Assignment Biotech-401

Role of Biotechnology in
Addressing World Hunger
Submitted to: Dr Iqrar
Submitted by: Syed Ali Hadi

2015-ag-6390
Introduction:

Hundreds of millions of people around the world cannot grow or obtain food in sufficient
quantity or quality to sustain healthy life. The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United
Nations (FAO) finds that the number of undernourished people worldwide and in developing
nations has risen over the past four years for which data is available. Currently, 842 million
people worldwide are believed to be undernourished, nearly three times the population of the
United States, and 798 million of these live in developing nations. Recently, the effects of
drought on food production have put additional millions of people in sub-Saharan Africa at risk
of not just malnutrition but starvation.

The topic of global hunger has become a prominent backdrop for the worldwide debate over
genetically modified (GM) food crops. The possible use of biotechnology to boost food
production and quality in developing countries has become a focal point for biotechnology
advocates and critics alike.

In some respects, the debate about the appropriateness of GM crops for developing countries is
not all that different from the debate occurring in the industrialized world. Proponents of the
technology point to the potential benefits of the technology to increase food production, reduce
crop losses from diseases, insects, and drought, and improve the nutritional content of traditional
foods. Critics point to possible human health risks from GM foods, such as new allergens or
toxins, or potential environmental and economic concerns, such as the spread of a transgenic trait
through wild ecosystems or conventional crops that could threaten biodiversity or trade with
nations that reject GM crops.

Global Food Production & Hunger

The Green Revolution:

The latter half of the twentieth century saw a dramatic worldwide increase in food production
generated by coupling higher yielding plant varieties with such increasingly intensive
technologies as irrigation and chemical fertilizers and pesticides. Norman Borlaug summarized
the gains in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal in 2000: In 1960 in the U.S., the production of
the 17 most important food, feed, and fiber crops was 252 million tons. By 1999, it had increased
to 700 million tons. It is important to note that the 1999 harvest was produced on 10 million
fewer acres than were cultivated in 1960. If we had tried to produce the harvest of 1999 with the
technology of 1960, we would have had to increase the cultivated area by about 460 million
acres of land of the same quality—which we didn’t have.4 This dramatic increase in food
production was dubbed the Green Revolution and is credited with staving off the worst
predictions of global food shortages that some feared would accompany the world’s burgeoning
population. The population growth experienced over the last thirty years was partly offset by an
18 percent overall increase in food production (measured as calories per person), combined with
growing cereal exports to developing countries.

Hunger Remains:

After 50 years of modernization, world agricultural production today is more than sufficient to
feed six billion human beings adequately. Cereal production alone . . . could to a large extent
cover the energy needs of the whole population if it were well distributed. However, cereal
availability varies greatly from one country to another . . . Moreover, within each country, access
to food or the means to produce food is very uneven among households . . . World food security,
therefore, is not an essentially technical, environmental or demographic issue in the short-term: it
is first and foremost a matter of grossly inadequate means of production of the world’s poorest
peasant farmers who cannot meet their food needs.

The global increase in food production, therefore, reflects an increasing disparity between the
most productive and least productive nations. This is particularly apparent in sub-Saharan Africa,
where the number of chronically undernourished people has more than doubled in the past 30
years. During this time, the rate of food production increases also slowed, from 3% per year in
the 1970s to 1% per year in the 1990s.

CONSTRAINTS ON EQUITABLE DISTRIBUTION:

While insufficient production levels continue to contribute to hunger among subsistence farming
communities in developing countries, many point out that hunger could be greatly minimized
with improved mechanisms for distributing the food that is produced. Many of the constraints on
food production cited above also serve as barriers to equitable food distribution at regional,
national and international levels. Consequently, even if populations in developing countries had
sufficient money to purchase food, problems with infrastructure and social stability would
continue to impede distribution and access to food commodities. Over eighty developing
countries lack sufficient food to feed their populations and the money to import food supplies. In
response, international development focuses both on poverty reduction and hunger reduction.
Individual country agencies such as the U.S. Agency for International Development and
international institutions like the World Bank provide funds to both improve agricultural
productivity and support business development through education and training and access to
capital and technology. The international community attempts to alleviate global hunger through
short-term relief efforts, as well as longer-term agricultural and economic development
programs, but the solutions to hunger are as elusive as its causes are complex. The United
Nations recently estimated that it will take 130 years to eliminate global hunger at the current
pace of progress.

