Biotechnology
Will Bypass The Poor
By Devinder Sharma
30 September , 2003
India's
former Prime Minister, the late Mr Morarji Desai, strictly followed
an unwritten principle. He would not inaugurate any conference, whether
national or international, which did not focus on rural development.
It so happened that it was during his tenure that the aircraft industry
had planned a conference in New Delhi. For the aircraft industry, the
inauguration of the international conference by anyone other than the
Prime Minister was not palatable and for obvious reasons.
Knowing well that
the Prime Minister would not make an exception, the aircraft industry
came out with an imaginative title for the conference: "Aerodynamics
and rural development"!
The global community
- market forces and its supporters - too are following Morarji Desai's
prescription. Agricultural biotechnology advances are being desperately
promoted in the name of eradicating hunger and poverty. The misguided
belief that the biotechnological silver bullet can "solve"
hunger, malnutrition and real poverty has prompted the industry and
the development community, political masters and the policy makers,
agricultural scientists and the economists to chant the mantra of "harnessing
technology to address specific problems facing poor people" And
in the bargain, what is being very conveniently overlooked is the fact
that what the world's 840 million hungry need is just food, which is
abundantly available.
The United Nations
Development Programme (UNDP) annual Human Development Report 2001, entitled
"Making New Technologies Work for Human Development" is yet
another biotechnology industry-sponsored study that categorically mentions
on the one hand that "technology is created in response to market
pressures - not the needs of poor people, who have little purchasing
power," and yet, goes on unabashedly to eulogies the virtues of
an untested technology in the laboratories of the North, which are being
pushed onto the gullible resource-poor communities of the South and
that too in the name of eradicating hunger and poverty.
The report states
that emerging centres of excellence throughout the developing world
are already providing hard evidence of the potential for harnessing
cutting-edge science and technology (as biotechnology is fondly called)
to tackle centuries-old problems of human poverty. But what the report
does not mention is the fact that the biggest challenge facing the global
community is increasing hunger and poverty in the developing countries,
which need to be tackled by a social and political commitment rather
than a market-driven technological agenda.
To say "if
the developing community turns its back on the explosion of technological
innovation in food, medicine and information, it risks marginalising
itself." is in reality a desperate effort to ensure that the American
economic interests are not sacrificed at the altar of development. Such
is the growing desperation at the growing isolation of the United States
in the global food market because of its "transgenic' food that
all kinds of permutations and combinations, including increased food
aid to Africa's school-going children, are being attempted. The deft
manipulation of the prestigious UNDP's Human Development Report (HDR)
to push forth the American farm interests, however, will cast an ominous
shadow over the credibility of the future UN programmes for human development.
In agriculture,
the HDR cites plant breeding promises to generate higher yields and
resistance to drought, pests and diseases. Biotechnology offers the
only or the best 'tool of choice' for marginal ecological zones - left
behind by the green revolution but home to more than half the world's
poorest people, dependent on agriculture and livestock. It is true that
green revolution left behind the small and marginal farmers living in
some of the world's most inhospitable areas. But the way the tools of
the cutting-edge technology are being applied and are being blindly
promoted, biotechnology will certainly bypass the world's hungry and
marginalised.
A third of the world's
hungry and marginalised live in India. And if India alone were to launch
a frontal attack on poverty eradication and feeding its 320 million
hungry, much of the world's hunger problem would be resolved.
Never before in
contemporary history has the mankind been witness to such a glaring
and shameful 'paradox of plenty'. In India alone, more than 60 million
tonnes of foodgrains are stacked, bulk of it in the open, while some
320 million go to bed hungry every night. In neighbouring Bangladesh
and Pakistan too, food silos are bursting. And yet, these three countries
are home to nearly half the world's population of hungry and the marginalised.
While none of these countries has shown the political courage to use
the mountains of foodgrain surplus to address the age-old problem of
hunger, the international scientific and development community too is
equally guilty by turning a blind eye to the biggest human folly of
the 21st century.
After all, science
and technology is aimed at removing hunger. The green revolution was
aimed at addressing the problem of hunger, and did a remarkable job
within its limitation. And now, when we have stockpiles of food surpluses,
the global community appears reluctant to make the food available to
the marginalised communities who cannot afford to buy the rotting stocks.
No aid agency, including the so-called philanthropic ones: Ford, Rockefeller,
ActionAid, Christian Aid, Oxfam, British BFID and the likes are willing
to take the bull by the horn. The Food and Agriculture Organisation
of the United Nations (FAO), which works for reducing hunger, too has
shied away from this Herculean task. It has instead convened a meeting
of the Heads of State at Rome in November, five years after the World
Food Summit, to reiterate its promise of halving world's hunger by the
year 2015.
