Agricultural Biotechnologies, Transgenic Crops and the Poor : Opportunities and Challenges

At the November 2009 World Summit on Food Security, states concluded that increasing agricultural productivity is the main means to meet the growing demand for food. They nominated agricultural biotechnology as a way of achieving this goal. A few months later, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) convened an important technical conference ('the Conference') to discuss the options and opportunities provided by such technologies for facing the challenges of food insecurity and climate change. The Conference did not use a human rights framework but it did come up with a number of conclusions directly addressing the needs of smallholder farmers and producers – one of the most vulnerable groups in the agricultural sector to which a human rights analysis would pay specific attention