Washington, DC
October 17, 2008
Seeds of a Perfect Storm:
Genetically Modified Crops and the Global Food Security Crisis
Nina Fedoroff, Science and Technology Adviser to the Secretary
of State and to the Administrator of
USAID
Inaugural Lecture in the Jefferson Fellows Distinguished Lecture
Series
Source:
U.S. Department of State
I welcome all of you to the first in what will be a regular
series of monthly lectures by the State Department’s Jefferson
Fellows. Before I get to the substance of my talk, I’d like to
tell you a bit about the Jefferson Fellows. The Jefferson
fellows are well-established academic scientists who come to the
State Department for a year, bringing their scientific expertise
to bear on our formal interactions with other countries. They
find homes throughout the State Department and USAID – and they
offer assistance and advice in their areas of expertise. Since
we have them as captives for a year, we decided that it would be
good to ask them to share their knowledge even more widely
through lectures to the entire community on scientific topics of
interest in our foreign relations. The next few lectures in this
series are going to be given by alumni of the program. What you
need to know is that the Jefferson fellows agree to be
consultants for the State Department for 5 years after they’ve
served their year here. This means that they can be called on to
participate in any activity in which their expertise is needed –
and many of them are willing to travel to other countries as
speakers and as participants in international activities of
interest to the State Department. You need only contact my
office to obtain information on the areas of expertise
represented among those in the current class of fellows as well
as past fellows. We are currently arranging a reception to
introduce the current class to all of you – please come and get
to know them. They are a wonderful resource for the whole
department.
Tom Friedman has attracted a great deal of attention over the
past few years with his declaration that the world is flat. By
this he means that the Internet revolution and globalization has
put all peoples of the world on an equal economic footing. A
comforting message. But despite the extraordinary increase in
our ability to communicate and access information, even Friedman
is beginning to concede that things aren’t quite so simple. He
now concedes that the world is also rather warm and a bit
crowded. In his new book, Friedman addresses many of the world’s
current woes: climate change, energy, economic development, and
preservation of biodiversity. Curiously missing in his call for
a Green Revolution is what we generally mean by a Green
Revolution: increasing the food supply. What will it take to
grow food for the 9 or so billion people expected to populate
the Earth by mid-century – and meet the growing demand for
steaks and hamburgers as people become increasingly affluent.
Well, I can’t miss the chance to address that oversight. I’ll
start by telling you how we got here, how we planted the seeds
of the stormy food security crisis of 2008. Then I’ll tell you
how we’ve learned to improve food crops over the eons, then over
the past century. And I will tell you how many countries have
gotten themselves into the paradoxical position of rejecting the
most promising and environmentally conservative means of
ensuring global food security ever to have been developed.
Since the introduction of science into agriculture in the late
18th century when Joseph Priestley showed that plants evolve
oxygen by using a plant to keep a mouse alive, science and
engineering have powered enormous gains in agricultural
productivity through fertilizer production, plant breeding, and
mechanization. In some parts of the world, not one person in a
hundred is growing plants or raising animals for food. Science-
and technology-based farming have freed us be scientists and
politicians, artists, teachers, doctors, newspaper reporters –
and diplomats.
We buy what we eat in grocery stores, or restaurants, or fast
food joints. . And yet, in many countries, particularly in
Africa, the task of growing food is still done by such manual
labor and by each family.
Thomas Malthus published his famous Essay on Population in 1798
predicting that humanity was doomed to poverty and famine
because the human population was growing exponentially, while
mankind’s ability to produce food could only increase at a
linear rate. He wrote at a time when the famous curve of human
population growth was way down here (arrow). The ensuing
science-based increases in agricultural productivity supported a
tripling of the human population.
Particularly important were the inventions of these two
gentlemen, Haber and Bosch, who figured out how to convert
atmospheric nitrogen to forms that plants can use – we call it
fertilizer. This is now done in huge plants around the world.
But around the middle of the 20th century, there was a
resurgence of Malthusian predictions of mass famines in the
populous countries of Asia whose agriculture had not yet
benefitted from science. Perhaps the most famous catastrophist
of this era was Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb.
Remarkably, it took just a handful of scientists – principally
plant breeder Norman Borlaug – to avert the predicted famines.
He and others identified dwarfing mutations in wheat and rice
that grew prolifically with fertilization without falling over.
And they tirelessly promoted their rapid adoption, along with
improved agricultural practices and increased fertilizer use.
