The new GM revolution
Salina Nobulhe Manukuza is very happy. Over the past six years, the 33-year-old farmer from Makhathini Flats in South Africa’s Kwa-Zulu Natal province has seen yields on her cotton farm increase and her profits rise. “Life used to be hard, and the future was uncertain,” she explains. “But I can now pay the school fees for my kids and buy some clothes for them and myself.”
The secret behind Manukuza’s success is Bollgard, a strain of cotton that is resistant to the bollworm, the sworn enemy of cotton farmers around the world. Developed by the US biotechnology company Monsanto, this so-called Bt cotton has been genetically modified through the addition of DNA from a common soil bacterium, Bacillus thuringiensis (hence ‘Bt’), that produces an insect toxin.
Since she adopted this new variety, Manukuza has not only produced higher yields of better quality cotton, she has been able to save money she would have spent on insecticides, as well as the time and energy it took to spray her crop.
Manukuza is one of 3,500 farmers who’ve adopted Bt cotton in South Africa since it was first introduced in 1998. Together, they represent an estimated 95 per cent of the country’s small-scale cotton farmers. Ongoing research by agricultural economists from Reading University has shown that, almost without exception, the new technology has been well received: average yields are up by 65 per cent and profits by almost 300 per cent. “Today, I am very respected in the community as one of the men who gives job opportunities,” says 55-year-old Dumezweni Mhawu Ntuli, also from Makhathini Flats. “To myself, I’m very happy to know that I can provide for my family’s needs.”
But how can this be? According to environmental groups such as Friends of the Earth (FOE) and Greenpeace, GMOs and the developing world don’t mix. They’re simply the means by which large multinationals such as Monsanto plan to take over the world’s agriculture and squeeze every last penny out of its poorest farmers. Not only is GM technology dangerous, they say, it doesn’t work.
In fact, all of the available evidence suggests that the opposite is true. Ten years after the commercialisation of the first biotech crops, more than six per cent of the world’s agricultural land is devoted to GM varieties. Not only have the plants themselves flourished, with none of predicted health and environmental problems, but millions of people are enjoying the benefits, the vast majority of them resource-poor small-holders in developing countries who live on less than US$1 a day.
The fact is that, contrary to what we in Europe have been led to believe, GM crops can work. And not only can they work safely and effectively, they can also give poor farmers such as Manukuza an opportunity to raise their standard of living.
Indeed, with experts predicting the arrival of a second wave of GM crops developed specifically to meet the needs of the world’s poorest farmers, the next ten years might well prove that it’s in the developing world that GMOs will be most appreciated.
Enthusiastic adoption
News of GM crops’ success may come as something of a surprise to many Geographical readers. In the UK, we’re more used to reading about the failures of, and opposition to, biotechnology because what can only be described as propaganda from the anti-GM lobby has skewed the debate. Riding the popular wave of anti-globalisation sentiment and the public concern about food safety caused by the BSE and foot-and-mouth outbreaks, environmental and social-rights groups have whipped up frenzied opposition to GM crops among the press and general public here and elsewhere in Europe. Unfortunately, much of its information is based on half truths and factual inaccuracies (see Public service or propaganda?).
The latest FOE report on GMOs, published earlier this year to mark the tenth anniversary of the commercialisation of transgenic crops, is typically inflammatory and misleading. Entitled ‘Who Benefits from GM Crops? Monsanto and its Corporate Driven Genetically Modified Crop Revolution’, it paints a picture of aggressive biotechnology companies forcing GM crops upon poor farmers as a means of gaining control of the world’s seed supply. It claims that despite the companies’ best efforts, governments and farmers all over the world are rejecting biotech crops because the technology doesn’t work.
However, it appears that, behind the smokescreen of anti-GM propaganda, many governments and farmers are enthusiastically adopting the technology. According to the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications (ISAAA), a non-profit organisation that delivers the benefits of new agricultural biotechnologies to developing countries, the uptake of biotech crops has increased dramatically since 1996. Today, 8.5 million farmers grow transgenic crops in 21 countries, covering an area of 900,000 square kilometres – six per cent of the world’s agricultural land. “We’ve seen a 50-fold increase in the area devoted to biotech crops during the past ten years,” says Clive James, the ISAAA’s director. “This technology is moving faster than any other crop technology that we know of.”
