I am interested in whether or not biotechnology can reduce hunger in ways that are effective, affordable and safe. In this respect I am less sceptical of biotechnology than many who currently debate the matter.

There are three crucial questions:

• can biotechnology help reduce hunger and hence help development?

• if biotechnology can potentially be helpful, what obstacles – including health and safety issues – should be considered?

• who should decide whether biotechnology helps development?

There are currently about 800 million chronically malnourished human beings in the world. About 200 million are in Africa, a third of the population of the continent. Most studies indicate that a great deal of the hardship there is borne by women and children. 65% of African women of childbearing age are anaemic, 40 million children are severely underweight for their age and 50 million are vitamin-A deficient. One estimate puts the number of children who die every year of illness related to malnutrition at 6 million.

So far, programmatic and governmental solutions have fallen far short of what is necessary to solve the problem. The United Nations has issued declarations, held meetings, and released plans to cut hunger in half by the year 2015, but no experts I know believe the problem will be any smaller by that time. Most expect it will get worse. As many as 2 billion may be chronically undernourished in 2015.

Africa: the heart of the dilemma

In Asia, average agricultural production skyrocketed after the Green Revolution to nearly 3 tons per hectare. But Africa, with its different geography and water systems, remains trapped or falling backward at a production level of about 1 ton per hectare. That is probably about the productivity a British farmer enjoyed during the reign of the Roman Empire. And the old Green Revolution has little to offer. Indeed, the increases in farming yields we saw then are slowing, and are now about half of what we saw at its peak.

In Africa, poverty is essentially rural and the only way out of poverty is through development based on agricultural and other rural resources.

• 70% of African employment is on small-scale farms
• 40% of all African export earnings are from agriculture
• Around 30% of African gross national product (GNP) is based on agriculture – and for most Africans there is really not a choice of employment. Either your farm succeeds or you are jobless.

The typical farmer in Africa is a woman with a family who has one hectare or less of low fertility land to harvest with erratic rainfall and no irrigation. Her farm faces numerous pests, diseases, and environmental stresses which would severely vex an EU farmer who enjoyed plenty of equipment and resources. But of course she lacks any real capital and her income is too small to enable her to maintain a sustainable livelihood, or provide adequate food, education, or health care for her children.

Today, she can potentially harvest 2 tons from her hectare, given the low fertility of her soil and her lack of fertiliser. African farmers pay the highest fertiliser prices in the world. Prices in western Kenya are $400 per ton of urea against $90 per ton in Europe. On average (and many use none at all) African farmers use only 10 kilograms per hectare of fertiliser while European farmers use over 200 kg/ha.

The African farmer’s staple crop, maize, is attacked by the parasitic weed striga. The latter sucks nutrients from roots, by boring insects, which weaken stems, and by streak virus. Her cassava crop is devastated by cassava mealybugs and a new super-virulent strain of mosaic virus. Her banana seedlings are infected with weevils, nematodes and the fungal disease black sigatoka. Her beans suffer from fungal diseases that shrivel pods and lower nitrogen fixation. And more often than not, she faces a drought during the growing season, reducing the yield of everything. Even if she produced some surplus harvest for sale, she would face stiff competition from highly subsidised farmers in Europe and America.

There are a variety of solutions to her problems. But many of her problems are difficult to solve by conventional means, or are even intractable. Examples include: resistance to striga, tolerance of drought, cowpeas resistant to pod borers, more nutritious maize, rice and cassava, and resistance to herbicides.Sometimes, conventional breeding simply takes too long. The high protein quality maizes took sixteen years to develop and they are only just getting into the hands of African farmers.

The growing success of biotechnology

It is to solve these problems in a timely and efficient manner that we need to turn to biotechnology. There are already indicators of success.

Biotechnology is not just about genetically-modified (GM) crops. It spans the full range of applications of the extraordinary discoveries of modern cellular and molecular biology – the fruits of a revolution that began over sixty years ago. Tissue culture, one of the key applications, has already produced crops that are in the hands of African farmers.

In East Africa, tissue cultured bananas – a staple food – are being produced free of pest and diseases and yielding over 50 tons per hectare in the hands of poor farmers. In West Africa, the new strains of rice – crosses produced by tissue culture between Asian and African species – are spreading rapidly. They are resistant to pests and weeds, grow in relatively dry conditions and yield 3 tons per hectare (or more) with little or no fertiliser. Most significantly, these new crops were largely developed with public money and hence have been made cheaply available to poor farmers.

The same is true of that other product of biotechnology – GM crops. For instance, China has had a lot of success with GM crops, and it clearly won’t stop. Some 5 million small farmers in China have been growing GM cotton for six years. They have higher yields, greater returns and, most important, no longer have to rely on the backbreaking and hazardous spraying of their cotton crops. As a result, pesticide poisoning of humans is declining. There have been similar successes in Africa, for example in the Makhathini Flats in South Africa where GM cotton has been grown for the past four years.

This evidence clearly suggests that biotechnology can help reduce hunger and hence help development. An increase in farm productivity produces a greater economic return from an African farmer’s labour and they will be significantly better off.