The resulting increases in food production underlie the rapid
economic development that we are now witnessing in India, China
and other parts of Asia and which are a driving factor of the
current food crisis.
The population has more than doubled again since the middle of
the 20th century and the population experts are expecting
another roughly 3 billion people to be added to the planet’s
population by midcentury. That’s somewhere in the neighborhood
of 9 billion people. Here’s a sobering factoid: the amount of
arable land has not changed for more than half a century. And it
isn’t likely to increase much in the future because we’re losing
it to urbanization, salinization, and desertification as fast as
we’re adding it.
But somewhere between the first Green Revolution and the
biotechnology revolution I’ll tell you about in a moment, the
developed world seems to have declared the battle for food
security won and moved on to other concerns. Investment in
agricultural research has steadily declined over the past three
decades, even as the human population has continued to grow. The
successes of the first Green Revolution have supported rapid
economic development in many countries. These advances out of
poverty have stimulated demand for more meat, expanding the
acreage used to grow animal feed. Oil is getting expensive,
driving up the cost of fertilizer: it takes energy to crack
apart the nitrogen molecules in the air and convert them to the
forms that plants can use. And now that the world has decided
that plants must fuel not just animals and people, but cars as
well, it is perhaps not altogether surprising that food prices
suddenly spiked.
The New York Times quoted FAO’s Jacques Diouf last December
saying that in an “unforeseen and unprecedented” shift, the
world food supply is dwindling rapidly and food prices are
soaring to historic levels. The price of wheat increased 130% in
the past year, that of soybeans almost 90% and that of rice more
than 70%. Josette Sheeran, Executive Director of the World Food
Program was quoted thus: “We’re concerned that we are facing the
perfect storm for the world’s hungry.” Her agency’s food
procurement costs had increased to the point that poor people
are being “priced out of the food market.” There is a very real
food crisis and it weighs most heavily on the poorest countries.
There have been food riots around the world.
The prices of basic grains has come down a bit in recent months,
but they remain at levels that mean that people in the poorest
countries not only eat less, but turn to less nutritious diets.
Is there a quick solution? Probably not. This is definitely not
a crisis of the sort that can be addressed simply through a
transient increase in food aid. It is the coming reality for a
world increasingly limited in natural resources and water facing
a changing climate and a growing population. So what stands in
the way of another Green Revolution?
There are parts of the world that are, by now, two scientific
generations behind the leading edge in agriculture. Let me show
you how dramatically we have transformed our food plants first
over millennia and more recently over the past century. Maize
(also known as corn) came from this grassy relative, called
teosinte. Corn and teosinte are so different that they were
originally assigned to different species. Over many thousands of
years, people have converted this grass to one of humankind’s
three staple grains. And yet these two plants are so closely
related that they can be crossed and the off-spring are
everything from what looks like teosinte seeds to small and
medium-sized ears of what is recognizably corn. Teosinte seeds
are produced at the top of the plant, like those of other
grasses and are inedible. In fact, they have silica deposits in
their surface layers – they’re hard as rock.
About 10,000 years ago, people collected a few mutations that
converted teosinte into the precursor of the modern corn plant,
with soft seeds carried on this telescoped side shoot we call an
ear. The truly dramatic expansion of the ear took place largely
during the 20th century, when it was discovered that seeds from
a cross between two highly inbred, rather small and weak plants
gave much more vigorous plants with much bigger ears in the
first generation. This is called hybrid vigor and is the basis
of our current extraordinarily productive hybrid corn varieties.
These were introduced in the U. S. during the 1930s, facing a
good deal of the kinds of resistance that current biotech crops
are now facing. Today hybrid corn is widely grown around the
world, but not in many parts of Africa. We’ve done the same with
wheat (parenthetically, wheat is a hybrid between 3 different
species) and rice.
Here are some examples of what we’ve done to transform plant
seed structures into human foods. This juicy, huge tomato’s
precursor was a tiny, toxic seed pod. Seedless fruits, of
course, are crippled in their ability to reproduce, since seeds
are the plant’s reproductive structures, and are today produced
entirely by cloning, generally by a procedure in which shoots
are grafted to hardy roots, sometimes even of a different kind
of plant. During the 20th century we added some new methods that
allowed breeders to speed up the processes of genetic change
that are inherent in all organisms. In particular, they used
certain chemicals and radiation to increase the rate of
mutation, that is, genetic change. For example, one favorite
variety of very red grapefruit – the Texas Rio Red grapefruit –
was created by irradiating seedlings from Texas at the
Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, then sending them
back to Texas to be grown and examined for desirable mutations –
one of the mutations produced this redder, more healthful fruit
that’s such a favorite at Christmas time. By the end of the
century, up to half of new crop plant varieties released had a
chemical or radiation mutagenesis step in their derivation.
