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GE FOOD END WORLD HUNGER? Brian Halweil is a staff researcher at the Worldwatch Institute who studies issues related to food and agriculture, including organic farming, biotechnology and hunger. Editor's Note: On July 12, 2000, Brian Halweil testified in front of the Senate Subcommittee on International Economic Policy, Export and Trade Promotion at a hearing on "The Role of Biotechnology in Combating Poverty and Hunger in Developing Nations." This is his testimony. Good afternoon, Mr. Chairman and other members of the Subcommittee. My name is Brian Halweil, and I am a staff researcher at the Worldwatch Institute. Worldwatch is an independent, nonprofit environmental research organization based here in Washington, DC. Our mission is to foster a sustainable society in which human needs are met in ways that do not threaten the health of the natural environment or future generations. To this end, Worldwatch conducts interdisciplinary research on emerging global issues, the results of which are published and disseminated to decision-makers and the media. At the Institute, I work primarily on issues related to food and agriculture, including the topics of malnutrition and biotechnology. Thank you for this opportunity to testify on the role of biotechnology in combating poverty and hunger in developing nations -- a subject that I consider central to the broader debate on the use of agricultural biotechnology. In searching for a biotech fix for hunger, we are pursuing an agricultural will-o'-the-wisp, a seemingly attractive sounding goal that is simply not well connected to the products which the biotech industry has brought to market. Instead of looking to as yet unproven and nonexistent biotech breakthroughs, we should be looking at the extremely full body of research that shows quite clearly those policies and agricultural interventions that will help to reduce poverty and eliminate hunger. There are four basic points that I wish to make in my presentation. First, the dominant causes of poverty and hunger around the world are not technological in nature, but rooted in basic socioeconomic realities. This is not to say that technology -- including biotechnology -- plays no role in the alleviation of malnutrition, but there is no technology that can override the immediate forces keeping people poor and hungry. Second, the global biotechnology industry has funneled the vast majority of its investment into a limited range of products for which there are large, secured markets within the capital-intensive production systems of the First World -- products which are of little relevance to the needs of the world's hungry. Third, if we are interested in eradicating hunger and poverty in the developing world, there are approaches other than investment in biotechnology that are better understood, less risky, and which may ultimately prove more effective. Fourth, because developing nations are home to the majority of the world's plant biodiversity, and because crops in the developing world often exist in close proximity to wild relatives, the risk of cross-pollination between genetically engineered crops and wild relatives is greatest there. Development economists, including Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen, have persuasively argued that poverty -- rather than food shortages -- is frequently the underlying cause of hunger. In a report released on World Food Day last year, the United Nations showed that nearly 80 percent of all malnourished children in the developing world in the early 1990s lived in countries that boasted food surpluses. In other words, people often go hungry even where food is readily available. The more important feature common to these hungry countries is pervasive poverty, which limits people's access to food in the market or to land, credit, and other resources needed to produce food. Poverty also means poor access to non-food services, including health care, education, and a clean living environment, which increases the likelihood of hunger. Medical conditions like diarrhea, for instance, which is usually the result of an unclean water supply, prevent a child from absorbing available nutrients. Poverty often strikes hardest among women, the nutritional gatekeepers in many families. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that more than half of the world's food is raised by women, and in rural areas of Africa, Latin America, and Asia, the figure soars to 80 percent. Yet, because women have little or no access to land ownership, credit, agricultural training, education, and social privileges in general, their ability to provide adequate nutrition for their families is handicapped. Eradicating hunger requires elimination of its root causes, including gender discrimination and desperate poverty which prevents access to food or the resources to produce it. A 1999 study of malnutrition in 63 countries by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), the World Bank's agricultural policy arm, found that improvements in social factors -- health environment, women's education, and women's status -- accounted for nearly three quarters of the reduction in malnutrition in these countries since 1970. (This study noted that increased food availability was an important fourth factor, responsible for roughly one quarter of the reduction in malnutrition in these countries.) The global biotechnology industry has funneled the vast majority of its investment into a limited range of products ... which are of little relevance to the needs of the world's hungry.This having been said, consider where the majority of investment in agricultural biotechnology is going. The global area planted to genetically engineered crops has grown 23-fold since 1996, the first year of large-scale commercialization. Global area now stands at 39.9 million hectares compared to 1.7 million hectares in 1996. Despite this tremendous growth, 99 percent of the current area is found in just three nations -- the United States, Argentina, and Canada; 72 percent is in the United States alone. Dozens of crops -- from apples to lettuce to wheat -- have been genetically modified and are near commercialization, though only transgenic varieties of soybean, corn, cotton, canola, squash, and papaya are currently grown commercially. Of these seven crops, soybeans and corn account for 54 percent and 28 percent of the global transgenic area, respectively, while cotton and canola share most of the remainder with nearly 9 percent each. The transgenic crops currently being grown around the world have been engineered either to resist spraying of herbicides (herbicide-resistant crops), to churn out the insecticide produced by the soil bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) (Bt-crops), or to do both. In 1999, herbicide-resistant varieties of soy, corn, cotton, and canola were planted on 71 percent of the global transgenic area, while Bt-corn and Bt-cotton were sown on 22 percent. Corn and cotton varieties that both produce Bt and resist herbicides were planted on the remaining 7 percent. These traits offer large-scale industrial farmers reduced production costs or