15.12.2000

This is from Tim Roberts. I am a consultant patent attorney based in UK, formerly working for a seed company.

Professor Muir makes a vital point. Indeed, "with unchecked population growth", no systems are sustainable. However, is such growth inevitable? Birthrates in developed countries have fallen to below replacement levels. This seems to be associated with prosperity. If such prosperity (or some of it) can be generated in developing countries, one may reasonably hope birthrates will fall there too. Prosperity comes from economic growth, which is linked to globalisation and technical advances. The latter (even if some of your correspondents doubt it) can also help to relieve misery. Trying to make the poor richer is certainly a more acceptable option than exhorting them to have fewer children. Of course, it has one serious drawback - it is likely to make the rich richer as well.

Tim ("Pollyanna") Roberts, UK
[email protected]

[To contribute to this conference, send your message to [email protected] The last day for receiving messages is Sunday 17 December. 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: Friday, December 15, 2000 2:21 PM
To: '[email protected]'
Subject: General Points

[A reminder: Messages received up to and including Sunday 17th December will be posted in this conference....Moderator]

The latest conference was most interesting I would say, but affected slightly by some unhelpful political rhetoric, and some mis-reading of some mails (due to language difficulties perhaps?), or people picking up on a point half way through a string without checking what had been discussed previously. No way to avoid that I suppose.

My approach to these issues is that poverty is not nobel or an ideal to be sanctified, and that severe poverty is indeed a terrible thing which all the wealthy of the world are morally obliged to help resolve. And the scale of such problems in the developing world today (itself a demeaning term) are huge. There is indeed an apartheid of resources (and opportunities) in the world today, with countless millions (billions?) almost permanantly excluded from the world's wealth generating system, execpt perhaps as near slaves to the system which has so far not helped them.

These are the foundations upon which any rational debate should be founded, but I do not believe in prescriptive solutions (biotechnological or otherwise). Local remedies, especially where people have the choice about what to use will probably be the best, but may still not prevent the flood of populations to the cities. In this circumstance, it will be very easy for any policy (especially over-rigid, externally imposed ones, whether due to WTO type constraints as some might claim, or even potentially those initiated by NGO's) to inadvertantly make the problems much worse, in the short or longer term. No easy answers then.

On a wider note, there must be a physical limit to human population expansion, and the expansion in the consumption in resources. It may be arguable that those at the bottom of the heap are already suffering from this limitation, or it may be the case that with technology - and time - the benefits of technological advancement (i.e. a break out from poverty - which suggests a break out from small scale subsistence farming to me) can be much more widely spread than they are now. In the longer term, increases in the productivity of food in developing regions are surely no bad thing (whether measured in terms of gross yield, reduced losses to pests and disease, reduced storage losses, or avoiding the problems of excess pesticide use etc. that farming in developed regions is struggling with), but again they almost certainly will cause short term 'instabilities' as the effects are worked through.

Biotechnology has much to offer the developed - and developing world (100% assuming all safety issues are worked out), but it should by no means be regarded as the only means, or even the major means, not withstanding the financial, social and political problems surrounding and interwoven with all this. Doom and gloom laden scenarios of a rolling world capitalism rolling ever forward upon ruthless 18-19th century European and US models are by no means inevitable (nor even necessarily desirable, as I hope I made clear), but it is the simplest most dominating economic model around, and has tended to prevail over all efforts to change or stop it so far. All I would say is that anyone attempting to do so, or suggesting doing so, should seriously consider what the chances of a successful alternative outcome are and, if slim, what the risks are for efforts in those directions being counter-productive.

So, no dogmas, but pragmatism must rule - like it or not. And there isn't time to lose. I do not hold to the 'biotechnology will cure everything' view of some who over-hype the industry (who were pretty much absent I note), but I did worry that some of the mails with the most dogmatic and strident tones appeared to come from some in the aid agency sector. This may have been unintended, but I do wonder whether it is because of such people's closeness to the problems, or (worse) because such organisations have become part of the problem.

I offer no answers to that or any of the other issues.

