Advancing Biotechnology in Developing Countries
Providing New Technologies for the Developing World:
Meeting the Challenges and Opportunities
Rob Williams
CAB International
Good morning Ladies and Gentlemen.
It is a pleasure to have the opportunity to participate in this event, and I thank the Association and the College for my invitation.
What I say today is not necessarily the view of CAB International, but my own view, based on having had the privilege to work in the international agricultural research and development arena for the past 30 years.
I was asked by the organisers to address the topic: Providing New Technologies for the Developing World: Meeting the Challenges and Opportunities.
I have structured my presentation as follows:
It is clear that the world faces many major challenges in the next 50 years. In the context of this meeting, the following are of relevance:
India passed the 1 billion population mark on the weekend of August 7-8 this year. Dr. R.S. Paroda, Director General of the Indian Council for Agricultural Research wrote in an ICAR Newsletter in 1998: "The challenges are daunting. …The burgeoning population requires 230 million tonnes of food grains by 2002, i.e. an additional 5 – 6 million tonnes of food grain per annum. …. New partnerships will need to be forged between the public & private sectors. The focus will be on new science."
China currently feeds 22% of the world’s population with 7% of the world’s arable land. By the year 2020 the population in China is predicted to grow by another 400 million people to 1.6 billion. This will lead to a shortfall in grain production of up to 200 million metric tons. The increase of population and the decrease of arable land demand an increase of unit yield of food grains of 60-80% within the next 30 years. And there is also the challenge of overuse and misuse of pesticides. In China there is an annual production of 260,000 tons of which more than 70% are insecticides, mostly organophosphates, of which 40% are used in cotton and 35% in rice.
In Africa the population has grown from 200 million to 500 million in 30 years and is projected to grow to 1.3 billion by 2025. More than 200 million people suffer chronic undernutrition. Even today, per capita food availability remains lowest in Africa, at an average of 2,100 kilocalories per day, compared with 3,500 in Western Europe and 3,600 in North America. And sub-Saharan Africa is alone among developing regions in having the per capita food cereals output actually decline over the past 30 years
In the developing world more then 800 million people are seriously malnourished, more than 170 million pre-school children are undernourished, more than half a million children go blind each year from lack of Vitamin A, and iron deficiencies are responsible for anaemia among millions of women and children making them vulnerable to a host of diseases.
Ladies and Gentlemen, the developing world faces a deepening crisis in food security, malnutrition, food access and environmental degradation. It will not just go away. Unless there is some intensive and co-ordinated action it will worsen, and will sooner or later come to affect the comfortable food-secure lives in the developed Western economies. For humanitarian, economic and political reasons the developing world must find ways to tackle the challenges faced.
There are those that say the world has plenty of food and all we have to do is to distribute it more equitably. The Director of the Kenyan Agricultural Research Institute, Dr. Cyrus Ndiritu, had the following to say on this at a recent international conference on Biotechnology and Developing Countries:
"The notion that at global level the problem is not one of food production but of distribution is trivial and highly misleading. For it entails that redistribution of static food supplies is the solution of food deficiency, and it relegates the need to increase production in regions like Africa to a subsidiary role."
He went on to say:
"Innovative technologies are now urgently needed as the way forward in transformation of agricultural growth and development in Africa."
Let’s unpack the agriculture "black box" and look at the key "players" that exert major influences on agricultural productivity and development. These are:
Let’s examine some in more detail. First the Farmers.
Farmers are in the private sector and survive, thrive or ‘dive’ based on the success of their individual endeavors. Farmers will normally not do something that they:
Farmers in the developing world are for the most part resource-poor, small-scale and, depending on the country, often neglected by the research communities. For technology to be developed and adapted to be useful to these farmers, the research community has to work with them to understand their constraints and capabilities
Now let’s look briefly at the plants as the basic resource in agricultural production, and plant x environment interactions
Plants need light energy, nutrients and water. The crop plant genotype provides the potential for that plant to grow and produce, but it is the genotype x environment interactions that determine the actual performance. Crop-associated biodiversity is a major biotic component of the environment, which can and does exert huge effects, positive and negative, on the performance of crops. The ‘quality’ of the soil is fundamental to crop productivity, as the ecosystem for plant roots and the interactions of biotic and abiotic factors affecting crop plant productivity.
