When Liberals Ignore Science

By David Harsanyi

Friday, February 06, 2015

The New York Times claims that the vaccine controversy we’re all talking about raises important questions about “how to approach matters that have largely been settled among scientists but are not widely accepted by conservatives.”

Well, here’s another question: How do we deal with the false perception that liberals are more inclined to trust science than conservatives? Also, how do we approach the media’s fondness for focusing on the unscientific views of some conservatives but ignoring the irrational — and oftentimes more consequential — beliefs of their fellow liberals?

Though outing GOP candidates as skeptics of science may confirm the secular liberal’s own sense of intellectual superiority, it usually has nothing to do with policy. However, if you walk around believing that pesticides are killing your children or that fracking will ignite your drinking water, or if you hyperventilate about the threat of the ocean’s consuming your city, you have a viewpoint that not only conflicts with science but undermines progress. So how do we approach matters that have been settled among scientists but are not widely accepted by liberals?

Take vaccines. There is little proof that conservatives are any less inclined to vaccinate their children than anyone else. If we’re interested in politicizing the controversy, though, there is a good case to be made for the opposite.

For starters, polls show that Millennials (most of whom lean liberal) are far more skeptical about vaccines than are older Americans. You’ll notice that laws with easier loophole exemptions from vaccination are most often found in blue states, where we also find the most outbreaks. You may also notice that leading anti-vaxxers, such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr., are writing in the mainstream Rolling Stone, not National Review. As the New York Times itself already reported, half the children attending schools in Marin County, Calif., go unvaccinated by their enlightened parents. Unvaccinated children are clustered all over liberal counties in California. None of this is particularly surprising. Modern environmentalism perpetuates myths about the inorganic world and the evils of big pharma. Its adherents are just as likely to be in conflict with settled science as anyone else.

The perception that one political group is less science-savvy than another is predominately driven by the unwillingness of many conservatives to accept alarmism about global warming and the policies purportedly meant to mitigate it. But when it comes to climate change, volumes could be written about the ill-conceived, unscientific, over-the-top predictions made by activists and politicians. We could start with our own Malthusian science czar, John Holdren, who once predicted that climate change would cause the deaths of a billion people by 2020 and that sea levels would rise by 13 feet. In 2009, James Hansen, one of the nation’s most respected climate scientists, told President Barack Obama that we have “only four years left to save the earth.” In 1988, he predicted that parts of Manhattan would be underwater by 2008. If you don’t like high-speed rail, California governor Jerry Brown will let you know that Los Angeles International Airport is going to be underwater. And so on and on and on.

Undermining the future of genetically modifying crops — a process that, in one form or another, humans have been engaged in for about 10,000 years — probably hurts society (the poor, in particular) more than any global-warming denial ever could. Across the world, almost every respected scientific organization that’s taken a look at independent studies has found that GMOs are just as safe as any other food. There is no discernible health difference between conventional food and organic food. There is a difference, though, in productivity, in environmental impact, and in the ability of the world’s poor to enjoy more-healthful high-caloric diets for a lot less money.

Yet while Republicans are evenly divided on whether genetically modified foods are unsafe, Democrats believe so by a 26-point margin. Liberals across the United States — New York, California, Oregon, and Massachusetts recently — have been pushing for labeling foods to create the perception that something is wrong with them. Science disagrees.

Hydraulic fracturing is as safe as any other means of extracting fossil fuels. It creates hundreds of thousands of jobs. It provides cheaper energy for millions of Americans. It has less of an environmental impact than other processes. It means less dependency on foreign oil. It helped the economy work its way out of a recession. So 62 percent of Republicans support science, and 59 percent of Democrats oppose it. Numerous scientific studies — one funded by the National Science Foundation, which debunked the purported link between groundwater pollution and fracking — have assured us that there’s nothing to fear.

It doesn’t end there. What are we to make of people who mock religion as imaginary but believe an astrological sign should determine whom you date or are concerned that they will be whisked away in a flying saucer? According to a HuffPost/YouGov poll, 48 percent of adults in the United States believe that alien spacecraft are observing our planet right now. Among those who do believe extraterrestrials are hanging around, 69 percent are Democrats. Democrats are also significantly likelier than Republicans to believe in fortunetelling and about twice as likely to believe in astrology. I won’t even get into 9/11 truthers.

For many conservatives, resolving issues of faith and science can be tricky. What excuse do Democrats have? Maybe someone at the New York Times can find out.

