The increasingly bitter debate over the safety of genetically modified crops threatens to sabotage all the benefits that biotechnology can bring to agriculture and the developing world, federal international co-operation minister Susan Whelan warned last week.
She used a speech in Nairobi, Kenya, on Oct. 29 to call on developing countries to become more involved in the debate and on scientists to take seriously the critics of GM crops.
In the prepared text of her speech, Whelan said the debate is centred on just a small part of biotechnology, and a part that presents both opportunities and dangers that should be assessed “in a dispassionate manner” and judged in balance.
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“What is important is for developing countries themselves to make the decisions about the appropriate balance,” she said.
“It is crucial therefore for developing countries to join more forcefully in the debate on this issue.”
Whelan said it also is important that scientists join in the debate and take the critics seriously.
“Ignoring what may appear to the scientific community as the misguided or uninformed opinions of the anti-GMO groups could well disrupt the flow of both resources and goodwill to this area of agricultural research that holds significant potential benefits for developing countries.”
She said there is a “troubling and apparently growing divide on this issue” that threatens the general good, based on a fear of food safety, biodiversity contamination and intellectual property rights.
“The controversy in this one area threatens the entire field of biotechnology, which has served agriculture very well over many decades.”
Whelan was one of the first politicians invited to deliver the annual lecture to an international gathering of agricultural researchers affiliated with an international network of research stations. The invitation came after she was internationally lauded for her role in returning agriculture to the core of Canada’s international development strategy.
She used the lecture to deliver some blunt messages:
- If scientists want continued public support for long-term research funding, they should help their cause by showing governments some short-term results.
- Governments, including Canada, made an “unfortunate and costly mistake” in cutting back food aid and development funding in the 1990s. Canada now is trying to make up for its mistake by increasing agricultural development funding, aiming for $500 million annually by 2007-08.
- Developing country governments must invest more in agriculture and research.
- Governments must continue to contribute the majority of funds for international agricultural research to avoid having the research agenda set too much by the shorter-term goals of private investors.
- Climate change, while a controversial topic in some quarters, is real and will cause particular hardships in many poor and arid countries.
Whelan said sustainable development, with agriculture at its core, gives poor people more freedom.
“When people must choose between feeding their family and sending their children to school, they have no freedom,” she said.
Whelan pledged that Canada, after years of cuts to foreign aid and development, is committed to increasing its spending on international research and foreign agriculture development.
However, prime minister-in-waiting Paul Martin said last week he will review all future spending commitments made by the current government after he takes over.
As a deficit-fighting finance minister, Martin engineered the foreign aid budget cuts that Whelan now is criticizing and vowing to reverse.
