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Critics Of Biotechnology Are Called Imperialists

(Summary)

Andrew Pollack of the New York Times, opens his February 4, 2001 op-ed with a vivid account of Kenyas starvation caused by a severe drought. According to this story, opponents of agricultural biotechnology urged the Kenyan government to reject corn donated by the United States and Canada because some of it was genetically modified. In addition, when the United States sent corn and soy meal to India after a 1999 cyclone that killed 10,000 people, a prominent biotech critic in that country accused Washington of using the cyclone victims as "guinea pigs" for bio-engineered food.

The author insists that such actions raise a troubling question about the critics of biotechnology. Are they so against it that they are willing to let people die? Indeed, the critics, most of whom live in wealthy countries, are increasingly being called imperialists for opposing a technology that could be used to develop improved crops for poor nations.

Hassan Adamu, Nigeria's Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development, was quoted as writing in an op-ed piece in The Washington Post that, "To deny desperately hungry people the means to control their futures by presuming to know what is best for them is not only paternalistic but morally wrong."

The story says there is a growing recognition that the third world might have the swing vote on whether genetically modified agriculture succeeds or fails. So both sides are courting developing countries, though some experts say the poor are being used as pawns. . C. S. Prakash, a professor at Tuskegee University who is developing genetically modified crops for the third world was quoted as saying, "For us to take an attitude that these farmers are gullible and ignorant and we have to take care to protect them from Western influences is absurd," accusing biotech opponents of romanticizing the old ways that left people in poor health and abject poverty.

Ingo Potrykus, the Swiss scientist who led the development of golden rice, was quoted as saying that opponents have a "hidden political agenda" and that in an article to be published in the journal In Vitro Plant, he writes: "It is not so much the concern about the environment, or the health of the consumer, or help for the poor and disadvantaged. It is a radical fight against a technology and for political success."

In fighting to keep golden rice from the poor in developing countries, he adds, the opposition "has to be held responsible for the foreseeable unnecessary death and blindness of millions of poor every year."

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