Agricultural Biotechnologies, Transgenic Crops and the Poor : Opportunities and Challenges

At the 2009 World Summit on Food Security, states concluded that increasing agricultural productivity is the main means to meet the growing demand for food. They nominated agricultural biotechnology as a way of achieving this goal. A few months later, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) convened an important technical conference to discuss the options and opportunities provided by such technologies for facing the challenges of food insecurity and climate change. The Conference did not use a human rights framework but it did come up with a number of conclusions directly addressing the needs of smallholder farmers and producers – one of the most vulnerable groups in the agricultural sector to which a human rights analysis would pay specific attention. The article takes some of the recommendations of the Conference as a starting point to discuss two main challenges that have to be met if the use of agricultural biotechnologies in developing countries is to help alleviate poverty and food insecurity, and to contribute to a better realisation of human rights. The rights at stake here are, among others, the right to benefit from scientific progress and its applications, and the right to an adequate standard of living, including the right to adequate food. The obligation to improve methods of production by making full use of technical and scientific knowledge in order to fulfil the right to food also comes into play. The article pays specific attention to transgenic crops, the agricultural biotechnology that is often regarded as either particularly promising or particularly detrimental, depending on the perspective. The structure is as follows: Section 2 provides an overview of agricultural biotechnologies, including transgenic crops, and the world food situation. The subsequent section (section 3) discusses two challenges: the first is the challenge of focusing more on the needs of the poor in agricultural biotechnology research. The second is the central challenge of developing appropriate policy and regulatory frameworks for the use of agricultural biotechnology in developing countries. The last section of the article, part 4, summarises the conclusions of the analysis