In the 1960s, we embarked on a genetic revolution that has
permitted the development of a new set of methods for modifying
plants in ways that are useful to people. Research in the 1950s
and 1960s identified the existence of tiny chromosomes in
bacteria that could replicate themselves independently -- these
are called plasmids. Other discoveries led to the identification
of proteins, called restriction enzymes, that could cut these
little chromosomes in a way that made it possible to insert a
piece of genetic material, the DNA, from a completely different
organism, then reseal the plasmid. So, for example, the green
part of this circle could be a piece of DNA from a plant or an
animal and the resealed plasmid is then called a “recombinant”
plasmid. This new recombinant plasmid can be slipped back into
the bacterium, where it replicates itself many times over, even
as the bacteria multiply. But before they begin to multiply, the
bacteria are spread in a very thin film on a agar-filled dish so
that each bacterium grows separately into a colony. Each of
these small dots on this Petri dish consists of millions of
bacteria derived from one single bacterium that received one
single recombinant plasmid. The bacterium has copied the same
piece of DNA many times over, making enough copies so that the
DNA can be analyzed at the chemical level to determine its
informational content. DNA is a long, skinny molecule that
encodes the information needed to make protein – the linear
sequence of the 4 building blocks of the DNA molecular specifies
the sequence of a protein. Proteins, in turn, are the basic
building blocks and powerhouses of organisms. The basic
techniques of cloning and sequencing DNA underlie today’s
genomic revolution, in which scientists have determined the
genetic information of literally hundreds of different
organisms, from viruses and bacteria up to plants and animals
and humans.
There’s one more player in the
modern plant breeder’s toolkit for modifying plants. That player
is a soil bacterium called Agrobacterium tumefasciens -- its
nature’s genetic engineer. This video clip shows how the
bacteria are able to transfer genes into plants. Wounded plant
cells – in the video clip its roots -- send out chemical signals
the bacteria detect and move toward. They then transfer a piece
of DNA from a plasmid they carry to the plant cell, where it
integrates into the chromosomes of the plant and are then
expressed to promote the formation of a tumor. Interestingly,
the genes the bacterium inserts into the plant also stimulate
the production of compounds, called opines, which nearby
bacteria use as food. What scientists have done is to remove the
pathogenic genes that cause the tumor and used the transfer
mechanism to carry genes they wish to add to the plant. Here’s
how it looks in the laboratory. Leaves are cut into pieces to
stimulate the release of the wound compounds, dipped into a
suspension of Agrobacterium carrying a gene to be added to the
plant, and then put on a medium that will allow only those cells
that are carrying the new genes to grow under the influence of
hormones in the medium. This allows the cells to grow into a
lump called a callus. When the growth-promoting compounds are
removed from the medium, the cells do something magical -- they
develop into a plant. The plant is exactly the same as the plant
from which the leaf was taken, but it now carries a new gene and
is called a transgenic plant.
Now I will show you some of the crop modifications that have
been achieved using these methods. Here’s the kind of damage
corn borers do to corn -- this is one of the most damaging of
corn pests. This is an ear of corn on a transgenic plant
carrying a bacterial gene that codes for a protein that is toxic
to the larvae of the plant pest, but not to animals or people.
It’s called Bt because the gene comes from another soil
bacterium, Bacillus thuringiensis, which has long been used as a
biological pesticide and is popular with organic farmers. Genes
from the same bacterial family have been used to protect cotton
from the devastating cotton bollworm.
Here’s an example of a very different kind of biological
protection from a virus disease. This is the damage that papaya
ringspot virus does to papaya fruits; this is a healthy plant
and this is a sick one. Here’s the virus and its insect vector.
This is virtually impossible to control in the long run and was
threatening to destroy the papaya industry in Hawaii in the
early 90s. Here’s the damage to trees and here are resistant
trees. These transgenic plants express just a tiny segment of
the viral genetic material, which is enough to trigger the
destruction of a new invading virus injected by an insect. This
remarkable system of protection is based on a very old
observation that plants become immune to viruses once they’ve
been exposed to them, much like people. But plants don’t have an
immune system and the mechanism is different at the molecular
level, yet it’s very effective. Resistant papayas saved the
Hawaiian papaya industry and are currently being developed for
the Phillipines.
