Article for openDemocracy website
Is there a sustainability case for biotechnology?
Yes, to show my cards from the outset, I believe there is a 'sustainability case' for many forms of biotechnology. Used wisely, genetic modification technology could play a part in the development of a truly sustainable world - with environmental and social benefits as well as economic ones. But before I explain why, perhaps I should declare an interest - and explain where, as the Americans would say, I'm coming from.
I first worked on biotechnology for the UK Department of the Environment in 1980. The Department's strategic planners wanted to know what the environmental impacts of these new technologies might be. Later, for 15 years from 1983, I edited Biotechnology Bulletin, enabling me to visit over 100 biotech companies worldwide. I wrote a book (The Gene Factory: Inside the Biotechnology Business, Century Publishing, 1985) and several reports, including Double Dividends: US Biotechnology and Third World Development (World Resources Institute, 1986).
Since we founded the business strategy and sustainable development consultancy SustainAbility in 1987, we have also worked for a number of companies that use modern biotechnology and genetic engineering. Our longest-standing relationship is with Denmark's Novo Nordisk, but other companies that we work - or have worked - with in this area include Aventis, Cargill Dow, DuPont, Monsanto, Novartis and Unilever.
Because of the sensitivity of the issues, we developed a policy statement specifically on biotechnology in 1998 and posted it on our website. Our values had been tested late in 1997 when working with Monsanto, a relationship we unilaterally and publicly resigned early in 1998. We don't like resigning from relationships with our clients, but the issue was fundamental: we judged that the way Monsanto planned to handle biotechnology in Europe, particularly genetically modified foods, was doomed to failure. Worse, it threatened to undermine public confidence in other types of biotechnology. And so it proved. But none of that has shaken our belief that biotechnology will play a central role in the achievement of more sustainable forms of development.
We do see three possible scenarios for the future of genetic modification (GM), however. We label them Nuclear, Antibiotic and Microchip. In the first scenario, GM technologies are seen as having great promise early on, but then are progressively restricted as major issues arise. In the second, the usefulness of the technologies ensure wide use, but resistance and other negative effects drive growing controls. The third scenario is the one in most GM scientists' minds, in which modified genes become as ubiquitous in the modern world as microprocessors and chips.
Our interest in such technologies should be seen in the context of likely demographic trends and of the UN Millennium Development Goals. The goals range from reducing extreme poverty to halting the spread of HIV/AIDS. No-one should expect technology to solve all our fundamental socio-economic problems, which often have strong political roots. But I cannot see how the world will feed, service and support a population of 9-10 billion people in the latter half of this century without radically new technologies. It is not simply a numbers game, but the speed of the innovation processes that will be need to cope with the changes that growing human numbers and population densities numbers bring. These range from SARS-like infections through to the agricultural and health knock-on effects of climate change.
So does that mean that the protestors were wrong to try to stop Monsanto's promotion of GM crops in Europe? No, and indeed the opposite is true. The issues of traceability and consumer choice are basic to the development and introduction of more sustainable technologies - and Monsanto and its US government backers were clearly trying to deny European consumers choice by resisting GM crop segregation and the labelling of foods based on GM crop products .
But the real point is that public confidence is going to be a fundamental factor in the process of innovating our way towards sustainability. History suggests that any new technology will have a range of positive and negative impacts - economic, social and environmental. Modern biotechnology will follow the same pattern. If we are to introduce such technologies successfully in our increasingly complex world, we must ensure at least three basic conditions are met: (1) high levels of transparency and accountability; (2) small-scale piloting before large-scale introduction; and (3) a rapid response capacity to pull potentially problematic technologies or products off the market if and when significant problems begin to appear.
In thinking all of this through, I find it helpful to consider the labels used by EuropaBio (the European Association for Bioindustries) . It uses different colours to distinguish different application areas. So, for example, red biotechnology covers such human health care applications as diagnostics, vaccines, medicines and, over the longer term, gene therapy; white biotechnology involves the use of living cells like bacteria, moulds and yeasts to produce antibiotics, vitamins and enzymes; and green biotechnology can boost the production of renewable materials and fuels - and cut environmental impacts.
All these forms of biotechnology, and others, will need to be developed in close consultation with a wide range of stakeholders if they are to be socially sustainable. Green biotechnology, for example sounds attractive, until you recall that GM crops raise a whole raft of control, intellectual property rights, resistance and cross-contamination issues. But so great is the pace of change, and so focused will the bioindustry be on getting products with real benefits to consumers that my hunch is that by 2020 many different forms of genetic modification will be widely accepted by the public that would currently seem almost unimaginable.
For this to happen Europe will need to build democratically accountable political institutions and regulatory agencies that help rebuild public trust. And another necessary condition for sustainable innovation in Europe will be better education in science, technology and sustainable development. Europeans will also need more timely, credible and useful information on the characteristics of particular products. But no-one should use the very real innovation gap between Europe and the USA as an alibi for force-feeding Europeans, or anyone else, with the products of biotechnology without their prior informed consent.
Nor, despite the early failures of the coalition forces to find weapons of mass destruction (including germ warfare weapons) in Iraq, should we forget the very real long-term risks of what we might call aggressive biotechnology (or perhaps black biotechnology). Anyone who wants to get a sense of where that might take us should read The White Plague by the late Frank Herbert. When he wrote the book, over 20 years ago, he did the costings for a lab in which genetic weapons could be developed to kill off the world's women. When I talked to him soon afterwards he had reassessed the costings, because the first major recession to hit the biotech industry had left mountains of sophisticated equipment available at virtually bargain basement prices.
In the face of this particular aspect of biotechnology's potential, you might expect me to side with those who want to stuff the gene genie back into the bottle. Not so: even if we wanted to renounce GM technology now, we couldn't. Indeed, I support further bio-innovation in line with the principles of sustainability and the three conditions outlined above. But there is also something about the thinking of Richard Jefferson which I find deeply thought-provoking (www.cambia.org). He argues that biotechnology suffers because it is often pursued by giant corporations shifting from industrial chemistry to industrial biology, Monsanto among them. By contrast, he insists that we should radically democratise bio-innovation, to ensure both equity and food security. The idea of farmers setting up their own bio-labs, might raise hairs on many necks (how would we feel about North Korean GM farm labs?), but don't dismiss Jefferson out of hand. By definition, managing radical challenges requires radical thinking.
In many ways, what people like Richard Jefferson have in mind is very much akin to what happened with computers. To begin with, they were the preserve of very large producers and very large users. Then with the invention of the personal computer they escaped from their air-conditioned habitats out into the real world, mutating that world as they went. The early internet, in turn, cross-fertilised with these new technologies to put amazing tools in the hands of ordinary citizens. In the US, similarly, there are those who see the same thing happening with technologies like fuel cells, on the road to the much-vaunted 'Hydrogen Economy', and with space travel, with super-wealthy people like Amazon's Jeff Bezos intent on prizing space travel out of the bureaucratic claws of NASA.
However much we may feel that the GM-in-everyman's-hands future
is a profoundly uncomfortable vision of the future, history suggests this
is the way things will go. So do we wait for the future to run us off the
road, or do we try to jump aboard and grab the steering wheel?