The genetic engineering industry has been claiming that at a time when more than 800 million people go to bed hungry, and their number is likely to swell to over 1.5 billion in the next ten years, biotechnology provides the only hope to feed the burgeoning world population.

The fact is that even at present the world has enough food to feed these 800 million hungry mouths. The problem is not of production but of access and distribution. It involves politics more than technology, with biotechnology having virtually no role to play.

The number of the hungry and malnourished in India alone has been steadily rising; in the rural areas, from 224 million in the early 1990s to 250 million in the mid 1990s. In 1999, India had produced a bumper harvest of wheat, some six million tons more than what it produced a year before. It already had a carryover stock of four million tons. In effect, the country was saddled with a ‘surplus’ wheat stock of ten million tons above the buffer requirements.
Aware that at least 250 million people were going to bed hungry every night, still the government had allowed the surplus stocks to be exported.

India’s stocks have multiplied to 44 million tons of wheat and rice this year, some 20 million tons more than the annual buffer requirement. Instead of distributing the surplus grain among those who desperately need it, the government is toying with the idea of either finding an export market or releasing the grain in the open market (read the private trade) at a subsidized price.

Much of the plentiful stocks are lying in the open for want of adequate storage space, and by the time the next harvest flows into the markets, considerable quantity will have been rendered unfit for human consumption.

Is the biotechnology industry competent to address the problems arising from over-production and lack of distribution?