Miracle Or Menace?
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MIRACLE OR MENACE? Biotechnology and the Third World by Robert W algate The Panos Institute Budapest-London-Paris- Washington © The Panos Institute 1990 All rights reserved Published by Panos Publications Ltd 9 White Lion Street London Nl 9PD, UK British Library Cataloguing information available. ISBN 1-870670-18-3 Extracts may be freely reproduced by the press or by non-profit organisations, with or without acknowledgement. Panos would appreciate clippings of published material based on Miracle or Menace. Funding for Miracle or Menace was provided by the Rockefeller Foundation, New York and Oxfam, UK. Any judgments expressed in this document should not be taken to represent the views of any funding agency. Signed articles do not necessarily reflect the views of Panos or any of its funding agencies. This dossier was written by Robert Walgate, with assistance from: Andy Crump, Talib Esmail, June Goodfield, Khoo Hock Aun, Paul Icamina, K.S. Jayaraman, Bernardo Kolcinski, O'Seun Ogunseitan and Hannah Pearce. This dossier was edited by Benjamin Pogrund with assistance from Eleanor Lawrence. The Panos Institute is an international information and policy studies institute, dedicated to working in partnership with others towards greater public understanding of sustainable development. Panos has offices in Budapest, London, Paris and Washington DC and was founded in 1986 by the staff of Earthscan, which had undertaken similar work since 1975. For more information about Panos contact: Juliet Heller, The Panos Institute. Production: Jacqueline Walkden Picture research: Patricia Lee Cover design: Viridian Publications Director: Liz Carlile Printed in Great Britain by The Southampton Book Company, Southampton Acknowledgements t would be impossible to name the tens - hundreds - of I individuals who in ways small and large have contributed to this dossier and made it possible. I must begin with the great encourage ment given to me by Kenneth Warren, who in his time at the Rockefeller Foundation provided the first pilot grant to begin the project, and Gary Toennissen, also of the Foundation, who continued support and so enabled its completion. Then must come the many scientists and programme administrators who patiently responded to questioning, and freely provided countless documents, reports and pictures; and then the writers who have contributed excellent material to the dossier from around the world: O'Seun Ogunseitan from Lagos, Bernardo Kolcinski from Sao Paulo, K.S. Jayaraman from New Delhi, Khoo Hock Aun from Kuala Lumpur, and Paul Icamina from Manila. In London, Andy Crump helped get the project started; Hannah Pearce, who had worked on biotechnology for Greenpeace, provided her invaluable expertise and energy and researched and wrote the reports on Chinese hybrid rice, cocoa and cassava; June Goodfield generously provided her interview material on rinderpest vaccines; Talib Esmail wrote the rinderpest report and provided much further research and found the excellent pictures. The dossier would have been impossible without kind invitations to several meetings, such as the European Commissi9n and UN Food and Agriculture Organization's 1989 meeting on Agricultural Biotechnology in Luxembourg, the June 1989 Joint Co-ordinating Board meeting of the UNDP?World Bank/WHO's Tropical Disease Research Programme in Geneva, and the Rockefeller Foundation's Rice Biotechnology Programme annual meeting in 1989 in Columbia, Missouri. Last but not least, I shall have undying gratitude to my editors, Benjamin Pogrund for his unfailing sense of clear English, rejection of obscurity- and willingness to learn some molecular biology! - and the untiring and painstaking Eleanor Lawrence, who going far beyond the call of contract and duty has ensured that the text is short, to the point, and scientifically as accurate as can be achieved in the time and space available to us; to Liz Carlile, who has ensured that the book was not only produced, but looked good too, against constant changes of deadlines by a pressing author; to James Deane for helping to fmd the funds for publication; and to Jon Tinker for having the foresight to let me undertake this project. In the end, though, the responsibility must be mine. Any errors of judgment, fact or balance, must be laid at my door. Robert Walgate London May 1990 l Preface echnology has transformed the lives of nearly everyone on the Tplanet. Automobiles, corrugated iron, plastic shoes, calculators, fertilisers, jumbo jets, television, tractors, nuclear weapons ... The twentieth century so far has been dominated by technologies based on physics and chemistry. Now it is biology's turn. Biotechnology, the application of an explosion of biological knowledge over the last twenty years, gives