The Poor, Malnutrition, Biofortification, and Biotechnology - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 163

crops. This clearly hampers the commercialization of humanitarian or other minor GM
crops (Enserink 2008; Miller and Bradford 2010). Likewise, the time needed for these
processes has led to delays in advancing the development of Golden Rice and other GM
crops with product quality traits (Enserink 2008; Graff et al. 2009a; Potrykus 2010a,
2010b). This created a self-defeating situation: opponents of Golden Rice criticize that
so far little has come out of the research, while, not least due to their opposition to GM
crops, research on GM crops can only advance slowly.
In this context a main criticism of current regulation is the inconsistency with
which GM crops are treated vis-à-vis crops produced through other breeding meth-
ods (Enserink 2008; Potrykus 2010a, 2010b; Fedoroff 2011). Whether this unequal
treatment is likely to change any time soon is questionable, given that analyses
of the underlying political economy indicate that “the sum of all interests involved
ensures that subsistence farmers are systematically denied access to agricultural bio-
technology” (Apel 2010, 635). For various reasons many stakeholders—whether the
agri-biotech industry, agrochemical companies, the organic food industry, EU farm-
ers, activist groups, Western consumers, or politicians in both developed and devel-
oping countries—have a self-interest in maintaining a strict regulatory framework
even if the easier development of more and new GM crops would increase global wel-
fare (Graff et al. 2009b).
Conclusions
Next to outright hunger and overweight, micronutrient deficiencies represent a third
aspect of the global malnutrition problem. The lack of essential vitamins and minerals
in people's diets may be less apparent at first sight, which is why it is also called “hidden
hunger,” but it is one of the leading contributors to the global burden of disease. While
micronutrient malnutrition has been recognized as a public health problem, and inter-
ventions such as supplementation or fortification are being implemented with varying
success in developing countries, progress has nevertheless been limited.
In this context a new approach has been developed that aims at complementing these
existing interventions: staple crops are bred for higher contents of vitamins and min-
erals. This is called biofortification. The main advantage of this approach is its focus
on rural areas, which are not as easily reached by conventional programs. Moreover,
because these crops have to be developed only once, their widespread and continuous
cultivation and consumption allows exploiting economies of scale in reaping the nutri-
tional benefits. This makes biofortification potentially a very cost-effective intervention.
So far only very few biofortified crops have reached the stage of dissemination. Apart
from orange-fleshed sweet potatoes (OFSP), their potential has not yet been confirmed
in real-world settings. However, a substantial body of studies shows that increasing the
micronutrient content in crops is possible, whether through breeding or agronomic
approaches, and that the accumulated micronutrients have the potential to improve the