Bush Didn’t Lie

By Deroy Murdock

Thursday, October 17, 2014

New media accounts — including coverage by National Review Online’s Patrick Brennan — confirm what I repeatedly have written since the depths of Operation Iraqi Freedom: The late dictator Saddam Hussein did have weapons of mass death, and the United States of America was correct to invade Iraq, find these toxins, and destroy them. Also vital: padlocking this Baathist general store for militant-Islamic terrorism.

As I explained on July 17, 2006:

    While the liberal press gently sleeps, evidence continues to mount that Hussein had WMDs, though perhaps not in quantities that would bulge warehouses.

    “Since 2003 Coalition forces have recovered approximately 500 weapons munitions which contain degraded mustard or sarin nerve agent,” states a June 21 declassified summary of a report from the National Ground Intelligence Center. “Despite many efforts to locate and destroy Iraq’s pre-Gulf War chemical munitions, filled and unfilled pre-Gulf War chemical munitions are assessed to still exist.”

It turns out that — based on open sources — I vastly underestimated the size of Hussein’s stockpiles of deadly devices.

In this story’s first outrage, it now transpires that Hussein had some 5,000 tank shells filled with sarin nerve gas, mustard gas, and other lethal agents. This is roughly ten times the arsenal that I reported that he possessed. Had I access to more accurate information back then, my pieces would have reflected the depth of Hussein’s supplies of these munitions.

These recent news stories overlook another discovery from 2004: The U.S. Department of Energy and the Pentagon removed 1.77 metric tons of low-enriched uranium from Iraq “that could potentially be used in a radiological dispersal device or diverted to support a nuclear weapons program,” according to a DOE press release. This development was almost totally overlooked by the entire press corps, absent The Weekly Standard’s Stephen Hayes, author Richard Miniter, and yours truly.

Team Bush’s near-silence about Saddam Hussein’s 3,894 pounds of uranium points to this story’s second outrage: the Bush administration’s phenomenally flaccid response to its most vociferous detractors on the WMD question.

Then-president George W. Bush’s critics used the most bitter and vicious tones to accuse him of deceiving America and the world about weapons of mass death. “Bush lied, people died” was the Left’s relentlessly repeated anti-Bush indictment. The liberal fever swamps were rife with theories that Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and their pals at Halliburton concocted the WMD charges from whole cloth. Why? To justify a U.S. invasion in order to seize Iraq’s oil fields. Lifting sanctions and simply letting Iraq’s oil flow must have been too much trouble.

The notion that Operation Iraqi Freedom rested upon a giant foundation of even bigger lies severely damaged the reputations of the United States of America, Bush, the conservative movement, and the GOP — the latter two of which tended to support the Iraq invasion. (So did then-senators Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, and John Kerry, and 108 other congressional Democrats at the time, although most later turned tail and pretended never to have voted to attack Iraq.)

Amid this wholesale meltdown of domestic and international public opinion, the Bush administration inexplicably and unforgivably yielded to the architects in Bush’s political operation and sat on this treasure trove of exculpatory evidence. In fact, Bush did not lie about WMDs. They really existed — and in enormous amounts. Moreover, they were sitting in the Iraqi desert, making U.S. GIs physically ill. (In yet another outrage, 17 soldiers reportedly were denied the medical attention or subsequent commendations that they deserved for handling these poisons. They also allegedly were told to clam up about what they saw.)

It is outrageous that the Pentagon and, apparently, Bush’s political team concealed proof that America’s chief casus belli actually existed. Instead, the howling hyenas of the Left were allowed to gnaw away at Bush’s political corpse.

Why did anyone involved in this disaster think that this would be good for America domestically or globally? How thick were the skulls of Bush’s political advisers not to see the importance of presenting this information amid deafening shouts that the president and those of us who supported Operation Iraqi Freedom were a pack of filthy liars?

Anyone who aided and abetted this extremely destructive cover-up should be removed immediately and barred permanently from government agencies, political campaigns, and party organizations.

The third and most frightful outrage here is that some 2,500 of these canisters of nerve gas and mustard gas remained in Iraq. Rather than implement a policy of “No WMD Left Behind,” roughly half of Saddam Hussein’s WMDs were cast adrift in Iraq.

And now they are in the humane and prudent hands of the Islamic State.

“Experts” now say that these deadly weapons have degraded and pose no threat to anyone.

