Scientists Release Biotechnology Report

July 12, 2000

Seven academies of science from around the world, including five from developing nations, issued a white paper Tuesday spelling out what they believe is the promise of agricultural biotechnology to alleviate hunger and poverty in the Third World. The paper urges governments to base their decisions regarding biotechnology on sound science and strongly encourages private corporations and research institutions to share their technology with scientists and farmers in developing countries who desperately need it.

"It is essential that we improve food production and distribution in order to feed and free from hunger a growing world population, while reducing environmental impacts and providing productive employment in low-income areas," the paper says. One key consideration to moving forward is responsible research, development, and implementation of genetic modification (GM) technology for widespread agricultural use, according to the paper.

The white paper was prepared by a working group of members from the Royal Society of London, the national academies of science of Brazil, China, India, Mexico, and the United States, and the Third World Academy of Sciences. Because agricultural biotechnology has come under fire in recent months, the working group endeavored to produce a brief report that clearly lays out the potential for GM technology to assist developing countries, as well as the obstacles that stand in the way of its widespread use.

"The obvious concern is that the recent backlash against GM technology will completely overshadow all the promise that the technology offers," said Bruce Alberts, president of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and member of the working group. "Our group concluded that the revolution in molecular biology provides the developing world with some important new tools for feeding and caring for its people. It will be critical to use the best science to make wise choices with respect to the application of these technologies."

Concerted, organized efforts on a global scale are needed to quickly identify potential health and environmental risks from GM crops, the working group points out. To that end, "public health regulatory systems need to be put in place in every country to identify and monitor any potential adverse human health effects of transgenic plants, as for any other new variety," it said. Also, environmental concerns must be addressed systematically and assessed against the agricultural technologies currently in use that cause environmental problems, such as pesticides.

Procedures that most nations already have in place to approve the use of new crop plants could serve as the model for a more formal risk-assessment process. This process would be used to investigate the potential environmental impact of new varieties, including those that have been developed using GM techniques, the working group said.

Much of the funding for agricultural research in general - and GM technology in particular - has shifted from the public sector to private corporations in recent years, with an eye toward creating profitable products, the paper says. At the same time, public and noncommercial research efforts have waned, a trend "that needs to be reversed," the working group said. Public-sector funding for GM research is critical for meeting specific needs - those of small-scale farmers, for instance -- where profits for big agricultural corporations are unlikely to be forthcoming. Governments, international organizations, and aid agencies should encourage plant genomics research as an important area for public funding, and the results of such research should be placed in the public domain. "Care should be taken that research is not inhibited by over-protective intellectual property regimes," the paper says.

The white paper, Transgenic Plants and World Agriculture, is posted on the National Academy press web site at http://books.nap.edu/html/transgenic.

An organization representing more than 900 biotechnology companies, academic institutions and state biotech centers, the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO), endorsed the recommendations contained in the report to apply biotechnology to agriculture in developing nations to fight hunger, improve the environment and help stabilize economies.

Val Giddings, BIO's vice president of food and agriculture, said, "We endorse the report's recommendation for more collaboration between biotechnology companies and the public sector on research and development of biotechnology products for developing nations. But biotechnology companies cannot do it alone. Biotechnology companies already have made major donations of technological knowledge and inventions to developing nations."

Some examples, he said, include the donation of the sequence of the rice genome to help nations develop improved varieties of rice; the donation of technology to protect papaya, sweet potatoes and cassava from destructive fungi and viruses; the donation of funding to train scientists worldwide; and the donation of some of the technology to produce vitamin A and iron enhanced rice to fight blindness in children and anemia in adults.

"To meet the objectives of the scientific academies, governments around the world will have to reverse their decades-long decline in funding to support basic biological research relevant to plant and animal agriculture," Giddings said.