Rockefeller Foundation president says biotech is key to easing hunger

Gordon Conway, president of the Rockefeller Foundation, lectures on "Food Security in Africa" in the Biotechnology Building, Oct. 4. Robert Kaussner/University Photography

By Lissa Harris

Biotechnology is an important tool for alleviating hunger in Africa, according to agricultural ecologist Gordon Conway, a pioneer of the green revolution in the 1960s and now president of the Rockefeller Foundation. Conway, long an advocate of using technology as a means of alleviating hunger and poverty, was speaking in a Cornell public lecture in G10 of the Biotechnology Building, Oct. 4.

The directors of philanthropic organizations are not generally known for getting embroiled in controversy. Over the past few years, however, Conway has been doing just that. In the furor over genetic engineering, he has adopted a high profile as one of the few public figures charting a middle course.

However, Conway is quick to point out that his primary interest is not the technology but the problems of hunger and malnutrition he believes that technology will help solve. "The Rockefeller Foundation is not interested in biotechnology per se," he said. "It is only interested in biotechnology in the sense that it may have something to do with improving food security in developing countries, and particularly in Africa."

Conway said he sees genetically engineered crops as a potential boon to subsistence farmers in the developing world. He believes that opponents of genetically modified food are standing in the way of technology that could help poverty-stricken farmers. However, he also is a critic of the biotechnology industry, in particular for its development of "terminator" genes, which cause seed sterility, thus forcing farmers to buy fresh seeds every year instead of saving seeds from the previous growing season. Indeed, in response to public rebukes from Conway, Monsanto -- a leading agricultural biotechnology and chemical company -- recently pledged to drop plans to market terminator seeds.

The Rockefeller Foundation provides extensive research funding for both genetic engineering and traditional plant breeding. One of its best-known projects is the development of golden rice, a variety that has been engineered, using genes from a daffodil and a bacterium, to contain high levels of beta-carotene and other carotenoids, the nutrients the body converts into vitamin A. Other Rockefeller research seeks to develop crop varieties that are resistant to pests and diseases or that can thrive in soils with poor nutrient levels.

One of the challenges of such research, says Conway, is that it is impossible to devise solutions that are effective for all farmers. "The diversity in Africa is so great that if you wanted to have enough extension workers to make it function, you would have to have one extension worker per farm," he said. "The obvious answer is to turn the farmers into extension workers themselves, and then to turn the farmers into researchers. That's the revolution going on in Africa, which in some ways is the most exciting."

Conway showed a dramatic image of a farmer-as-researcher laying out patterns of seeds and stones on the ground as she constructed an intricate calendar of farming methods used on her land at different times in the year. "This is the kind of information that, when you see it finished, would be a scientific paper," he said. "I actually produced a histogram [a type of bar graph] based on that and published it."

Before his 1998 appointment as the 12th president of the Rockefeller Foundation, Conway served as vice chancellor at the University of Sussex, England. He also chaired the Runnymede Trust's Commission on British Muslims and Islamophobia, which issued the1997 special report Islamophobia: A Challenge to Us All.

Cornell University Press plans to publish the second edition of Conway's 1997 book Doubly Green Revolution: Food for All in the 21st Century. In the book, Conway tackles the
challenges of improving high-yield agricultural techniques to make them both ecologically safe and sustainable.

Conway's Cornell lecture was sponsored by the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, the Institute for Genomic Diversity, the Institute for African Development, and the Cornell International Institute for Food, Agriculture and Development.