The reality of hunger
and malnutrition is too harsh to be even properly understood. Hunger
cannot be removed by producing transgenic crops with genes for Vitamin
A. Hunger cannot be addressed by providing mobile phones to the rural
communities. Nor can it be eradicated by providing the poor and hungry
with an 'informed choice' of novel foods. Somehow, the authors of the
HDR have missed the ground realities, missed the realities from the
commercial interests of the biotechnology industries. In their over-enthusiasm
to promote an expensive technology at the cost of the poor, they have
forgotten that biotechnology has the potential to further the great
divide between the haves and have-nots. No policy directive can help
in bridging this monumental gap. The twin engines of economic growth
- the technological revolution and globalisation - will only widen the
existing gap. Biotechnology will, in reality, push more people in the
hunger trap. With public attention and resources being diverted from
the ground realities, hunger will only grow in the years to come.
It does not, however,
mean that this writer is against technology. The wheels of technological
development are essential for every society but have to be used in a
way that helps promote human development. Technology cannot be blindly
promoted, as the UNDP report does, in an obvious effort to bolster the
industry's interests. Ignoring food security in the name of ensuring
'profit security' for the private companies, can further marginalise
the gains, if any. And herein lies a grave danger.
While the political
leadership and the development community is postponing till the year
2015 the task to halve the number of the world's hungry, the scientific
community too has found an easy escape route. At almost all the genetic
engineering laboratories, whether in the North or in the South, the
focus of research is on crops which will produce edible vaccines, address
the problems of malnutrition or 'hidden hunger' by incorporating genes
for Vit A, iron, and other micro-nutrients. But what is not being realised
is that if the global scientific and development community were to aim
at eradicating hunger at the first place, there would be no 'hidden
hunger'.
Take, for instance,
the much-touted 'golden rice', the rice which contains the genes for
Vit A. It is true that there are 12 million people in India alone who
suffer from Vit A deficiency. To say that 'golden rice' would provide
the poor with a choice of such 'novel foods' is to ignore the realities.
It is also known that almost the entire Vit A deficient population in
India lives in marginalised areas and comprise people who cannot or
who do not have access to two square meals a day. If only these hungry
people were to get their adequate dietary intake or the two square meals
a day, they would not suffer from Vit A deficiency or for that matter
any other micro-nutrient deficiency. If these poor people cannot afford
to buy their normal dietary requirement of rice for a day, how do we
propose to make available 'golden rice' to them is something that has
been deliberately left unanswered.
And this reminds
me of what exactly another former Indian Prime Minister, the late Mrs
Indira Gandhi, used to do when it came to addressing problems. If the
ethnic crisis confronting the northeast Indian State of Assam becomes
unmanageable and goes out of her hands, she would create another problem
in northwestern Punjab. In simple words, the national attention gets
diverted to the fresh crisis confronting Punjab, and the country would
forget Assam. And when terrorism in Punjab goes out control, create
another problem in down south, in Tamil Nadu. And slowly, people would
forget about Punjab. For political leaders, Mrs Gandhi's proven mantra
does provide an easy escape route. And this is exactly what they intend
to do when the Heads of State of 170-odd countries would gather at the
World Food Summit Plus Five in Rome in November.
Scientists, development
agencies and the policy makers (and now of course the United Nations)
too seem to have derived their futuristic vision from the political
sagacity of Mrs Indira Gandhi. After all, the only way to divert the
attention of international community from the more pressing and immediate
problems of abject hunger and poverty is to either postpone the priorities
for removal of hunger (and that too by only a half) to the year 2015
as the FAO has done or is to talk of the virtues and potentials of biotechnology
for eradicating 'hidden hunger' and malnutrition in the next two decades.
Who will take on
the biggest challenge of all times - the elimination of hunger - which
forms the root cause of real poverty and the lopsided human development
is an issue no one is willing to stick his neck out for. With even the
UNDP buckling under industrial pressure, the monumental task to feed
the hungry - and that too at a time when food grains are rotting - may
eventually be left to the market forces. The underlying message is very
clear: the poor and hungry will have to live on hope.
(Devinder Sharma
is a New Delhi-based food and trade policy analyst. Among his recent
works include two books: GATT to WTO: Seeds of Despair and In the Famine
Trap. His email contact is: [email protected])