Sussex University

Health Implications Of Genetically Modified Foods

To the Letters Editor of The Financial Times
29 May 1999

As a co-author of the Nuffield Bioethics Council's report ('Poverty compels GM crop research', FT, May 26,) I respond to the statement by Alan Simms of Christian Aid that GM foods are unnecessary because 'there is more than enough food to feed everybody in the world'. If income and cropland were equally shared, that might be true. In reality, big commercial farms own much of the best land, and use it mainly to feed the well-off with costly meat and milk. Land reform and income redistribution could help the world's 800 million clinically undernourished people, but are at best very slow, due to political obstacles. Most of the 800 million are farmworkers or smallholders on plots of a hectare or less, growing food at high risk and low yields. It is unethical to deny these people achievable gains from GM food staples on the Pollyanna principle that their misery 'might' be alleviated otherwise.

We recognise that the poor need income from productive work, not simply more food. But the capital cost of an extra workplace in developing countries is 3-4 times as high in industry as in farming. So, for some decades, farming must provide most new jobs for the poor - and alone can provide, locally and reliably, the basic foods they need. But only rising yields can make those jobs economic. Hence the first 'green revolution' of the 1970s, by boosting cereals yields and workplaces, slashed poverty in large areas of many poor countries, including China, India, Mexico and Indonesia. Yet it hardly touched most of Africa, and most drylands. And it has slowed; in developing countries as a whole, yields of food staples are growing at only 1.3 per cent yearly, as against 3 per cent in the 1970s - and over 2 per cent yearly increase in the developing world's population of working age for the next twenty years!

Our report reaches three conclusions. GM food staples can greatly help to feed the poor. Other measures are needed too, but will not suffice. But today's structure of GM plant research - its concentration in five large firms - directs it to meeting the demands of the rich rather than the needs of the poor: yellow maize for chickens, rather than white maize for hungry people; herbicide-resistant crops to save labour costs for big farmers, not drought-resistant and higher-yielding staples to provide food security for the poor.

The first 'green revolution' required new institutions and incentives for appropriate research, not just in big Western firms, but mainly in public, developing-world and international institutions. Without similar initiatives soon, the 'second green revolution' will continue to plant over 10 per cent of its fields to GM tobacco, but under 1 per cent to GM wheat, sorghum, millet and cassava for human food. I hope that Christian Aid will use its energy, not to attack a technology with great potential to help the world's poor, but to help steer it towards saving undernourished lives, and away from providing cheaper cigarettes or even long-life tomato paste. We can and must design institutions and incentives that produce GM crops designed to benefit the world's needy.

Yours faithfully,

Michael Lipton

Professor of Economics, Poverty Research Unit at Sussex University;
Member, Working Party on GM Crops, Nuffield Council on Bioethics