humankind the ability to alter the structure of life itself. The risks and the benefits of biotechnology are similar to those offered by any new technology: electricity, the microchip or chemical fertiliser. Who controls it, and for whose benefit? The potential of biotechnology is enormous. In 1885 Louis Pasteur developed the first vaccine- against rabies. Since then, 21 other effective vaccines have been developed against human diseases. With the help of biotechnology another 28 may be produced over the next decade, which could have bigger impacts on human health than the introduction of antibiotics. Biotechnology can telescope years of laborious plant or animal breeding into a few hours of genetic manipulation, offering the prospect of massive increases in food and crop production at a time when human populations are still rising steadily, and when global food stocks have rarely looked more precarious. For the West, biotechnology may well bring further increases in affluence. For the Third World, it could bring less hunger and starvation - or more; less disease and sickness - or more; better or- perhaps even worse- standards of living. In the 1960s and 1970s, new high-yielding varieties of rice and wheat, combined with effective pesticides and chemical fertilisers, dramatically increased food production in some of the poorest countries of the world. For some people, the Green Revolution raised living standards substantially, but it also forced many of the poorer farmers to sell their land to those rich enough to invest quickly in the new technology. In some countries, economic inequality, and consequent political and social tensions, were greatly increased. Biotechnology will pose many similar problems. It is now possible to manipulate the genetic make-up of a crop so that it is resistant to a specific weedkiller. Farmers who buy these new varieties should be able to achieve much higher yields - but only if they also buy the appropriate weedkiller. If the new technology is only available to the richer farmers, poverty and inequality may be deepened. For the technologies based on physics and chemistry, most of the Third World has been a bystander, receiving leftovers from western tables, with little opportunity to influence research or innovation. With biotechnology too, the West, mainly through new multinational companies, is already defining the direction and emphases of research and development. Yet there are many biotechnology research institutes in the South, both private and public, which could play a key role in ensuring that biotechnology benefits the Third World as well as the industrialised North. Much of the biological wealth on which biotechnological research depends is found in the Third World. The biotechnology industry needs the genes from plants and animals, yeasts and bacteria which can still be found in the forests and wildernesses of the developing world. This could provide a way for the poorer nations of the world to have, if not a controlling interest, at least a substantial shareholding in the future direction of biotechnological research. Biotechnology raises profound economic, environmental and political questions -and fierce and often ill-informed passions. This dossier explains some of the promises offered by biotechnology, especially to the Third World, and outlines some of the risks and dangers associated with it. Whether biotechnology proves to be a miracle or a menace depends on how it is used and controlled. But control depends upon knowledge, and biotechnology is such a new subject that even science graduates often have only a sketchy understanding of it. The Panos Institute hopes that this publication will help stimulate and inform a debate both in the North and in the South, on how biotechnology can best be harnessed in the service of humankind - and on how we can ensure that biotechnology is used to reduce rather than to deepen the obscene inequities which exist today both between and within different countries. Jon Tinker President The Panos Institute. CONTENTS CHAPTER!: 1 TAKING CONTROL OF EVOLUTION CHAPTER2: 6 FINDING GENES FOR BETTER CROPS CHAPTER3: 23 PLANT TISSUE CULTURE CHAPTER4: 41 PLANT GENETIC ENGINEERING CHAPTERS: 58 THREE CROPS: COCOA, CASSAVA AND TREES CHAPTER6: 71 BIOTECHNOLOGY AND HUMAN HEALTH CHAPTER 7: 91 MAKING NEW VACCINES AND DRUGS CHAPTERS: 108 GENETIC ENGINEERING OF MICRO ORGANISMS CHAPTER9: 125 ANIMAL, FISH AND INSECT BIOTECHNOLOGY CHAPTER10: 136 PRIVATE AND PUBLIC BIOTECHNOLOGY CHAPTERll: 159 GENETIC RESOURCES CHAPTER12: 168 ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES CHAPTER13: 180 CONCLUSIONS REFERENCES: 183 INDEX: 189 BOXED INFORMATION A few basics, 2 - Recombinant DNA, 3 - Species, varieties, lines, 10 - Tissue cUlture, 12- Malaysia to clone rattan, 25-Vietnam's success with potatoes,