Biotechnology: A Hope or a Threat?

296 Pages·1992·24.822 MB·English

by  Iftikhar Ahmed (eds.)

BIOTECHNOLOGY
The ILO's World Employment Programme (WEP) aims to assist and
encourage member States to adopt and implement active policies and
projects designed to promote full, productive and freely chosen employ
ment and to reduce poverty. Through its action-oriented research, technical
advisory services, national projects and the work of its four regional
employment teams in Africa, Asia and Latin America, the WEP pays
special attention to the longer-term development problems of rural areas
where the vast majority of poor and underemployed people still live, and
to the rapidly growing urban informal sector.
At the same time, in response to the economic crises and the growth in
open unemployment of the 1980s, the WEP has entered into an ongoing
dialogue with the social partners and other international agencies on the
social dimensions of adjustment, and is devoting a major part of its policy
analysis and advice to achieving greater equity in structural adjustment
programmes. Employment and poverty monitoring, direct employment
creation and income generation for vulnerable groups, linkages between
macro-economic and micro-economic interventions, technological change
and labour market problems and policies are among the areas covered.
Through these overall activities, the ILO has been able to help national
decision-makers to reshape their policies and plans with the aim of
eradicating mass poverty and promoting productive employment.
This publication is the outcome of a WEP project.
Biotechnology
A Hope or a Threat?
Edited by
Iftikhar Ahmed
Development Economist, International Labour Office, Geneva
Foreword by
Michael Lipton
Institute ofD evelopment Studies, University of Sussex
Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN 978-1-349-12867-9 ISBN 978-1-349-12865-5 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-12865-5
© International Labour Organisation 1992
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1992
All rights reserved. For information, write:
Scholarly and Reference Division,
St. Martin's Press, Inc., 175 Fifth Avenue,
New York, N.Y. 10010
First published in the United States of America in 1992
ISBN 978-0-312-07154-7
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Biotechnology: a hope or a threat? I edited by Iftikhar Ahmed :
foreword by Michael Lipton.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 978-0-312-07154-7
1. Biotechnology-Social aspects. I. Iftikhar Ahmed, 1944-
TP248.2.B523 1992
303.48'3-dc20 91-47618
CIP
The designations employed in ILO publications, which are in
conformity with United Nations practice, and the presentation of
material therein do not imply the expression of any opinion
whatsoever on the part of the International Labour Office concerning
the legal status of any country, area or territory or of its authorities,
or concerning the delimitation of its frontiers.
The responsibility for opinions expressed in studies and other
contributions rests solely with their authors, and publication
does not constitute an endorsement by the International Labour Office
of the opinions expressed in them.
Reference to names of firms and commercial products and processes
does not imply their endorsement by the International Labour Office,
and any failure to mention a particular firm, commercial product
or process is not a sign of disapproval.
To my wife Selina and daughters Alvina and Shadia
Contents
Foreword, Michael Lipton IX
Acknowledgements xv
Notes on the Contributors xvi
List of Abbreviations XX
List of Tables xxiii
List of Figures xxvii
1 Introduction and Overview 1
Iftikhar Ahmed
PART I CONCEPTUAL APPROACHES
2 A Conceptual Framework for Biotechnology
Assessment 17
Harold H. Lee and Frederick E. Tank
3 New Biotechnologies for Rural Development 43
Paolo Bifani
PART II ADVANCED PLANT BIOTECHNOLIGIES
4 Advanced Plant Biotechnology in Mexico: A Hope
for the Neglected? 65
Amarella Eastmond and Manuel L. Robert
5 Biotechnology and Farm Size in Kenya 79
Leopold P. Mureithi and Boniface F. Makau
6 Biotechnology and Labour Absorption in
Malawi Agriculture 94
Chinyamata Chipeta and Mary Wezi Mhango
vii
viii Contents
PART III MILK AND FEED
7 The Differential Impact of Biotechnology: the
Mexico - United States Contrast 117
Gerardo Otero
8 Biotechnology to Combat Malnutrition in Nigeria 127
Gilbert U. Okereke
PART IV THE EXTERNAL THREAT
9 Biotechnology Trends: a Threat to
Philippine Agriculture? 147
Saturn ina C. Halos
10 Can we Av ert an Oil Crisis? 166
Guido Ruivenkamp
11 Policy Perspectives and the Future Outlook 189
Iftikhar Ahmed
Appendix (Table A.I) 220
Glossary 232
Bibliography 247
Index 262
Foreword
Michael Lipton
This important book aims to analyse, predict and thereby improve the
impact of biotechnology (BT) on poor people in developing countries.
Modern BT comprises the alteration of the genetic structure of an organ
