Washington

Pressure point: protestors in Colombia lobby talks on regulating GM trade earlier this year. Credit: AP/CARMELO BOLANOS

Developing countries have called on the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) — an influential federation of agricultural research centres — to develop guidelines for the research, trial and commercialization of genetically modified (GM) crops.

At a meeting in Washington last week, hosted by CGIAR and the US National Academy of Sciences, agricultural researchers and research administrators appealed to CGIAR to provide guidance to help poorer countries address the global debate over the application of agricultural biotechnology.

With consumers' groups, largely from Europe, and purveyors of transgenic crops, mainly in the United States, battling to determine the global acceptability of the new technology, many speakers warned that the interests of poor nations are being brushed aside.

Even the most powerful developing countries are seeking help from CGIAR, a network of 16 major agricultural centres sponsored by the World Bank, the Food and Agriculture Organization and the United Nations, which spent $340 million last year on agricultural research.

Manju Sharma, secretary for biotechnology at India's Ministry of Science and Technology, called on CGIAR to publish guidelines on scientific research, field trials and commercialization to help governments set policies on agricultural biotechnology.

Speakers at the meeting also said that developing countries will depend on CGIAR to help counter the influence of the private corporations that control patents and information on transgenic crops.

Villoo Morawala-Patell, a professor at the University of Agricultural Sciences, Bangalore, India, said that public resistance is “not so much to GM food as to big industry”. She called on CGIAR to “set up a parallel and alternative technology base” to that established by the corporations “in which the status of the farmer is protected”.

CGIAR demonstrated its influence on the global GM food debate earlier this year, when it called on developing countries to boycott the ‘Terminator’ gene technology, which Monsanto has since abandoned.

CGIAR held the meeting of several hundred of its centres' officials and other interested parties to help develop its approach to transgenic crops. “Everyone is waiting for them, because they are such a big actor,” says Calestous Juma, a professor at Harvard University and a special adviser to the group.

“They can't sit on the fence anymore, because everyone is hacking away at the fence.” But the “conflicting interests” of CGIAR's donors, who include the major industrialized countries, make it hard to determine a policy on GM crops, says Juma.

Older biotechnology tools, such as genetic markers in plant breeding, are firmly established in the centres. But less than ten per cent of their work currently involves transgenics, say officials.

Many of the research centres are determining whether and how to take their first transgenic crops into field trials. As the Washington meeting took place, for example, rice farmers were invited to the International Centre for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) at Cali, Colombia, to discuss trials of the centre's first transgenic rice plant, resistant to the hoja blanca virus that damages rice crops in Latin America.

Such trials are strongly supported by researchers and research administrators across the CGIAR network. But private corporations have found them difficult to put into practice. In Brazil an injunction by Greenpeace has stalled Monsanto's plans to test five breeds of soybean, and in Mexico concern has focused on the effect of GM maize on wild strains of the plant.

The extent to which the publicly funded CGIAR network should support either field trials or the commercialization of GM crops was fiercely debated. Brian Johnson of English Nature called for a moratorium on commercialization, and Fred Gould, an ecologist at North Carolina State University, warned that developing countries are ill-equipped to cope with unforeseen environmental problems that may arise from the crops.

But supporters of transgenic technology, such as Klaus Leisinger of Novartis, accused detractors of delaying nutritional improvements that could save thousands of lives.

Leisenger attacked what he termed “bio-McCarthyism”. But Mark Sagoff, an ethicist at the University of Maryland, accused Leisinger of “fundamentalism” and argued that poverty is the real cause of malnutrition.

There was agreement with Sagoff's point that the ‘safety’ of GM crops is not the primary issue. As James Cook, a plant pathologist at Washington State University who represented the US National Academy at the meeting, put it: “This whole debate isn't really about safety. Safety is the card which is played to get the deeper political and economic issues on to the table.”

These issues include the fact that none of the first-generation transgenic crops are of much use to farmers in poor countries — rather, they will extend the productivity advantages enjoyed by heavily subsidized farmers in industrialized countries.

Another issue is the lack of technical knowledge in poor countries. But the most pressing concern is the imbalance of negotiating strength between the corporations that pioneered transgenic crops and farmers, scientists and governments in poor countries.

The developing world “must rely on the international organizations” to protect its rights, says Behzad Ghareyazie, director of the Agricultural Biotechnology Research Institute of Iran. But some speakers doubted whether even CGIAR has much negotiating power compared with the corporations.

Richard Jefferson, director of the Centre for the Application of Molecular Biology in International Agriculture in Australia, called on CGIAR to give its researchers “freedom to operate” in the face of ever-tightening restraints on their work.

Ismail Serageldin, chairman of CGIAR, was absent — he was in Paris, seeking to become head of the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization (see page 833). Alex McCalla, director of rural development at the World Bank, summed up on his behalf, saying: “We've heard nothing that shakes my conviction that biotechnology has tremendous potential.”