Genetically modified organisms and smallholders in the developing world

✍ Scribed by C. S. Srinivasan; Colin Thirtle

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2000
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 31 KB
• Volume: 12
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0954-1748
• DOI: 10.1002/jid.753

✦ Synopsis

Earlier versions of the papers that constitute this policy arena were presented as a symposium at the annual conference of the Agricultural Economics Society, held at Hulme Hall, University of Manchester, in April, 2000. The conference came at a time when the environmental and food safety issues involved in the use of genetically modi®ed organisms (GMOs) had been continually in the national press for several months. By July 2000, the gulf between American and European attitudes was suf®ciently great that the USA was threatening to take the EU to the World Trade Organisation over the issue of restrictions on GM imports.

Whilst the GMO debate has raged in the industrialized countries, which really do not need to worry about food security, the developing country concerns have been rather different, but again the range of views is wide. In most developing countries there are clear opportunities as well as risks and the views of key institutions range from deep scepticism to cautious optimism. These issues are discussed in some detail in the background paper presented here, which is a short version of a study that Jonathan Kydd and his colleagues produced for the Department for International Development.

The second paper, by ourselves, investigates a particularly emotive issue, which is the terminator gene. Whilst it has been seen as a threat to the livelihood of poor farmers, the terminator technology is a response to the inadequacies of existing intellectual property rights institutions. The technology will have a signi®cant impact on the appropriability of returns from investment in plant breeding and consequently on private investment in the development of new plant varieties. However, the third paper, by Timo Goeschl and Timothy Swanson suggests that genetic use restriction technologies do in¯ict losses of productivity growth in developing countries. Their empirical investigation overcomes the