I am Dominic Glover, a researcher on technological change in smallholder agriculture, based at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. I'm one of the few people in the world who have read almost all of the peer-reviewed literature on the performance and impacts of Bt cotton in the 'global South' and I am sceptical about the uncritically laudatory ways in which that technology has been celebrated as a 'pro-poor' success. Bt cotton technology 'works' in a technical sense, but it is not without problems and it is not a miracle cure for poverty (Glover, 2010).

I also recently completed a literature review on the performance and impacts of transgenic crops in global agriculture, which includes a chapter on transgenic crops in the pipeline. Unfortunately, the document is not yet in the public domain but my experience in producing that document informs this message.

I have followed the discussion to date with interest and I thank the FAO for organising the conference and all the contributors for taking part. However, I am disappointed to see very little discussion so far relating to the development of subsistence food crops incorporating transgenic traits that could be of interest to resource-poor farmers.

I am thinking primarily of production traits such as drought-tolerance, nitrogen use-efficiency and salt tolerance, or basic characteristics like yield stability, hardiness/adaptation to poor soils, or suitability for intercropping.

I am aware of research programmes under way on important crops of the poor such as cassava, legumes (e.g. pigeonpea and cowpea) and sorghum. As far as I know, these programmes are prioritising traits such as nutritional improvement, insect resistance and virus resistance, all of which are traits whose value to the poorest and most marginal farmers can be questioned.

(For example:
- The Bt cotton experience shows that an insect-resistance trait cannot solve pest problems once and for all.
- Recent human feeding studies with Golden Rice confirm that that crop's beta carotene was bio-available to healthy consumers who were not particularly malnourished, which does not reflect the status of the target group of vitamin A-deficient people (Tang et al., 2009, 2012).
- Viruses are difficult to tackle because they tend to mutate very fast. A decade-long effort to develop a virus resistant crop may be wasted in a year or two if a virulent new strain of virus appears. [Was this a factor helping to explain why the famous transgenic virus-resistant sweet potato developed in Kenya did not perform well in field trials?])

In addition, every time I read about these projects on transgenic subsistence food crops, I hear that they are underfunded and struggling to overcome technical obstacles. Evidently, they remain 'orphan crops' compared to the sums invested in improvement programmes for commercial grain crops. (The possible exception is cassava, which is the focus of the BioCassava Plus project - http://www.danforthcenter.org/science/programs/international_programs/bcp/).

I would like to hear more about these and similar research programmes, especially their potential to reach commercialisation in the short- to medium-term.

Dominic Glover 
Post-doctoral Fellow 
Technology and Agrarian Development Group 
Wageningen University
The Netherlands
Tel: +31 (0)317 48 40 18 
Email: dominic.glover (at) wur.nl 
Skype: domglov
Personal website: http://www.tad.wur.nl/UK/People/Fellows/Dominic+Glover/ 
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/dominicglover 

References:
- Glover, D., 2010. Is Bt cotton a pro-poor technology? A review and critique of the empirical record. Journal of Agrarian Change 10 (4), 482-509.
- Tang, G., et al., 2009. Golden Rice is an effective source of vitamin A. The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 89 (6), 1776-1783.
- Tang, G., et al., 2012. â-Carotene in Golden Rice is as good as â-carotene in oil at providing vitamin A to children. The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 96, 658-664.

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