By Kevin E. Noonan --
The current crises in energy and food have followed eerily similar paths. The founding of OPEC and the exponential rise in crude oil prices during and after the 1973 Arab-Israeli conflict produced a short-lived emphasis in the U.S. with fuel efficiency and smaller automobiles. These were predominantly imported from Japan and U.S. automakers were unable to compete despite government efforts to encourage conservation, such as mandated fuel efficiency standards, "gas guzzler" taxes, and the 55 mph speed limit. But during the 1980's and 1990's, as the relative cost of gasoline in the U.S. fell, U.S. automakers and consumers returned to bigger automobiles, particularly SUVs, as safety and room for suburban soccer moms and their broods were more important considerations than fuel efficiency. Indeed, the small trend towards more fuel-efficient cars since the turn of the century was motivated more by the threat from greenhouse gases and global warming than fuel costs per se. Until recently.
Similarly, the last time world food supplies were threatened by world population growth was the 1960's, and the response was "The Green Revolution," a combination of technology transfer and agricultural subsidies by individual Western governments, including our own and institutions like the World Bank. These efforts were so successful that by the 1980's an American government official scoffed at the idea that poor and developing nations should be concerned with local agriculture when they could just "buy American."
But today the world food supply is dwindling as an increasing number of the increasing populations in countries like China and India are becoming prosperous enough to pursue a greater percentage of the food supply. This has led to food riots in some countries and calls for increased government cooperation and subsidies for food. As reported in a May 18th article in The New York Times, the world may soon reap what it has sown over the past twenty years, as a result of severe neglect of the infrastructure research and development efforts in countries around the world (see "World's Poor Pay Price as Crop Research Is Cut"). The Times article documents how research institutions like the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines and the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center in Mexico, remnants of the Green Revolution efforts, have suffered years of underfunding and neglect. Ironically, these institutes and others have made scientific developments in insect resistance and increased yields that could address some of the causes of reductions in food supply, but don't have the funds to transfer the technology to the farmers, mostly impoverished, that most need it. One example discussed in the article is the brown plant hopper, a rice pest that threatens rice harvests throughout Asia. Scientists at the Rice Institute "have identified 14 genetic traits that could help rice plants survive" infestation by this pest, but there are no funds to support the work of transferring these traits into the most common rice varieties. Staffing has been drastically cut (from 5 entymologists supervising 200 employees to 1 entymologist with a staff of 8) and the physical plant of the institute neglected. A similar situation exists in the Maize and Wheat Institute in Mexico, where scientists have developed drought-tolerant corn that could be used in Africa and disease-resistant wheat that could be grown in parts of Asia. But without funding, these new varieties cannot be sent to the places that most need them.
And while Western governments are awakening to the problem, they have not reversed a decades-long trend to reduce agricultural aid. As cited in the article, the U.S. under the Bush Administration has slashed 75% of the monies this country gives to global efforts (and the researchers manning those efforts) to improve crops grown in poor countries. What makes the situation worse is the penny-wise/pound foolish nature of American policies, since at the same time the Administration has asked Congress for an "extra" $770 million in food aid for poor countries. The Times sets forth a series of informative graphs showing the decline in agricultural aid over the past 20 years (click on graphs to enlarge).
Agricultural support from the World Bank, for example, has dropped from $7.7 billion in 1980 to 2 billion in 2004 (although this trend may be reversed under the new President, Robert B. Zoellick, who has proposed doubling agricultural lending to Africa). On the whole, the article states that Western countries have reduced agricultural aid from $6 billion in 1980 to $2.8 billion in 2006; U.S. support in that time frame has fallen from $2.3 billion to $624 million according to the Times.
The frightening reality is that the food supply is always finely balanced between agriculture and nature i.e., pests and diseases that affect yield, much like the constant battle between disease-causing microorganisms and antibiotics. Traditional plant breeding programs, because they can take several generations or growing seasons to establish useful traits are more vulnerable to variations in support and effort and operate best when the research is sufficient to stay abreast if not ahead of diseases, pest, environmental changes, and other yield reducing phenomenon. This is precisely what the world has not done over the past 25 years, and one of the reasons why worldwide agriculture is lagging behind population growth for the first time in more than a generation. As Robert S. Ziegler, director general of the Rice Institute is quoted in the article as saying, "[c]utting back on agricultural research today is pure folly."
This is where biotechnology might provide an antidote. One of the advantages of biotechnology as compared with traditional agricultural research is that it can be more easily targeted and new traits more rapidly introduced, as a consequence inter alia of being able to assess genotype as well as phenotype. The biotechnology approach also has the benefit of being part of private enterprise, which can avoid the bureaucratic and political inertia associated with government-run programs. The fruits of agricultural biotechnology can also have a plurality of applications, so that applying the technology to profit-making ventures can subsidize technology transfer to countries without the ability to afford it. (In some ways this is already happening in the pharmaceutical industry, where drug pricing is much lower even in developing countries like Brazil as a result of government policies that force Western drug companies to provide lower drug prices. Ultimately, the differential costs are borne by Western consumers more able to pay the full price.) Under these circumstances, initiatives like the ones announced by Monsanto last week, pledging to provide pest-, disease-, and drought-resistant varieties of important crop species may become an important solution to the world food problems.
Only the naïve would not recognize the potential for abuses under a system where a significant component of global food technology is in private hands. But the reality is that biotechnology provides the only known solution with the potential to alleviate the results of decades of neglect of more traditional agricultural research in a time frame short enough to make a difference between starvation and survival for the world's poorest inhabitants. It would be unconscionable to forego the potential of biotechnology in these efforts.
For additional information on this topic, please see:
• "Monsanto Moves to Address World Food Shortages," June 4, 2008
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