Plant sciences,public policies and food security

The context

Through at least the 1970s, aspiring plant pathologists at Cornell University were expected to read E.C. Large’s (1940) ‘The Advance of the Fungi’. This stirring account of early developments in the understanding of plant disease placed the impact of public policy squarely before the reader in its opening chapter on the Irish potato famine. While the devastation this disease wrecked on the potato crop captured students’ attention, Large made it clear that the ensuing starvation was as much caused by public policies as by the pathogen. The very high protectionist tariffs on grain imported into the United Kingdom kept prices well above what most Irish peasants could pay, with over a million people dying from starvation in the midst of relative food abundance. This is a sobering reminder that scientists engaged in research directed to improving food security must have an appreciation for the interplay between technological advances and public policy and the broader social context within which their findings will be applied.

‘The Advance of the Fungi’ was written early in the Second World War and the worldwide destruction from both wars in the first half of the 20th century far surpassed anything humans had wrought in their history. There was broad agreement among all combatant countries that such wars should never happen again. The United Nations was established to develop mechanisms to address potential conflicts before war broke out. But, it was widely appreciated that social conditions in which conflict thrived – poverty and hunger – would have to be eliminated for the world to enjoy lasting peace. Recognizing the perilous state of global food security and that over half of humankind was engaged in agriculture, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN was created in 1945 (http://www.fao.org/about/en/) to develop the means to systematically improve global food security.

Over the last 75 years, coordinated and sustained international investments have been made to promote sustainable economic development and food security. These include private philanthropy and the creation of numerous international development organizations: The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (www.worldbank.org), the Asian and African Development Banks (www.adb.org and www.afdb.org, respectively), the International Monetary Fund, the World Food Program (www.WFP.org), the International Fund for Agricultural Development (www.IFAD.org) and the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR, www.cgiar.org). Therefore, there is ample evidence that there are national and international policies explicitly directed to achieving food security and economic development. ¹

The relationship between public policies and technologies is strained and complex, with feedback loops, creative tensions and unintended consequences. Policies are the means to codify society’s norms, values and priorities. As circumstances change, often driven by technological advances, norms, values and priorities may shift and policy adjustments are needed. The process of making these adjustments can be a cumbersome and very time consuming in representative liberal democracies where conflicting values must be accommodated. As the pace of technology development increases, policy responses can lag and fail to address political and social concerns in relevant time frames.

As we are well into the twenty-first century, it is useful to consider how effective 20th century policies have been, the challenges they faced in implementation and how shifting geopolitical relationships, and especially a changing climate, are impacting agricultural science and food security.

Avoiding our Malthusian fate

Thomas Malthus articulated his concerns about humankind’s ability to feed itself in his landmark 1798 ‘Essay on the Principle of Population’. ² He argued that no matter how fast technology improved people’s lives, population growth would outpace technological advances and food production, resulting in starvation, disease and misery. ³ His assumptions were that human population growth rates are exponential while technological growth rates are arithmetic. His assumptions on population growth were well-supported at the time. And, he can be forgiven for not appreciating what was to happen in the world of science and technology.

While Europe was experiencing a transformation in knowledge as exploration revealed vast ecological riches and introduced new knowledge, in the late eighteenth century, the industrial revolution was barely underway and science was still in its infancy. Today, we take for granted that technology engenders its own positive feedback loops that lead to accelerating rates of change in much the same way as population growth. Innovation begets new products which themselves spawn new innovation and technologies. This has entered the modern lexicon as ‘Moore’s Law’, which anticipated the exponential growth in computer memory and processing capacity.

Nonetheless, during the 1960s, there was an influential school of thought that placed the Malthusian model in the context of the ecological concept of ‘carrying capacity’. This was popularized in Paul and Anne Erlich’s (1968) ‘The Population Bomb’ and plant pathologists William and Paul Paddock’s (1967) ‘Famine 1975’. Their thesis was that, based on historical growth rates, agricultural production could not keep up with population growth rates and that millions were on the brink of starvation. Their solutions included giving up on very large parts of the world that were doomed to famine and decline, regardless of any international aid (Official Development Assistance – ODA) efforts. Rachael Carson’s 1962 landmark ‘Silent Spring’ (Carson, 1962) highlighted the negative consequences of intensive farming, especially pesticide use, on natural ecosystems systems.