Would you bet your life on this?

At any time, the Islamic State can use these weapons against American and allied targets in the Middle East or anywhere else. If they detonate them and they work, hundreds or thousands could be killed.

Then again, they or their comrades in the Jihadist International could strap these artillery shells to sticks of dynamite and threaten to explode them. While the sarin and mustard gas might be inert, which mayor, governor, prime minister, or president could bank on that? Such uncertainty would give the Islamic State tremendous leverage: “Obey our demands, or those sticks of dynamite will become a cloud of nerve gas.”

Bush did not lie, we now learn.

However, in some twisted act of self-mutilation, his government severely wounded itself and America by hiding the abundant evidence that would have silenced Bush’s and the USA’s loudest and harshest opponents and enemies. Even worse, these “imaginary” weapons — that proved to be all too real — were abandoned in the sands for the Islamic State to adopt as their own.

And, before he prematurely withdrew U.S. troops from Iraq, Obama did nothing to fix any of this.

From the Euphrates to the Potomac, this is nothing short of governmental malpractice.

A Different Consensus

Wall Street Journal Europe
Friday, June 6, 2008

Even as the U.S. Senate debates a vast new tax and spend regime in the name of fighting climate change, a more instructive argument was taking place in Copenhagen, Denmark. Some of the world's leading economists met last week to decide how to do the most good in a world of finite resources.

Scarcity is a core economic concept, though politicians and even many economists prefer to ignore it. There isn't an unlimited amount of money to be spent on every problem, so choices have to be made. The question addressed by the Copenhagen Consensus Center is what investments would do the most good for the most people. The center's blue-ribbon panel of economists, including five Nobel laureates, weighed more than 40 proposals to improve the world by spending a total of $75 billion over the next four years.

What would do the most good most economically? Supplements of vitamin A and zinc for malnourished children.

Number two? A successful outcome to the Doha Round of global free-trade talks. (Someone please tell Barack Obama.)



Wall Street Journal Europe
Friday, June 6, 2008

Even as the U.S. Senate debates a vast new tax and spend regime in the name of fighting climate change, a more instructive argument was taking place in Copenhagen, Denmark. Some of the world's leading economists met last week to decide how to do the most good in a world of finite resources.

Scarcity is a core economic concept, though politicians and even many economists prefer to ignore it. There isn't an unlimited amount of money to be spent on every problem, so choices have to be made. The question addressed by the Copenhagen Consensus Center is what investments would do the most good for the most people. The center's blue-ribbon panel of economists, including five Nobel laureates, weighed more than 40 proposals to improve the world by spending a total of $75 billion over the next four years.

What would do the most good most economically? Supplements of vitamin A and zinc for malnourished children.

Number two? A successful outcome to the Doha Round of global free-trade talks. (Someone please tell Barack Obama.)

Global warming mitigation? It ranked 30th, or last, right behind global warming mitigation research and development. (Someone please tell John McCain.) The nearby table lists other rankings.

"It's true that trade doesn't immediately save lives," explains Bjorn Lomborg, the political scientist who heads the Copenhagen Consensus Center. "But it's proven that when people have more money" – as tends to be the case when trade barriers fall – "they improve their health, their education and so on." The resulting prosperity reduces such problems as malnutrition and disease, while improving education. All three of those ranked high on the priority list.

The benefits of freer trade were estimated in a paper presented by Professors Kym Anderson and Alan Winters. They found that a successful Doha Round could generate up to $113 trillion in new wealth during the 21st century, at a cost of $420 billion or less from inefficient industries going bust. If you like ratios, that's a return of $269 for every $1 of cost. A less conservative projection puts the gains three times higher. More than 80% of this global windfall would go to the world's poorest countries.

Meanwhile, providing vitamin A and zinc would help some 112 million children in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia for merely $60 million a year. The minerals would help prevent blindness and stunted growth – increasing lifetime productivity by an estimated $1 billion. Similar if not quite so bountiful returns apply to investments in iron supplements, salt iodization and deworming, all low-cost measures that the economists in Copenhagen ranked highly. A private charity would be smart to seize on these opportunities, the way that Rotary International led the fight to all but eradicate polio in the 20th century.

No doubt there is room to debate these priorities, and that was the point of the Copenhagen sessions. But it's also instructive that the rich world's political cause du jour, global warming, fell well down the list. Research into low-carbon energy technologies, at No. 14, was the only climate-related proposal to reach even the middle of the priority list.

