|
|
|
|
Foreign Affairs
Farming the Genetic Frontier
By David G. Victor and C. Ford Runge
David G. Victor is Director of the Program on Energy and Sustainable Development at Stanford University and Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. C. Ford Runge is Distinguished McKnight University Professor of Applied Economics and Law at the University of Minnesota. This essay is based on a Council on Foreign Relations study group; for more detailed information see www.cfr.org/GMO.
Brave New World?
For more than ten thousand years, farmers have improved their crops by letting nature do the breeding and then choosing the tastiest, hardiest, or most productive offspring. This ancient technique was accelerated in the last century through more systematic attempts to oversee the breeding and selection process. Today, however, new scientific techniques are making it possible to design crops with far greater precision and effect than ever before.
The most controversial and important of these techniques are called "transgenic": they allow scientists to engineer new crops by splicing together particular genes rather than relying solely on the uncertain crosses that are the hallmark of traditional crop breeding. For some, the transgenic revolution in biotechnology is a horror. Tinkering with nature's order, they argue, will backfire when engineered genes escape to the wild and disrupt delicately balanced ecosystems. For others, plant engineering is a Promethean step forward that will lead to more nutritious, productive, and disease-resistant crops, which will in turn help alleviate global hunger and reduce the amount of land and pesticides used in agriculture.
The optimists are right about the promise of biotechnology. But in their eagerness to see new crops deployed, the most zealous advocates pretend that genetic engineering is similar to prior agricultural innovations, ignoring the fact that there are indeed substantial differences that call for new types of regulatory oversight. At the other extreme, a vocal minority of detractors has hyped the risks of crop engineering all out of proportion to reality and blocked the new technology's greatest potential contribution: advancing the welfare of poor farmers and consumers around the world through publicly funded crop programs. These divergent factions have made it hard for governments to implement balanced long-term policies for biotechnology.
To break the impasse and unleash the true power of crop engineering, countries, especially the United States, must pursue a long-term strategy for managing the gene revolution in agriculture, because markets by themselves will not do the job. Such a strategy has three essential components. First, governments must sustain the incentives for private companies to invest in crop engineering, particularly by reducing the risks of international trade disputes. Avoiding unwinnable trade disputes, especially with the European Union (EU), will allow innovators to thrive in more receptive markets, such as the United States and China. Second, they must support greater investment in agricultural research to ensure that the benefits reach the world's poor. And finally, they must reform the rules governing the treatment of intellectual property, finding a way to balance protecting innovators' intellectual property with ensuring access to new crops for the poorest farmers.
Supercrops
Farmers in the United States, Canada, Argentina, and China are already embracing the first generation of engineered crops. These have spread rapidly because the crops are engineered to make farming more efficient. For example, soybeans and canola (also known as rapeseed) engineered to withstand the powerful herbicide glyphosate have lowered the cost of weed control; farmers who plant these hardy crops need only apply glyphosate a few times to kill weeds, . . .