Criticism of USAID's biotecnology in Agriculture Program

GRAIN Briefings: "USAID: Making the world hungry" :

I am linking to this paper in order to argue against it.

The report starts its history a little late. While I suspect Monsanto did contact Joel Cohen in 1990, but I asked the National Academy of Sciences to hold a meeting on biotechnology in development in 1982, and we began funding small projects in agriculture, health and biomass conversion in 1983. The idea was not to create opportunities for U.S. international business, but rather to help developing nations to create a capacity to deal with a technology that was clearly going to be important, that had risks associated, and that was likely to be beneficial.

The paper focuses on agricultural biotech, and USAID does have a big program in the area. But I think that there is probably more work going on applying biotech in medical research.

The paper is, of course, written by people who don't like biotech. It quotes Cathy Ives, but does not mention that her laboratory was burned down by bio-terrorists. The intemporate criticism of biotech programs by the NGOs contributes both to the violence, and to the overly slow application of the technology.

(I helped bring Cathy both and Joel into USAID as AAAS fellows, and know them well. They are good people, and both devoted to the applications of science to improving the lives of poor people in developing nations.)

The problem of hunger is still primarily an economic problem. Biotechnology is increasingly a great tool for agricultural research, helping to develop technologies to increase agricultural productivity. If agricultural productivity goes up, farmers tend to have more money and live better. Food prices go down, and poor people who buy food, can buy more.

In an increasingly globalized world, the food supply is international, not just limited to the food that can be grown within a country or a region of a country. It is important that poor countries grow more and better food. But so too is it is important that safe food grown abroad can flow into poor countries without inappropriate trade barriers. Tanzania is a case in point, where a corrupt government would let people go hungry rather than allow the distribution of food (that is identical to that we are eating) citing (false) fears of biotechnology.

Of course, the only legitimate way for poor countries to determine if a food is safe is to have the expertise in the country to deal with the issues competently. The USAID biotechnology efforts over the past 20 or more years have tried to help poor countries develop this capacity.

Of course U.S, agricultural firms will benefit if developing nations make rational decisions to accept GM foods. The United States is a world leader in the applications of the technology. So what. That certainly was not the main motivation for the biotech programs in USAID!

Unfortunately, I see the pattern of slow application of biotechnology to development being repeated with nanotechnology, where uninformed critics are charging "grey-goo" fears, and delaying the development of capacity in the advanced developing nations to utilize the technology. At the same time, those with excessive fear of the technology would delay the development of capacity in poor nations to make the judgements on trade-offs between productivity and safety for themselves.