Another school argued that investments in agricultural technology, infrastructure, education and health care could buy enough time for population growth rates to be brought down to sustainable levels while feeding the world’s population and avoiding social and economic collapse. ⁴ The Rockefeller Foundation had been investing in agricultural and health sciences for decades, but in the late 1950s joined forces with the Ford Foundation to create centres of scientific excellence located in the developing world and focusing on the development of improved food production technologies. They created the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines in 1960, followed soon after by the International Center for Wheat and Maize Improvement (Mexico), the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (Colombia) and the International Institute for Tropical Agriculture (Nigeria). From this institutional nucleus grew the CGIAR ⁵ system of some 15 international research centres dedicated to various aspects of food security.

The initial achievements in rice and wheat yield growth far exceeded expectations in the first decade after the creation of the centres. By modifying the plant biology (primarily architecture, fertilizer response, photosynthate distribution to grains, day length sensitivity and seed dormancy), the yields of a single crop could be more than double and two or even three crops per year could be grown where only one was possible using traditional crop varieties. Long growth duration traditional varieties would simply add more leaves and stems with additional fertilizer while the modern varieties produced more grain.

The technological advances that led to these dramatic yield increases were built on over a century of work in the plant sciences – primarily genetics and nutrient management. But the seemingly sudden progress was a powerful argument for immediately investing in enabling technologies so that the much higher yield potential of staple crops could be realized at national scale. Major investments were made in irrigation schemes to assure a good yield in the event of drought and permit multiple crops throughout the year in tropical regions. Fertilizers were subsidized and transportation systems improved so that excess production could reach markets. And seed of the improved varieties was made publicly available at subsidized prices and free of any use restrictions. The phenomenal increase in wheat and rice production across Asia and the Americas – which came to be known as the Green Revolution – without doubt prevented famines and served as a solid foundation for the Asian economic miracle.

This is a classic technology – policy feedback system. The policy to invest – in this case by private philanthropies – successfully in science to improve food security justified infrastructure investments to enable the productivity potential to be expressed. The realized production growth yielded a financial and social return on the investments. Likewise fertilizer subsidies and creation of agricultural extension systems helped drive rapid and widespread adoption of the suite of interdependent technologies: seed, fertilizer, ⁶ irrigation and transportation. Economic growth and poverty reduction were products of policies and technologies derived directly from investments by private philanthropy, multilateral lending agencies and governments.

The Green Revolution was not without its shortcomings. While the new varieties responded to fertilizer applications and irrigation with dramatic grain yield increases, they tended to be susceptible to some pests and diseases. This led to farmers applying large amounts of pesticides that almost paradoxically made the pest situation worse (Heinrichs 2019). And many farmers adopted an ‘if 1 is good, 2 is better’ approach to fertilizer use. The combination of excessive pesticide and fertilizer use and uncontrolled extraction of ground water for irrigation has caused environmental damage in some areas. Critics also described Green Revolution technology as a tool of western capitalists to subjugate farmers in developing countries and destroying indigenous cultures. Irrigation schemes that help drive production growth favoured those farmers in the scheme, creating disparities in income and welfare. Widespread adoption of modern varieties replaced traditional varieties that had been developed by farmer selection risking the loss of hard-earned biodiversity.

The unintended consequence of potential biodiversity loss by varietal replacement was recognized early on. Indeed, plant breeders knew that they needed as much naturally occurring genetic variation as possible to use as raw material in their breeding programmes. It was obvious that if the dream of wide adoption of modern varieties were to be realized, breeders risked losing the source of future improvements. The potential tragedy of the plant version of killing the goose that lays golden eggs was addressed by the systematic collection of traditional crop varieties and maintaining them in sophisticated gene banks (Bramel, 2019; van Hintum, 2019). Decades of painstaking and rigorous conservation are now being rewarded as affordable gene sequencing technologies make it possible to delve into the genetic sequences behind the many attractive traits found in traditional varieties of many crops (Wang et al., 2018; Wing, 2019)