There are major yield gaps between what is achieved on experiment stations and farmers’ fields, and between developed and developing countries. Why is this so and what does it tell us about research needs? This does not mean that modern technology is premature or unnecessary, rather that it needs to be applied specifically to closing the gaps and to meeting developing country needs? An interesting phrase increasingly used is ‘high science – low tech.’, indicating that it is how new technology is adapted and used that is important, and that modern ‘high science’ can be of value in unsophisticated on-farm situations.
There is a research continuum, from the molecular biology laboratory to the farmers’ fields. Effective linkages are needed along the continuum, moving knowledge in both directions, so that ‘high science’ can be focused on and turned into ‘low technology’ to solve problems and meet needs at the farm level, including the farms of the resource poor farmers in developing countries.
So, what are the priority on-farm problems and what modern "high science" has the potential to provide innovative and durable solutions to these problems.
Put simply the farmers need well-adapted highly-productive crop genotypes, the necessary nutrients and water to enable the productivity to be achieved, and protection of the crop from the significant biotic and abiotic stress factors that prevent the genotypic potential being achieved. There is not time today to get into an exhaustive review of these factors, but let’s just pick out a few that impact on the productivity of some major staple food crops in the developing world, and then go on to consider what the opportunities are to manage or control them.
Cassava, a major staple food crop in the humid tropics, is vegetatively propagated, and in Africa is widely infected with Cassava African Mosaic Disease - - a major yield reducer in Africa of the cultivars there and prevents improved cultivars from Latin America being utilized directly in Africa.
Maize, another major staple in the humid and sub-humid tropics, which in Africa can be devastated by maize streak virus, stem borers, stem and cob rots, and the grain can be infested with fungi which produce toxins that are mammalio-toxic e.g. aflatoxin and ochratoxin.
Rice, the staple food of the Asian masses and a growing staple in the humid tropics of Africa and Latin America, is prey to a host of pests and pathogens. Serious yield-reducing virus diseases include Tungro virus in Asia, rice yellow mottle in Africa and hoja blanca in Latin America. Rice blast disease and stem-borers throughout the world. In the Indo-Gangetic plain of South Asia, the "bread-basket" of the region, the yields of rice (and wheat) are declining steadily, due to a combination of biotic and abiotic stresses. There are also growing problems of salinization of irrigated rice lands, and the nutrient deficiencies that can arise from a diet primarily of carbohydrate staples such as rice and cassava.
Sorghum and pearl millet, the so-called coarse grains that are the staple grains of the semi-arid regions of the world, which can be devastated by the parasitic weeds in the Striga genus and downy mildew fungi. Huge amounts of money have been spent on conventional plant breeding to try to develop resistance to these parasites and pathogens, and certain modern biotechnologies can accelerate progress.
Potato, an important vegetatively propagated food crop in many tropical countries, has several bacterial, viral and fungal diseases that significantly reduce crop production.
Many of these are orphan crops and/or are orphan problems; i.e. the private sector in the developed world will not work on them because they do not represent a significant market to justify the R&D costs. Yet, they are major problems that modern biotechnology can assist in solving.
In my examples I have focused on crop production. There are clearly similar challenges and opportunities in relation of animal production, e.g. bovine diseases in Africa, but I am not familiar enough with them to talk sensibly about them, and for the purpose of this presentation the key concepts can be put forward by focusing on crops.
O.K., let’s recap to this point. We’ve outlined some major challenges the world faces in relation to the population-food-environment interactions. We’ve recognized farmers, crop plants and policy makers as major groups of players that we need to consider. And we’ve identified some significant constraints to productivity and value of staple food crops in the tropics that need to be removed.
Let’s now look at the range of modern biotechnologies that are available to be used to remove these constraints, and then see what challenges we can identify that are preventing or slowing such use.
First of all, we should probably not talk of biotechnology as a single thing, for there are a range of technologies that fit under the biotechnology heading.
