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Nature Reviews Bioengineering volume 1, pages786–787 (2023)Cite this article
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The scientific narrative around food biotechnologies, such as genetically modified crops, is ineffective at predicting their role in the development and change of agricultural practices and food. Here, we suggest placing the scientific discussion of new food technologies in the context of the political and economic forces that shape agriculture.
A narrative has become commonplace within the scientific community on the role of new biotechnologies in relation to agriculture and food. It is frequently circulated by molecular biologists, plant scientists working on the development of new crops1 and agricultural economists2, and can be summarised as follows: “Biotechnologies have great potential in improving crops in faster and more precise ways than traditional crop breeding, making bioengineered crops key tools in the urgent challenge of combatting global food insecurity as they will enable farmers to produce higher yields. Additional benefits include a reduced environmental impact and improved health through insect-resistant and vitamin-enriched crops. The precision of the technology, adherence to scientific procedures and extensive biosafety regulations make the products safe for consumers”.
Notably, this narrative focuses solely on the potential benefits of biotechnologies, in particular, their role in ‘saving’ food-insecure communities in the Global South. Efforts to broaden this narrative to appreciate wider questions about the dominance of multinational companies over seed, and concerns about how to deal with the uncertainty that inevitably comes with the use of new technologies, are yet to be effective. Often, such efforts are framed as unscientific and an obstacle to the commercialization of new technologies, and subsequently, to societal progress.
We argue that refuting these broader questions about food technology is a lost opportunity. For example, although genetically modified crops have existed for over 30 years, they have been of limited usefulness to food-insecure communities in the Global South thus far. An important reason for this is that the dominant scientific narrative fails to account for how food technologies are shaped by political, economic and social factors, and how they are used by various stakeholders in society3,4.
Here, we highlight three ways in which the prevailing narrative simplifies the role of crop biotechnology in agricultural development. We argue that understanding the future of food, and the role that new biotechnologies may or may not have in this context, requires a broader conceptualization of food security, political economy and agricultural practice than the prevailing narrative conveys.
The scientific narrative that new, higher-yielding crops will have a key role in building food security frames food security as a simple equation of ‘production minus consumption’. However, there is seldom such a direct connection between farmers’ yield levels and their food security5. Firstly, farmers do not necessarily select seeds or design their farming practices solely to maximize yield, and sometimes yield is not even a priority. In cases in which risk aversion and yield levels do not correlate positively, risk aversion is often prioritised. Colour, taste and storability are other factors that are often prioritised over yield6.
Factors beyond the farm also influence, and are sometimes decisive for, food access. One historical example is the Irish potato famine in the mid-nineteenth century, which killed a million people. The famine was a result of failed potato harvests caused by potato late blight fungus (Phytophthora infestans). On the face of it, resistance to late blight fungus (which can now be genetically engineered) would have prevented the famine. However, understanding the causes of the famine is complicated by the fact that Ireland continued to produce and export other food crops throughout the famine. Similarly, the global crises of the COVID-19 pandemic and the war in Ukraine have disrupted local and global food markets, raised food prices and increased global food insecurity — issues that cannot be solved simply by efforts to boost productivity at the farm-level. In this regard, narratives that frame biotechnologies within a simple equation of adoption–production–consumption do a disservice to the complexities of local and global food systems.
Despite initial hopes and continuing promises about crops with traits that are of benefit to subsistence farming and smallholders’ marginal environments, nearly three decades since their introduction, commercially available genetically modified crops, such as soybean, rapeseed, cotton and maize, remain primarily industrial, and have mainly been modified to include herbicide resistance, insect tolerance, or both7. These crops and traits have been useful and accessible to many large-scale commercial farmers who have the resources to invest in these technologies; however, existing genetically modified crops are neither affordable nor suitable for resource-constrained smallholder farmers.
Industrial crops and traits dominate the market owing to private-sector dominance of research and development, fuelled by increased opportunities to make private profits through patents. In fact, control over food production is limited to an increasingly narrow set of global players8. This concentration restricts choices for farmers and consumers, shifting control over seed from the farmer to the agrochemical industry, and limiting the variety of crops that are grown on our farms, thus undermining biodiversity. These are important reasons for the scepticism about genetically modified crops among farmers and environmental non-governmental organizations (NGOs). Despite hopes that gene editing would be coupled with less private-sector control and broader accessibility, the number of patents is on the rise9. By altering the scientific narrative to acknowledge this accessibility problem, the scientific community could become a key agent of change, for example, by pushing universities to waive patents, as was recently announced by Wageningen University in The Netherlands9.
Although the market is an important arena shaping the future of food, the way the market is constructed in the scientific narrative in effect only includes primary producers (farmers) and end consumers. The role of farmers beyond being commodity producers6, supermarkets steering production and consumption, and multinational seed companies limiting farmers’ choices8 are all invisible in the narrative despite their effect on global food regimes. Furthermore, the way in which the dominant narrative constructs citizens merely as consumers limits their choice to saying ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to a product already on supermarket shelves. Thus, the narrative does not reflect a broad understanding of how citizens object to, and seek to shape, new biotechnologies and technology governance, as, for example, reflected in social mobilizations by environmental NGOs and farmers’ organizations10.
The scientific narrative around new biotechnologies in agriculture has so far been unable to predict the real role that these technologies have in the context of the future of food. Accordingly, if scientists want to play a productive part in shaping the role that these technologies may have in our societies, the narrative needs to change. The new narrative should not ignore the relevance of these technologies, but instead place them in a more complex reality by acknowledging the political and economic forces that shape agriculture. To carve out this narrative, a broader group of actors, beyond molecular and plant sciences and economics, must work together. We suggest that interdisciplinary and trans-disciplinary dialogue should take place between natural and social scientists, environmental NGOs and farmers’ organizations on the possible technology pathways that lie ahead. This kind of exchange can create a more realistic narrative around the future of food and the role science and technology might have in agricultural change
