Stop Blaming Biotech Companies

Much of the debate about genetically modified food centers on the role of multinational biotech companies. Critics contend that biotech companies’ sole motive is to enrich themselves at the expense of poor farmers. Exploitative profit, to critics of genetically modified food, is what drives biotech companies. This is far from the truth.

True, biotech companies - and this applies to every business concern - are not philanthropic entities, there to dole out technologies as freebies. They must have return of investment. This, however, has never overshadowed their desire to solve the world’s food problems. If such was the case, American, Canadian, Mexican, South African, Indian, Chinese and Argentinean farmers, who cultivate genetically modified food, would be the worst of the wretched of the earth.

In conjunction with world governments, the biotech industry has fed hitherto hungry populations and invented vaccines to once untreatable diseases such as cancer and malaria.

To downplay the role of biotech companies in sustainable development is to miss the point. Governments don’t innovate, companies do. It’s the private sector that’s endowed with resources to engage in high-tech biotech research, and not governments. In most developed countries, investments in agricultural biotechnologies are concentrated in the hands of the private sector. Resultant benefits, however, have been transmitted to entire populations.

Corn or soybean farmers in these countries do not view biotech companies as profiteers. Instead, they see them as partners in development. Biotech companies supply farmers with high yielding quality planting seeds. Farmers are always guaranteed of high yields. This is, perhaps, the single-most lesson developing countries need to learn.

Government /private sector partnership is critical in enhancing food security. Governments can’t, by themselves, fight hunger and malnutrition. They must enlist the support of the private sector. Developing countries seem not to appreciate this fact.

Most developing countries are yet to acknowledge the important role that the biotech industry can play in enhancing food security. This might explain why they perceive biotech companies as profiteers, and not key players in emancipating poor farmers from decades of hopelessness and emptiness.

China, India, South Africa, Brazil, Mexico and Argentina have made tremendous progress in agricultural biotechnology. They are classic examples of what government/private sector partnership can achieve. There is need for other countries to follow suit for the war against hunger and malnutrition will never be won through lone-ranger tactics.