Biotechnology is any technology that uses living organisms, processes or substances from those organisms, to make or modify a product, improve plants or animals, or develop microorganisms for specific uses. The key components of modern biotechnology include:
Let’s look at what value these biotechnologies may have in relation to the constraints we identified earlier:
Cassava African Mosaic Disease:
Maize pest and diseases
Rice virus diseases, insect pests and abiotic stress tolerances
Sorghum and Pearl Millet Striga
Potato Bacterial and Viral diseases
These solutions in part continue the tradition of selection and improvement of cultivated crops and livestock developed over centuries. Many of the solutions are likely to be delivered in the form of new or cleaned "seed", new strains of livestock, and new ways of using crop-associated biodiversity. The major difference with conventional breeding is that new gene technology identifies desirable traits more quickly and accurately than conventional plant and livestock breeding, and can introduce genes with far greater precision and control than can conventional methods. An exciting prospect is the control of problems that have not been amenable to control by conventional technologies.
Biotechnology applications in agriculture are in their infancy. The rapid progress in genomics will transform plant, tree and livestock breeding. Marker assisted selection will assist breeding for resistance to complex traits such as drought tolerance. This is an area of great potential benefit for tropical crops, which are often grown in harsh environments and on poor soils.
Modern biotechnologies will not solve all the problems of food insecurity and poverty. But they could provide key components to solutions if given the chance, and if steered by a set of appropriate policies.
What are the challenges that will constrain the realization of the opportunities?
They include:
Insufficient Investment: There is declining public sector investment in agricultural research, whereas modern biotechnologies are resource hungry. This will result, as it has done for human health, in lack of attention to the crops and problems that do not present a sufficient market for the private sector. This leads to:
Challenge No. 1: How to secure and apply sufficient resources to the orphan crops/problems so that they can benefit from solutions delivered by modern biotechnology. This will of necessity involve public-sector/private-sector partnerships.
Insufficient trained scientists and technicians: In order for the developing country problems to receive focused attention, with the required understanding of the needs and capabilities of the farmers and sufficient two-way communication along the research continuum, there do need to be cadres of trained scientists and technicians active in the national research systems. They need to be able to assist in the setting of national policies and to be active in the securing of the resources needed.
Challenge No. 2: to provide a critical mass of trained scientist and technicians to focus on the priority problems of the country, to inform policy makers and secure resources. As this is a challenge that will not be met in the short term, there is a major role for the CGIAR-IARCs and ARIs to work in partnership with developing country NARS.
Access to technology: At least some of the technologies needed will be subject to intellectual property rights issues. There will be proprietary technology used in the developed world that can be used readily to meet needs in developing countries.
Challenge No. 3: How to access proprietary technology from the developed world for the benefit of the developing world, to produce public goods the poor can afford. Again there is a need for public-private sector partnerships, and these are already happening with Monsanto making the viral coat protein technology available to Mexico for control of some potato viruses and Novartis making Bt technology available to IRRI for research on resistance to rice pests.
Providing the Needed Policies: The agricultural policies of developing countries should enable and facilitate the safe and effective development, introduction and uptake of valuable new technologies. These would need to include aspects of biosafety, and the protection of consumers and the environment.
Challenge No. 4: Develop agricultural policies that enable and facilitate the safe and effective development and adoption of valuable new technologies.
Fear and Confusion: The heated and often polarised debate in Europe that is now being taken up in the USA, on the potential risks of so-called GMOs, is a cause of fear and confusion for many developing countries. It affects the degree to which NARS are able to raise resources to invest in modern biotechnologies, and the degree to which the developed world development assistance agencies are allowed to assist developing countries take advantage of the technologies. It could also impact on the trade potentials with products produced using some of the modern biotechnologies.
Challenge No. 5: The debate in Europe and some other developed countries is damaging the readiness and abilities of some developing countries to invest in and/or use biotechnologies that would be of great value to those countries.
In the context of Challenge 5, I would like to share with you some excerpts of a presentation made at the International Conference on Agricultural Biotechnology and the Poor, jointly convened by the CGIAR and the US National Academy of Sciences at the World Bank in the third week of October this year. I extract from the paper by Cyrus Ndiritu, Director of the Kenya Agriculture Research Institute:
"Biotechnology, which includes plant tissue culture, molecular marker-assisted technologies and genetic engineering is a technology that bears relevance and has scope to resolve many of the external problems affecting crop and livestock production in Africa.
"The debate on biotechnology for Africa must be considered in the context of the continent’s need for more food and survival of its people.