In terms of area, a handful of large countries dominate: in 2005, the USA accounted for 55 per cent of all GM crops planted, with almost 500,000 square kilometres, Argentina 19 per cent and Brazil ten per cent. The crops themselves are largely restricted to soya (60 per cent), yellow maize (24 per cent), cotton (11 per cent) and rape (five per cent) – although there are small amounts of papaya, squash, white maize and rice.
These statistics appear to support the claim that biotechnology doesn’t help the poor. But since 2000, the uptake of biotech crops in developing countries has outpaced that in the industrialised world, and last year, the former accounted for 38 per cent of the total area. Aside from Argentina and Brazil, in Latin America, Colombia, Honduras, Mexico, Paraguay and Uruguay all planted around 100,000 hectares last year. In Asia, China planted 33,000 square kilometres of GM cotton last year and India 13,000, while the Philippines grew 100,000 hectares of GM maize. Iran planted 4,000 hectares of Bt rice with a view to full commercialisation this year.
More importantly, of the 8.5 million people currently using this technology, 90 per cent are resource-poor farmers. Around 6.4 million farmers now grow Bt cotton in China, and one million in India. In South Africa, 95 per cent of all small-scale cotton farmers now use Bt varieties.
Reports of Bt cotton failing in India, and South African farmers abandoning their Bt varieties in the past few years are misleading (see Public service or propaganda?). So far, only a handful of independent, peer-reviewed studies have assessed the performance of GM crops in developing countries accurately and thoroughly. And, without exception, these have found that the overall impact has been positive. Studies on Bt cotton in China, Argentina, Mexico, South Africa and India reveal average yields up by between 11 and 65 per cent and profits increasing by between 12 and 340 per cent.
“In both South Africa and India, we’ve found that the Bt technology actually improves livelihoods,” says Richard Bennett, an agricultural economist from Reading University. “It means the farmers have more money and more time to do other things – often other agricultural activities. In India, the money has been used to repay debts, send children to school and to carry out other enterprises, both on-farm and off-farm.”
And the benefits aren’t just financial, explains Jocelyn Webster, executive director of AfricaBio, a South African biotechnology stakeholders organisation. “If you’re a small-scale farmer with four hectares of cotton and you have to spray that cotton with insecticide, you have to do between eight and ten sprays a season with a knapsack sprayer on your back. That would mean you’d walk 400 kilometres in one season. In this respect, Bt cotton takes away a huge amount of effort and time.”
Studies in China have documented benefits to farmers’ health and the wider environment as a result of substantial reductions in insecticide use. And it’s thought that lower levels of mycotoxins – which cause cancers, birth defects, and, at high levels, acute toxicity in humans – in Bt maize could benefit consumers in those countries where the crop is a staple.
According to James, the past ten years have provided clear evidence that biotech crops can deliver benefits to the poor. “This technology has been used by millions of farmers on a total of four million square kilometres. Every year more farmers are adopting it. Why? Because they see it in their neighbours’ field, they compare it with their conventional varieties and decide they’d be better off with biotech. If Friends of the Earth are correct and this technology has nothing to offer, then these millions of farmers must be wrong.”
Help for orphans
One of the main criticisms of GM crops is that they haven’t been developed to tackle the needs of the poor directly. And in this respect, the environmental groups are right. Although Bt cotton has improved the livelihoods of millions of poor farmers in China, India and South Africa, none of the principal biotech food crops will help reduce hunger and malnutrition in the developing world: soya and rape are both grown primarily for processing into vegetable oil, while GM maize is used for cattle feed.
These crops, says FOE’s Clare Oxborrow, have been developed to cater for the commercial agriculture market. “But millions of small-scale farmers still face starvation every year because they have difficulty growing staple crops such as sweet potato and cassava. The technology hasn’t been implanted into these types of foods.”
This may be about to change. A few GM varieties of so-called ‘orphan crops’ – crops such as millet and cowpea that, while regionally important, don’t receive a great deal of attention or research due to their relatively low commercial potential – have recently been introduced or are in the final stages of testing. Around six per cent of farmers on the borders of Kwa-Zulu Natal and Mpumalenga provinces in South Africa are growing Bt and herbicide-tolerant white maize, a staple in large parts of sub-Saharan Africa. And last year, farmers in Iran grew the first Bt rice.
Significantly, China is on the brink of commercialising its own Bt rice. “China has been very close to introducing this technology for a couple of years,” says Terri Raney, an agricultural economist with the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. “But they’ve been stalling because they want to make sure that farmers will benefit and that consumers are comfortable with it.”
