A presentation given by Erik Millstone, co-convenor of the STEPS Centre food and agriculture domain on 2 December 2009 at the Royal Society of Chemistry, London. The meeting was jointly organised by the RSC and the Institute for Food Science & Technology.

1. Ethics of GM crop development
Erik Millstone
December 2009

2. Philosophical preliminaries:
I recognise that groups and individuals often
make different and conflicting moral
judgements, but assume that there are
some ethical issues on which we can
definitely distinguish between right and
wrong.
Those fundamental ethical benchmarks can
and should be grounded by reference to
universal human needs, primary amongst
which is the need to eat safe and nutritious
food, and to drink safe clean water.

3. Chronic under-nutrition, in a world in
which, in aggregate, there is more than
enough food for everyone, is ethically
unacceptable.
Currently something like 1,000,000,000
people are chronically under-nourished.
The needs of the most hungry constitute
the primary ethical benchmark for judging
agricultural and food systems and
practices.

4. A similar number suffer with chronic
over-nutrition, ie are over-weight or
obese; which is an important issue, but
ethically less important than chronic
hunger.
Chronic hunger is caused by poverty
not by scarcity. It is an artefact of
socio-economic regimes, not the
product of biology.

5. In 2008 the FAO estimated that in
aggregate the world’s total production of
cereals was ~2,285,000 million tonnes.
The FAO also estimated the world’s
population in 2008 at ~6.7 billion.
To a good first approximation in 2008 the
average per capita food availability was
~340kg/cap/year, or ~1kg/person/day.

6. If those cereals had been uniformly
distributed across all of humanity they
would have been sufficient to support
healthy lives for all who were not otherwise
unwell. One kilogramme of cereals is
sufficient to provide more than 2,300
Cals/day/cap.
There are post-harvest losses of cereals,
but people also eat fruits, vegetables, nuts,
fish, meat and dairy products.

7. The development of GM crops can and
should be judged against that
background, and by reference to the
criterion:
will they contribute to
diminishing chronic hunger,
poverty and under-nutrition?

8. The Green Revolution showed that
inappropriate technologies can be
technically successful but a socio-
economic failure because it amplified
inequalities. More food was produced
in eg Punjab, but ironically more people
suffered chronic hunger, because the
rich got richer and the poor got poorer.
In Kerala and Taiwan, there was a
more beneficial outcome.

9. The ‘unit of analysis’ is not so much ‘the
technology of genetic manipulation’, as
the particular ‘technological trajectories’
along which it is being, or could be
developed, and regulatory regimes
within which they operate.

10. I have no trouble identifying conditions
under which GM technology could be
used in ways that could benefit poor
subsistence farmers in rural areas of
developing countries, eg GM staples
for the Sahel region that were safe and
nutritious, but unpalatable to locusts -
though only if other socio-economic
conditions were also met.

11. A key question is: are the GM crops currently
available, and those under development,
suitable for the needs and interests of poor
rural subsistence farmers?
The answer is unambiguously: NO.
Herbicide tolerant crops were developed eg by
Monsanto to extract rent from ‘Round Up’, once
the patents on glyphosate expired.

12. Those corporate strategies were enthusiastically
backed by eg the UK government.
DTI, Jan 1991

13. Subsistence farmers in SSA have never
used herbicides. They hoe out weeds.
New technologies for SSA must be
employment-generating not labour-
displacing.
Insect resistant Bt crops have been
developed for the pests on industrial farms
not subsistence farms; they are far too
expensive for the poor.

14. WEMA and Harvest Plus will be irrelevant to the
needs of subsistence farmers, unless the seeds
are
• very low priced or free
• OPVs rather than hybrids
• free of IPR restrictions
• productive without other costly inputs
• reliable across climatic and seasonal variations.
WEMA is designed to be
• fully commercial
• hybrids
• partly IPR protected
• highly input responsive, and drought-specific.

15. A poor-farmer-friendly GM trajectory would be
very different. It would need to be:
• farmer first, bottom-up choice of R&D goals
• independent of MNC corporate control
• socio-economically and cultural sensitive
• employment-generating not labour-displacing
• resilience-enhancing
• dependency-reducing
• affordable
• sustainable and
• risk reducing.