One can not agree less with the contribution of David Steane [5 December] if you live in a developing country like Nigeria or any sub-Saharan African country. When people talk of hunger they focus only on plants and animals have nothing to do with it. When you talk of solutions to the problem of hunger in the developing world they talk only of their own perceived solutions. When they talk of helping the poor of the world they mean their own perception of the help needed by the poor. This had been the scenario of aid programmers by the developed countries to the developing countries. I saw this same pattern even in the on-going debate in this conference.
As stated by some contributors, food production in developing countries is primarily plagued by storage problems and biotechnology can help in this area but, we all know, this brings nothing or very little to the "companies" and livestock production, as stated by David Steane, will benefit tremendously with reproduction technology in the developing world but this is hardly what is needed in the developed world and the "companies" do not see a pot of gold in this. There are few genuine concern for the poor of the world !
Sanya Olutogun
Department of Animal Science
University of Ibadan
Nigeria
olutogun@steineng.com
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-----Original Message-----
From: Biotech-Mod1
Sent: Monday, December 11, 2000 9:13 AM
To: 'biotech-room1@mailserv.fao.org'
Subject: 2 Approaches to development
Further to my previous mails. By 'Philosophy' I mean that the way of looking at the world and its problems is at issue, rather than suggesting a disinterested debating process.
Many millions of people were driven from the rural areas in Britain as the industrial economy developed 150 years ago - often by deliberate policy. The suffering and hunger inflicted was severe, but ultimately the benefits were widely spread. Such benefits were not seen for at least one or two generations, however, so those immediately effected had little if any benefit from the process - as is the case today where similar processes are at work in today's developing regions, but on a vastly larger scale.
Would the people in today's developed regions want to go back to the previous situation? By and large not it seems, but this still leaves the question as to where the people of rural areas in today's developing regions want to end up, and how best to achieve it? Have they been asked? They clearly should be, but how to ask in any meaningful way? Market type solutions are one way, but do not always bring about the intended result. Besides, the billions of poor in this world have little influence over the 'market forces' affecting them. Democracy is clearly one solution, but that is hard to effect in an impoverished environment (and goes beyond this debate too), implies free markets of some sort again, and tends to succeed only where there is some pre-existing consensus anyway.
Increased prosperity is needed whatever, but how to achieve it? Biotechnology can potentially play a role here, but is complicated by the expense of implementation, and the consequent involvement of private capital. The technology itself is neutral, offering huge potential benefits as well as risks, but will tend to play into any already ongoing political or economic developments, hence all the doubts expressed here. What I would say is that the 19th century model of development must have its resource limits somewhere (if only for Darwinian reasons), but maybe - just maybe - biotechnology might be able to help push those back a bit.
I think it comes down to two approaches:
1) The "Go along with it" approach of accepting the bone crushing process of development as inevitable, in the hope that things will ultimately be better for everyone, while trying to access the necessary resources (including possibly biotechnology) to alleviate the suffering and speed the process to completion. Or
2) the "Try to stop it" approach of trying to give people the resources to prosper where they are now, which might not be impossible given today's changing technology - and could still include biotechnology, but on a much more selective basis.
One may hold out hopes for the second approach, but the risk is that it requires more continuous intervention than the first, and the processes already at work will tend to eat into the success of the second, undermining it and possibly destroying any achievements, and thus such efforts may ultimately be wasted and fail, like trying to stop the tide. I am not saying anything about the rights and wrongs in all this, just trying to illuminate the issues. And there are no guarantees with either approach incidentally. People should be asked, but as politics tends to concentrate upon short term issues, no one should count on getting clear answers before acting. Whatever the approach supported by the people here, agencies, or Governments, flexible local programs and inclusive approaches are needed in either case, and not political or economic dogmas.
Trevor Fenning, Germany
Fenning@ice.mpg.de
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-----Original Message-----
From: Biotech-Mod1
Sent: Monday, December 11, 2000 9:28 AM
To: 'biotech-room1@mailserv.fao.org'
Subject: Re: Many biotechnology methods
Peter Singer, a controversial philosopher in his own right, in a recent New York Times Magazine essay (see www.reason.com) argued what I think is a very interesting proposition that "If allowing someone to die is not intrinsically different from killing someone, it would seem that we are all murderers". Singer's point is that the average American household needs only about $30 000 per year (so he calculates) in order to avoid the next person from being poor and destitute.
What is Singer's message? On the one hand we hope to feed the world with supposedly ingenious technology. On the other side of the world, there are people stuffing themselves up with food, and consumables that go beyond reasonable levels of comfort, and need. We live in an inherently very contradictory society. Even Singer, who owns a neat flat in Australia, would admit that although he touches on a profound practical ethical issue, he cannot resist from indulging in the more than $30 000 US he pockets through the sale of his books and lecture tours.
For me, food insecurity, is least about good technology, high yields, and whether we are able to finally find the right gene to cure nutritional deficiencies. It is fundamentally, a reflection and symbolism of the inequities that exist in our societies. Very recently too, someone, and I cannot remember the Professors name, argued in the Financial Times about the wonders of the Green Revolution in India and China. But, economists like Amartya Sen and others have shown that even at the height of the Green Revolution, we did not necessarily see the reduction of famine. In fact countries which were autocratic, had wars, no land reform programme and other factors were more than likely to have incidences of famine than countries which were democratic and had a good land reform process in place.