increased ease of crop management by lowering the need to scout for pests, cutting labor costs, allowing a shift to cheaper chemicals, and generally simplifying pest control -- which explains the exceptionally rapid adoption of transgenics in a few nations. For the foreseeable future, these are the sorts of crops and traits that will dominate the global area planted to genetically engineered crops. There is very little connection between these applications and the needs of the world's hungry -- modified soy and corn are mainly used in livestock production and processed foods; modified canola is pressed into oil and used in processed foods; and cotton is used for its fiber and oil. Herbicide-resistant crops, for example, are not helpful to poor farmers who rely on manual labor to pull weeds because they couldn't possibly afford herbicides. As a result, the immediate markets for biotech in the developing world are not the subsistence farmers, but the larger operations, which are often producing for export rather than for local consumption. The adoption of genetically engineered soybeans by Argentina's industrial export producers illustrates this point well. There is a basic disconnect between these research priorities and the alleged beneficiaries of genetically engineered crops -- the world's hungry. Compare, for example, the $4 million that has been spent on developing a Beta-carotene enhanced rice for use in Vitamin A deficient populations with the $500 million spent on developing Roundup-Ready soybeans, the dominant herbicide-resistant variety. This $500 million spent on developing Roundup-Ready soybeans also compares with the $400 million annual budget of the Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), a consortium of international research centers that form the world's largest public-sector breeding effort. In addition, a joint report released yesterday by the National Academy of Sciences and seven other academies around the world concluded that transgenic plants are not being used in many parts of the developing world where the needs are greatest. There are other concerns associated with a technological landscape that is controlled almost exclusively by the private sector and defined by patent protection. Patents and similar legal mechanisms are giving a declining number of large private firms substantial control over crop genetics and farmers, with worrisome implications for seed saving, farm incomes, and food security. Although Monsanto and AstraZeneca recently announced that they would not commercialize the so-called "Terminator" technology or other seed sterilization technologies, the biotech industry collectively owns at least three dozen patents that control either seed germination or other essential plant processes. This privatization of germplasm is already putting public sector agricultural research at a disadvantage, and might ultimately prove life-threatening to the majority of small farmers in Africa, Latin America, and Asia who depend on saved seed from year to year. In addition to this financial obstacle, there is a biological obstacle that may limit the potential of biotech to combat poverty and hunger. The crop traits that would be most useful to subsistence farmers tend to be very complex. The kinds of products that would make sense in a subsistence context include crop varieties responsive to low levels of soil fertility, crops tolerant of saline or drought conditions and other stresses of marginal lands, improved varieties that are not dependent on agrochemical inputs for increased yields, varieties that are compatible with small, diverse, capital-poor farm settings. In herbicide-resistant crops and Bt crops, the engineering involves the insertion of a single gene. Most of the more complex traits mentioned above are probably governed by many genes, and for the present at least, that kind of complexity is beyond the technology's reach. The experience of the Green Revolution has shown that if the introduction of agricultural technology is not sensitive to social and economic inequalities, then it can actually exacerbate existing inequalities, poverty and hunger, as the better off farmers grab the majority of the technology's benefits. Today, the majority of the world's hungry are those farmers in Africa, Asia, and Latin America who were bypassed, or even marginalized, by the Green Revolution package of seeds that were highly dependent on fertilizer and irrigation inputs. Without addressing inequitable land distribution or differential access to credit, for example, the consequences of introducing even the most promising biotechnology are likely to be less than desirable. "Third World farmers don't need improved seeds, but rather improved natural resource management."I would like to point to some interventions other than biotechnology that may prove more effective at reducing poverty and hunger in the developing world. As mentioned earlier, land reform, improved access to reproductive health services, and improved educational opportunities for women are among those policies that have had a sizable impact on reducing poverty and malnutrition in the past and are likely to do so in the future. (These same policies are also the most effective ways to reduce birth rates and slow population growth.) Investments in agriculture are key to boosting incomes and ultimately reducing malnutrition. This is particularly true in the poorest regions of the world, Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, where the majority of people make their living from agriculture and where the gross national products are still heavily dependent on agriculture. Pedro Sanchez, the Director-General of the International Centre for Research in Agroforestry (ICRAF), one of the CGIAR centers based in Nairobi, argues that "Third World farmers don't need improved seeds, but rather improved natural resource management, including soil and water conversation, crop rotations, and nitrogen-fixing crops." Sanchez notes that until these resource management issues are addressed, farmers in Africa, Asia, and Latin America will not be able to take full advantage of any potential offered by improved seeds, whether genetically engineered or traditionally bred. Below, I have assembled a short list of agricultural interventions in the developing world that focus on improved resource management and that have all resulted in large yield increases. These interventions are often characterized as ecological or agroecological, because they depend on building or harnessing the ecological processes -- including crop diversity, nutrient cycling, plant and pest interactions, competition, and symbiosis -- occurring in the field rather than on external chemical inputs.
These sorts of yield
increases are considerably higher than any present results with biotech
seeds. And these interventions, in contrast to biotech interventions,
depend on resources and know-how that is already available to resource-poor
farmers, working in ecologically sensitive areas. I offer these examples
to demonstrate that there are alternatives to biotechnology for combating
poverty and hunger in developing nations.
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