Its success or failure will have a tremendous impact, she says, not only because rice is the world’s most important food crop, but because Bt rice is the first major GM food crop that will be eaten directly by humans. (The vegetable oils made from soya and rape contain none of the transgenic DNA.) “If the Chinese rice goes well – and the farmers benefit and there is no severe market reaction – then we will increasingly see developing countries adopting more Bt food crops. India is already close with a Bt eggplant [aubergine], and I think the white maize would spread quickly as well.”
The largest constraints to food production in the developing world, however, are drought, nutrient-poor soils and disease. While none of the GM crops introduced so far address these problems, new technologies may not be far away. There has been a great deal of research into disease resistance – in, among others, tomatoes, groundnuts, sweet potatoes, cooking bananas and papaya. Drought tolerance is more difficult to deal with, although work is underway to develop this trait in rice and maize.
The other area in which scientists are working is increasing the nutritional value of crops. “It’s very difficult to distribute vitamin and mineral supplements among poor people in rural areas,” says Per Pinstrup-Andersen, professor of food, nutrition and public policy at Cornell University in New York. “But if you could build a better nutrient quality of, for example, iron, vitamin A and zinc into the food people eat anyway, then it becomes a self-sustaining solution.”
Perhaps the best and most promising example of this sort of crop is Golden Rice, which was developed to address vitamin A deficiencies, particularly in Asia. After several years of troubled research and development, a second strain with increased levels of beta-carotene is being tested in India and the Philippines. Speaking last year, Ingo Potrykus, chairman of the Humanitarian Project for Golden Rice, said: “Optimistically, we might be able to grow this in the countries that need it within three years.” Work is now under way to introduce further nutrients, including iron, zinc, pro-vitamin A and vitamin E.
Multinationals and monopolies
Developing this new technology is all very well. But is it wise to place the livelihoods of the world’s poorest farmers in the hands of a few multinational corporations? According to FOE, Monsanto is responsible for 90 per cent of the GM traits used around the world and “aims to aggressively displace conventional seeds with its patented GM varieties”.
Professor Ian Scoones of the Institute of Development Studies at Sussex University agrees that the monopolisation of the market by a few companies is potentially problematic. “When a company has a monopoly on a product, or when its presence is very significant in a particular market, it can restrict access to, and control the price of, new technologies. The result is often increased prices, as competition between suppliers is low.”
However, according to Scoones, the way in which the anti-GM lobby has presented this issue in relation to GMOs is misleading. “For a start, this problem isn’t exclusive to transgenic crops,” he explains. “It’s part of the corporitisation of agriculture as a whole, and is just as likely to affect the conventional seed market.”
More importantly, however, the large multinationals have little interest in orphan crops because they aren’t commercially lucrative. “The cost of biotechnology research is huge,” continues Scoones. “The cost of developing a product from scratch and getting it through bio-safety clearance is in the region of hundreds of millions of dollars. The private companies aren’t going to invest these amounts of money into developing a product unless they can make significant profits in return.” It’s unlikely they will get that from selling a crop such as virus-resistant cassava in the developing world, he continues, where farmers can’t afford to pay high premiums for the technology.
In focusing on the corporatisation argument, the anti-GM lobby has overlooked the fact that the majority of research into orphan crops is being conducted in the public sector, funded by governments and charitable organisations, and by relatively small private companies. “In these cases, market monopolisation and access to technology aren’t major issues,” says Scoones.
All over the world, governments are investing in research and development programmes. In China, where 6.4 million farmers already grow Bt cotton, the government is investing US$500million every year, with more than 2,000 scientists working on 21 crops. Those currently being field-tested include cabbage, peanut, melon, chilli and tobacco, as well as three staples.
Elsewhere, India has 16 crops, including coffee banana and chickpea, being developed in the public sector and nine in the private sector at a cost of US$25million a year. The South African government has made US$64million available over three years, while Brazil’s national agricultural research body is spending US$15million a year and is close to finishing work on papaya and a type of bean. Many other countries, including Bangladesh, Ghana, Malawi, Mali and Tanzania, plan to start their own research projects once the appropriate bio-safety regulations are in place.