My view is simple: understanding food insecurity requires a very good understanding of inequality. In fact, many of the debates on agrarian reform are fundamentally, about the shift in economic power that is necessary in rural areas - which is tied with land/water rights, and the relationship of landless people to those who own land. The manner in which markets in urban centres interact, and procure commodities and goods from rural producers. A divide which in many cases is also a bit too simplistic, because we have peripheral agrarian activities, and, in many developing countries, urban agriculture is also flourishing, and in fact is becoming more succesful because of the proximity to markets, ideas, services, and inputs. Therefore food insecurity reflects a thread, or can be traced back to the root of structural inequalities, at the global, national, local and household levels.
Saliem Fakir
Head of IUCN-South Africa
sfakir@icon.co.za
[To contribute to this conference, send your message to biotech-room1@mailserv.fao.org For further information on the FAO Electronic Forum on Biotechnology in Food and Agriculture see http://www.fao.org/biotech/forum.asp ]
-----Original Message-----
From: Biotech-Mod1
Sent: Monday, December 11, 2000 2:31 PM
To: 'biotech-room1@mailserv.fao.org'
Subject: Public institutions and the fight against hunger
I think that we should perhaps come back to what, according to me, is a question on which some of us have perhaps some capacities of action, or at least some influence: Is the research on biotechnology realised by public institutions adapted to contribute to the fight against hunger? In which precise cases, and in which conditions?
I am surprised to see that no biotechnologist has replied to the message of Peter Rosset [5 December] concerning the danger of the sweet potatoes research programme aimed to incorporate Monsanto virus genes. Furthermore, in the report indicated by Andrea Johanson [5 December] on "an inventory of agricultural biotechnology for the eastern and central Africa region", there is no word on the question of the biosafety of these African GMOs programmes! When concrete examples of GMOs interest or inconvenience are presented, the debate stops!
To come back to the example of tissue culture bananas [Frey, 6/12 and Ferry 7/12...Moderator], I think that, in that case, it is not the biotechnology product in itself that is questionable but the policy designed around it. To help the poorest farmers (of course I do not share at all the view of Trevor Fenning: for me, the development of family farming systems should be the priority), a voluntary research/development policy should be designed to give the preference to this group of farmers.
In our own project, to introduce date palm tissue culture plants in Sahel, as a contribution to develop drought resistance farming systems by the nomadic families, we are working directly with, and for, the livestock breeders that have lost all or nearly all their animals. We have decided not to contribute to an other project that is aimed to develop large date palm plantations. It is a question of choice and of priority. Do we consider that fighting against hunger is definitely the priority of development? If yes, all the means should be re-oriented for that priority. Have our public national or international research institutions made clearly this choice? As a consequence, have they re-evaluated their research programmes for this objective?
As FAO's Director General Jacques Diouf has written, our time can be characterized "sadly as the age of inequity". Do we consider the fight against this inequity as the world's social priority? In the developing countries of course, but in the developed countries also? Do we consider also that this priority has to be faced without degrading still more the environment? If we agree on these two points, we should not of course consider the American liberal system as a model. It is seriously failing on these two points.
Michel FERRY
Directeur scientifique
Station de Recherche sur le Palmier Dattier
et les Systèmes de Production en Zones Arides
Apartado 996
03201 ELCHE
Espagne
tél: 34.965421551
fax: 34.965423706
e-mail: m.ferry@wanadoo.es
[To contribute to this conference, send your message to biotech-room1@mailserv.fao.org For further information on the FAO Electronic Forum on Biotechnology in Food and Agriculture see http://www.fao.org/biotech/forum.asp ]
-----Original Message-----
From: Biotech-Mod1
Sent: Monday, December 11, 2000 4:04 PM
To: 'biotech-room1@mailserv.fao.org'
Subject: Re: Public institutions and the fight against hunger
Michel Ferry writes [Dec 1]:
If I understand him correctly, Dr Ferry believes that we are advocating no debate on biosafety issues for GMOs in Africa! Rather we encourage such debate. One of the main objectives of our project is to build capacity in biosafety in the developing countries in which we work, and we are very proactive in this activity. Building capacity in biosafety is a broad task, but includes training individuals in the scientific and policy aspects of risk assessment. By its very definition, risk assessment advocates assessing the risk of each individual GMO on a case by case basis, which is the only way that an assessment has any validity. Of course it is possible (even likely) that a particular transgenic crop can be assessed as 'safe' in one environment, but judged to pose an unacceptable environmental risk in another, and I can give examples of this. It is in this context that we list in our report 'available and potential' technologies -- a thorough and rigorous risk assessment must be carried out for each product for each environment in which its use is proposed.
Hunger and poverty are obviously complex issues, and as such are unlikely to have simple solutions. Despite much of the spin we read in the media, I know of no responsible scientist naive or egotistical enough to claim that biotechnology alone will solve all these problems. However, do we not have an obligation to investigate all possible solutions, both technical and political? Anyone who has spent any time in developing countries will be only too aware that there are very serious technical problems in agriculture that demand a solution. As a plant pathologist, I could name a dozen or more plant diseases that regularly cause devastating crop losses for small farmers. Should we really not bother to address these technical issues and leave the problems of hunger solely to the economists and politicians? And if there really are so many different ways to supply enough Vitamin A in people's diets, why can we not investigate them all without attacking the approaches of others?
I assume that most people contributing to this conference are committed to finding ways to alleviate hunger and poverty, and therefore I would strongly concur with David Steane's wise comments [December 5] :
Andrea Johanson
Assistant Director, Agricultural Biotechnology Support Project
Michigan State University
http://www.iia.msu.edu/absp
e-mail: andreaj@pilot.msu.edu
[To contribute to this conference, send your message to biotech-room1@mailserv.fao.org For further information on the FAO Electronic Forum on Biotechnology in Food and Agriculture see http://www.fao.org/biotech/forum.asp ]