A Technology for the ‘Base of the Pyramid’: Green Biotechnology in the Eyes of a Scientist, a Social Researcher, a Consumer

By Dimitris Drisis

A reader on Plant Biotechnology can see most of the publications rotating
and repeating the issues around Food Safety, Regulatory and Public Policy
and the role of capital in their support and development. The originality
of this work stems from the view that looks Plant Biotechnology in an
optimistic manner and through the spectrum of an old social theory where
science and public interest coexist in a harmonious way. It is informative
on the social role of Agricultural Technology to feed the world, but also
provides to scientists and managers in the industry an applied way to
solve ethical dilemmas with the introduction of a new technology.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris UK
• Release date: Apr 27, 2012
• ISBN: 9781469197166

Dimitris Drisis

Dimitris Drisis was born in Kavala Greece in 1969, fi rstborn of 3 children. His early exposure to Malthusian Economics by his father, the social role of agriculture to feed a growing population, his affi nity to nature and his fascination with the work of Norman Borlaug created the right motivation mix to study Agronomy, unusual for an city boy. His Postgraduate studies were in Masters Business Administration, Postgraduate qualifi cations in Marketing Management and Doctor in Business Administration with a doctoral thesis in the technology vs. society interaction using the profound and popular example of Agricultural or Green Biotechnology. His studies and professional life developed his pro-science and pro-capital professional attitude. His favorite quotes from Schumpeter “capital is not to provide silk stockings to the queens of the world, but to the factory girls” and Albert Einstein that “I never think of the future, it is always close enough” defi ned his economical beliefs on the role of corporations to plan timely and develop technologies that increase the social welfare.

Book preview

Copyright © 2012 by Dimitris Drisis.

Library of Congress Control Number:       2012906318

ISBN:         Hardcover                               978-1-4691-9715-9

                   Softcover                                 978-1-4691-9714-2

                   Ebook                                      978-1-4691-9716-6

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Contents

Acknowledgements

Reflections—A Personal Overview

Part I

The Base of the Pyramid

The Food Challenge

Part II

Part III

Making Sense of a New Technology

How Far is Scientific Risk

From its Perception?

Will More Knowledge Lead to Different Perceptions?

Do We Trust Science

and the Systems?

Solving Ethical Dilemmas for a Business Manager, for a Scientist, and for Everyone

Bibliography

Endnotes

To Norman Borlaug for inspiring me

To Iulia Drisis for encouraging me

To the brainy eight-year-old Efi Drisis for challenging my views

Acknowledgements

The writing of this publication was a long, invigorating, and motivating process that was accomplished in an appealing period of my life. Its completion would not have been possible without the help of a number of well-skilled and knowledgeable people.

First, I would like to thank my father and his strong conviction that Thomas Malthus could properly foresee the inability of Earth to feed the growing population. He gave to me the opportunity to argue that he was not. What started as a teenage challenge in my scientific curiosity lasted finally as more than 25 years of intense professional endeavour.

I thank Professors Alan Lovell, Paul Whysall, and Colin Fisher for inspiring me and encouraging me to pursue a doctoral thesis in the social consequences of agricultural biotechnology. Their coaching, support, and theoretical guidance were of paramount importance for externalising my view from lab to society. The originality of the idea, the debates that followed, and the applicable outcome marked to the outmost my professional ethics and career.

I thank the retired University Professor Pantousis Kaltsikis for advising me back in 1987 when I was a young student that ‘the secret to feed the future generations is inside the seed and not inside the field’. His multiple ‘invitations’ to resit in his exams shaped professionally my technical knowledge. In a witty but always respectful manner, I thank him for everything.

I thank my colleagues and friends Miltos Galanis, Spyros Adamopoulos, Philippe Castaign, Ursula Luettmer Ouazane, George Pontikas, Carlos Vicente and Andrei Marutescu. My view would never be complete without their expert opinion and the ‘platonic-symposium’ discussions. The young, enthusiastic, but also clear, reflective, and realistic mind of Andrei will be always remembered.

Reflections—A Personal Overview

The way to rock oneself back into writing is this. First gentle exercise is in the air. Second the reading of good literature. It is a mistake to think that literature can be produced from the raw. One must get out of life . . . one must become externalised; very, very concentrated, all at one point, not having to draw upon the scattered parts of one’s character, living in the brain.

(Virginia Woolf, A Writer’s Diary)

It was a critical moment in my life, not only in my career, to consider my professional exit from the agriscience industry, where I had spent sixteen years as a professional and another five years as a student. Revealing my age to the reader, that was almost half of my life.

I was lucky enough to see professionally and personally how agriculture and society interact in many parts of the world. Early enough as a young city boy spending the summer with my grandparents in rural northern Greece, I have experienced joy, happiness, and prosperity when the harvest was good, and misery and conflicts when a disease, pest, or drought was eradicating the harvest. Later, as a professional traveller in the developing world, I have experienced the same but with serious life implications following a crop failure. A technology that grows and secures the harvest provides to society and creates wealth; wealth creates health, higher life expectancy, social progress, and well-being. I will quote Jeffrey Sachs, who puts it bluntly, ‘Technology has been the main force behind the long term increases in income in the rich world’.

There was an intellectual stimulation during my teenage years that led me to study a domain that not many city boys find exciting. I was inspired by the role of Norman Borlaug as the feeder of the world. Imagine a simple process of crossing bread wheat varieties for rust resistance with a short Japanese variety that produces shorter, straighter, and stronger plants. You properly irrigate and fertilise, and the result is three times higher yield, and hundreds of thousands of people could be fed. This was the famous wheat that made Pakistan self-sufficient in wheat in 1968 and Dr Borlaug fairly recognised with the Nobel Prize in 1970. It was not a surprise that NGOs opposed him and he responded by calling them ‘elitists and naysayers who do not know what hunger means’. Although a story forty years old, it can always be contemporary.

Historically, agriculture and domestication were not a ‘different way’ of producing food, but it was a mental development among humans¹ deriving from environmental and societal changes. When someone considered that the ‘hunter-gatherer’ model was far more efficient, had a lower probability for malnutrition, infectious diseases, dental decay, and a more exciting diet, the obvious question was, ‘Why to change?’ Why to be a farmer? Using our imagination, we could see the anti-domestication homo Neanderthal activists questioning the trend. A theory argues that at the end of the ice age, the world suffered major climatic changes that shrank the amount of open land, dramatically favouring forests and seas. Another theory² argues about a population growth due to the birth of more children and the extinction of the mega fauna and mega mammals that decreased the availability of protein for the hunters and gatherers. There are many theories, but they all have the same basis—environmental changes, more ‘people to feed from a determined amount of land’, disease, and social changes deriving from different religious rituals. Although a story many thousand years old, it is still contemporary.

The first agricultural technologies were ‘slash and burn’ tools and the selection of the ‘non-shattering grain’ in the field in order to be used as seeds. This process initiated what agriculture is all about³—managing the nature’s resources for the good of mankind. In all theories, the change in life and the social structure comes as a consequence of the need to change; someone may argue. What is different today? Water will become a scarce resource, the number of the habitants in the earth will reach nine billion in 2050, which need to be fed from the same farming land, more and more humans will lead an urban life, etc.

Reflecting on the historical example mentioned above, I have realised that very few people understand what we do. As an employee of a well-known biotechnology company in a biotechnology moratorium country, I am a very ‘popular’ guest in the parties and public fora. It has become a political force to say that we bring only ‘evil’ in the world and the food comes only from the supermarket. Is it because of our communication ineffectiveness? Is it because laymen do not know what we do?