While the Chinese are developing their own technologies from scratch, most GM orphan crops rely on traits developed in the private sector. This situation has raised fears of corporations only releasing their patented intellectual property for exorbitant fees. But in many of these cases, companies have donated their technology for free – another fact that the anti-GM campaign has overlooked. Monsanto, for example, donated the gene that confers virus resistance to cassava to a research project in Kenya, and has licensed its Bt gene for use in a transgenic aubergine in India. “We work with a variety of partners in this way,” says Monsanto’s Chris Horner. “And we’re happy to offer our technology with no fee for humanitarian work on crops that won’t go into the commercial market.”
Given the costs involved in bringing these technologies to market, collaboration is essential if resource-poor farmers are to benefit from biotech crops. And public–private partnerships may be the best way to make this happen. “Golden Rice is, notionally, the classic case,” says Scoones. “There were 70 patents associated with that one product, and it was convened under a public–private process of negotiating patent access for a public-good product that, it was argued, would help to address critical vitamin A deficiencies in the developing world.”
But even when a private company is selling to poor farmers, it makes no sense for it to sell its seed at an extortionate price, says Yousouf Ismael, an agricultural economist from Reading University. “In South Africa and India,” he says, “Monsanto sells its Bt cotton seed for the same price that farmers would have had to pay for their conventional seed and insecticide combined, so their costs end up being the same.”
According to James, farmers won’t be fooled, despite what FOE would have us believe. “It’s naďve to think you can rip off farmers. You may be able to do it once. But never a second time. Farmers are the best judges of technology. They have to be, because their livelihoods depend on it. What happens is they try it once and if it works, they use it again. If it doesn’t work, they won’t buy it again. It’s as simple as that.”
Not a panacea
So if biotech crops can work and they can be distributed equitably, the question is, can they reduce poverty and hunger in the developing world? Surprisingly, most experts to whom Geographical spoke seemed to agree on this point. “This is a very powerful technology and has the potential to be very valuable, but it isn’t a panacea,” says the FAO’s Terri Raney. “There are lots of issues in meeting the challenges faced by farmers in the developing world, such as better seeds, better water management, better access to markets and so on.” Nevertheless, she says, the FAO would like to see biotech being incorporated into integrated, aggressive public-sector programmes. “That way, farmers will have the option of using transgenic technology should the need arise.”
It’s important not to generalise about whether or not transgenic crops are appropriate, she says. “They should be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. So the solution for farmers struggling with potato blight in northern India, for example, may not be right for those with the same problem in Indonesia. You need to look at the specific crop, the specific trait and the area where it’s being used, and evaluate it on its merits. And it should be compared with the alternatives, not with perfection, because perfection doesn’t exist in agriculture.”
But Scoones warns that too much focus on GM crops could end up draining scarce public resources in poor countries. “There are plenty of other, less expensive technologies – including others involving biotechnology – that show significant potential.” And even when the private sector is involved, he says, the negotiations could prove too difficult. “There were 70 patents associated with Golden Rice. For how many other products will such complex arrangements be forged?”
While biotech crops may provide part of the solution to current problems in the developing world, in the long term, says ISAAA’s Clive James, they will become increasingly important to all of us. “In the next 50 years, the world’s population will rise to nine billion people. To meet their needs, we’ll have to double production of food, feed and fibre. The only way to do this without continuing to destroy our remaining forests and natural sanctuaries is to increase production on the same area of land. We can’t do this with conventional technology alone, so at some stage we’ll have to start thinking about using biotechnology for conservation reasons.”
In this context, there may be parallels with the patent-free, generic anti-retroviral drugs that were sanctioned by the World Trade Organization to address the HIV/AIDS crisis.
At present, however, the dogmatic opposition to GM crops in Europe is hindering their development. “Several countries, including Thailand, Zambia and Zimbabwe, have delayed or abandoned biotech crop programmes because of fears for food safety and that they would lose export markets into Europe,” says James.
And in Kenya, the biotech regulatory body has imposed meaningless regulations on trials of virus-resistant cassava, says Frank Shotkoski of the USAID-funded Agricultural Biotechnology Support Network Project II, most likely because of misinformation spread by environmental campaigners in Europe. “One of the restrictions that their regulatory people put on the testing application is that non-target insects should be tested. But there are no target or non-target insects. Even so, somebody, somewhere convinced them it was important to insist that insects be tested for this technology. All this ridiculous constraint will achieve is to set back the research by one or two years and add to its cost.”
This is perhaps the crux of the matter. It seems that the continued opposition to biotech crops in Europe won’t halt their adoption, but it could do a great deal to hinder their development. “The potential is enormous for these crops to do a tremendous amount of good in the world,” says Bennett. “It would be a great shame if we stop resource-poor farmers in developing countries from being able to adopt such a potentially beneficial technology.”
