Genetic technologies key to reducing poverty
By Werner Balsen
FRANKFURT (DPA): New genetic technologies hold the key to reducing global poverty, the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) said in its latest Human Development Report.
More than a few Third World activists have no doubt taken to the barricades as anti-globalization forces have howled their protests. Just a year ago at the G-8 Summit in Okinawa, Japan, critics theatrically set a laptop on fire. "We can't eat computers!" the globalization sceptics shouted at the representatives of the industrial nations -- a dramatic, fiery gesture to let the conference delegates know what the demonstrators though of the "transparent attempts" to solve the problems of the southern states by means of high-tech.
UNDP Administrator Mark Malloch Brown, without disputing the that those charges have some merit, warns against ignoring the explosively increasing technical innovations in the areas of food, medicine and information. This would mean denying poor nations opportunities to make meaningful use of innovations which could change the life of needy people and open up pioneering development prospects to poor states.
Advances in biotechnology and new generations of medicines are making breakthroughs possible in the fight against hunger and illness. Brown has called for "a partnership between technology and development" The new UNDP report is intended to become a "manifesto" for this.
However, the report's authors carefully avoid idealizing new technologies as a cure-all, and they don't deny the risks -- in genetic engineering, for instance. But, they say, the economic and ecological needs of the industrial nations play too big a role in weighing the benefits and dangers and in deciding what the world's poorer states need.
The report said the arguments of the developing countries have to be taken more strongly into consideration in the interest of a fair debate. "We are bringing in this perspective," says Andreas Pfeil of the team of authors.
A further basic problem is that research institutes and industry orient their efforts towards the needs of high income consumers. As a result, more money flows into developing medication against the mad-cow disease which occurred in Europe, than into malaria research for instance, although 1.7 million human beings -- especially children -- die from this tropical disease each year.
On the whole, the report says, only 10 percent of medical efforts are concentrated on ailments which make up "90 of the world's burden of sickness".
Research in the agricultural and energy sector are just as little oriented towards the needs of developing countries. The UNDP report calls that a "market failure" and urged both the industrialized nations and the UN to correct it. Perhaps, for instance, governments could use guaranteed sales volumes as incentives for pharmaceutical companies to increase their efforts to develop medicines that are needed in southern countries, the UNDP said.
However, the authors stressed that they are not urging "a classical Keynesian intervention state". Their idea is one of governments, both in the north and in the south hemispheres, who recognize problems and try to solve them as "active mediators," the UNDP team said.
Renowned economist John Mayard Keynes says that state intervention is integral to macro-economics while classical economists hold the view that governments have to limit their activities in the economic field.
In a market economy, state intervention sometimes is incontestable (declining production, uncertainty, external factors, social costs) but it must not be overwhelming.