Promethean science : agricultural biotechnology, the environment, and the poor

Meeting the food needs of this growing and increasingly urbanized population requires increasing production and productivity and matching these to dietary changes, including the increasing demand for livestock and fish. World grain production alone will have to increase 40% by 2020. Without increased productivity, there are likely to be 135 million malnourished children in 2020, 77% of them in Africa and South Asia. Several emerging economies (including Argentina, Brazil, China, India, Thailand, Kenya, and South Africa) are making major investments in harnessing modern biotechnology to improve food security and reduce poverty. The major constraints to the widespread application of biotechnology to the food needs of the poor is the economic concentration of investment, science, and infrastructure in industrial countries and the lack of access to the resulting technologies. Several actions are urgently required: (1) Ensure that the descriptions of genomes of the world"s agriculturally important species are genetically mapped and placed in the public domain. Twelve crops (banana/plantain, cassava, maize, groundnut, oil crops, millets, potato, rice, sorghum, sweet potato, soybean, wheat), five species of livestock (cattle, goats, sheep, pigs, and chickens), and fish species provide approximately 95% of the food in the developing world. (2) Identify the genes conferring traits that are important to poor producers in marginal environments. Some, such as drought tolerance in cereals, appear likely to be shared across species. (3) The collections of plant and animal genetic resources, as well as the biological information pertaining to them, are a vast resource for genetic improvement and the identification of useful traits. There is an urgent need to finance these collections in a more sustainable way so as to ensure that the genetic resources of the world"s major agriculture species are conserved, characterized, and accessible for use in perpetuity. (4) Obtaining access to proprietary technologies is key to the successful applications of biotechnology to agriculture in the developing world. (5) A concerted international effort is needed to establish a new compact between the public and private sectors of the industrial and developing countries, so that the new developments in modern science are able to be used more effectively. (6) Significant additional investments by the public and the private sectors are required if agricultural productivity is to increase in the developing world in an environmentally sustainable way. (7) Incentives for private sector participation and partnerships must be provided. (8) The vast resources of the international scientific community must be mobilized in new and imaginative ways if a quantum leap is to be made in improving agricultural productivity, food access, and livelihoods by 2020. (9) Innovations required to contribute to improved food security and to create wealth in the poorer regions of the world include improved genotypes and better agricultural practices to ensure sustainable increases in productivity, and new biological products, such as vaccines, biocontrol agents, and diagnostics for the control of major endemic diseases of crops and livestock. The role of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) in this effort is detailed. Includes references.