July 2006
The secret behind Manukuza’s success is Bollgard, a strain of cotton that is resistant to the bollworm, the sworn enemy of cotton farmers around the world. Developed by the US biotechnology company Monsanto, this so-called Bt cotton has been genetically modified through the addition of DNA from a common soil bacterium, Bacillus thuringiensis (hence ‘Bt’), that produces an insect toxin.
Since she adopted this new variety, Manukuza has not only produced higher yields of better quality cotton, she has been able to save money she would have spent on insecticides, as well as the time and energy it took to spray her crop.
Manukuza is one of 3,500 farmers who’ve adopted Bt cotton in South Africa since it was first introduced in 1998. Together, they represent an estimated 95 per cent of the country’s small-scale cotton farmers. Ongoing research by agricultural economists from Reading University has shown that, almost without exception, the new technology has been well received: average yields are up by 65 per cent and profits by almost 300 per cent. “Today, I am very respected in the community as one of the men who gives job opportunities,” says 55-year-old Dumezweni Mhawu Ntuli, also from Makhathini Flats. “To myself, I’m very happy to know that I can provide for my family’s needs.”
But how can this be? According to environmental groups such as Friends of the Earth (FOE) and Greenpeace, GMOs and the developing world don’t mix. They’re simply the means by which large multinationals such as Monsanto plan to take over the world’s agriculture and squeeze every last penny out of its poorest farmers. Not only is GM technology dangerous, they say, it doesn’t work.
In fact, all of the available evidence suggests that the opposite is true. Ten years after the commercialisation of the first biotech crops, more than six per cent of the world’s agricultural land is devoted to GM varieties. Not only have the plants themselves flourished, with none of predicted health and environmental problems, but millions of people are enjoying the benefits, the vast majority of them resource-poor small-holders in developing countries who live on less than US$1 a day.
The fact is that, contrary to what we in Europe have been led to believe, GM crops can work. And not only can they work safely and effectively, they can also give poor farmers such as Manukuza an opportunity to raise their standard of living.
Indeed, with experts predicting the arrival of a second wave of GM crops developed specifically to meet the needs of the world’s poorest farmers, the next ten years might well prove that it’s in the developing world that GMOs will be most appreciated.
Enthusiastic adoption
News of GM crops’ success may come as something of a surprise to many Geographical readers. In the UK, we’re more used to reading about the failures of, and opposition to, biotechnology because what can only be described as propaganda from the anti-GM lobby has skewed the debate. Riding the popular wave of anti-globalisation sentiment and the public concern about food safety caused by the BSE and foot-and-mouth outbreaks, environmental and social-rights groups have whipped up frenzied opposition to GM crops among the press and general public here and elsewhere in Europe. Unfortunately, much of its information is based on half truths and factual inaccuracies (see Public service or propaganda?).
The latest FOE report on GMOs, published earlier this year to mark the tenth anniversary of the commercialisation of transgenic crops, is typically inflammatory and misleading. Entitled ‘Who Benefits from GM Crops? Monsanto and its Corporate Driven Genetically Modified Crop Revolution’, it paints a picture of aggressive biotechnology companies forcing GM crops upon poor farmers as a means of gaining control of the world’s seed supply. It claims that despite the companies’ best efforts, governments and farmers all over the world are rejecting biotech crops because the technology doesn’t work.
However, it appears that, behind the smokescreen of anti-GM propaganda, many governments and farmers are enthusiastically adopting the technology. According to the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications (ISAAA), a non-profit organisation that delivers the benefits of new agricultural biotechnologies to developing countries, the uptake of biotech crops has increased dramatically since 1996. Today, 8.5 million farmers grow transgenic crops in 21 countries, covering an area of 900,000 square kilometres – six per cent of the world’s agricultural land. “We’ve seen a 50-fold increase in the area devoted to biotech crops during the past ten years,” says Clive James, the ISAAA’s director. “This technology is moving faster than any other crop technology that we know of.”
In terms of area, a handful of large countries dominate: in 2005, the USA accounted for 55 per cent of all GM crops planted, with almost 500,000 square kilometres, Argentina 19 per cent and Brazil ten per cent. The crops themselves are largely restricted to soya (60 per cent), yellow maize (24 per cent), cotton (11 per cent) and rape (five per cent) – although there are small amounts of papaya, squash, white maize and rice.