GM crop acreage has increased rapidly world-wide, driven
primarily by cotton, corn and soybeans. The 2007 global acreage
planted in GM crops was 114.3 million hectares. Better yet, the
adverse effects, such as rapid development of Bt resistance,
have not materialized. The only unexpected effects have been
beneficial. For example, many grains and nuts, including
peanuts, are often contaminated by toxic compounds, called
mycotoxins, made by fungi that follow boring insects into the
plants. Two of these, fumonisins and aflatoxin, are extremely
toxic to people and animals. Bt corn, however, shows as much as
a 90% reduction in mycotoxin levels because the fungi that
follow the boring insects into the plants can’t get in. No
insect holes, no fungi, no mycotoxin.
Better yet, it appears that planting Bt crops might well reduce
insect pressure in other crops growing nearby. Bt cotton has
been widely planted in Asia. Analysis of the population dynamics
of the target pest, the cotton bollworm, showed that Bt cotton
not only controls the target pest, cotton bollworm, on
transgenic cotton designed to resist this pest but also reduces
its presence on other host crops and decreases the need for
insecticide sprays in general (Science 19 September 2008).
Strikingly, among the 23 countries growing GM crops, half are
less developed countries. More importantly, 11 of the 12 million
farmers growing biotech crops are small-holder, resource poor
farmers. The simple reasons that farmers migrate to GM crops is
that their yields increase 5-25% and their costs decrease, in
some cases by as much as 50%. The estimated cumulative increase
in farmer income over the 12 years since GM crops began to be
used is on the order of 35 billion US dollars.
There are environmental benefits, as well. Herbicide tolerant
crops contribute significantly to soil conservation because more
farmers farm without ever plowing their land – this is called
no-till farming. A second benefit has been the concomitant
reduced fuel use because of tilling takes tractors and fuel.
Thus herbicide tolerant crops have two environmental benefits:
soil conservation and reduced CO2 emissions.
Both people and wildlife benefit from insect-resistant crops.
Pesticides are applied quite safely in the highly mechanized
agriculture of developed nations using climate-controlled
tractors, but there are some 25 million cases of pesticide
poisoning every year in less developed countries where farmers
often have little protection from it. Moreover, pesticides kill
a broad spectrum of insects, both harmful and beneficial. In
just 12 years since their initial introduction, insect resistant
GM cotton and corn have reduced the amount of pesticide used by
almost 290,000 metric tons of active ingredient. That translates
into is more insects and more wildlife, such as birds, which can
thrive along with crops. In China, farmers growing GM rice
reduced their pesticide use by nearly 80 per cent and more than
half of them used no pesticide at all. More than 10% of farmers
growing conventional rice showed symptoms of pesticide
poisoning, while none of the farmers growing Bt-resistant rice
did.
So now I’ve told you that there are environmental benefits to
using GM crops, as well as benefits to people from reduced
pesticide use. But are GM foods safe to eat? What makes them
either more or less safe than food crops produced by radiation
or chemical mutagenesis – or even by traditional breeding? Let’s
start at the simplest level: what’s being added by these
procedures I described and are these things safe? What’s added
is a gene or a bit of DNA. Do plants contain DNA? Yes. DNA is
the stuff that genes and chromosomes are made of and they’re
what makes a plant a plant and a human being a human being.
You’ve been eating the DNA of plants and animals all your life,
cooked and raw – although I have to tell you I’ve been asked
more than once whether plants have DNA. The amount of DNA that’s
added is about a billionth or so of what’s already there. You
break down DNA starting in your mouth and by the time
digestion’s done, it’s pretty much broken down into its
nourishing constituents.
Now most genes encode – that is,
contain the instructions for – assembling a protein. Proteins
are the nourishing things you eat in meat, milk and eggs – these
are really rich in proteins. But the plants you eat contain
proteins, too, although the parts of plants we tend to use – the
seeds of wheat and rice, the kernels of corn – are rather rich
in starches and sugars – and sometimes oils, too. That’s why we
grow them. Now most of the thousands of proteins you eat are
perfectly harmless, but a few, like one of the proteins in
peanuts, cause allergic responses in some people. And there are
a few proteins that are toxic to people and animals. So before a
protein-coding gene is added to a plant to make a GM crop plant,
the protein must be subjected to tests for toxicity and
allergenicity. Now this has never been done before in the
history of agriculture – testing for whether a new protein in
the food supply is either toxic or allergenic! We had to find
out the hard way. Peanuts are a relatively recent addition to
the American diet and kiwi fruits and even more recent addition
– the incidence of allergies to both is quite high. No allergic
responses have been detected to GM crops. So the answer to this
question is a simple YES. In fact, because of the extensive
prior testing, I submit to you that GM crops are the safest
we’ve ever introduced into the food chain.
