Sir Brian Heap
Well, Christian Aid and some other NGOs have set themselves, rather unwisely in my view, against modern technology and particularly against genetically modified crops and arguably, they say, it’s because of their concern for poor farmers in less developed countries. I’m quite willing to discuss that - I won’t delay on it at the moment but there are some serious concerns about their argument.
Now the Nuffield Council on Bio-Ethics, which is an independent organisation, not funded by Government, specialises in the analysis of complex bio-ethical issues and it concluded in the year 2000 that the large scale introduction of genetically modified crops was a moral imperative on the basis of the ethic 'to each according to need.' And the joint study which I chaired at the Royal Society of the UK’s Academies of Science and the US National Academy of Science in Washington, the Third World Academy of Sciences, the academies in Brazil, China, Mexico and India, all concluded that GM crops can be used to produce foods that are more nutritious, stable in storage, in principle health-promoting, and bringing benefits to consumers in industrialised and developing countries.
Now the academies also recognise that multi-national private corporations of research and institutes should share their technology with scientists in less developed countries to enhance food production per acre and hence food security; and schemes have been developed by UNEP specifically to do that so that this technology is now shared, and in my experience some of the brightest young molecular biologists in this field are from less developed countries who when they go home are fully equipped to use this new technology for enhanced food production and food security, but a central fund is needed and this is another international requirement: a central fund is needed to help those who work in less developed countries to protect their new discoveries, to patent their new inventions with the help of the World Bank and the IMF and the Rockefeller Fund. And if that was done, many of us believe it would be a potent signal to the next generation who are coming along that there is a social, political and humanitarian will to eliminate hunger and address climate change by rewarding innovation and by providing income generation for local institutions in less developed countries.