As Mr. Lomborg explains, the costs of mitigating climate change would be enormous for what are highly speculative benefits. He prefers research on new technologies, rather than a global cap and trade regime that would raise energy prices and thus reduce overall economic growth. Meanwhile, societies that are wealthier due to free trade will be better able to cope with the consequences of warming, if it occurs.

The Doha trade round has fallen out of the news, largely because there is so little political will to compromise and get a deal. As the Copenhagen Consensus shows, this is a global tragedy that will do far more harm to more people than a modest increase in global temperature.

How Sarkozy Lost France

By Guy Sorman
Monday, June 2, 2008

How does one go from a 53% electoral victory to a 20% approval rating in one year? Embattled French President Nicolas Sarkozy is undoubtedly asking himself that very question.

His private life isn't the problem. His much publicized divorce, followed by a third marriage to a former model turned singer, shocked the oldest and the most conservative voters. But the new Madame Sarkozy has become as discreet as she is elegant.

Rather, the problem is the disconnect between Mr. Sarkozy's rhetoric and his actions. What his first year in office teaches us – America's presidential candidates take note – is that the way to become the most unpopular of presidents is to take all sides on every issue. By talking like a reformer, Mr. Sarkozy has displeased the partisans of the status quo, and by failing to undertake the reforms he proclaims, he's also disappointed the partisans of change.

France missed out on the free-market reforms that swept the world in the 1980s, and has not since been able to make up for its relative loss of dynamism. Economic growth has been presentable – thanks to the accumulation of capital and to the excellence of globalized businesses that do not depend on the state – but nothing new is happening. For younger workers and smaller entrepreneurs, the operation of the market is gummed up by state interference. Unemployment remains around 25% for those between the ages of 20 and 28 (higher still among those without a diploma) and as high as 80% among immigrant populations in the ghettos.

No president before Mr. Sarkozy had directly confronted this French stagnation: Francois Mitterrand (1981-1995) could not liberalize France because he was a socialist; Jacques Chirac (1995-2007) did not want to.

Mr. Sarkozy said he wished to end this stagnation. He clearly campaigned on the promise of a freer economy. But once he was president, things changed; every gesture friendly to economic freedom has been followed by a half-measure or a renunciation.

Consider his recruitment of Socialist ministers – most notably Bernard Kouchner to head the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, but also Eric Besson at Economic Planning and Fadéla Amara at Urban Policy. This might have seemed wise at the time, but the pursuit of consensus prevents boldness of action.

Or consider his very first reform, that of the universities. The reform provides that university presidents are now to be elected by a council representing faculty, employees and students. Predictably, these councils have been taken over by leftist unions who will eliminate all conservative candidates. Privately, the professors' unions exult because nothing has really changed; publicly, they condemn the universities' supposed enslavement to the requirements of capitalism.

Another reform failure: genetically modified organisms (GMOs). France is one of the few countries in which farmers, in the face of a coalition of ecologists and leftists, find themselves denied the right to raise these plants. So what does Mr. Sarkozy do? In the land of Louis Pasteur, one might expect a speech about the glories of progress, an appeal to the French biotechnology industry. Instead, he supports a law that authorizes GMOs but makes their approval conditional on the permission of judges who will see that the environment is respected. Neither side in this fight was satisfied.

On the immigration front, Mr. Sarkozy has managed to antagonize both the right and the left. He provoked an outcry on the left and among human-rights organizations when he proposed to check the DNA of immigrants asking for family reunification. Meanwhile, he angers the right as his campaign promise to shift from spontaneous (often illegal) immigration to a more selective immigration policy remains merely rhetoric.

But perhaps nothing better illustrates Mr. Sarkozy wanting it both ways as his stance toward France's famed 35-hour work week. As a candidate, Mr. Sarkozy repudiated the extravagant law that limited the work week to 35 hours. As president, Mr. Sarkozy maintains the 35-hour limit: the left celebrates; the right is befuddled. But at the same time, Mr. Sarkozy multiplies exceptions to the 35-hour law, as long as the employer respects Byzantine juridical procedures.

One last example: Mr. Sarkozy and globalization. A steel business purchased by the Indian group Mittal risks going out of business. Will Mr. Sarkozy call upon the French to make the transition to activities that are more creative and worthier of the national genius (and of France's high salaries)? No. He hurries to the Lorraine, and swears to workers that he, as president, will not close a single factory.

