
Executive Director ad interim of the Syngenta Foundation for
Sustainable Agriculture.
"Disentangling Risk Issues." In: Persley, G.J. (ed.). Focus
2: Biotechnology for Developing Country-Agriculture: Problems
and Opportunities. Washington, D.C.: International Food Policy
Research Institute (IFPRI), October 1999. (Brief 5 of 10.) |
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