"There is no doubt that biotechnology, including genetic engineering, bears great potential in the improvement of agriculture and food production in Africa. However, there are numerous challenges that need to be addressed if the continent is to benefit from biotechnology in a sustainable way.
"There is overwhelming evidence that the needs and drive for biotechnology in Africa are quite different from those of the western developed countries.
"While Africa’s agenda is based on the urgent needs for technological change to enhance food production and alter the course of the widespread poverty, hunger and starvation, the West is driven by market and profit.
"The on-going debate, especially from Europe, about the real and perceived hazards of biotechnology in Africa can be taken as being aimed at creating fear, mistrust and general confusion and has failed to seek the views of African policy makers and stakeholders.
"The debate for biotechnology for Africa should not be whether or not the continent needs biotechnology but how biotechnology can be promoted, supported and applied in ways that enable it to make its rightful, positive and sustainable contribution to agriculture and the economic welfare of the people of Africa".
I believe these views are shared widely among those responsible for the agricultural research and development in developing countries, and those responsible for development assistance. Evidence for this is seen in many of the papers presented at the international conference at the World Bank in October, entitled "Ensuring Food Security, Protecting the Environment, Reducing Poverty in Developing Countries: Can Biotechnology Help?"
Constraints listed by delegates include limited human resources, inadequate infrastructure, low budget, anti-biotechnology groups, (strict) biosafety guidelines.
It is clear, developing countries around the world recognize the great potential that modern biotechnologies can bring. They are investing in them and beginning to generate benefits from them. Why should they worry about the negative attitudes in the press and among consumers in Europe particularly. In this context I believe it will be of interest to this audience to see the contents of a letter to the Washington Post on 27th October this year from Per Pinstrup Anderson, DG of IFPRI. He wrote:
"
Agricultural biotechnology can be used to help Third World farmers produce more by, for instance, developing new crop varieties that are drought tolerant, resistant to insects and weeds and able to capture nitrogen from the air."Biotechnology can also make the food more nutritious by increasing vitamin A, iron and other nutrients in the edible portion of the plant. In August, researchers announced that they had succeeded in genetically modifying rice to provide more iron and vitamin A.
"Thorough testing is, of course, necessary to ensure the safety of new crop varieties developed through biotechnology. Consumers have a right to know the content of their food, so they can make informed choices.
"But while concerns about biotechnology, even those that are ill-founded, can hold up its adoption in the industrial world without disastrous results, putting the brakes on biotechnology could have dire consequences for developing countries, where populations are growing rapidly and all arable land is already under cultivation.
"For most people in developing countries, a better standard of living depends on increasing productivity in agriculture. Modern biotechnology research, together with appropriate policies, better infrastructure and traditional research methods can bring benefits to millions of poor farmers and consumers.
"Why should the debate over biotechnology in Europe and the United States matter to developing countries? Developing countries cannot expect to receive any scientific or financial support for modern agrobiotechnology from countries where such research methods are prohibited and where genetically modified food is considered too risky for their own populations to consume.
"Moreover, most developing countries will not be able to undertake effective agricultural biotechnological research for their own urgent needs without the scientific and financial support of industrial countries. And, if the moratoriums on biotechnological research became widespread, developing countries would not be able to export genetically modified food and agricultural goods to Europe and other countries where they are prohibited.
"Developing countries need more investment in strengthening biosafety testing and developing agricultural biotechnology suitable for their needs and their environments.
"It is clear, then that governments must invest in biotechnological research to help poor farmers and that the public and private sectors must work as partners. The potential of the new agricultural technologies is enormous, particularly for the poor in developing countries.
"Condemning biotechnology for its potential risks without considering the alternative risks of prolonging the human misery caused by hunger, malnutrition and child death is as unwise and unethical as blindly pursuing this technology without the necessary biosafety."
For further reading on the challenges and potentials, I recommend the set of 10 Briefs on Biotechnology for Developing-Country Agriculture: Problems and Opportunities, published by IFPRI under its 2020 Vision initiative, and the soon to be published proceedings of the International Conference on Biotechnology: Agricultural Biotechnology and the Poor, G.J. Persley and M.M. Lantin Editors, to be published by the CGIAR [now available February 2000].
Rob Williams
1st December 1999