CONVENTIONAL BREEDING:

In the late nineteenth century, plant breeders began using hybridization and crossbreeding more
aggressively as a means of improving agricultural crops. Since then, the application of a growing
body of knowledge about plant genetics, combined with the application of statistical methods to
plant breeding and the development of effective field trial protocols, has led to the development
of hardier and more productive varieties of corn, wheat, and other staple crops. The use of these
techniques to enhance desirable traits (the physical characteristics of a plant generated by its
genetic makeup) dominated plant breeding efforts for much of the twentieth century, famously
marked by the awarding of the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize to Norman Borlaug for his development
of high-yield wheat varieties using these methods. The application of advanced conventional
breeding technologies has made much of the production gains of the Green Revolution possible.

The Development of Modern Biotechnology

As these advances in conventional plant breeding led to the development of hardier and more
productive varieties of food crops, scientists began using recombinant DNA (rDNA) techniques
as a new tool for developing crops with beneficial traits. Recombinant DNA techniques allow
scientists to isolate certain desired gene sequences from various organisms and introduce
(recombine) them into other organisms (or insert multiple or reverse copies of an organism’s
genes to alter various metabolic functions).

Biotechnology: Putting an End to World Hunger

Agricultural biotechnology, a dynamic new science that uses genetic engineering to enhance the
output and value of many agricultural products, may hold the key to helping stop world hunger.

But if the environmental movement has its way, further development of this promising new
technology will be halted, consigning hundreds of millions of impoverished residents of the
developing world to additional decades of starvation and misery.

Environmentalists argue that agricultural biotechnology poses too many risks to human health
and the environment, and that its use should be sharply curtailed or even banned altogether.
However, an overwhelming number of scientists from around the world emphatically dismiss
these objections as unfounded. It would thus be a tragedy if misinformation spread by the
environmental movement about agricultural biotechnology is allowed to win the day and the
world is deprived of its great potential to improve and save lives.

There is simply too much at stake.

Starvation and disease continue to hamper the poorest nations of the world:

 At least 800 million people suffer from malnutrition.

 Sub-Saharan Africa has an infant mortality rate of 9.2 per cent and three million children
in the region have gone blind due to a deficiency of Vitamin A.

 An estimated 1.3 billion people live on less than $1 per day, insufficient income to
purchase an adequate diet.

One reason that so many nations suffer from hunger is that their climates are often inhospitable
for efficiently producing agricultural products. Of the 42 highly indebted poor countries of the
world, 39 are located in tropical or desert regions where growing conditions are less than
optimal. Plant viruses, soil erosion, costly fertilizers and pesticides and inadequate storage are
endemic problems for developing world farmers - problems that too frequently they cannot
overcome. In 1999, for example, the mosaic plant virus destroyed 60 per cent of Africa's cassava
crop and 30 per cent- 40 per cent of the worldwide papaya harvest is lost each year to viral
infection.

But agricultural biotechnology can play a major role in helping end this human suffering.
Through gene manipulation, scientists have been able to alter many of the staple food crops that
developing nations depend on, such as cassava, rice, maize and potatoes, to make them more
resistant to disease, more nutritional and more productive. With the help of bioengineered seeds
that "vaccinate" crops with their own herbicides and pesticides, crop losses to disease and insects
can be minimized and farmers can produce more plentiful harvests. Also, crops can be grown on
previously unpalatable lands using no-till farming, a type of farming that does not require heavy-
duty farm machinery to till the soil but relies on the herbicides within the plant to destroy
unwanted weeds.

With the no-till technique, farmers can plant on land previously too steep for farming. Very
important too is that no-till farming cuts down on farmers' production costs because they do not
have to rely as heavily on machinery, fuel, chemicals and labor. A major environmental benefit -
which environmentalists curiously ignore - is that no-till farming can reduce erosion of critical
topsoil by anywhere from 70 per cent to 98 per cent.

