U.S. Relations With the People's Republic of China (2008)

U.S. Department of State

Seeds of a Perfect Storm: Genetically Modified Crops and the Global Food Security Crisis

Nina Fedoroff, Science and Technology Adviser to the Secretary of State and to the Administrator of USAID
Inaugural Lecture in the Jefferson Fellows Distinguished Lecture Series
Washington, DC
October 17, 2008

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Particularly important were the inventions of these two gentlemen, Haber and Bosch, who figured out how to convert atmospheric nitrogen to forms that plants can use – we call it fertilizer. This is now done in huge plants around the world. But around the middle of the 20th century, there was a resurgence of Malthusian predictions of mass famines in the populous countries of Asia whose agriculture had not yet benefitted from science. Perhaps the most famous catastrophist of this era was Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb. Remarkably, it took just a handful of scientists – principally plant breeder Norman Borlaug – to avert the predicted famines. He and others identified dwarfing mutations in wheat and rice that grew prolifically with fertilization without falling over. And they tirelessly promoted their rapid adoption, along with improved agricultural practices and increased fertilizer use. The resulting increases in food production underlie the rapid economic development that we are now witnessing in India, China and other parts of Asia and which are a driving factor of the current food crisis.

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Both people and wildlife benefit from insect-resistant crops. Pesticides are applied quite safely in the highly mechanized agriculture of developed nations using climate-controlled tractors, but there are some 25 million cases of pesticide poisoning every year in less developed countries where farmers often have little protection from it. Moreover, pesticides kill a broad spectrum of insects, both harmful and beneficial. In just 12 years since their initial introduction, insect resistant GM cotton and corn have reduced the amount of pesticide used by almost 290,000 metric tons of active ingredient. That translates into is more insects and more wildlife, such as birds, which can thrive along with crops. In China, farmers growing GM rice reduced their pesticide use by nearly 80 per cent and more than half of them used no pesticide at all. More than 10% of farmers growing conventional rice showed symptoms of pesticide poisoning, while none of the farmers growing Bt-resistant rice did.

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The world is indeed moving ahead with the introduction of GM crops. India has witnessed the extremely rapid adoption of Bt cotton and is expecting a further 5% increase in its cotton crop over last year because of it. India is moving to commercialize Bt eggplant and Bt rice in advanced stages of testing in China, India and the Philippines. China has recently announced a 3.5 billion dollar investment in agricultural biotechnology research.

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Just as medical research allows us to understand and control diseases, so research on plants, plant stresses such as heat and drought, and plant pests and pathogens are absolutely essential to our ability to achieve food security on our small and crowded planet. Today -- and increasingly in the coming decades -- it will be modern molecular science that offers the knowledge and the tools to grow more food with less water and less damage to our environment. Our most advanced agricultural biotechnology companies are anticipating doubling of yields per acre in our major staple and feed crops, corns and soybeans in the coming years. This will be reached through an increasingly sophisticated use of molecular modification – what the world calls GM – and genome-based plant breeding. If the developing world is to benefit from these advances, it is important to moderate the widespread prejudice against them in the developed world. I am encouraged that China and India, both of which have their fair measures of anti-GM controversy, are steadily moving forward in using molecular modifications to improve crops. Perhaps a combination of increasing food prices and growing recognition that modern GM crops are no more dangerous than their more conventionally derived precursors will permit other countries to move forward. The unacceptable alternative is an ever-widening food security gap between the developed and the developing nations.

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