There’s been widespread interest in the UK Government Office for Science’s final report on The Future of Food and Farming: Challenges and choices for global sustainability. Most of the excitement has centred on the claim that GM foods are essential to feed future populations. I’m not going to go there; that way lies madness. Nor have I had time to read the whole thing, although I did take a pretty close look at the papers on which the final report was based. So I’m grateful to colleagues at the Global Crop Diversity Trust who pointed to a nugget from the Executive Summary. Among its “general priorites” for new science, are:
- Development of new varieties or breeds of crops, livestock and aquatic organisms, capitalising on recent advances in the biosciences.
- The preservation of multiple varieties, land races, rare breeds and closely related wild relatives of domesticated species. This is very important in maintaining a genetic bank of variation that can be used in the selection of novel traits.
- Advances in nutrition and related sciences. These offer substantial prospects for improving the efficiency and sustainability of animal production (both livestock and aquaculture).
The Trust, naturally, lighted on that middle one, but as I read it I found myself humming “Is that all there is?” It isn’t. There’s also “Undernutrition needs to be tackled by direct and by indirect intervention,” promising approaches for which “include biofortification of staple food crops with micronutrients, and the health conditionalities embedded in cash transfers”.
It will be fascinating to see how this extremely comprehensive report influences future policy on agricultural research and development, widely construed, not just in the UK but around the world.
Yes indeed. How influential are these reports really? Especially when decision-makers seem to largely prioritise their own jobs, golden handshakes and pensions above integrity.
I liked these bits:
“Strengthening rights to land and natural resources, such as water, fisheries and forests … at the levels of individual local producers and communities” … “should be a high priority”.
“Recent empirical evidence suggests that, compared with growth from other sources, growth in agriculture generates welfare gains that are much stronger for the poorest parts of the population. Cross-country econometric analysis reported in the 2008 World
Development Report shows that a 1% gain in gross domestic product (GDP) originating in agriculture generates a 6% increase in overall expenditure of the poorest 10% of the population, while the equivalent figure for GDP growth originating in non-agricultural sectors is zero growth.”
“… agriculture needs to be repositioned within governments as a profession dedicated to multiple ends, of which hunger and poverty reduction are central. Food production is the means, not the end.”