Second-order problems

By the1980s, the success of the Green Revolution caused concerns over mass starvation to recede. But, two serious classes of problems arose to take its place: food quality and the environment. This is a manifestation of ‘Liebig’s Law of the Minimum’ a concept in plant nutrition that states that rather than being limited by the overall nutrient supply, an organism’s growth is limited by that essential nutrient that is in shortest supply. ⁷ When that shortage is addressed, the next near-limiting nutrient becomes limiting. In our human context, once the basics of providing sufficient calories to keep people alive were met, shortages of vitamins and minerals became limiting and other imbalances led to increases in diet-related disorders such as type II diabetes, heart disease, obesity and colorectal cancers. Micronutrient deficiencies have been termed ‘hidden hunger’ and are being aggressively addressed by a number of public institutions, including those key to the successes of the Green Revolution (Bouis and Welch, 2019; Low and Zeigler, 2019). However, changing our crops to provide more balanced nutrition in many cases involves extremely complex engineering including transfer of novel genes into the crop species. The challenges presented by genetically engineering food crops will be treated in more detail later.

By the late 1980s, policy makers were paying serious attention to Rachael Carson’s warning of the impact of misuse of pesticides on our environment and turned their attention to degradation of our natural environment from deforestation and desertification, serious misuse of agricultural chemicals and loss of biodiversity. Worries over food security were superseded by worries over the quality of human lives in degraded environments. Emerging biotechnology facilitated identification of useful products in wild plants and court rulings permitted the patenting of naturally occurring compounds and genes in crops and wild species. This sparked fears of ‘biopiracy’ where originating countries and farmers would not share in the wealth generated by these discoveries.

These concerns found voice in the Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit in 1992 where The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) was introduced and subsequently ratified (www.cbd.int). The goals of the CBD were to preserve biological diversity, enable its safe and sustainable use and assure the equitable distribution of benefits derived from genetic diversity. These lofty goals are pretty much beyond reproach; but, developing and implementing policies to achieve them have turned out to be rife with consequences that were not necessarily fully appreciated at the time. Two implementing agreements, the Nagoya Protocol an Access and Benefit Sharing (www.cbd.int/abs) and the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety (http://bch.cbd.int/protocol), have had dramatic effects on the exchange of genetic resources and the use of genetic engineering, respectively.

Prior to the CBD, genetic resources were treated as public goods to be freely exchanged across borders. Plant breeders could protect novel creations, but the raw materials remained accessible to all and others could use even the protected varieties for further improvement. With the CBD and Nagoya Protocol genetic resources became sovereign resources and previously open exchanges among plant scientists were effectively stymied by complex bureaucratic procedures around ownership, licensing and several aspects of revenue sharing (see van Hintum and Brink, (2019) for a more detailed discussion). The International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (ITPGRFA) was developed in an effort to isolate food crop species somewhat from the most onerous consequences of the Nagoya Protocol. The Crop Diversity Trust (www.croptrust.org) was created to help provide long-term support for gene banks and implement benefit sharing that nonetheless remains a very difficult concept to operationalize. Wood and Lenné (2011) present comprehensive critical assessments of the CBD, ITPGRFA and the Crop Diversity Trust.

Unintended consequences

The continuing controversy over the use of transgenic organisms (hereafter referred to as genetically modified organisms (GMOs)) in food and agriculture is a timely example of unintended consequences and policies seriously lagging technological developments. Many in the scientific community are perplexed by the strong resistance in some quarters to GMOs in agriculture, despite abundant peer-reviewed scientific evidence for their relative safety compared to conventional technology and their positive environmental effects through reduced pesticide applications and enabling low- or no-till cultivation. Particularly dismaying is that many vocal GMO critics who reject the scientific consensus on GMOs disparage climate change deniers as ‘anti science’ because they dismiss scientific near-unanimity on the causes of global climate change.

A common critique of GMOs in agriculture is that they might cause unknown, devastating and unintended impact on the environment or human health. Indeed, embedding the ‘Precautionary Principle’ in the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development reflected this concern. Translating this concern into specific policy ended up being an enormously complex task as the Cartagena and Nagoya Protocols were being negotiated (Segger et al., 2013). The underlying, unspoken assumption is that unintended effects of a technology are bad. A problem with this thinking is that all technologies create knock-on effects many of which are unforeseen. And, there is no a priori reason to believe that these will be overwhelmingly negative. In many cases whether an unintended consequence of technology is good or bad depends on one’s perspective. ⁸

