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SCIENCE. Cont'd.

Photo: GM crops could help poor farmers.

In its State of Food and Agriculture report, the Organization said that biotechnology could help poorer farmers by increasing both the amount of crop grown and its quality. "Biotechnology has tremendous potential to improve agricultural productivity and raise farm incomes," FAO's Terri Raney, author of the report, told BBC News Online.

Gene revolution: Genetic modification, Raney said, could create crops that targeted the specific problems and needs of developing countries. Vitamin-laced strains of rice and protein-enriched vegetables could improve nutrition levels. In India, researchers are developing a "protato" - a protein-rich variety of the tuber - which includes genes from a high-protein South American wheat called amaranth. And in the Philippines, "golden rice" - a strain genetically engineered to produce beta-carotene - is estimated to have potential economic benefits of $137m. Critics say these kinds of GM foods will not solve fundamental problems of poverty and undernourishment, and are "technical fixes" for problems that could be solved by, for example, greater investment in distribution networks and a fairer system of international trade. "We know there is ample food on the planet. Most of the problems are not technical, they're about access to markets, access to credit, land," Dr Doreen Stabinsky, a Greenpeace science adviser, told the Associated Press. "Hunger is not a problem that needs technical solutions; it needs political will and appropriate policies." .

Photo: Others: 0.3 mha (Australia, Bulgaria, Colombia, Germany, Honduras, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Philippines, Romania, Spain and Uruguay)

Research for the poor: It also remains unclear exactly what impact GM crops have on both human health and the environment. "The only way to find out is to cautiously experiment with those crops," Raney said. At the moment, FAO said, biotech companies were making crops for the industrialised world and not for those who farmed in developing countries. It argued multinationals needed to be persuaded that it made financial sense to invest in new varieties of crops already grown in the developing world, such as rice, millet, cassava, banana and white maize. Currently just four crops - soybean, maize (corn), BT cotton and canola (oilseed rape) account for 99% of global genetically modified crops. The bulk of these are grown in six countries - the US, Argentina, Canada, Brazil, China and South Africa. Any potential gains would take time to arrive, Raney said. "There are big challenges - much of the science is still in the pipeline," she said. "We won't start to see the impact for at least five or 10 years."

End of the article.