Regards once again,

Trevor Fenning, Germany
[email protected]

-----Original Message-----
From: Biotech-Mod1
Sent: Friday, December 15, 2000 2:43 PM
To: '[email protected]'
Subject: Risk assessment // Biotechnology and sustainability

First of all, I apologise for leaving this message to the last days of the conference. Since my previous message (21 November) I have not been able to follow the debate very closely, until today. I hope that this message will be helpful to the discussion, and that there will still be time for people to respond to it, if they wish.

Several participants have mentioned the importance of having 'a thorough and rigorous risk assessment ... for each product for each environment in which its use is proposed' (Andrea Johanson, 11 December); that 'each example will need to be assessed upon its own merits - as well as for its applicability' (Trevor Fenning, 6 December). For transgenic crops, I agree that detailed, context-specific risk assessment is vital.

However, I think there is good reason to doubt whether such detailed testing or risk assessment is likely to be carried out in poor countries. Risk assessment, field trials and so on, are time-consuming and expensive. It is highly questionable whether public authorities in many poor countries have the expertise or resources to carry out this work effectively [the same point was made, even more explicitly, by Glenn Ashton on 12 December ...Moderator]. They may have to rely on the private corporations themselves to supply data or to carry out trials.

Unfortunately, the corporations have a vested interest in keeping risk assessment procedures to a minimum, which explains why they are so keen to argue that transgenic crops are not intrinsically different, or inherently more risky, than crops derived from traditional breeding. Corporations are also adamant that regulations on testing and labelling transgenic crops should be rigorously 'science-based,' focusing exclusively on characteristics of the crop as a product, like toxicity and allergenicity, and not on the process by which it has been produced. Crucially, they would prefer to see a system of 'mutual recognition' in risk assessment, so that testing and approval in one country could be used to get approval for importing the crop for use in another country with quite different local conditions. In a globalised world, corporations use their influence with governments to get these interests included in regulations and agreements like the Biosafety Protocol.

On a different note:
It is interesting that, in this conference as much as anywhere else, the current 'big global energy-intensive wasteful agriculture' (Jeffrey Kirk, 13 December ) is used as the benchmark against which we should measure the potential benefits of agricultural biotechnology. Why is this? The intensive 'industrial' model of modern farming creates vast monocultural wastelands which are vulnerable to pests and disease; it relies on expensive industrial inputs of often toxic chemicals, which can be dangerous to both farmers and consumers; and it causes serious environmental degradation. Importantly, it stimulates what Jack Kloppenburg (1988) calls 'the technological treadmill', in which farmers become locked into an accelerating cycle of technological 'solutions,' each one more short-lived and with more marginal benefits than the last. (For a good example of this phenomenon, see Genetic Resources Action International (GRAIN)'s highly critical view of the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI)'s efforts to develop rice plants resistant to bacterial blight - especially the first 2 sections: http://www.grain.org/publications/reports/bbrice.htm ). Instead of measuring the potential of agricultural biotechnology against the current industrial model, shouldn't we consider whether biotechnology has any role in bringing us closer to an alternative model of farming which would be more sustainable, more accessible to the resource-poor, and better at providing sustainable livelihoods in rural areas?

Dominic Glover LL.B. MA
Research Assistant
Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, Brighton BN1 9RE, UK
Email: [email protected]

Kloppenburg, J.R., jnr. (1988). First the seed: The political economy of plant biotechnology, 1492-2000, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

-----Original Message-----
From: Biotech-Mod1
Sent: Friday, December 15, 2000 3:23 PM
To: '[email protected]'
Subject: Re: Limitations to Food Security and Biotechnology

In reponse to Tim Roberts' message [15 December]:

According to the UN's projections (used throughout the UN and its agencies), the rate of population growth has already slowed down. Their model suggests world population will peak at around 9 billion people (from something over 6 billion today) in around 2050, before declining slowly. Population growth is predicted to be concentrated in the countries of Southern and Eastern Asia, with China and India contributing an astonishing one-third of annual global population growth between 1995 and 2000.

