The developing world is in trouble. A staggering number of people worldwide - an estimated 800 million people - are undernourished because they lack the resources to obtain the food they need. This shortage of food contributes not just to starvation, but also to disease and malnutrition. Millions die annually from infectious diseases. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), just three diseases -- malaria, tuberculosis and HIV -- together cause some 300 million illnesses and 5 million deaths annually.

The undernourishment problem is one of distribution of food supplies: Although enough food is now produced worldwide to supply all who need it, hundreds of millions of people are undernourished or malnourished because they lack the resources to obtain the food they need. And, as the WHO tells us, the three deadliest infectious diseases "can each be prevented or treated for between $.05 and $10 [per capita]." So the most obvious solution to the most pressing problems faced by people in poorer countries is money.

Yet developing countries' financial woes are likely only to be solved by years of development, if at all. Massive charitable aid might help to assuage these problems in the short term, but finding a solution to the ravages of poverty that is both quick and sustainable is a complex puzzle.

There is some evidence that genetically modified (GM) crops might be a part of such a solution, but the use of such plants is a highly contentious political issue.

What's at stake

At stake in "The Global Food Fight," as one scholar has termed it, is the allocation of scarce funds to alleviate world hunger. The crux of the GM debate lies in whether the best way to increase local yields is by engineering better crops, or by educating farmers about how to more effectively utilize existing resources. On one side are biotech companies and some scientists; on the other, environmental groups such as Greenpeace. Advocates of GM crops in the developing world argue they have the potential to enhance yields, lessen the need for chemical pesticides and herbicides, increase the amount of arable land, and even deliver vitamins and vaccines. Opponents point to the inherent risks of the technology: People who have never been allergic to a certain food might have an allergic reaction to a GM version of the food that contains a gene from a different species. And ecosystems could suffer if hardy GM plants bred with wild species create invasive "super weeds."

During the Green Revolution of the 1960s, scientists in the United States and other developed countries bred high-yield strains of staple crops. They then distributed the new seeds to farmers throughout Asia, Latin America, and sub-Saharan Africa, all with funds provided by various governments and private charities. Sub-Saharan Africa is thought not to have benefited fully from the new strains because they were unsuited to its harsh environment, and the Green Revolution hurt some subsistence farmers who could not afford the chemical fertilizers required for optimum growth of the new strains.

The fact remains, though, that the Green Revolution marked a significant increase in worldwide food production. The crossbred plants that sparked the Green Revolution were created using a method of artificially mating plants to produce desired traits, such as higher yields or greater resistance to disease and pests. Genetic modification is a more direct means of achieving the same end: Rather than altering a crop over generations of breeding, scientists modify the plant's genome directly, usually by inserting one or more genes from other strains or species. Each alteration creates a unique product, one with no inherent similarity to any other genetically modified plant.

Ironically, the surge in production from the Green Revolution seems to have inspired a degree of complacency on the part of Western governments and philanthropic organizations.

"Annual foreign aid to agriculture in poor countries fell by 57% between 1988 and 1996 (from $9.24 billion down to just $4.0 billion, measured in constant 1990 dollars)," according to an essay by Robert Paarlberg of the Weatherhead Center for Public Affairs at Harvard University.

Worldwide hunger ranks at a lower priority on the agendas of many governments and charities, and there continues to be little agreement on how aid monies should be spent.  

GM enthusiasts and critics

While GM enthusiasts tend to believe that using GM crops to increase local production is the simplest and most pragmatic solution to the hunger problem, many environmentalists vehemently disagree. The way to increase production, they say, is not through "conventional" -- that is, technology-based --agriculture. Conventional techniques have damaged the environment with their reliance on chemical fertilizers and pesticides, environmentalists argue, and GM crops, rather than reversing this trend, could cause unpredictable harm to local ecosystems. The most promising remedies for world hunger, according to Greenpeace's website, "do not require risky releases of Genetically Modified Organisms, but simply involve improvements of present breeding technologies."

Some environmentalists also argue that GM foods will not alleviate hunger at all. As Brian Halweil of Washington's Worldwatch Institute told The New York Times, "The feeding-the-world argument is a very carefully engineered PR exercise to create some moral legitimacy for this technology."

Critics like Halweil cite the GM industry's concentration on crops to be sold to North American farmers, rather to poorer people in developing countries.

Advocates of GM view the lack to funding by private companies differently, however. "That is why public spending is still important," claims Martin Lipton, an economics research professor at the University of Sussex.

These two sides have become quite polarized, so that despite the commonality of their professed interests, there appears to be little prospect of an agreement on how best to combat world hunger. One example of this polarization occurred in July 2001 when the United Nations released a report stating that developing countries might benefit greatly from GM technology.

Grassroots groups around the world attacked the report's conclusions. Kevin Watkins of the charity Oxfam complained, "It diverts attention from the other technologies and farming practices that could also raise productivity."

Neither the report's authors nor its detractors put forth the idea that GM crops and sustainable agriculture techniques might be successfully combined.

Besides modifying foods to reduce hunger and dietary deficiencies, some scientists are developing GM products that could counter disease by producing antigens. Antigens are proteins that the immune system recognizes as foreign and eliminates. In a normal immune response, a virus, bacteria, or parasite produces an antigen, and immune cells target the invader by attacking the antigen. A plant containing an antigen might act as an oral vaccine. An oral vaccine is similar to conventional vaccines in that they both introduce an antigen to the body to prepare it for possible future infection. If the body encounters the antigen again, it then responds much more strongly than it would have without the vaccine "primer."

