21 - 27 March 2002
Issue No.578
|
Al-Ahram Weekly Online 21 - 27 March 2002 Issue No.578 |
||
| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 | Current issue | Previous issue | Site map | ||
Science serving the poor
International experts converged on Alexandria this week to discuss how biotechnology can be used as a development tool. Fatemah Farag attended
This week, between 16 and 20 March, the Alexandria Library hosted its first major conference -- "Biotechnology and Sustainable Development: Voices of the South and North." In the words of Ismail Serageddin, the Library's director-general and the conference's chairman, for "too long, the debate on biotechnology has been seen as a debate between the US and Europe or between NGOs and the private sector, largely in the industrialised countries." Therefore, the Library's choice of biotechnology as the subject of a conference that drew experts, including three Nobel Prize laureates, from across the globe to Alexandria, was heavily nuanced. "The voice of the developing countries needs to be heard much more forcefully than has been the case so far. Not just by having an occasional representative in a meeting held in a Western capital, but by being the hosts of the international meetings, and engaging their decision-makers in this debate," Serageddin added.
Serageddin
After all, it is the "South" or the "developing world" that has the most at stake, given that this is where 80 per cent of humanity resides. It is the developing world that suffers the most from drought and famine, in which children less than five years old are 25 times more likely to die of infectious diseases and where diarrhoeal diseases still claim lives. Of the estimated 5.1 billion people that live in developing countries, three billion live in rural areas and are largely dependent on agriculture for their livelihood while roughly 1.2 billion exist below the poverty line, living on less that $1 per day.
Biotechnology is being touted as a powerful tool to address global poverty and promote sustainable development. According to Brian Johnson, head of the UK's Biotechnology Advisory Unit, "Biotechnology and other new breeding techniques could revolutionise the global capacity to produce food and other materials. Future breeding programmes will enable more complex changes in plants and animals than the relatively crude transformations now available."
But there remain, in biotechnology, several development leaps to be made and snags to be ironed out. "Unfortunately many of these potential benefits [of the new sciences] may not be realised, or if they are, may not be accessible to the people in greatest need," pointed out Gordon Conway, president of the New York-based Rockefeller Foundation, "In the global market economy, the profit objective of the private sector directs research agendas toward the needs and desires of those who can pay. Most of our brightest scientists are working in sophisticated laboratories in industrial countries with little knowledge of the needs of the poor, living in rural areas a continent away. The global rules governing ownership of the new sciences are being formulated in and by wealthy countries in part to protect their own competitive advantage in international trade."
This is a particularly pertinent point for Egypt's agricultural sector, currently moving towards privatisation. This entails that institutions such as the government's Agriculture Genetic Engineering Research Institute (AGERI) are working with private companies to gain access to modern technology. Magdi Madkur, director of AGERI, showcased the relationship that his organisation has developed with Pioneer, a private US company, where the ground rules for cooperation involve co-developing technology as opposed to simply transferring it.
Eusebius J Mukhwana, executive director of the Sustainable Agricultural Centre for Research argues that, while "biotechnology has produced plants that are salt, pest and even drought- resistant, these advancements, while laudable, cannot go far in reducing the poverty and hunger that afflicts this continent, as this poverty is structurally rooted in an unfair and exploitative system of international trade and resource control."
And while the pros and cons of genetically modified food were discussed, as was the isolation of a 2.46 Kb DNA fragment from the genomic DNA of Salmonella Typhimurium and a host of legal ethical issues, the words of the Egyptian Minister of Agriculture Youssef Wali's statement to the conference, read by Mahmoud Riyad, minister of state for the environment, identified the bottom line: "We must learn how to deploy these technologies wisely so that they serve the needs of humanity at large, benefit the poor and safeguard the environment, rather than only serve the interests of the few."
© Copyright Al-Ahram Weekly. All rights reserved
 |
|
|||||||||||||||||
| ARCHIVES Letter from the Editor Editorial Board Subscription Advertise! |
WEEKLY ONLINE: www.ahram.org.eg/weekly Updated every Saturday at 11.00 GMT, 2pm local time weeklyweb@ahram.org.eg |
 Al-Ahram Organisation |
Recommend this page