Source: UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division. 1998. World Population Prospects: the 1998 Revision. New York: UN. Summary available from http://www.un.org/popin/

Dominic Glover
Research Assistant
Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex, Brighton BN1 9RE, UK
Email: [email protected]

-----Original Message-----
From: Biotech-Mod1
Sent: Friday, December 15, 2000 3:25 PM
To: '[email protected]'
Subject: Technical issues

It has been correctly noted that the conference has not dwelt much on technical issues. They have been raised many times, but the theme has tended to revert to more philosophical and grand economic issues. This has been partly due to the theme of the conference, as many technical issues relate to biotechnology in general, rather than specifically to those of the developing world, and also because the different approaches to the problems of food security in developing regions clearly needed an airing.

It is still possible to have such a discussion, if anyone is interested, but presumably at this late date it would require another conference. However, I would warn in advance that such discussions (without the legitimate political discussions) tend to become extremely dry and excessively tedious to those not directly involved in the subject, and with the current controversy still raging around the subject, it is still likely to end up in circles of disagreement. Due to the speed of developments/revelations it will also probably be out of date before the conference is ended.

The place for such discussions is in the scientific literature, even with the strict limitations that are imposed there.

Trevor Fenning, Germany
[email protected]

-----Original Message-----
From: Biotech-Mod1
Sent: Friday, December 15, 2000 4:15 PM
To: '[email protected]'
Subject: isn't the answer yes ?

My name is George Mackay. I am employed at the Scottish Crop Research Institute, a public sector funded institution and I am a plant breeder.

I have read the contributions to this conference with more than a passing interest as we are intending to hold an Open Forum on "The Future of Biotechnology in Crop Improvement" at the XVIth Congress of the European Association of Plant Breeders (Eucarpia) in Edinburgh in September 2001 (for further info. see http://www.eucarpia.org ) . I am concerned as Ned Donkin is (13 Dec.) that our forum might too become side-tracked. There are many historical, political and socio-economic reasons why a proportion of humankind goes hungry whilst some of us consume more than our fair share. Whilst it behoves all of us to address this issue and ameliorate the situation, it seems unreasonable to argue that biotechnology per se will provide all the answers. Nevertheless it would be extremely foolish to ignore the tremendous potential that the new technologies offer as part of a solution.

Many of the developments that have taken place under the broad umbrella of "biotechnology" are already augmenting "conventional" plant breeding. The production of crops more resistant to, or tolerant of, abiotic and biotic stresses, of superior quality or for use as renewable industrial feedstock in an environmentally sustainable way has to be a desirable goal. If biotechnology can help achieve this, as I believe it can, then the answer to the main question has to be yes [The main question being: Can agricultural biotechnology help to reduce hunger and increase food security in developing countries ?...Moderator]. Perhaps we need to address some of the more specific questions raised by Ned Donkin and solve the technical problems ?

George Mackay
President of EUCARPIA
c/o Scottish Crop Research Institute
Invergowrie, Dundee DD2 5DA
Scotland UK
tele +44 (0) 1382 568 515 FAX +44 (0) 1382 568 587
e-mail: [email protected]

-----Original Message-----
From: Biotech-Mod1
Sent: Friday, December 15, 2000 5:05 PM
To: '[email protected]'
Subject: Food Security, the answer is yes and maybe

George Mackay's answer [15 December] to the question "can agricultural biotechnology help to reduce hunger and increase food security in developing countries ?" is that it "must be yes". However, this really depends on projections for the impact of biotechnology on population growth. If the answer is that biotechnology will only allow the population to grow larger before it again becomes too large to be sustainable, then we are back to the same state, but with a larger population. So in the long run the answer could be no.

Tim Roberts [15 December] questions if unchecked population growth is inevitable due to the effect of wealth on birth control. In support to that conclusion, Dominic Glover [15 December] notes that according to the UN's projections the rate of population growth has already slowed down, suggesting only another 50% increase in population numbers before stabilizing. However, is the population growth rate declining because we are approaching the critical carrying capacity? Population models predict that a decline and leveling off will occur in that manner as the limit is approached. If that is true, then biotechnology could simply lift those limits and result in a new expansion.

I therefore feel that there is a short and long term answer and it really depends on the impact of biotechnology on population growth. If the answer is as Tim Roberts suggests (i.e. raising income levels will reduce birth rates) then maybe the more important question is what impact will biotechnology have on average wealth? Now we have to bring the agricultural economists into the debate.

Bill Muir
Professor of Genetics
Department of Animal Sciences
Purdue University, USA
[email protected]

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