Biotechnology and the World Food Supply
Today, in a world with abundant food, more than 700 million people are chronically undernourished. Over the next 20 years, the world's population will probably double. The global food supply would need to double just to stay even, but to triple for the larger population to be fed adequately. Meanwhile, we are approaching limits in arable land and productivity and are employing practices that are destroying the soil's capacity to produce food.Some see biotechnology as the answer to the problem of enabling this much larger population to feed itself. But biotechnology, if by this we mean crops engineered to contain new genes, is not essential. It could play a minor and useful role in developing new agricultural products, but other factors -- including other kinds of breeding technologies -- will be much more important than transgenic crops in determining whether we meet this challenge. It would be a tragedy if other necessary actions were not taken because of a mistaken belief that genetic engineering is some sort of a panacea for hunger. Some of the reasons biotechnology should not be relied on to enable the world to feed itself are outlined below.
More productive crops are only part of the solution to the world's food crisis.
There are many reasons for the current and projected food crisis. Among the most important are lack of income to buy food, lack of infrastructure like roads to get products to market, trade policies that disadvantage farmers in the developing world, lack of inputs such as fertilizer, lack of information, and low-yield farming practices. More productive crops will do little to alleviate hunger if deficiencies in those areas are not addressed as well.
Where more productive crops are needed, there is little reason to believe that genetic engineering will be better than other technologies -- in particular, sophisticated traditional breeding -- at producing higher yielding crops.
Many technologies can increase the yields of crops. These include traditional breeding, production of hybrids, so-called marker-assisted breeding (a sophisticated way of enhancing traditional breeding by knowing which plant cultivars carry which trait), and tissue culture methods for propagating virus-free root stocks. All of these could help improve the productivity of crops in the developing world, but currently only limited resources are available for applying them there.
So far, there no reason to believe that genetic engineering would be markedly better than these more traditional technologies in improving crops. Early "gene dreams" were of nitrogen-fixing crops, higher intrinsic yield, and drought tolerance. But so far none of these seems realistic because most involve complex multigene traits. For the most part, genetically engineered crops are limited to one or two gene transfers and have relative few applications of use to hungry people. Those that are of use, such as insect resistance and virus tolerance, do not increase intrinsic yield and vary in effectiveness. In addition, they appear to be short lived due to the almost certain evolution of resistant pests.
Currently, there is no reason to believe that the limited resources for agricultural development would be better spent on producing genetically engineered crops rather than on applying breeding technologies.
For the most part, genetic engineering techniques are being applied to crops important to the industrialized world, not crops on which the world's hungry depend.
Most genetic engineering in agriculture is being done by large transnational corporations that need to sell their products at premium prices to cover the cost of research. These companies are developing products for farmers in rich countries who can afford to pay high prices for seed. Such farmers are interested in field crops like corn, soybeans, and cotton and fruits like tomatoes and cantaloupes. And that is what the agricultural biotechnology industry is providing. In many cases, genetically engineered fruits are sold at premium prices and seeds are sold with an added technology fee to cover the costs of research. These products are of virtually no value to hungry farmers in Africa, who cannot afford the products of traditional technology, much less these expensive genetically engineered products. In addition, these products are often inappropriate for the developing world because, among other things, they require large amounts of fertilizers, pesticides, and water.
In sum, more productive crops are only part of the solution to the world hunger problem and transgenic crops are not uniquely capable of increasing food production. While some genetically engineered crops will undoubtedly prove useful, there is no reason at this time to invest huge sums in them, especially at the expense of traditional breeding.
What can be done to increase the food supply, particularly for the poor?
Much can be done to promote the sustainable intensification of agricultural production. Most of it should be done in developing countries to enable people to feed themselves so that they do not become dependent on commodities from abroad. All of it depends on local climates, cultures, and economic conditions. Rice farmers in Southeast Asia, for example, are in a far different situation from farmers living at the edge of the Sahara desert. Among the many research areas important for increasing production are the efficient use of irrigation water, crop improvement through traditional plant breeding, and new ways to manage crop-pest interactions, such as integrated pest management.
There is every reason to expect that research along these lines will lead to increased yields. Recently, agricultural scientists working in the Philippines announced that they had used sophisticated traditional breeding techniques to develop a rice variety that increased the proportion of the plant devoted to rice grains in ways that improved rice yields by 20 percent, a stunning achievement considering the importance of rice in the human diet. (Interestingly, the announcement was not accompanied by headlines like "Traditional Crop Breeding Can Feed the World!")
Improvements in other parts of the agricultural system are also essential. These include building and maintaining roads so that farmers can get their crops to market, organizing cooperatives so that farmers can purchase equipment and fertilizer, and reducing post-harvest losses of crops.
Finally, meeting the world food crisis will require changes outside of agriculture like improving the incomes of the poor through microenterprises and shifting the diet of the rich away from excessive dependence on grain-fed livestock. Growing corn to feed cows and chickens is a much less efficient use of limited arable land than growing corn for humans to eat directly.