These statistics appear to support the claim that biotechnology doesn’t help the poor. But since 2000, the uptake of biotech crops in developing countries has outpaced that in the industrialised world, and last year, the former accounted for 38 per cent of the total area. Aside from Argentina and Brazil, in Latin America, Colombia, Honduras, Mexico, Paraguay and Uruguay all planted around 100,000 hectares last year. In Asia, China planted 33,000 square kilometres of GM cotton last year and India 13,000, while the Philippines grew 100,000 hectares of GM maize. Iran planted 4,000 hectares of Bt rice with a view to full commercialisation this year.
More importantly, of the 8.5 million people currently using this technology, 90 per cent are resource-poor farmers. Around 6.4 million farmers now grow Bt cotton in China, and one million in India. In South Africa, 95 per cent of all small-scale cotton farmers now use Bt varieties.
Reports of Bt cotton failing in India, and South African farmers abandoning their Bt varieties in the past few years are misleading (see Public service or propaganda?). So far, only a handful of independent, peer-reviewed studies have assessed the performance of GM crops in developing countries accurately and thoroughly. And, without exception, these have found that the overall impact has been positive. Studies on Bt cotton in China, Argentina, Mexico, South Africa and India reveal average yields up by between 11 and 65 per cent and profits increasing by between 12 and 340 per cent.
“In both South Africa and India, we’ve found that the Bt technology actually improves livelihoods,” says Richard Bennett, an agricultural economist from Reading University. “It means the farmers have more money and more time to do other things – often other agricultural activities. In India, the money has been used to repay debts, send children to school and to carry out other enterprises, both on-farm and off-farm.”
And the benefits aren’t just financial, explains Jocelyn Webster, executive director of AfricaBio, a South African biotechnology stakeholders organisation. “If you’re a small-scale farmer with four hectares of cotton and you have to spray that cotton with insecticide, you have to do between eight and ten sprays a season with a knapsack sprayer on your back. That would mean you’d walk 400 kilometres in one season. In this respect, Bt cotton takes away a huge amount of effort and time.”
Studies in China have documented benefits to farmers’ health and the wider environment as a result of substantial reductions in insecticide use. And it’s thought that lower levels of mycotoxins – which cause cancers, birth defects, and, at high levels, acute toxicity in humans – in Bt maize could benefit consumers in those countries where the crop is a staple.
According to James, the past ten years have provided clear evidence that biotech crops can deliver benefits to the poor. “This technology has been used by millions of farmers on a total of four million square kilometres. Every year more farmers are adopting it. Why? Because they see it in their neighbours’ field, they compare it with their conventional varieties and decide they’d be better off with biotech. If Friends of the Earth are correct and this technology has nothing to offer, then these millions of farmers must be wrong.”
Start the slideshow (7 pictures)
Help for orphans
One of the main criticisms of GM crops is that they haven’t been developed to tackle the needs of the poor directly. And in this respect, the environmental groups are right. Although Bt cotton has improved the livelihoods of millions of poor farmers in China, India and South Africa, none of the principal biotech food crops will help reduce hunger and malnutrition in the developing world: soya and rape are both grown primarily for processing into vegetable oil, while GM maize is used for cattle feed.
These crops, says FOE’s Clare Oxborrow, have been developed to cater for the commercial agriculture market. “But millions of small-scale farmers still face starvation every year because they have difficulty growing staple crops such as sweet potato and cassava. The technology hasn’t been implanted into these types of foods.”
This may be about to change. A few GM varieties of so-called ‘orphan crops’ – crops such as millet and cowpea that, while regionally important, don’t receive a great deal of attention or research due to their relatively low commercial potential – have recently been introduced or are in the final stages of testing. Around six per cent of farmers on the borders of Kwa-Zulu Natal and Mpumalenga provinces in South Africa are growing Bt and herbicide-tolerant white maize, a staple in large parts of sub-Saharan Africa. And last year, farmers in Iran grew the first Bt rice.
Significantly, China is on the brink of commercialising its own Bt rice. “China has been very close to introducing this technology for a couple of years,” says Terri Raney, an agricultural economist with the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. “But they’ve been stalling because they want to make sure that farmers will benefit and that consumers are comfortable with it.”