Another major benefit of biotechnology is that it can significantly improve the nutritional content
of various foods. Researchers at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, for instance, have
developed a new breed of rice that has a higher content of iron, thus helping to address an iron
deficiency suffered by 3.7 billion people worldwide. Iron deficiency can lead to the development
of anemia, a disease characterized by insufficient red blood cells. The rice also contains enough
Vitamin A to satisfy daily requirements in just a 300-gram serving while the same amount of
standard rice contains little or no Vitamin A. Besides causing blindness, lack of Vitamin A has
been linked to heart disease and some cancers. The United Nations Children's Fund estimates
that one to two million deaths of children between ages one and four each year could be
prevented if these children got more Vitamin A. Rice fortified with Vitamin A would be
especially welcomed by several Asian countries where 80 per cent of daily caloric intake consists
of rice. But rice is by no means the only food that can add this much-needed vitamin to the diets
of the populations of developing countries. Just recently, an international team of scientists used
genetic engineering to create a tomato with three times the normal level of beta-carotene, which
the human body processes into Vitamin A.

Agricultural biotechnology also yields medicinal benefits. Researchers have developed a vaccine
for the hepatitis virus that can be taken via banana consumption, negating the need for injection
vaccines that require extensive storage and sterilization.

Through the simple act of eating a banana, a patient could receive a hepatitis vaccination for a
mere $.02 per dose instead of the current rate of $125 per dose.

Despite the vast possibilities of agricultural biotechnology, environmentalists such as Green

peace’s Benedict Haerlin make unsubstantiated claims that governments need to "protect the
environment and consumers from the dangers of genetic engineering." Contending that
agricultural biotechnology is a dangerous and untested technology, environmental activists warn
of a litany of environmental horrors that agricultural biotechnology could spawn, such as so-
called "super weeds" spreading over the landscape, resistant to human attempts at control.

Such claims, however, have no basis in fact.

Nearly 2,300 scientists from around the world - including respected Nobel prize-winners - have
signed a petition organized by Dr. C.S. Prakash, director of the Center for Plant Biotechnology
Research at Tuskegee University, strongly endorsing the environmental and nutritional safety of
foods modified through agricultural biotechnology. These scientists are especially supportive of
agricultural biotechnology's potential to feed a hungry world - and improve the environment at
the same time. Their petition states: "Through judicious deployment, biotechnology can also
address environmental degradation, hunger and poverty in the developing world by providing
improved agricultural productivity and greater nutritional security." Indeed, agricultural
biotechnology can offer much benefit to the environment by way of less soil erosion, lower
amounts of fertilizer run-off into waterways and decreased use of pesticides and herbicides.
Environmentalists' war against agricultural biotechnology, a technology that has so much
potential to alleviate human suffering and improve the environment, is not only illogical - it is
immoral.

Sadly, affluent Western environmentalists are more concerned with rigid adherence to their
wrongheaded ideology than saving the lives of millions of people in the developing world.

Conclusion:

There are major systemic barriers to increasing agricultural production in many developing
nations. Civil strife, weak governmental institutions, lack of public funds and private capital,
lack of access to agricultural inputs, and inadequate agricultural and transportation infrastructure
are all barriers to adequate production. Agricultural biotechnology as a whole does not offer
solutions to these broad systemic problems. Agricultural biotechnology may, however, provide
the means for developing crop varieties tailored for particular regions that could play an
important role in addressing hunger. Traits such as disease, pest, and drought resistance could
help to increase food production and thereby help meet local food needs. Increased food
production and reduced pest control and labor costs could also help to address rural hunger
through increased income. Surplus production and reduced post-harvest losses may also help
deal with hunger in urban areas. In addition to helping address hunger through increasing
production and availability of food, biotechnology may help address critical nutritional
deficiencies by enhancing the nutritional value of staple crops in the developing world.

References:

 Rodemeyer.M.”Feeding the World, A look at Biotechnology & Hunger”2004.

 "Modern Food/Biotechnology: Facts and Figures," The Alliance for Better Foods, 1999.
 Krattiger,A. "The Importance of Ag-Biotech to Global Prosperity," International Service
for the Acquisition of Agri-Biotech, 1998.
 http://www.agbioworld.org
 https://www.pewtrusts.org