Besides food safety, perhaps the most frequently expressed
concern about GM crops is whether they’re safe for the
environment. That seems to mean different things to different
people. I think that I’ve already addressed one aspect of this
question: controlling pests with insect resistant plants is
better for the environment from the perspective that pesticides
are non-specific and kill all kinds of insects, while
insect-resistant crops affect only those insects that attack the
crops. Less pesticide is better for the environment – more
insects, more birds and so forth. Less cultivation in the case
of herbicide tolerant plants reduces CO2 emissions and soil
erosion. But often what people have in mind when they question
the safety of GM crops is whether the genes that are added to
them will somehow escape and create superweeds or perhaps
invasive species. Well, here I think one needs to use a bit of
common sense. For the most part, crop plants are plants that
people have crippled in their ability to survive in the wild and
adding one gene that codes for a well-characterized protein to a
familiar crop gives you the sum of the two: your familiar crop
plant with one extra gene. If the plant wasn’t invasive or weedy
to begin with, adding one gene will not make it weedy. People
also talk about something called gene “flow” – the escape of
genes. Genes move only through pollen or seeds – they don’t move
on their own. And they only move to close relatives – other
varieties in nearby fields. So this is mostly a management
problem for farmers and it isn’t a new one. So…. a farmer has to
know not to plant his sweet corn too close to his fodder corn,
or he’ll have fodder kernels among the sweet. Spreading genes
from crop plants into wild plants happens only if there are
closely related weeds nearby, it’s happened since people
domesticated plants, and it is generally not a problem, since
the traits that people value in food crops don’t help plants to
survive in the wild. People have worried about this a lot, but
studies so far say it actually doesn’t happen much in the field,
even when it can be done in the laboratory. So the answer is
YES.
But will GM crops reduce biodiversity. Human agriculture itself
is, other than building roads and cities, the most destructive
thing we do to biodiversity, stripping the land and planting one
crop. As the food needs of the human population continue to
grow, the very most important thing that we can do is to
increase our agricultural productivity on the land we already
farm in order to preserve what wildlands we have left,
particularly tropical forests which are extraordinarily rich in
biodiversity. So the answer is NO and in fact, GM crops can help
us preserve biodiversity by reducing our use of toxic chemicals
in agriculture and perhaps in time, increase the efficiency with
which plants use nitrogen fertilizers and solar energy.
The world is indeed moving ahead with the introduction of GM
crops. India has witnessed the extremely rapid adoption of Bt
cotton and is expecting a further 5% increase in its cotton crop
over last year because of it. India is moving to commercialize
Bt eggplant and Bt rice in advanced stages of testing in China,
India and the Philippines. China has recently announced a 3.5
billion dollar investment in agricultural biotechnology
research.
The bad news is that well-meaning people around the world still
believe that GM crops are dangerous, their beliefs fueled by
misinformation – even disinformation – on the Internet, from
public interest groups and the communications media. Although
some European countries, particularly Spain, are growing GM
crops, much of Europe, Japan, and most of Africa remain
adamantly opposed to crops improved using molecular techniques.
These persistent perceptions that GM crops are dangerous and
unhealthful have resulted in restrictive and costly regulation
of such crops – even banning of both their use and even to their
import as food aid.
Perhaps the most unfortunate consequence of such attitudes
occurred in 2002. With almost 3 million people at risk of
starvation as the result of drought, President Mwanawasa of
Zambia refused to accept shipments of corn from the U.S. because
he could not be sure that it was GM-free. I wish I could tell
you that this was an aberration, an idiosyncrasy of one leader.
But it is not.
