John Witcombe

Senior Research Fellow
University of Wales, Bangor

Perspective

The debate on the use of genetically modified crops has been based on hypothetical risks but these risks are no greater, in my opinion, than those that could be associated with conventional plant breeding. Scientifically there is absolutely no reason to reject biotechnology.

I am a plant breeder and I have spent much of my working life breeding, conventionally, crops for poor people. There have been absolutely no biosafety tests on the varieties which I and other plant breeders have produced. Indeed, one could argue that conventional plant breeding is more risky because it is unregulated. By contrast, a great deal of attention has been paid to biosafety regulations for genetically modified crop varieties. For example, for transgenic potatoes in Bolivia, there is a functioning biosafety committee which has stricter regulations than those of the United Kingdom. This is not atypical. What tends to happen is that developing countries adopt regulations in their stricter, original form whereas in the developed world there has been a trend towards deregulation as the technology has been proven to be safe.

The real tragedy of the GM debate is that those who are so vehemently opposed to this technology have not asked farmers what they want. An independent survey in India showed that 96% of farmers interviewed said that they wanted GM seed. They recognize that it reduces dependency on pesticides and raises production. Indeed, many in the developing world are saying that they do not want the considerations in the developed world to be imposed upon them. There is a great deal of difference between the luxury of saying you want to consume food that is not genetically modified and a situation in which you cannot afford to buy food to eat. Developing countries are saying they need the technology to feed their people. Many developing countries are investing in the technology - India and China have some of the biggest research programmes on genetic modification in the world.

There are, of course, many choices of technology for improving agricultural production but the scale of the problem is absolutely immense. For everyone to have an adequate diet, grain production needs to increase by at least 40% by 2020 and it needs to increase by 40% in those rural areas where redistribution is an extremely difficult and complex problem. About 70% of the poor live in rural areas and do not produce enough food and nor can they afford to buy it. What you actually need to do to get the rural poor out of the trap of poverty is to put increased productivity in their hands - increased productivity in the hands of the poor for the benefit of the poor. It seems to me, given the importance of the need for poor people to have enough food to eat, that we need to use all the available technologies that are at our disposal. It seems to be too much of a risk for the actual lives of the poor people to say that we can solve problems without using some of the most powerful tools available to us at this time.

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