The case of GMO maize is instructive. Larvae of several Lepidoptera pests of maize bore into plant tissue to feed and develop. They are extremely difficult to control with ordinary pesticides that kill on contact because most of their life cycle is spent inside the plant where they do their damage. Maize engineered to express Lepidoptera-specific toxins produced by the soil bacterium Bacilllus thuringiensis (Bt toxin) ⁹ resist insect feeding damage and show the expected loss reduction. What was unexpected was the effect this had on some pathogens of maize. Fungi of the genera Fusarium and Aspergillus can infect maize plants via the wounds created by Lepidoptera larvae as they bore into the plant. These fungi also produce compounds (mycotoxins) that are highly toxic and carcinogenic to mammals – including humans and livestock that consume contaminated maize. It is now well demonstrated that maize engineered with Bt toxin shows reduced levels of these mycotoxins compared to near-isogenic lines without the Bt toxin (Bakan et al., 2002; Munkvold and Hellmich, 1999). Therefore, an unintended consequence of GMO maize is reduced levels of dangerous mycotoxins in the food system.

Another concern around GMO crops is that the seed will be patented and produced by large multinational companies, leaving control of our food supply in the hands of very few companies. A corollary is that only mega crops, such as maize, cotton and soybean, grown by relatively wealthy farmers will benefit, while ‘orphan’ food crops grown on relative small areas and by smaller farmers will be sidelined. An important reason that large companies seem to be the sole providers of GMO crops is that they are extremely expensive to develop and carry substantial risk. The expense of development, though, is not in the technology as this is now well advanced and widely available. Rather, very complex requirements have been put in place before a GMO can be approved such that only the largest companies can afford to comply with them. The regulations also carry the risk that if they are not properly satisfied, an otherwise safe and productive crop variety can be completely excluded from major markets. Bayer CropScience agreed to pay US$750 million to compensate US rice farmers when their crop was excluded from European markets because it contained trace levels of a GMO product not yet approved in Europe but approved in the United States (https://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/02/business/02rice.html).

It is a straightforward business calculation that large companies will go for the largest markets with the lowest risks. Smaller companies either cannot afford to take crops through the regulatory process or assume the risks of an inadvertent release, or both. Likewise crops with limited areas, or those grown by small farmers with limited resources, will be unattractive to large companies and too risky for smaller companies. The concern that GMOs will result in our food supply being controlled by multinationals looks to be a prophecy fulfilled by the regulations intended to assure that these foods are safe. Raybould (2019) presents an excellent analysis of regulatory frameworks, how they impact technology development and a way forward to simplify the current situation.

It is clear to many engaged in addressing issues around food security for coming generations that genetically engineered crops must play an increasing role in addressing some of the most intractable problems facing the global food sector. Micronutrient deficiencies in many of our staple crops can only be addressed through genetic engineering. Bouis et al. (2019) present a case study of the challenges facing public sector efforts to develop more nutritious GMO rice. We will need to modify some of the fundamental characteristics of our staple foods to better accommodate the changes in human lifestyles over the past 100 years and reduce the growing impact of lifestyle-related diseases alluded to earlier. This is only practical in many cases through genetic engineering (Singh et al., 2019). Adapting crops to the very different growing conditions that will be imposed by climate change can be done by a combination of genetic engineering and more conventional approaches (Ismail and Atlin, 2019). Reengineering the genetics of the fundamental plant process of photosynthesis can give real reductions in crop requirements for water and nitrogen while increasing yields (Long, 2019). Can our policies that are rooted in serious concerns from the 1980s and implemented through laborious negotiations during the 1990s and 2000s accommodate the new technologies that are emerging today? Recent events suggest that perhaps the rate of technological advances is outpacing the ability of policy makers to respond, leaving outmoded policies to constrain application of promising advances.

The policy – Technology disconnect

Public investments and private profit

Major advances in crop technology have resulted from massive public sector investments in basic and applied research at public research and education institutions. The working principle during most of the 20th century was that the products of these public investments would be freely available (Baenziger, 2019). The private sector could develop and commercialize products based on publicly funded research, but the underlying knowledge and technology would remain available to all. The public–private dynamic of agricultural technology was straightforward: The ‘public good’ feature of enabling technologies was preserved, while the private sector assumed the risks and harvested the benefits of product development. For federally funded research in the United States, the US Government retained any patents on the research results and would license them non-exclusively. There were two problems with this. First, government agencies had little incentive to aggressively commercialize products. Second, the non-exclusive licenses that government agencies granted were not very attractive to companies as it was difficult to establish a competitive edge in the market.