As Professor Robert Paarlberg explains in his new book titled
“Starved for Science: How Biotechnology is Being Kept Out of
Africa,” Europe’s anti-GMO beliefs are in some sense forced on
Africa through a variety of mechanisms, ranging from the funding
of anti-GM NGOs, such as Greenpeace to threats of trade
embargoes. For example, Paarlberg relates that in 2002, with
drought in Zambia creating a dire need for international food
aid, Agriflora, a private company in Lusaka, Zambia that
produces vegetables for export to the UK received phone calls
from UK supermarkets that their exports of organic baby corn
would be in jeopardy if food aid shipments containing GM maize
were allowed into Zambia. Agriflora and other export-oriented
growers asked President Mwanawasa to reject the food aid. He
did. His advisors later confirmed that exports were a concern,
citing “a potential risk of GM maize affecting the export of
baby corn and honey in particular and organic foods in general
to the European Union if planted.” (Paarlberg, p 136). This is a
dramatic story, but not a unique one. Today, there is still only
one country in Sub-Saharan Africa that grows GM crops on a
commercial scale.
So how important are these molecular techniques we call GM to
achieving food security in the world? They are an important part
of future food security, but only a part of it. There are large
parts of the world that in which agriculture has not yet
benefitted from science, much less the most up-to-date molecular
science. Many of the world’s poorest people are rural,
small-holder farmers, still farming the same way their ancestors
did a hundred years ago, virtually untouched by modern
agriculture.
Land-holdings are small and, as you can see from these pictures
of Rwanda, farmers plant many different crops on each small plot
– some bananas, some coffee trees, some corn and other
vegetables. Farmers take what they grow to open air markets and
what isn’t sold and used right away, rots. There is virtually no
food processing industry and no cold storage.
Today we hear talk of a second Green Revolution, but expanding
the food supply today in the poorest, most crowded, and insecure
nations is no easy task. The next slide is my only wordy slide
and it lists the many challenges that must be met in less
developed countries to increase food security and to make it
agriculture a viable source of income.
There’s plenty of room for increasing productivity – the
benefits of good seed, including hybrid corn seed, and
fertilizer have not been realized in many countries. After
Malawi experienced a famine in 2005, its president decided to
defy the international donor community and subsidize seeds and
fertilizer. The results were stunning: within two years, Malawi
went from being a food aid recipient to a food exporter. How
will this momentum be maintained as fertilizer costs go up with
energy costs? Is this a model for other countries? Hugh Grant,
CEO of Monsanto, points out that it costs $400/ton to ship corn
to Malawi from the US and it costs $35/ton to grow it there.
Next year, even with escalating fertilizer prices, the
difference may be even greater. But the good news is that the
Josette Shearin announced at the recent UN General Assembly
meeting in New York that the World Food Program will begin buy a
billion dollars of the food it procures locally, rather than
shipping it in from foreign countries. This will provide a
welcome stimulus for farmers in less developed countries.
Establishing a sustainable modern local agricultural economy in
the poor countries of Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia
demands many improvements, from roads to storage and food
processing facilities, to food safety monitoring, to the
reduction of regulatory and trade barriers. It can be done and
there is growing recognition that all these elements have to be
addressed -- simultaneously. Looking to a future that may bring
a drier climate -- or perhaps just a more unpredictable one --
our most important resources are people and knowledge.
Just as medical research allows us to understand and control
diseases, so research on plants, plant stresses such as heat and
drought, and plant pests and pathogens are absolutely essential
to our ability to achieve food security on our small and crowded
planet. Today -- and increasingly in the coming decades -- it
will be modern molecular science that offers the knowledge and
the tools to grow more food with less water and less damage to
our environment. Our most advanced agricultural biotechnology
companies are anticipating doubling of yields per acre in our
major staple and feed crops, corns and soybeans in the coming
years. This will be reached through an increasingly
sophisticated use of molecular modification – what the world
calls GM – and genome-based plant breeding. If the developing
world is to benefit from these advances, it is important to
moderate the widespread prejudice against them in the developed
world. I am encouraged that China and India, both of which have
their fair measures of anti-GM controversy, are steadily moving
forward in using molecular modifications to improve crops.
Perhaps a combination of increasing food prices and growing
recognition that modern GM crops are no more dangerous than
their more conventionally derived precursors will permit other
countries to move forward. The unacceptable alternative is an
ever-widening food security gap between the developed and the
developing nations.
I end with a quote from Dr. Florence Wambugu, a Kenyan plant
pathologist who has devoted her life to bringing modern methods
of crop improvement to Africa, starting with the development of
virus resistant sweet potatoes. She says simply: “You people in
the developed world are certainly free to debate the merits of
genetically modified foods, but can we please eat first.” |
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