How can one explain Mr. Sarkozy's refusal to choose, this great capacity to proclaim contradictory imperatives with such enthusiasm?

First, the noble hypothesis: To become the consensus president of all the people when one was elected by just over half of them is a temptation that spares no chief of state. But the allure of consensus, a nice idea in itself, leads to an incapacity to govern.

Another hypothesis: Mr. Sarkozy's inability to choose reflects a postmodern personality detached from all ideological convictions. Thus, President Sarkozy has conserved the whole monarchical protocol established by General de Gaulle in 1959, but he runs around in shorts through the palace grounds.

Mr. Sarkozy calls this collage of opposites "pragmatism." He denies (somewhat like Barack Obama) that there is still a division between right and left, as if there remained only the proponents of change and those of the status quo. But what change?

Without a clear vision, pragmatism à la Sarkozy, like consensus à la Sarkozy, is a recipe not for change but for ambiguity and unpredictability: France has a skipper without a compass.

The French are not pleased.

Bio-Foolishness

Wall Street Journal Europe
Monday, April 21, 2008

Poverty, famine and violence are among the supposed products of global warming in the future. Yet these calamities are with us today thanks to a key element of "green" policy, biofuels. This feel-good measure is becoming a real-world disaster.

The prices of wheat and rice this year will have doubled since 2004, according to World Bank projections. Soybeans, sugar, soybean oil and corn are expected to be 56% to 79% costlier than in 2004. The bulk of the increases have come in the past year and can be attributed to the West's push to turn these crops into fossil-fuel replacements like ethanol. Food prices will likely remain overinflated until at least 2015, the Bank says.

The result of these rising prices is that 100 million people could slip back into poverty, erasing seven years' worth of gains, Bank President Robert Zoellick warned earlier this month. Food inflation and shortages have sparked riots from Egypt to the Philippines, and six people were killed in Haiti alone during nine days of related unrest there this month.

Soaring oil prices have made it more expensive to transport food products, though the World Bank estimates this and costlier fertilizer account for only 15% of the rise in food prices. Improved eating habits in developing nations are also increasing demand for grains – both for human consumption and to feed livestock, since rapid economic growth in places like China means more people have enough money to buy meat. But the Bank notes that "almost all" of the increased growing of one of the key crops, corn, "went for biofuels production in the U.S."

It's no coincidence that the U.S. and the EU, which are leading the biofuel charge, both have powerful ag lobbies that see this latest eco-craze as a new way to milk taxpayers. U.S. and EU promotion of biofuels represent a trifecta of bad regulation: arbitrary production targets to juice demand, subsidies that encourage inefficient use of crops as fuel rather than food, and tariffs that stifle foreign competition. If only Third World consumers had the same influence as rich-world farmers.

The link between biofuel mandates and food shortages has become so clear that the European Environment Agency this month recommended that Brussels drop its target of getting 10% of its fuel for road transportation from crops and biomass by 2020. But so far, EU policy makers aren't budging. The only movement from Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas has been to make a tautological call for "sustainability criteria" for this supposedly "sustainable" policy.

The U.S. isn't any better. As these columns noted in February, the White House and Congress had scarcely mandated 36 billion gallons of biofuel production by 2022 – five times 2006 levels – when scientific studies debunking the environmental benefits of ethanol, et al. began piling up. So far, there's no sign of any serious rethink going on in Washington.

Meanwhile, the United Nations is playing its usual head-in-the-sand role. A report issued Tuesday at a Unesco conference in Paris suggests that greater reliance on organic farming – not biotechnology – is the key to stabilizing food supplies. In truth, using plants that are genetically modified to consume less water and produce greater yields, among other benefits, is probably the best chance we have of filling the food gap in the short and medium term. But eco-radicals have been making unscientific objections to "frankenfoods" for a long time now. It's hardly surprising that the specter of famine wouldn't change their minds.

Biofuel advocates say a "second generation" of plant-based power that doesn't compete with food production for cropland will be ready by 2020. Maybe so. But even if these predictions are right, can we really afford a 12-year transition to those new fuels, given the upheaval that is already under way?

