Biotechnology for food security: Risks and rewards

Safety and security

Two of the well-known researchers from the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) -- Drs Mahabub Hossain and Swapon Kumar Dutta -- set the tone round the table at the very outset. They made preliminary remarks on scientific evolution in molecular biology over the last two decades, genetic basis of living organism, and the ability to develop processes and products useful to food security, nutrition and human health. These two speakers succinctly summarised the potentials and the problems of biotechnology. While the issue is being debated both in the developed and the developing world, according to them, the premises are quite different and hence a grandiose generalisation should be shelved. The developed ones stand against it in the face of an almost stagnant population growth for decades with a consequent crave for food safety, while developing countries' imperative is food security.

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For example, a la Mahabub and others, about 1.2 billion people mostly in South Asia and Sub-Sharan Africa live in a state of absolute poverty with an income of less than one US dollar a day. About 800 million people are food insecure and 160 million preschool children suffer from energy-protein malnutrition, which results in the deaths of over five million children under the age of five years. Thus the whole issue boils down to a debate between food safety and food security.

Problems and potentials

I assume that my readers are well informed of the potentials of biotechnology as these are by now articulated and known. Even then, to put it simply, biotechnology can bring forth a revolution not only in food production -- in a regime of declining land and rising population -- but also in the realm of nutrition for the poor. One example should suffice to sound the semantics. Vitamin A deficiency affects 400 million people worldwide, leaving them vulnerable to infections and blindness. Iron deficiency affects 3.7 billion people, particularly women, leading to higher maternal deaths and infant mortality. Developing micronutrient dense rices, with higher amounts of iron, zinc and vitamin A, can have a tremendous impact on the health of low-income people. Conventional breeding when combined with biotechnology can provide powerful tools to achieve this goal. Besides, rice hybrids have 15-20 per cent yield advantage over inbred rices. Their adoption by farmers is, however, constrained by the need to buy seed every season and sometimes at high seed cost. But government's commitments and gearing up national research institutions, should help stem the rot in the long run.

There is another point to ponder over. The big multinational companies -- the candidates for criticisms on this count -- have reportedly backtracked in recent years fromn rice biotechnology as they observed the dominance of small holders in Asia and the high transaction costs of enforcing intellectual property rights under weak judicial system. By and large, both in developed and developing Asia, the public sector needs to be the vanguard of rice biotechnology.

Bangladesh perspective: Complacency and concerns

The Bangladesh perspectives on potentials and problems -- quite obviously -- were on board for threadbare discussions. Bangladesh is one of the most land scarce country in the world with cultivation frontier closed almost half a century ago. The green revolution that swept over the last decades helped a balance between growth rate of population and food. Most of the gains of green revolution came from improved rice and wheat varieties developed by the Bangladesh agricultural research institutions in collaboration with international research centres. Two-thirds of the cropped areas are now being covered by modern varieties and 55 per cent of the cultivated areas are now under irrigation facilities. In tandem, population growth rate also declined appreciably, say from 2.2 to 1.2 per cent per year in the 1990s.

While complacency could be in one corner, concerns loom large elsewhere. Every year, two million people are added to the existing stock putting a pressure on food supplies of 0.56 million tons a year, just to maintain the same level of per capita consumption. Despite the claim of self-sufficiency in food and the calm it confers upon, occasional imports invoke inquiry into the claims made so far. The easy options of realising increased rice production have already been exhausted and Bangladesh is poised to reel under a regime of losing cultivated areas at more than one per cent per annum due to growing urbanisation, population pressure and leaving land for non-rice crops. In this scenario of an almost closed cultivation frontier, declining yield and increasing population Bangladesh -- a country that stands with higher population density than America when all people of the world are pushed into that country -- must strive for the alternatives, especially the opportunities created by the rice biotechnology.

It is also because 60 per cent of the children under age five are underweight and more than half are stunted. More than 70 per cent of pregnant women suffer from Anemia due to iron deficiency. In rural areas, where three-fourths of the people live, malnutrition is acute due to lack of knowledge or financial capacity to buy a balanced diet. Since poor people consume nearly 150 to 170 kg of rice per year, incorporation of a small amount of iron and Vitamin A in rice could go a long way in meeting the deficiencies in these micronutrients

For and against

There are a lot of risks too. Concerns on food safety, ethical points and environmental implications and socio economic risks were also deliberated upon by the authors. Taking all the risks into consideration, the authors noted that samples drawn from a large section of the civil society and agricultural institutions seem to support biotechnology on certain conditions. For example, it could be supported provided done by public sector and free for farmers, with health and environmental assessment before the release etc. And those who declined to support put forth various arguments like, the development of pests to destroy food sources, dependence of farmers on private companies, additional production of rice not needed and gene transformation is unethical etc.

Riding the risks

Given the growing constraints on future rice availability in Bangladesh and the devastatingly developed micronutrient deficiency among the poor households in rural areas, the rice biotechnology issue should be left neither to rhetoric nor to emotions. In the seminar mentioned before, sordidly, I sensed emotions engulfing economics, rhetoric ruling over realties on the ground in the case of a few. We think that the society needs to rise above all rhetoric and emotions and seriously start a systematic inquiry into the nexus soon. Dr Mhabub Hossain and others provided sufficient food for thought for a safe and secured world of food, particularly in the context of Bangladesh. We strongly feel, biotechnology could be the key to the upcoming crisis, but keeping in mind the questions. We have to seek answers to the questions raised rather than throwing away the question itself. Allow me to remind my readers that had we not hailed adoption of modern rice technology in the 1960s and 1970s, we would have, probably, experienced a worse food situation to turn into a beggar's bowl. Many of the forecasts at that time turned out to be futile. We can only hope that we shall be able to find a judicious path for our survival.

Abdul Bayes is Professor of Economics at Jahangirnagar University