The rush to promote genetic engineering as a solution to world food shortages is undermining crop research in the developing world, claim leading agricultural scientists. Governments, the World Bank and other funding bodies are withdrawing their support for biological pest control and switching to genetic research, they say. This summer, Monsanto, the world's largest supplier of genetically modified seeds, appealed to African heads of state to back genetic engineering as a solution to the world's food problems. It also launched an advertising campaign claiming that biotechnology offered the best hope of achieving sustainable food production. But Hans Herren, director of the International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology in Nairobi and a leading expert on fighting crop diseases, told a meeting at the Overseas Development Institute in London last week that these claims are diverting essential funds from traditional pest control: "We shouldn't be driven by this unproven technology when there are many more efficient solutions to food problems." Herren accuses agricultural researchers at UN agencies and the World Bank of joining a commercial bandwagon that is halting potentially more useful crop research. He is particularly critical of the UN's development and agricultural agencies and the Rockefeller Foundation, one of the world's largest private funders of agricultural research for the developing world. "Half of Rockefeller's agricultural money now goes to biotechnology," says Herren. Many of the 16 research centres run by the World Bank-backed Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, to which Herren's own institute is affiliated, have also switched from traditional research. "When I visit agricultural research institutes, I find the biological control lab half empty with broken windows, and the taxonomy lab derelict, but the biotechnology lab will be brand new with all the latest equipment and teeming with staff," Herren adds. Herren's views carry weight. A decade ago his work helped to save Africa from famine caused by a South American mealy bug that was devastating the cassava crop. It threatened disaster for 200 million Africans, until Herren found a Paraguayan parasitic wasp that killed the mealy bug by laying eggs inside its body, and released the wasp across the continent. Herren claims that if the same problem arose today, he would not get the money for such research. "The transgenics people would say they could insert a gene resistant to the mealy bug into the plant instead." He argues that if they were successful, they would charge for new seeds, which African farmers could not afford. His solution "solved the problem once and for all" and did not cost farmers a penny--one reason why companies are not interested in biological control. Herren says his centre has lots of proposals for pest control based on botanical products, "but nobody in the aid community wants to fund them." Monsanto rejects Herren's charges. The US-based company says that resistance to insects and disease will be among the first benefits of its products. Forty Percent (40%) A Cornell University analysis of population trends, climate change, increasing pollution and emerging diseases, as published in the October 1998 journal BioScience, points to one inescapable conclusion: Life on Earth is killing us. An estimated 40 percent of world deaths can now be attributed to various environmental factors, especially organic and chemical pollutants, according to a study led by David Pimentel, professor of ecology and agricultural sciences at Cornell. "More and more of us are living in crowded urban ecosystems that are ideal for the resurgence of old diseases and the development of new diseases," said Pimentel, lead author of the BioScience report titled "Ecology of Increasing Disease: Population Growth and Environmental Degradation." "We humans are further stressed and disease prevalence is worsened by widespread malnutrition and the unprecedented increase in air, water and soil pollutants," he said. The disease-ecology analysis was performed by a team of 11 graduate student researchers who gathered data from a variety of sources, such as the World Health Organization (WHO) and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), as well as previous studies at Cornell and other universities. Their findings span a planet made less habitable by human habitation: * Each year, air pollutants adversely affect the health of 4 to 5 billion people worldwide. An expanding world popu lation is burning more fossil fuels, emitting more industrial chemicals and driving more automobiles. The number of automobiles is increasing three times faster than the rate of population growth. * The snail-borne disease schistosomiasis,causes an estimated 1 million deaths annually and is expanding its range as human activities provide more suitable habitats in contaminated fresh water. * Of the 80,000 pesticides and other chemicals in use today, 10 percent are recognized as carcinogens. Cancer-related deaths in the United States increased from 331,000 in 1970 to 521,000 in 1992, with as estimated 30,000 deaths attributed to chemical exposure. * Smoke from indoor cooking fires that burn fuelwood and dung is estimated to cause the death of 4 million children each year worldwide. * Lack of sanitary conditions contributes each year to approximately 2 billion diarrhea infections and 4 million deaths, mostly among infants and young children in developing countries. In the United States, inadequate sanitation accounts for 940,000 diarrhea infections and about 900 deaths each year. * Dengue fever, spread by mosquitoes that breed in old tires and other water-holding junk in crowded urban environments, infects an additional 30 million to 60 million people each year. * Less than 1 percent of 500 Chinese cities have clean air. Respiratory disease is the leading cause of death in China. * Although the use of lead in U.S. gasoline declined since 1985, other sources inject about 2 billion kilograms of lead into the atmosphere in this country each year. An estimated 1.7 million children in the United States have unacceptably high levels of lead in their blood. * The global use of agricultural pesticides rose from about 50 million kilograms a year in 1945 to current application rates of approximately 2.5 billion kilograms per year. Most modern pesticides are more than 10 times as toxic to living organisms than those used in the 1950s. The only chance for relief, the researchers wrote in the BioScience report, comes from "comprehensive, fair population-control policies combined with effective environmental management programs. Without international cooperative efforts," they predicted, "disease prevalence will continue its rapid rise throughout the world and will diminish the quality of life for all humans."
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