Like "an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal"? - Reflections

UN Chronicle, Sept-Nov, 2001 by Jacques Diouf

An ever-increasing number of people around the world are focusing their energies to address and express their worries and concerns that scientific advance may change the safety of the food we eat and pose risks to the environment in which we live. As scientists, public servants, politicians or private sector leaders, directly or indirectly engaged in the management and use of our natural resources, we have an inescapable duty to harness science not only to produce more and safe food, to eliminate hunger and poverty, but also to conserve the natural resource base we inherited from our forefathers. This broad challenge embraces science, ethics, food security and food safety. More specifically, the challenge taxes us to build, monitor and connect the strands of knowledge and understanding that buttress the nexus where science, ethics, food security and food safety meet.

Last year, we witnessed the President of the United States of America and the Prime Minister of Great Britain jointly announce the mapping of the human genome, with, may I add, a joint commitment that this information--a most fundamental public good--must remain in the public domain. As the year drew to a close, an international team of scientists published the first complete genetic map of a plant, the Thale cress (Arabidopsis thaliana)--a small weed related to the mustard plant (illustration at left). In the first three months of this year, very significant advances in our understanding of the human genome and the mapping of further plant and animal species (e.g., rice, the laboratory mouse) have been published in Nature, almost on a weekly basis. And global efforts to unravel the bovine genome continue apace.

Biotechnology includes a large range of different techniques, many of which are not controversial, as well as the now widely discussed technique known as genetic engineering. Central to genetic engineering is the ability to identify and manipulate genetic material with great precision and to transfer traits of interest from one organism or species and express them in another. Biotechnology also encompasses the development of cloned organisms, such as Dolly (the famous cloned sheep), and the modification of reproductive mechanisms in farm animals and fish. A further field of rapidly advancing application of biotechnology is represented by the food processing industry, where modem molecular techniques are currently being applied in a number of sectors, including fermentation and the production of starter and separation technologies. There have also been rapid and significant advances in the application of modem biotechnology to food and forest crops over the past decade.

Important advances have been made in each of the following areas of research: (i) in plant propagation techniques; (ii) in the diagnosis of pests and diseases; (iii) in the construction of transgenic plants with improved yields, disease, pest and stress resistance and/or nutritional quality; and (iv) in the use of genetic markers, maps, genomics and informatics in marker-assisted and gene-assisted selection.

From the mid-1990s, as a direct result of advances of genetic engineering, we have witnessed a substantial cultivation of the first generation of new genetically engineered, or transgenic, plant varieties. In the year 2000, more than 44 million hectares of land were planted with transgenic varieties of more than twenty plant species; the most commercially important were soybean, corn, rapeseed and cotton. These new varieties were planted in 13 countries, including Argentina, Australia, Canada, China, Mexico, South Africa and Uruguay, and most predominantly in the United States. However, it is worth noting that approximately 24 per cent were grown in developing countries. The value of the global market in transgenic crops has grown from $75 million in 1995 to $1.64 billion in 1998.

The specific characteristics for which these new transgenic varieties were bred include insect resistance, herbicide tolerance, delayed fruit ripening and virus resistance. Still further genetic modification (GM)-based improvements are currently under field-testing. Interestingly, a new emphasis is now being directed to improving the nutritional value of foods and food crops that may have direct and tangible benefits for the consumer--that is where the concern and GM debate are most strongly engaged.

While no commercial-scale production of genetically modified forest trees has yet been reported, research is under way, especially for timber-producing species grown in intensively managed plantations. Traits for which genetic modification can realistically be contemplated in the near future include insect and virus resistance, herbicide tolerance and modified lignen content.

The World Food Summit highlighted the importance of agricultural research, and biotechnology in particular, in the fight against hunger and malnutrition. First of all, let us remind ourselves that we can no longer depend on bringing significant new areas of virgin lands into the food production chain, and that further expansion of food production must come from increased yields on the lands already farmed by the poorest of small farmers and the larger farms alike. This raises the double challenges of raising productivity on the more fertile lands farmed by the better-off farmers together with an improvement in the output and range of food crops that can be grown on the less well-endowed fragile marginal lands.