The Use of GM Crops in Developing Countries
Food security and the role of agriculture
2.9 Improvement in the diet of poor people depends on growth not only in the supply of food and nutrients, but also in demand for their labour.5 Yet it has become even clearer since our 1999 Report that the extent of undernourishment is substantial, and that the previous decline in undernourishment has stalled. According to the FAO, 815 million people worldwide were undernourished in 1997-1999, of whom 777 million were living in developing countries. One third of the population of sub-Saharan Africa is undernourished.6
2.10 Seventy per cent of the world’s poor live in rural areas and depend mainly upon agriculture for their livelihood. Despite increasing urbanisation, over half will remain there in 2035.7 The role of agriculture in reducing poverty is therefore crucial. Its rapid growth can lower and stabilise the cost of food to poor consumers living in rural and urban environments.8 Where, as in the Green Revolution, small-scale agriculture has been a major beneficiary, it has been associated with an unprecedented reduction of poverty.9 Rapid agricultural growth, achieved on smallholdings using labour intensive methods, remains the best hope for poor people to enhance their prospects to achieve sufficient availability of food, and sufficient access to work or land to afford it. But this will happen only if farming is more lucrative. In view of the fact that expansion of the current agricultural area is uneconomic in most parts of the world, this can be achieved only by the enhancement of yields (see also Appendix 2).
2.11 Land reforms and fairer agricultural policies in the developed world can help in several ways. First, more equitable distribution of land and access to it could enable more people to benefit from agriculture. Secondly, trade barriers to agricultural imports from poor countries could be lowered, which would increase markets for developing countries. Thirdly, reducing subsidies to farmers in developed countries would reduce the glutting of world markets for agricultural products, which depresses prices and consequently the attractiveness of agricultural production in developing countries. However, history suggests that these situations will improve only slowly. Moreover, even changes in global trading rules will do little to help the many very poor farmers in developing countries, especially those in Africa, who are in substantial food deficit. Many of those with significant land operate with such poor quality seeds, and such recalcitrant soil-water environments, that their land and labour productivity are too low for them to feed themselves adequately. While conventional plant breeding has achieved some improvements for parts of Africa, especially for maize, similar advances are lacking with respect to the most important crops of the very poor, such as millet, sorghum, yams and cocoyams.10 We conclude that resuming and spreading rapid sustainable growth of farm yields, especially for food crops in developing countries, still remains crucial to achieving better income and food security for the world’s poor.
Footnotes5 FAO Electronic Forum on Biotechnology in Food and Agriculture (2000) Background Document to Conference 1, 20 March – 26 May 2000 How appropriate are currently available biotechnologies in the crop sector for food production and agriculture in developing countries (FAO UN). Available: http://www.fao.org/biotech/C1doc.htm. Accessed on: 10 Oct 2003; Department for International Development (DFID) (2002) Better Livelihoods for Poor People: The Role of Agriculture (London: DFID).
6 FAO (2002) The State of Food and Agriculture 2002 (Rome: FAO).
7 Population Division of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations Secretariat (2003) World Population Prospects: The 2002 Revision (New York: UN).
8 The recent report on rural poverty produced by the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) provides some evidence about the role of agriculture, enhancement of yield within agriculture and GM plants as possible sources of greater or more stable yields in providing food and labour income to poor people. See IFAD (2001) Rural Poverty Report 2001 – The Challenge of Ending Rural Poverty (Rome: IFAD).
9 This has been evident in the case of China in 1975-96, India in 1975-90 and Indonesia in 1970-95.
10 This is because conventional plant breeding is limited in part by the characteristics of plant genomes that are adapted to robustness at the expense of yield.