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GM crops could help alleviate food shortage in Pakistan

By Farooq Khan

LAHORE: The inaccessibility of cheap foodstuff means 70 percent of the country’s population faces a daily struggle to feed itself. And the increasing use of pesticides, herbicides and insecticides in agriculture is causing environmental pollution while increasing labour cost and decreasing yields.

A viable way to make agriculture less costly and more labour effective could be the cultivation of genetically modified (GM) crops. However, there are reservations about GM crops, and concerns that they could have harmful affects on vegetation and the people that consume them.

Crops can be genetically modified to grow resistance to fungal, bacterial and viral ailments. They can also be modified to grow in restrictive environmental conditions, like during a drought or in high salt or metal content soil. The nutritional value of agro-products can also be improved, adding specific nutrients.

Conventional breeding methods in agriculture have similar goals, such as better yield, low cultivation costs and disease and pest resistance. Conventional methods include crop hybridisation, which can take years to do what biotechnology can do much quicker.

According to a research paper compiled at the Institute of Plant Biology, University of Zurich, Switzerland, and faxed to Daily Times by Dr Noorul Islam from the Agricultural Research Centre in Faisalabad, evidence from industrial and developing countries shows that GM crops, in conjunction with conventional agricultural practices, can contribute to a cost-effective, sustainable, productive and sufficiently safe form of agriculture.

The same conclusion was reached by a group of renowned scientists, Anthony Conner, Travis Glare and Jan Peter-Nap, after they examined 250 publications on the subject.

These papers included the impact of GM crops on biodiversity, the environment and how this differed from common agricultural practices. The impact of GM crops is very similar to the impact of traditional breeding that has been an integral part of agriculture for many years, according to researchers from the New Zealand Institute for Crop and Food Research, Limited.

Dr Naseem Akhtar, chairman of the National Commission on Biotechnology, said that the risk factors regarding GM crops should be thoroughly investigated. Farmers in Pakistan should be allowed a free hand in choosing what kind of crops are to be cultivated, since they are the best judges, he added. The constant unimpeded introduction of dangerous chemicals as pesticides is also adding to the pollution of the underground water table in our country, he said.

Daily Times has learnt that Monsanto, a multinational company that is a proponent and developer of GM crops, has approached the Pakistan government and offered Bacillus Thuringienis (BT) cotton, wheat, corn, maize and rice. These crop varieties are resistant to various ailments, and would forego the need for expensive pesticides. A 10-year study shows that growing BT cotton in Arizona, USA, under varied soil conditions caused a long-term population declines in the pink bollworm. The weather and climate of Arizona is very similar to the plains of Pakistan. This disease, known here as American Sundi, has devastated Pakistan’s cotton crop.

The Federal Ministry for the Environment has asked the four provinces for feedback, and the Punjab has already agreed. The recommendations are lying with the ministry and the crops will be introduced pending final approval, said Dr Ghulam Ahmed, director general agriculture (research), Faisalabad.

The Asian Development Bank has approved a loan of $905,000 this year for the research and cultivation of iron-rich rice. There are 1 billion people, mostly women and children, at risk of anaemia and iron deficiency problems in Asia, according to the ADB. This could be averted by the introduction of this GM rice.

India’s National Academy of Agricultural Sciences (NAAS) fully supports the introduction of GM varieties of rice. It endorsed the development of rice varieties tolerant to drought, submergence and salinity, and rich in micronutrients. However, the academy is not encouraging work on GM rice varieties that produce drugs and pharmaceuticals

Biotech developments have not focused on crops that could tackle hunger, said Louise Fresco of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and a panellist at a conference on sustainable agriculture for developing countries in Brussels. She said there was a growing gap between the promise and the reality of the use of biotechnology and life sciences in sustainable agriculture. The assistant director general in the agriculture department at FAO spoke of how 85% of transonic crops, such as corn, cannola and cotton, are designed to reduce labour and input costs. However, crops such as chickpea, wheat, corn and cassava that would help tackle poverty and hunger are not being cultivated as extensively.

Likewise banana, considered a favourite fruit in this region, is also a staple food in many other regions of world. The banana plantations in rural Sindh and Punjab are yielding fewer crops every year and the size and quality of fruit is also declining. This is mainly due to the ever increasing use of pesticides and insecticides, which in turn produces resistance varieties of pests. These resistant varieties of pest then require even higher concentrations of pesticide, thus increasing costs and pollution, and so on.

The FAO says that new breeding methods and tools, including biotechnology, will be helpful to develop resistant bananas for cultivation. Since more than 50 percent of the banana germplasm (land varieties) are sterile, biotechnology and mutation breeding are important tools that can improve banana varieties without the threat of genetic drift, i.e., that the modifications will be passed on to wild varieties of banana or other plants, said the FAO.

The British Medical Association (BMA) has disputed the ethics of GM crops. Dr Vivienne Nathanson, Head of Science and Ethics, says that a meeting of scientists is needed to review developments in the field.

The greatest anticipated risk of GM crops that mutated genes could be passed on to insects and animals, which could have untold effects. Resistance genes for a pest in a crop could be passed on to a wild variety of the plant or a weed through pollen transfer, thus creating a resistant weed, which in itself would then become a pest. However, studies on the risk of gene transfer are inconclusive.

But the dangers of GM crops are not just biological, but economic as well. There are worries that the introduction of GM crops in certain countries could lead to a dependence on the company that supplies the seed, effectively giving that company a monopoly on the food supply of that country. Many think it is unethical that companies can copyright varieties of GM seeds. This has already led to problems for Monsanto, which saw the price of its share price plummet after protests by people in Canada, USA and Europe. The company has now been bought by Up John pharmaceuticals.

Until 1999, 82% of GM crops were grown in industrial countries. Argentina grows the most GM crops, about 17% in the developing countries, which include China, Mexico, South Africa and others where field trials are in the offing.

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