Where today's vaccines usually contain killed or weakened target virus, however, oral vaccines would include specific virus proteins. These oral vaccines would potentially have many advantages over conventionally administered vaccines, especially in developing countries. They could be produced cheaply, for a start. Also, they would be easy to administer compared to conventional vaccines, which require trained health workers, large quantities of clean needles, and often require special transport conditions, such as refrigeration.

Food vaccines are still in the nascent stages of development, but some encouraging results have been reported. In 2000, researchers at Cornell University reported successful trials of GM potatoes as edible vaccines against the relatively harmless Norwalk virus. The following year, Singapore's AgroPharm announced its intention to begin clinical trials of a potato Hepatitis B vaccine. Even if the clinical trials prove successful, however, more research will still need to be done to make edible vaccines easily transferable to developing countries. The potato is not an ideal vehicle for vaccines, since it is not a common food in many developing countries and may lose its effectiveness when cooked, as it did in the Cornell trial. The banana is an obvious candidate for edible vaccines because it is grown in tropical areas and readily eaten raw by children. However, it is genetically more complex than the potato and so would require more time to be successfully modified. Also, as molecular biologist William H.R. Langridge of the Loma Linda University School of Medicine in California pointed out in Scientific American, "Bananas need no cooking and are grown widely in developing nations, but banana trees take a few years to mature, and the fruit spoils fairly rapidly after ripening."

Despite these barriers, many scientists, including Alexander Karasev, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, see great promise in edible vaccines. At a recent American Medical Association media briefing Karasev named rabies, Hepatitis B, and even HIV as potential targets of the technology. "Eliminating infectious diseases through plant-based vaccines," he said, "will tremendously help people in developing countries."

Oral vaccines have gone largely unmentioned in the GM controversy, due in part to their newness.  

Responsible use of GM crops

As with any new product intended for human consumption, responsible use of GM crops requires careful oversight. Although GM foods have reportedly caused no ill effects to consumers or to the environment so far, concern exists that newly added genes in GM crops might cause unpredictable allergic reactions in some people. Also, crops engineered to resist pests or herbicides might crossbreed with closely related wild plants to create what environmentalists have termed "super weeds," invasive plants that would upset the ecological balance.

Environmental groups also point to Bt corn's detrimental effects on monarch butterfly populations, although it is not clear whether this effect is more significant than that caused by conventional pesticides.

In a study published this year in Science, Jikun Huang and colleagues showed that a similar product, Bt cotton, reduced farmers' use of chemical pesticides by more than 80%.

How can we be sure that the GM foods we eat everyday (and if you live in North America, you probably do eat them everyday) are safe? In the United States, environmentalists have criticized the Food and Drug Administration for what they see as lax regulation of GM foods.

Certainly most developing countries lack the resources to properly monitor the risks of GM crops. Regulation of GM crops is not a black-and-white issue, and one should be suspicious of claims that GM foods are inherently "safe" or "unsafe." After all, there is nothing in the process of genetic modification itself that distinguishes GM plants from any naturally occurring plant. Each modification of each plant carries its own risks. Thorough risk assessment, then, necessitates taking into account the specific modification when designing experiments to test under what conditions, if any, the plant might harm nearby ecosystems.

A 1999 report by the National Academy of Science recommends a series of lab tests on plants before they can be released into an open environment. If initial tests seem to indicate the plant is not a threat to the ecosystem, controlled field trials should then follow. During these field trials both the crop itself and the surrounding environment should be regularly tested for unanticipated effects. Such tests might also assess the long-term effectiveness of the crops - for example, plants expressing pesticides will eventually induce resistance to those pesticides in local insect populations. The National Academy of Sciences report also recommends establishing public databases of known allergens to help ensure that none are incorporated into new foods.

Opponents of GM crops tend to advocate a combination of old agricultural techniques and new means of information sharing as alternatives. There is an important distinction between conventional and indigenous agriculture: As used here, "conventional" refers to farming dependent on commercial or artificial input, while "indigenous" denotes older techniques.

"Experiments have shown that by changing farming methods, using better techniques, yields can be increased by far more than 35%," says Pete Riley of Friends of the Earth.

Some of these "better techniques" are detailed in The Real Green Revolution, a 2002 Greenpeace-sponsored report. The report cites cases of farmers increasing their yields by adopting alternatives to the "high input agricultural model where the benefits go to the equipment and chemical manufacturers and seed merchants."

The report calls for a switch from conventional agriculture to "organic and agro-ecological approaches," which are based on indigenous knowledge and sustainable techniques. This switch is no simple matter, though.

According to the report, obstacles include developing governments' active promotion of conventional agriculture, "crippling funding shortages" faced by non-governmental organizations that seek to introduce alternatives to farmers, and a lack of security of land tenure for Third World farmers. This last factor decreases farmers' incentive "to develop long-term organic management strategies," making the quicker pay-off of conventional agriculture more appealing.

Clearly, organic farming is not a quick fix for the world hunger problem, since it would require educational funds, social and political change, and significant information transfer to be implemented on a large scale. Most importantly, a switch to organic agriculture would necessitate a paradigm shift in developing countries from the idea that "modern," chemical-based methods are inevitably better, to an emphasis on the wide sharing of indigenous knowledge. But the scientific research needed to develop new GM crops is also neither cheap nor simple.