Pro-biotechnology scientists say that with new research methods, biotechnology can be used to develop new crop varieties that are drought tolerant, resistant to insects and weeds, able to fix nitrogen from the atmosphere and even increase the nutrient content in the edible portion of plants. Proponents say modern biotechnology offers enormous opportunities to poor farmers and low-income consumers in developing countries.

The first problem with that argument is that there is no relationship between the prevalence of hunger and a country's population. For every densely populated and hungry nation like Bangladesh, there is a sparsely populated (but also hungry) country like Brazil.

Even in the midst of superabundance in the United States, there are between 20 million and 30 million malnourished people. Thus, even though crop yields per acre improved dramatically between the late 1960s and the early 1990s, these advances in agriculture have only trimmed the ranks of the world's undernourished by 8 percent -- to 840 million from 920 million.

Poverty is the key reason why 840 million people do not have enough to eat. In the past 30 years, enough food was produced to feed everyone -- had it been more evenly distributed. Hunger is not a matter of agricultural limits, but a problem of masses of people not having access to food or the means to produce it.

Biotechnology proponents, however, argue that food production will not keep pace with the growth of the global population, which is expected to add 73 million people every year from now until 2020. The biotechnology proponents say hunger will persist unless the potential of biotechnology is realized. I say, if the root causes are not addressed, hunger will persist no matter what agricultural technologies are used.

At most, biotechnology has the yet-unrealized potential to deal with the issues of quality and quantity of food but does not address distribution and access. Insisting on technological solutions to hunger ignores the tremendous complexity of the problem. It is too easy to fall into the ``paradox of plenty'' -- more food accompanied by greater hunger. Any method of boosting food production that deepens inequality is bound to fail to reduce hunger.

This is particularly true for biotechnology, which is being promoted by private corporations to whom poor farmers (who produce most of the basic food crops in the developing world) do not represent an attractive market.

For example, the new strain of rice that is capable of producing provitamin A, which is being heralded as the best that agrobiotech can offer the developing world, constitutes a solution that ignores the root causes of why there are 2 million children at risk of vitamin A deficiency. In rural areas of the developing world, food preferences are culturally determined. Asians will not likely consume ``orange rice'' in the midst of abundant white rice.

In fact, Asian small farmers grow diverse rice varieties with varying nutritional content and adapted to a wide variety of environmental conditions. The resulting genetic diversity heightens resistance to plant diseases and enables farmers to derive multiple nutritional uses.

If, as expected, transgenic seeds continue to be developed and commercialized exclusively by private firms, poor farmers will continue to find them too expensive to purchase. The few that will have access to bioengineered seeds will be hurt by becoming dangerously ``dependent'' on the annual purchase of such seeds. Choices are surely also being denied to poor farmers when private industries insist upon protecting biotech patents that deny seed saving, an aspect that is of fundamental cultural importance to traditional farmers, who for centuries have saved and shared seeds.

Food production will have to come from agricultural systems in countries with the largest population growth. This poses a major challenge for biotechnology in these tropical countries where farmers are not only resource poor -- with no access to credit, technical assistance or markets

--but where about 370 million rural poor live in arid or semi-arid zones or in steeply sloped areas. In the past, such farmers were bypassed by advances in agriculture known as the Green Revolution because their soil, water and labor methods were unsuited to the demanding and costly management practices of improved seeds and accompanying need for pesticides and fertilizers. Biotechnology will exacerbate the problem even more. Some scientists and policymakers posit that a solution would be to increase government investments in biotechnology research. However, larger investments may not yield the desired results. Corporate legal rights to biotechnology is affecting the development of transgenic crops by public institutions. Moreover, the seed distribution channels and networks to reach farmers are being privatized, focusing on commercial farms rather than on poor farmers.

Much of the needed food can be produced throughout the world by small farmers using agroecological technologies. In fact, new rural development approaches and simple technologies spearheaded by farmers groups and nongovernmental organizations around the developing world are already making a difference.

These results are a breakthrough for achieving food security and environmental preservation in the developing world, but realizing their potential depends on investments, policies, institutional support and attitude changes on the part of policymakers and the international scientific community.

Failure to promote such people-centered agricultural research and development will miss an historic opportunity to raise agricultural productivity in economically viable, environmentally benign and socially uplifting ways.

Miguel A. Altieri is an entomologist at UC Berkeley.

©2000 San Francisco Chronicle

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