Biotech offers benefits and challenges

Biotech offers benefits and challenges

Biotechnology and the Environment
By Vandana Shiva, Third World Network, Pulau Pinang,
Malaysia, 37 pages.

JAKARTA (JP): Through biotechnology, known as biotech,
anything seemingly impossible becomes possible.

Theoretically, genetic engineering allows any gene to be moved
from any organism to any other. The recombinant DNA
(deoxyribonucleicacid) technology has the potential to transform
the genes into a global resource that can be used to shape new
life forms.

But, technological innovations and scientific change do not
merely bring benefits. They also carry social, ecological and
economic costs, writes Vandana Shiva in Biotechnology and the
Environment, a booklet which presents the impacts of biotech from
a critical standpoint.

The contents of Biotechnology and the Environment include
topics such as biotechnology and biohazards, which reveal some
current research on genetically engineered life forms and their
negative impacts on social, ecological and economic lives,
particularly in Third World countries; as well as biotechnology,
patents and private property rights regarding life forms, which
show how potentially harmful the patenting of life forms can be
for Third World nations.

The biotechnology referred to in this book consists of two
major groups. The first group -- genetic engineering -- refers to
the new technique deriving from advances in molecular biology,
biochemistry and genetics. The second is based on new cellular
procedures employing the older technology using tissue culture.

Biotech gives humankind the ability to alter the very fabric
of life. Biotechnologists are using this knowledge to play God.
Anxiety is increasing with the growing awareness that the
artificial recombinant DNA molecules could prove biologically
hazardous.

The adverse ecological and epidemiological consequences will
come true if self-propagating genetically engineered organisms
are accidentally or deliberately released into the biosphere. In
fact, the scientists closest to genetic engineering were the ones
who first expressed concerns regarding the emergence of the new
technology.

In this context, this book includes a statement by scientists
regarding the potential biohazards of recombinant DNA molecules,
led by Paul Berg, a molecular biologist from Berkeley.

Altering crops

At present, the development of these new technologies is
almost entirely controlled by transnational enterprises, although
universities and small firms formulate the techniques.

Twenty-seven corporations are working on all major food crops
to develop herbicide tolerance.

For the seed-chemical multinationals, this might make
commercial sense, since it is cheaper to adopt the plant to the
chemical than to adopt the chemical to the plant. The cost of
developing a new crop variety rarely reaches US$2 million,
whereas the cost of a new herbicide exceeds $40 million.

Herbicide and pesticide resistance will also increase the
integration of seeds/chemicals and the control of TNC in
agriculture. Soybeans have been made resistant to Atrazine
herbicides (from Ciba-Geigy), and this has increased annual sales
of the herbicide by $120 million.

However, strategies for employing more toxic chemicals in
pesticide and herbicide resistant crop varieties for Third World
farmers has had severe consequences.

Thousands of people die annually as a result of pesticide
poisoning. In 1987, more than 60 farmers in India's prime cotton
growing area of Prakasham district in Andhra Pradesh committed
suicide by consuming pesticide because of debts incurred for
pesticide purchases.

The introduction of hybrid cotton in the area created pest
problems. Pesticide resistance resulted in epidemics of the white
fly boll worm, for which the peasants used more toxic and
expensive pesticides, incurring heavy debts.

This is just one example illustrating the devastating impact
that new biotech products have on the economies of Third World
farmers.

Impact

Shiva examines the applications of biotech in the Third World
which, according to her, are worthless and detrimental.

The privatization of biotechnology in terms of patents in
agriculture and food production, the corporate effort to change a
common heritage into a commodity and to treat profits generated
through this transformation as a property right, will lead to
erosion, not just at the ethical and cultural levels, but also at
the economic level for Third World farmers, writes Shiva, who has
deep concern for Third World problems.

At any rate, Shiva blames, not only blame the North for
exporting their sophisticated and environmentally unfriendly
technology, but also criticizes the South for their governments'
efforts to access the new biotechnologies.

In their haste to acquire the new biotechnologies, the
Southern governments could unwittingly offer themselves, their
people and the environment as prime guinea pigs for the new
technology.

Therefore, she urges the Third World to rapidly evolve a
framework to assess biotech on the basis of ecological, social
and economic impacts.

This 37-page book gives insights into the consequences of
biotech in Third World nations. But, unfortunately, the book
lacks a glossary for current biological terms which makes it
difficult for readers not familiar with those terms to analyze
the text.

Wahyuni Rizkiana Kamah, graduate student of the Department of
Biology, University of Indonesia.