Transcript Could better regulation and competition control the influence of

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 foodsecurity ?
• These conditions are technical (which traits are
cultivated? What methods?); but also, institutional,
and political-economic
Knowledge, Innovation & Risk Life-Cycles
…Promise, hope,
R and D
expectation, selective
Social interests
Science-led
Uses
Innovation
No assessment benefits presumed,
purposes unquestioned
- - Risks - Impacts
Sole focus of assessment
Sole frame of recognised
meaning
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 foodproduction, 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
benefits issue?
• Regulation addresses risk 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 publicgood 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