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It is said that the development of genetic technologies is the key to sustaining agricultural productivity growth in the twenty-first century. Such growth is crucial if the world is to produce enough food to provide for what the United Nations estimates will be a global population of 7.5 billion people by 2020.

The belief that the silver bullet of biotechnology can ‘solve’ hunger, malnutrition and poverty has prompted the industry and the development community — political masters and policy makers, agricultural scientists and economists — to focus upon and exaggerate what the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization calls the immense potential of “harnessing technology to address specific problems facing poor people.”

Even the generally respected United Nations Development Program, in its annual Human Development Report 2001, entitled Making New Technologies Work for Human Development, made that mistake. On the one hand, the controversial report stated that “technology is created in response to market pressures — not the needs of poor people, who have little purchasing power.” On the other, it eulogized the virtues of risky technologies being pushed onto the gullible, resource-poor communities of the Global South under the pious pretense of eradicating want.

The report stated that emerging centers of excellence throughout the developing world are already providing hard evidence of the potential for harnessing cutting-edge science and technology (as biotechnology is termed) to tackle long-standing problems of poverty. Ignored were the excessively restrictive intellectual property rights, demanded by industry, which deprive developing countries of the ability to undertake research responsive to their own specific needs. Add to it the introduction of Genetic Use Restriction Technologies (GURTs), which leave plants sterile and farmers unable to save seed, and the dominance of the corporate world is complete.

The report also failed to consider the most important fact of all: hunger and poverty in developing countries require not a market-driven technological agenda, but genuine social and political commitment. Saying that “if the developing community turns its back on the explosion of technological innovation in food, it risks marginalizing itself’’ is in reality a desperate effort to ensure that humanitarian concerns do not impede corporate interests. A perfect example of why biotechnology will not feed the world can be found in India — a nation technically “self-sufficient” in foodgrain production — where reports of starvation pour in regularly from the infamous Kalahandi region and more recently from Kashipur in Orissa on the eastern coast. Kalahandi, with a population of 20 million, suffers from hunger and malnutrition despite any visible signs of ecological devastation. The region is fertile, and has traditionally been a basket of food — so much so that during the Bengal Famine in 1943, when an estimated 1.5 to 3 million people starved to death after food was diverted to British soldiers, it was Kalahandi that came to the rescue.

The problem is certainly not one of production: a little-known fact is that Kalahandi is the biggest contributor of rice to India’s central food reserves in the State of Orissa, providing an average of 50,000 tons of surplus between 1996 and 2001. The reason why people starve to death is not because there is too little food, but because they cannot afford to buy the food they produce. Biotechnology has no mechanism to ensure that food comes within the reach of these poorest of the poor. In India, where 320 million people go to bed hungry every night, though the nation has nearly 48 million tons of surplus rice and wheat stacked in the open, much of it rotting while the hungry stare at overflowing silos.

Thirty years after the Green Revolution, scientists are rediscovering the importance of nutritional security for the masses. Biotechnology is exalted as the best, if not the only, ``tool of choice’’ for marginal ecological zones — those left behind by the Green Revolution, but home to more than half the world’s destitute, dependent on agriculture and livestock for their subsistence. But from the way cutting-edge technologies are being applied and promoted, it is obvious that industry motives are hardly altruistic. At almost all genetic engineering laboratories, whether in the global North or South, the focus of research is on profitable transgenic crops that can be used to produce edible vaccines and bio-fortification, supposedly addressing problems of malnutrition or ‘hidden hunger’ by incorporating genes for Vitamin A, iron, and other micro-nutrients.

Hidden hunger — deficiency in key vitamins and minerals, resulting in debilitation or impairment but not death — is the new buzzword for science and development. But the industry approach is less about ‘hidden hunger’ than generating positive public relations for genetic engineering.

At the heart of the current debate is a protein-rich transgenic potato being developed by a team of scientists led by Dr. Asis Datta, a former vice-chancellor of the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. The potato, now undergoing field trials, has been augmented with a gene from a South American plant called Amaranth, giving it from one-third to one-half more protein than normal and substantially increasing levels of two essential amino acids, lysine and methionine.

It is true that potato is part of the common Indian diet. It is also true that potatoes are priced so low that even slum-dwellers can buy them. But potatoes are, on the average, less than two percent protein. Even raised by half, the amount of protein is still less than three percent. How will this ‘protein-rich’ potato help solve malnutrition? How will the country’s nutritional security be addressed with three percent protein? Why not instead focus on increasing the productivity and availability of legumes, which are also part of the average Indian diet, and contain an average of twenty to twenty-six percent protein?

But then, addressing problems related to micro-nutrient deficiency are really aimed at according credibility to a controversial science. What has been forgotten in the first instance is that unless hunger is removed, ‘hidden hunger’ cannot be eradicated. In other words, if the global scientific and development community were to aim at eradicating hunger, there would be little ‘hidden hunger’.

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 international community misses the ground realities in an effort to bolster the commercial interests of the biotechnology industries. In their over-enthusiasm to promote an expensive technology at the expense of the poor, what they have overlooked is that biotechnology has the potential to widen the great divide between haves and have-nots.

Devinder Sharma is an Indian journalist, writer, and thinker. Trained as an agricultural scientist, Devinder quit active journalism to research policy issues concerning sustainable agriculture, intellectual property rights, environment and development, biotechnology and hunger, and the implications of the free trade paradigm for developing countries. He was the founding member of the Chakriya Vikas Foundation (Foundation for Cyclic Development), is on the Asia Rice Foundation’s board of directors, and chairs the Forum for Biotechnology & Food Security in New Delhi.