The toolkit of biotechnology – with its range of scientific tools from diagnostics through tissue culture and marker-aided selection to genetic engineering – can help farmers have more cushion in their lives, more food, more money, more ability to compete in the marketplace. It can literally change their story from a fight for survival to a chance to live and even prosper.

The barriers to progress

But there are obstacles to overcome which still limit the use of biotechnology as a tool of development:

• scientific barriers
• barriers to market entry that particularly disfavour developing countries
• international politics.

First, new and sophisticated farming techniques are usually expensive to develop because they generally require large research infrastructure, as well as the ability and resources to navigate through extensive regulatory structures. The field is dominated by merged global entities from the seed industry and the chemical inputs industry that have combined into five very large multi-national corporations.

Second, therefore, there is no profit for these corporations from investing in expensive research on new products that can only be purchased by subsistence African farmers with little money. So quite logically, these companies are not focused on improving the basic crops of the developing world – such as millet, sorghum, cowpeas, yams or cassava.

The absence of a profit motive results, unfortunately, in more than just benign neglect for the field of developing nation agricultural research. Because of the rise of a sophisticated global intellectual property system that covers many of the basic technologies in this area, publicly-minded researchers often have little access to new ideas and technologies in their field or are legally blocked from using what they do know.

Hence, the modern marketplace is not functioning in a way likely to produce useful biotechnological innovation for poor people. Indeed, left to its own devices, the gap is likely to grow – with wealthy nations’ farmers using ever more sophisticated techniques and poor farmers left with the same tools they have used for centuries or even millennia.

The free market structure is, then, skewed to serve the wealthiest producers. Further, intellectual property rules discourage the sharing of ideas and innovations that may be helpful to those working on behalf of farmers in developing nations.

The third and best-known obstacle to the use of biotechnology is the questioning over the safety and environmental impacts of this science. In the case of genetically-modified organisms, for example, there are legitimate concerns about allergenicity, toxicity and antibiotic resistance, and about gene flow and the threats to biodiversity.

But these latter are problems that should be dealt with through reason and analysis – not by scaremongering and demonisation.

A future of freedom

The essential facts are these:

• antibiotic resistance is not an inherent part of biotechnology and we can eliminate the need for these genes

• allergenicity and toxicity are issues with all crop varieties and biotechnology could actually reduce such hazards

• the risk of gene flow to other crops and wild plants is a real one (as is also true of conventional and organic crops), but with care there need be no significant unwanted effects

• more generally, biotechnology has the potential to increase food safety and actually lessen environmental problems by allowing reduced levels of pesticides

• biotechnology can, at the same time, make food more nutritious

These potentials are, however, not the focus of current attention. No one is asking what it would take to make biotechnology work in this way. Instead, we have forums that tend to generate more heat than light. Rather than a discussion with many voices participating, there is often an argument dominated by extremes.

In its simplest form, one side supports biotechnology, declares it safe, ridicules those who oppose it or support more regulation, and complain that opponents are holding back progress; the other side responds by attacking biotechnology, employing imaginative horror stories about what will happen, and ridiculing biotechnology proponents as destroyers of the natural world.

This unproductive game has now been exported to Africa. These arguments are excellent fodder for the news media, and provide a healthy living for public relations specialists on both sides, but they don’t do much for very poor African farmers.

So who will decide whether biotechnology can be helpful to developing nations, especially in Africa? The answer, I believe, must be that Africans should decide. Weighing the risks and benefits of these new technologies must be the task of the people who will use the techniques, suffer the risks and enjoy the benefits from them.

I believe this for both moral and practical reasons. People, and their elected representatives, should be free to make decisions for their own lives and community. But they have to do this with all the relevant information at their disposal, and without pressure from outside vested interests – whether these be governmental, corporate or activist groups.

There are, of course, clear problems with this answer. Not least because, even as African societies have decided to investigate the potential further, they still lack the means – in particular, access to intellectual property – needed to make appropriate biotechnology. Moreover, African governments and regulators lack resources needed to make regulatory decisions and enforce them.

Just as Americans have determined they will use this science (more than 170 million hectares in the United States are planted with genetically-modified crops), and some French people have inveighed against their nation’s acceptance of GM, so should Africans be allowed to make their own choice.

Global free markets hold out the chance for prosperity for many poor people, but the deck is often stacked against them. Large multilateral institutions like the UN hold out the hope of improved bargaining power, but cannot make decisions for specific countries or regions – especially when those countries currently lack the resources to evaluate scientific data.

But throughout the entire development discussion I think we would do well to chart a course based on the values of partnership, rejection of ideological extremes in favour of results, and approaches that give to Africans the right, the opportunity, and the responsibility to make their own choices.

Near the end of his life, Albert Einstein reflected not on his native field of physics but on the nature of progress. He concluded: “Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labour in freedom.” We have the chance to help billions more people enjoy the greatness of labouring in freedom – freedom from hunger and from the constraints of our decisions about what is best for them. I hope we have the courage to do the right thing.