FEATURE - Hunger fighters see biotech hope for poor nations
Date: 12-Nov-01
Country: USA
Author: Julie Ingwersen
"You have two choices," Borlaug told Reuters in an interview. "You need it to further improve yields so that you can continue to produce the food that's needed on the soil that's well-adapted to agricultural production. Or, you'll be pushed into cutting down more of our forests."
Borlaug, 87, may know as much about food production as anyone alive. He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for developing wheat varieties and farming techniques that greatly reduced food shortages in Pakistan and India. His efforts in what came to be known as the "Green Revolution" are credited with saving millions of lives.
Borlaug said advances in conventional plant breeding had been a timely but temporary solution to meeting hunger problems. When he was born in 1914, the global population was 1.6 billion. "Today we're close to 6.2 billion and we're adding 85 million at least, every year," he said.
"You've got the choice: moving into partially sustainable, poor-yield agriculture and into forests, destroying the habitat for wildlife species, or producing higher yields on the land best-suited for all these techniques. Better hybrids," Borlaug said.
"But it's much more complicated than just producing the high-yielding varieties or hybrids. You have to put genes in for different diseases," he said. "That's new. And that's frightening. But I think we need to do this. We need to have the freedom to do it."
THE STAKE FOR DEVELOPING COUNTRIES
Borlaug and others believe genetically modified (GM) crops hold great promise for waging the battle against hunger and famine in poor countries.
The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations says the world community is well behind in its bid to halve world hunger by 2015 and estimates that 800 million people go to bed hungry every day.
"New technologies, including biotechnology, will help meet the challenge of feeding a growing world population with a limited resource base," U.S. Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman said at an FAO conference on November 5.
Veneman and others at the conference called for an international coalition to eradicate hunger. Such an alliance could conceivably help resolve cost issues that might otherwise keep high-tech GM crops out of the developing world.
But poor countries have not had much say in the biotechnology debate so far.
One reason is that the first genetically modified crops to win widespread use have been corn and soybean varieties designed to cut costs and boost productivity on large-scale farms in the United States. The crops have had genes inserted to fight insect pests or enable them to withstand herbicides.
GM crop pioneers like Monsanto, fighting to win hearts and minds for the crop technology, have now turned actively to addressing the problems of the developing world. Progress has been made on altering crops to thrive in salty or poor soils.
Researchers are working on rice and mustard seed varieties that contain high levels of vitamin A to fight malnutrition.
Other efforts are aimed at protecting small-scale farmers from devastating crop failures. Kenya is close to approving a GM sweet potato that resists the feathery mottle virus, an insect-borne disease that can destroy most of a crop.
NO RISK-FREE STRATEGIES
"Genetic engineering is not going to be the solution to the food supply," said Per Pinstrup-Andersen, director of the Washington-based International Food Policy Research Institute.
"But if it's applied selectively to solve specific problems that are best solved using that approach, then it would be an extremely important component," he said.
Pinstrup-Andersen, awarded the World Food Prize in Des Moines, Iowa, last month, said developing countries should also be able to make their own decisions about GM crops.
"If we sit in Europe or North America and decide that because we don't need that scientific approach for our food supply, therefore they can't have it either, that is grossly uneth
