Could better regulation and competition control the influence of companies

developing GM crops while allowing GM benefits to spread?

Professor Brian Wynne, ESRC Centre for Economic and Social Aspects of Genomics, Cesagen, Lancaster University

“GM Crops and Food Security 2010-2050” Parliamentary Food and Health Forum, 21 July 2010

Chronic under-nutrition, in a world in which, in aggregate, there is more than enough food for everyone, is ethically unacceptable.

Currently something like 1,000,000,000 people are chronically under-nourished.

The needs of the most hungry constitute the primary ethical benchmark for judging agricultural and food systems and practices.

• In 2008 the FAO estimated that in aggregate the world’s total production of cereals was ~2,285,000 million tonnes

• The FAO also estimated the world’s population in 2008 at ~6.7 billion.

• To a good first approximation in 2008 the average per capita food availability was ~340kg/cap/year, or ~1kg/person/day

• Production alone is a small part of the problem (though important, nevertheless)

Global Food Security

• Not just global biodiversity, but agro-biodiversity, is in serious decline, undermining resilience;

• Crop- and variety-diversity is a key pillar of global food security and sustainability;

• The Green Revolution increased yields (not consistently) – but it also increased inputs (oil, chemicals, capital,...). It also decreased diversity;

• Can we find the conditions under which GM can avoid destroying agro-biodiversity, thus resilience and food-security ?

• These conditions are technical (which traits are cultivated? What methods?); but also, institutional, and political-economic

Knowledge, Innovation & Risk Life-Cycles

R and D

Science-led Uses Innovation

- - Risks - Impacts

No assessment - benefits presumed,

purposes unquestioned

Sole focus of assessmentSole frame of recognised

meaning

…Promise, hope, expectation, selective

Social interests

Benefits.....? • Benefits to whom ? • Meeting what (and whose?) specific needs? • Short-term, or long-term? • What alternatives have been considered and tried? (Or perhaps,

pre-emptively dismissed?)• Benefits are not facts until they are delivered, but are possibilities• Their future possible delivery, as facts, is multiply conditional• Those conditions also need to be fulfilled for the benefits to

become real • One (only one) important conditions for benefits from food-

production, is adequate distribution and access • Distributed and diverse production may affect distribution/access• All these depend upon the forms of ownership, and control

Why has there been so little analysis of the benefitsbenefits issue?

• Regulation addresses riskrisk only – and risk as defined by government regulatory (risk assessment) science

• Why? (historical, ‘accidental’ reasons.....)

• This question does not fall easily into scientific terms• Big Corporate Promises given excessive credulity.... • Benefits of diversity of R&D, innovation-trajectories –

recognised by BBSRC, 2004 Crop Science Review ... • Real on-the-ground conditions and needs insufficiently

recognised (including knowledges, and temporalities)

BBSRC Crop Science Review, 2004

• “proposes a stronger national focus on research underpinning ‘public good’ plant breeding”

• “Public-good plant breeding: The response to the consultation exercise identified a widely perceived need for public-good plant breeding, in order to address crops and traits not emphasised by multinational interests and to restore public confidence in plant breeding…”

• “BBSRC should seek to increase publicity for public-good plant breeding and to emphasise the role of genomically-informed but non-transgenic approaches to crop science research”

• Now being funded, Crop Science Initiative ( ~£15m 2009)

(UK BBSRC Crop Science Review, April 2004)“We highlight two further issues concerning technological priorities. First is the need to identify and generate new sources of variation for important traits and to strengthen the science underpinning the development of non-GM approaches to crop improvement [my emphasis] such as the identification of allelic variants associated with improved function, introgression of chromosomal elements (or individual genes) from related species and resynthesis of polyploid crops. Transgenic plants involving gene transfer between species are not a prerequisite for exploiting genomics but do provide a useful tool in understanding gene function”

A key question is: are the GM crops currently available, and those under development, suitable for the needs and interests of poor rural subsistence farmers?

The answer is unambiguously: NO.

Herbicide tolerant crops were developed eg by Monsanto to extract rent from ‘Round Up’, once the patents on glyphosate expired.

Round Up 2, was developed to exploit the imminent expiry of the RR1 patent. Moreover its production of resistant weed-strains, thus requirement for more, not less overall pesticides-use, has been recognised – this is inter alia a question of what time-perspective we allow to dictate regulatory norms: short-term, or long-term?

Subsistence farmers in SSA have never used herbicides. They hoe out weeds.

New technologies for SSA must be employment-generating not labour-displacing.

Insect resistant GM Bt crops have been developed for the pests on industrial farms not subsistence farms; they are far too expensive for the poor.

GM Bt maize, ‘benefit’ is increased yield due to corn-borer pesticidal action. But French farmers for example, noted that crop-rotation gives little-or-no corn-borer problem. So GM ‘benefit’ only if industrial mono-cropping is assumed to be normal