One of the dangers of the global warming "consensus" is that policy makers, once committed to a certain plan of action, will be unable to change course. Admitting that biofuels are a special-interest scam would risk denting the enviro-industrial complex that is driving so much other policy these days. Just look at the continued push for a carbon cap-and-trade system in the U.S. While in theory this is a market-based mechanism for reducing carbon emissions, Europe's experience shows that in practice it's a way for certain companies to profit at the expense of others, with no discernible effect on the environment.

Green-dreaming central planners think they can radically alter the global economy with only minimal side effects. Unfortunately, as the food shortages world-wide are showing, this untruth is just too convenient for them to give it up easily.

Continuing the Green Revolution

Agricultural biotech has greatly improved human life. But we've still got a long way to go.

By Norman E. Borlaug
Sunday, July 22, 2007 12:01 a.m.

Persistent poverty and environmental degradation in developing countries, changing global climatic patterns, and the use of food crops to produce biofuels, all pose new and unprecedented risks and opportunities for global agriculture in the years ahead.

Agricultural science and technology, including the indispensable tools of biotechnology, will be critical to meeting the growing demands for food, feed, fiber and biofuels. Plant breeders will be challenged to produce seeds that are equipped to better handle saline conditions, resist disease and insects, droughts and waterlogging, and that can protect or increase yields, whether in distressed climates or the breadbaskets of the world. This flourishing new branch of science extends to food crops, fuels, fibers, livestock and even forest products.


Over the millennia, farmers have practiced bringing together the best characteristics of individual plants and animals to make more vigorous and productive offspring. The early domesticators of our food and animal species--most likely Neolithic women--were also the first biotechnologists, as they selected more adaptable, durable and resilient plants and animals to provide food, clothing and shelter.

In the late 19th century the foundations for science-based crop improvement were laid by Darwin, Mendel, Pasteur and others. Pioneering plant breeders applied systematic cross-breeding of plants and selection of offspring with desirable traits to develop hybrid corn, the first great practical science-based products of genetic engineering.

Early crossbreeding experiments to select desirable characteristics took years to reach the desired developmental state of a plant or animal. Today, with the tools of biotechnology, such as molecular and marker-assisted selection, the ends are reached in a more organized and accelerated way. The result has been the advent of a "Gene" Revolution that stands to equal, if not exceed, the Green Revolution of the 20th century.

Consider these examples:

• Since 1996, the planting of genetically modified crops developed through biotechnology has spread to about 250 million acres from about five million acres around the world, with half of that area in Latin America and Asia. This has increased global farm income by $27 billion annually.

• Ag biotechnology has reduced pesticide applications by nearly 500 million pounds since 1996. In each of the last six years, biotech cotton saved U.S. farmers from using 93 million gallons of water in water-scarce areas, 2.4 million gallons of fuel, and 41,000 person-days to apply the pesticides they formerly used.

• Herbicide-tolerant corn and soybeans have enabled greater adoption of minimum-tillage practices. No-till farming has increased 35% in the U.S. since 1996, saving millions of gallons of fuel, perhaps one billion tons of soil each year from running into waterways, and significantly improving moisture conservation as well.

• Improvements in crop yields and processing through biotechnology can accelerate the availability of biofuels. While the current emphasis is on using corn and soybeans to produce ethanol, the long-term solution will be cellulosic ethanol made from forest industry by-products and products.

However, science and technology should not be viewed as a panacea that can solve all of our resource problems. Biofuels can reduce dependence on fossil fuels, but are not a substitute for greater fuel efficiency and energy conservation. Whether we like it or not, gas-guzzling SUVs will have to go the way of the dinosaurs.

So far, most biotechnology research and development has been carried out by the private sector and on crops and traits of greatest interest to relatively wealthy farmers. More biotechnology research is needed on crops and traits most important to the world's poor--crops such as beans, peanuts, tropical roots, bananas, and tubers like cassava and yams. Also, more biotech research is needed to enhance the nutritional content of food crops for essential minerals and vitamins, such as vitamin A, iron and zinc.


The debate about the suitability of biotech agricultural products goes beyond issues of food safety. Access to biotech seeds by poor farmers is a dilemma that will require interventions by governments and the private sector. Seed companies can help improve access by offering preferential pricing for small quantities of biotech seeds to smallholder farmers. Beyond that, public-private partnerships are needed to share research and development costs for "pro-poor" biotechnology.

Finally, I should point out that there is nothing magic in an improved variety alone. Unless that variety is nourished with fertilizers--chemical or organic--and grown with good crop management, it will not achieve much of its genetic yield potential.