Agricultural Biotechnology and the Right to Food

The spread of agricultural biotechnologies, and the conditions conducive to their development, have economic, social and environmental implications. This paper explores these implications for the realization of the right to food emphasizing genetic engineering as the most controversial biotechnological application. First, this paper will examine the risks and opportunities of transgenic crops to realize the different components of the right to food, namely the availability, accessibility, safety, nutritious quality and acceptability of food, as well as the degree of sustainability with which that food is grown (infra IV). The opportunities seem boundless: higher productivity on the same amount of land, saving virgin soils and increasing overall availability of food; improved nutritional values; the development of crops for saline, dry or other marginalized soils; etc. At the same time uncertainties about the long-term health and environmental risks give rise to legitimate concern. Second, the analysis broadens to examine the effects on the right to food of the manner in which transgenic crops are developed, protected and marketed (infra V). This section will address issues such as the consequences of a marked privatisation and concentration of research and market share in the hands of a small number of powerful transnational corporations; the effects that increased protection of intellectual property rights has on further research, on the access of developing countries to the new technologies and on farmers' traditional practices of saving and re-using seeds from their own harvest; and the lack of mechanisms to adequately acknowledge the important contributions of farmers and developing countries to biotechnological inventions