Its success or failure will have a tremendous impact, she says, not only because rice is the world’s most important food crop, but because Bt rice is the first major GM food crop that will be eaten directly by humans. (The vegetable oils made from soya and rape contain none of the transgenic DNA.) “If the Chinese rice goes well – and the farmers benefit and there is no severe market reaction – then we will increasingly see developing countries adopting more Bt food crops. India is already close with a Bt eggplant [aubergine], and I think the white maize would spread quickly as well.”
The largest constraints to food production in the developing world, however, are drought, nutrient-poor soils and disease. While none of the GM crops introduced so far address these problems, new technologies may not be far away. There has been a great deal of research into disease resistance – in, among others, tomatoes, groundnuts, sweet potatoes, cooking bananas and papaya. Drought tolerance is more difficult to deal with, although work is underway to develop this trait in rice and maize.
The other area in which scientists are working is increasing the nutritional value of crops. “It’s very difficult to distribute vitamin and mineral supplements among poor people in rural areas,” says Per Pinstrup-Andersen, professor of food, nutrition and public policy at Cornell University in New York. “But if you could build a better nutrient quality of, for example, iron, vitamin A and zinc into the food people eat anyway, then it becomes a self-sustaining solution.”
Perhaps the best and most promising example of this sort of crop is Golden Rice, which was developed to address vitamin A deficiencies, particularly in Asia. After several years of troubled research and development, a second strain with increased levels of beta-carotene is being tested in India and the Philippines. Speaking last year, Ingo Potrykus, chairman of the Humanitarian Project for Golden Rice, said: “Optimistically, we might be able to grow this in the countries that need it within three years.” Work is now under way to introduce further nutrients, including iron, zinc, pro-vitamin A and vitamin E.
Multinationals and monopolies
Developing this new technology is all very well. But is it wise to place the livelihoods of the world’s poorest farmers in the hands of a few multinational corporations? According to FOE, Monsanto is responsible for 90 per cent of the GM traits used around the world and “aims to aggressively displace conventional seeds with its patented GM varieties”.
Professor Ian Scoones of the Institute of Development Studies at Sussex University agrees that the monopolisation of the market by a few companies is potentially problematic. “When a company has a monopoly on a product, or when its presence is very significant in a particular market, it can restrict access to, and control the price of, new technologies. The result is often increased prices, as competition between suppliers is low.”
However, according to Scoones, the way in which the anti-GM lobby has presented this issue in relation to GMOs is misleading. “For a start, this problem isn’t exclusive to transgenic crops,” he explains. “It’s part of the corporitisation of agriculture as a whole, and is just as likely to affect the conventional seed market.”
More importantly, however, the large multinationals have little interest in orphan crops because they aren’t commercially lucrative. “The cost of biotechnology research is huge,” continues Scoones. “The cost of developing a product from scratch and getting it through bio-safety clearance is in the region of hundreds of millions of dollars. The private companies aren’t going to invest these amounts of money into developing a product unless they can make significant profits in return.” It’s unlikely they will get that from selling a crop such as virus-resistant cassava in the developing world, he continues, where farmers can’t afford to pay high premiums for the technology.
In focusing on the corporatisation argument, the anti-GM lobby has overlooked the fact that the majority of research into orphan crops is being conducted in the public sector, funded by governments and charitable organisations, and by relatively small private companies. “In these cases, market monopolisation and access to technology aren’t major issues,” says Scoones.
All over the world, governments are investing in research and development programmes. In China, where 6.4 million farmers already grow Bt cotton, the government is investing US$500million every year, with more than 2,000 scientists working on 21 crops. Those currently being field-tested include cabbage, peanut, melon, chilli and tobacco, as well as three staples.
Elsewhere, India has 16 crops, including coffee banana and chickpea, being developed in the public sector and nine in the private sector at a cost of US$25million a year. The South African government has made US$64million available over three years, while Brazil’s national agricultural research body is spending US$15million a year and is close to finishing work on papaya and a type of bean. Many other countries, including Bangladesh, Ghana, Malawi, Mali and Tanzania, plan to start their own research projects once the appropriate bio-safety regulations are in place.
While the Chinese are developing their own technologies from scratch, most GM orphan crops rely on traits developed in the private sector. This situation has raised fears of corporations only releasing their patented intellectual property for exorbitant fees. But in many of these cases, companies have donated their technology for free – another fact that the anti-GM campaign has overlooked. Monsanto, for example, donated the gene that confers virus resistance to cassava to a research project in Kenya, and has licensed its Bt gene for use in a transgenic aubergine in India. “We work with a variety of partners in this way,” says Monsanto’s Chris Horner. “And we’re happy to offer our technology with no fee for humanitarian work on crops that won’t go into the commercial market.”