ism, not by selection - as accomplished by nature for millions of years,
by farmers for thousands, and by scientists for a few score - but by direct
genetic intervention, viz. tissue culture or gene transfer. So far, BT has
concentrated on human health, industrial processing, cattle, soil bacteria
and dicots, in that order. Its impact on poor people via crop production
in developing countries, however, depends quite heavily on the type of
BT - anther culture, to speed up purity (homozygosity) in parents for
F1 hybrids; meristem culture, to produce disease-free clones of roots and
tubers; and so forth. The linkages between type of crop, BT and poverty
reduction are explored in detail in my book with Richard Longhurst, New
Seeds and Poor People (pp. 364-83).
Although the main impact of BT has not been on tropical food staples,
the yields of cereal crops in many parts of the Third World had been
doubled - often tripled - between 1964 and 1988, largely before BT,
by another dramatic set of innovations: the so-called Green Revolution
(GR) in traditional plant breeding. BT's main potential contribution to the
production of food staples is probably as an adjunct to, and an accelerator
for, traditional plant breeding. This will continue to be the mainstay of
food crop improvement for several reasons. Many crucial crop traits - for
example, drought - are affected by several genes in complex ways; direct
manipulation of such genes is not yet feasible. Even when it is, effective
selection will depend on the response of BT planting materials to various
environments, that is, to the tests of traditional plant breeding, first in the
research station, then in farmers' fields. Indeed, there is a real danger
that BT will increasingly divert scientists and funds away from the more
'traditional', but central, plant breeding and testing that lie at the heart of
crop improvement.
Nevertheless, this book demonstrates that our analysis of BT's effects
on the poor needs to learn from the experience of GR. Both BT and GR
can enrich many poor people through higher and more stable employment,
ix
x Foreword
nutrition and small-farm income. Both can harm the poor if they are
directed, by policies or by markets, mainly towards labour-displacing
activities, or towards improving the competitiveness only of farms or
regions that tend to operate less labour-intensively - in other words, of
the more prosperous farms or regions. Yet many critics of the GR in the
1970s, and of BT today, wrongly concentrate their fire on the technology
itself, not upon its misuse and misdirection.
The main danger with BT - even more than with the GR - is that poor
people's regions and products may be neglected, rather than that they are
directly harmed. The GR began with wheat and rice in well-watered areas;
in several of these, notably the Indian Punjab, the GR has helped to make
poverty much rarer. The GR has also lately provided major benefits for
some crops of very poor people - sorghum, finger millet, even cassava - in
some rainfed areas. It is the vast areas where food staples are untouched
by GR, above all in most of Africa, that poverty has worsened. Yet
the current targets of BT - while including cheaper or new industrial
processes, often displacing labour-intensive Third World products such
as sugar or (potentially) beverages - largely neglect monocots, including
cereals. Much crop production by poor people, especially in remote areas,
is thus at risk of being by-passed, rather than being actively harmed or
distorted, by BT as by the GR.
Yet the potential for better results exists. In Mexico (Chapter 4) BT, by
rapidly developing and spreading disease-free coffee and coconut plants,
could probably help poorer producers in the very regions (and crops) left
out by the GR. Due care is needed, of course, to avoid over-rapid extraction
of scarce nutrients, especially from impoverished soils. BT, like the GR,
needs to concentrate its search upon planting materials with high and safe
'conversion efficiency' of nutrients into dry matter, and 'partitioning effi
ciency' of dry matter into economic products - not 'extractive efficiency'
at soil mining. However, this book shows that such projects from BT - for
very poor farmers in Kenya, Malawi, and the Philippines - are possible,
and justify the editor's warning to avoid 'negative generalisations which
could deprive' the poor of high potential 'benefits of BT'.
Indevelopedcountries,theheavyconcentrationofearly BT - forexamplevia
bovine growth hormone - upon highly organised and science-linked ani
mal production tends to favour big farms. In developing countries, however,
Table 11.3 (based on Kenyan data for tea and potatoes) suggests that
older BT - just like the GR - has strong potential to reinforce small farmers'
advantages. Although bigger farmers may adopt first, once adoption is
well advanced both BT and the GR re-confirm the 'inverse relationship'
in which small farmers have higher output-per-hectare than large farmers.