The Global Food Fight

Abstract

Powerful new technologies often provoke strong resis tance. When the internal combustion engine gave us automobiles, advocates of horse-drawn buggies scorned the fad. When nuclear fission was first mastered, much sentiment turned against its use?even for peaceful purposes. Thus today's backlash against the commercial use of recombinant dna technology for food pro duction should not be surprising. Consumer and environmental groups, mostly in Europe, depict genetically modified (gm) food crops, produced mostly in the United States, as dangerous to human health and the environment. These critics want tight la beling for gm foods, limits on international trade in gm crops, and perhaps even a moratorium on any further commercial develop ment of this new technology?all to prevent risks that are still mostly hypothetical. The international debate over gm crops pits a cautious, consumer driven Europe against aggressive American industry. Yet the real stakeholders in this debate are poor farmers and poorly fed consumers in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. These are the regions most in need of new transgenic crop technologies, given their difficult farming conditions and rapidly growing populations. Yet poor farmers in tropical countries are neither participating in nor profiting from the gm crop revolution.