Given the costs involved in bringing these technologies to market, collaboration is essential if resource-poor farmers are to benefit from biotech crops. And public–private partnerships may be the best way to make this happen. “Golden Rice is, notionally, the classic case,” says Scoones. “There were 70 patents associated with that one product, and it was convened under a public–private process of negotiating patent access for a public-good product that, it was argued, would help to address critical vitamin A deficiencies in the developing world.”
But even when a private company is selling to poor farmers, it makes no sense for it to sell its seed at an extortionate price, says Yousouf Ismael, an agricultural economist from Reading University. “In South Africa and India,” he says, “Monsanto sells its Bt cotton seed for the same price that farmers would have had to pay for their conventional seed and insecticide combined, so their costs end up being the same.”
According to James, farmers won’t be fooled, despite what FOE would have us believe. “It’s naďve to think you can rip off farmers. You may be able to do it once. But never a second time. Farmers are the best judges of technology. They have to be, because their livelihoods depend on it. What happens is they try it once and if it works, they use it again. If it doesn’t work, they won’t buy it again. It’s as simple as that.”
Not a panacea
So if biotech crops can work and they can be distributed equitably, the question is, can they reduce poverty and hunger in the developing world? Surprisingly, most experts to whom Geographical spoke seemed to agree on this point. “This is a very powerful technology and has the potential to be very valuable, but it isn’t a panacea,” says the FAO’s Terri Raney. “There are lots of issues in meeting the challenges faced by farmers in the developing world, such as better seeds, better water management, better access to markets and so on.” Nevertheless, she says, the FAO would like to see biotech being incorporated into integrated, aggressive public-sector programmes. “That way, farmers will have the option of using transgenic technology should the need arise.”
It’s important not to generalise about whether or not transgenic crops are appropriate, she says. “They should be evaluated on a case-by-case basis. So the solution for farmers struggling with potato blight in northern India, for example, may not be right for those with the same problem in Indonesia. You need to look at the specific crop, the specific trait and the area where it’s being used, and evaluate it on its merits. And it should be compared with the alternatives, not with perfection, because perfection doesn’t exist in agriculture.”
But Scoones warns that too much focus on GM crops could end up draining scarce public resources in poor countries. “There are plenty of other, less expensive technologies – including others involving biotechnology – that show significant potential.” And even when the private sector is involved, he says, the negotiations could prove too difficult. “There were 70 patents associated with Golden Rice. For how many other products will such complex arrangements be forged?”
While biotech crops may provide part of the solution to current problems in the developing world, in the long term, says ISAAA’s Clive James, they will become increasingly important to all of us. “In the next 50 years, the world’s population will rise to nine billion people. To meet their needs, we’ll have to double production of food, feed and fibre. The only way to do this without continuing to destroy our remaining forests and natural sanctuaries is to increase production on the same area of land. We can’t do this with conventional technology alone, so at some stage we’ll have to start thinking about using biotechnology for conservation reasons.”
In this context, there may be parallels with the patent-free, generic anti-retroviral drugs that were sanctioned by the World Trade Organization to address the HIV/AIDS crisis.
At present, however, the dogmatic opposition to GM crops in Europe is hindering their development. “Several countries, including Thailand, Zambia and Zimbabwe, have delayed or abandoned biotech crop programmes because of fears for food safety and that they would lose export markets into Europe,” says James.
And in Kenya, the biotech regulatory body has imposed meaningless regulations on trials of virus-resistant cassava, says Frank Shotkoski of the USAID-funded Agricultural Biotechnology Support Network Project II, most likely because of misinformation spread by environmental campaigners in Europe. “One of the restrictions that their regulatory people put on the testing application is that non-target insects should be tested. But there are no target or non-target insects. Even so, somebody, somewhere convinced them it was important to insist that insects be tested for this technology. All this ridiculous constraint will achieve is to set back the research by one or two years and add to its cost.”
This is perhaps the crux of the matter. It seems that the continued opposition to biotech crops in Europe won’t halt their adoption, but it could do a great deal to hinder their development. “The potential is enormous for these crops to do a tremendous amount of good in the world,” says Bennett. “It would be a great shame if we stop resource-poor farmers in developing countries from being able to adopt such a potentially beneficial technology.”
July 2006
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