GM technology is not the solution against hunger and poverty but that it can be part of the solution.  As part of the Millenium Development Goals, the 189 UN member countries committed to halve hunger between 1990 and 2015. This imposes a substantial (about 40%) increase in grain production worldwide, which in turn demands yield increases since land and water are the most limiting resources for food production. Claiming that hunger is a matter of food distribution is cynical and all governments share the view that food security and extreme poverty have to be faced together by developing local agricultural production, which will then contribute to increase the purchasing power and the access to food commodities and to other goods circulating on the world market. Crop Biotechnology has been critically assessed as to its capacity to enhance agricultural productivity by several groups of experts and standpoints supporting crop biotechnology have been advocated by FAO (www.fao.org/biotech) and even by moral authorities like the Pontifical Academy of the Vatican (see here).

All reports point to the essential roles that agricultural biotechnology, including GM plants, can play, by improving yield, tolerance to the abiotic constraints of marginal lands, post-harvest conservation and nutritional composition of food. There is a consensus that, in order to benefit from these technologies, developing countries need to strengthen their political, institutional and regulatory systems in order to bridge biotechnology and agricultural research, to stimulate the overall seed market by transparent intellectual property rules and to coordinate the regional implementation of biosafety provisions.  In that respect, it is worth noting that international support is provided for information exchange and national capacity-building, namely via the UN Cartagena protocol.

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