In the United States, the situation started to change in 1980 when the Bayh–Dole Act was passed by the US Congress. The resulting laws allowed universities to protect and own potentially useful findings obtained via federally funded programmes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayh%E2%80%93Dole_Act). The intent was to stimulate universities to innovate by allowing them to participate in profits that could eventually be derived from exclusive licenses to the discoveries of their faculty. There were two requirements. The institutions had to make an effort to commercialize, or license, their technologies. And, a portion of the revenue stream would go directly to the faculty or staff inventors named on the patents or licenses. Many OECD countries have adopted variations of the Bayh–Dole Act in governing intellectual property relationships between public institutions and the private sector.

While it appears that the overall impact of the Bayh–Dole Act has been positive, there are areas of concern. First, by including staff and faculty of publicly funded institutions in revenue streams, there is the potential for conflict of interests. Who will faculty in, for example, US Land Grant Universities respond to, the public or a company, if there are major financial advantages to favouring company interests? What research topics will scientists select? Low profit crops or systems could become orphans of the research and development communities. This dynamic is playing out across the globe as large agricultural technology companies increasingly dominate national markets and national governments for political, philosophical or economic reasons cede responsibility for research and technology development to the private sector.

This policy shift in powerful economies raises the much broader question of what the relationship between the private sector and the public sector should be and how benefits should be apportioned. This is particularly important for smaller and poorer countries as they typically adapt technologies and policies from richer ones, albeit much later. Public investment in agricultural research was a major driver for the assemblage of technologies and policies that revolutionized agriculture in the developed world. Public investments in international centres and national research and extension programmes played a similar role in helping developing countries escape the early predictions of widespread famine. Today’s major shifts in the roles and the relationships of the public and private sectors may have long lasting impact on future food security and whether the benefits of technology are fairly distributed. The most basic and risky research is still largely funded by the public, and this research will serve as raw material for later generations of technology. We may well be approaching a situation where the public sector assumes most of the risk while the private sector reaps and retains most of the gains. Unless means are found to direct significant finances from the private sector to maintain a vibrant public sector resilient enough to make risky research investments, societies risk starving the goose that has laid so many golden eggs.

Closing thoughts

The Malthusian fate of mass starvation did not occur because inherent feedback loops generated by new technologies kept food production rates ahead of population growth. Enlightened governments created policy environments in which investments were made by public and private sector that allowed and encouraged the new technologies to develop their potential. War-traumatized governments created an impressive set of institutions in the mid-20th century to resolve disputes, bolster temporarily weakened economies, stimulate economic development in newly independent colonies, promote orderly trade and generate new agricultural technologies in some of the world’s poorest and most populous regions. This is an inspiring record of success and is in large part due to the positive feedback between policies and technologies.

What should be our expectations that this mutually reinforcing feedback will continue? Policies may be considered to be the codification of the values, norms and priorities of their societies. In representative democracies arriving at a set of acceptable compromises from which the policies are derived can be a very messy and time-consuming process. The shorthand for this process is politics, and politics involve much more than dispassionate weighing of scientific evidence.

Policies have always lagged technology but the disconnect is becoming greater.

As the rate of technological change accelerates, it is becoming increasingly difficult for those advising policy makers to even keep up, let alone carry out a deliberate process of assessing the consequences of adopting new technologies. Temporarily halting certain lines of research until their consequences are better understood has worked in recent memory. In 1975, the scientific community self-imposed an informal moratorium on genetic engineering until there was reasonable assurance of it safety (Berg et al., 1975). The concerned research community at that time was small, rather insular, and the techniques required for genetic modification were available to only very few. Such an approach is unlikely to work in today’s global and interconnected scientific community.

Impacts on the environment, different segments of society – who will be winners and who will be losers – the broader economy, and relationships among trade partners and competitors may take many years to emerge. Retrofitted policies will likely be obsolete, as the technology they are responding to will have itself become obsolete. These may stymie new technologies, as in the case of CRISPR in the European Union. It may be noted that the political process engendered in liberal democracies is not capable of addressing the challenges posed by accelerating technologies. Thornton et al. (2018) lay out specific proposals for global policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and for the global community to mitigate and adapt to climate change. These proposals presuppose a global body with both the authority and the capacity to implement them. As the international institutions that so effectively dealt with hunger and poverty in the 20th century are under systematic attack by political philosophies favouring more nationalistic perspectives, the prospects for concerted global action grow dim.