Experts agree on need for GM crops in developing countries
Want to learn more about the benefits of genetically modified crops to small-scale, subsistence farmers in developing countries. Monsanto just issued this press release that links to a video on their Web site on this issue. Click on the link below for more information.
C.S. Prakash
Experts agree on need for GM crops in developing countries
Check Biotech
December 11, 2007
St. Louis, MO - In a new online video and podcast released today, eight globally recognized and distinguished experts discuss how GM crops are able to deliver significant benefits to small-scale, subsistence farming operations in developing countries and emphasize the need to expand the availability of this farming technology in these areas of the world.
“Here is a technology that is not only scale neutral, but delivers more benefits to the poor,” says Dr. Clive James, chairman of the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications (ISAAA). “For example, in the U.S., you would expect, on average, to increase productivity by five percent. If you use Bt maize … in the Philippines, that increase is 40 percent.”
Economic research to date does not support the widely held perception that agricultural biotechnology benefits only large farms. A 2006 review of peer-reviewed research by Dr. Terri Raney, senior economist of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), summarizes that the technology may be “pro-poor,” and concludes that economic results to-date suggest that farmers in developing countries can benefit from transgenic crops.
“What they typically require is a kind of an empowering tool, which allows them to reduce uncertainties, get greater incomes, and also to be able to invest more in their own households, as well as on the farm. What biotechnology enables them is precisely this,” says Dr. Laveesh Bhandari, economist and director of Indicus Analytics in India, who recently studied the impact of this new technology in farming on households and communities in India.
