“The only Thing That Will Feed The World is Farmers”

John Hart

Steve Savage says biotechnology alone cannot feed the world. “The only thing that will feed the world is farmers,” he said at a forum on agricultural biotechnology.

Agriculture needs to avoid claiming that biotechnology will feed the world, says Steve Savage, a worldwide expert on agricultural technology.

“There is no single technology that will feed the world. The only thing that will feed the world is farmers,” Savage said at a forum on agricultural biotechnology held at North Carolina State University in Raleigh Nov. 18. Savage is an independent communicator and consultant with Savage and Associates and brings experience from Colorado State University and DuPont. Savage was the keynote speaker at the forum that drew more than 500 participants.

The NC State forum was held to address the challenge of feeding 9 billion people by 2050. The forum looked at the technologies necessary to feed a growing population in a sustainable way. Savage and other speakers stressed that biotechnology is important, but it is ultimately farmers who feed the world.

“Farmers need lots of tools to be able to do that and biotechnology is a very important one of those tools,” Savage said.  “We would like to give farmers all of the possible tools that they need. There’s always a danger in support of biotech of also going on with some of the other societal myths about agriculture as a whole. I occasionally see advocates of biotechnology falling into the trap of talking about industrial agriculture or corporate farming. There is no corporate farming.”

Savage said activists have learned that there is a synergy between being able to scare people about chemicals and about biotechnology.

“It’s one thing to have a reduction in pesticide use when it’s a poor farmer in Bangladesh whose been using something that’s been banned for 25 years in the developed world. It’s another thing to talk about pesticide use as if all pesticide use was the same when pesticides themselves differ dramatically,” Savage said.

“When we talk about a Bt-insect-resistant crop, were not reducing pesticides, we’re changing the mode of delivery and maybe changing the exact pesticide being used. Chemical and genetic solutions need to be used in parallel if we’re going to have sustainable control of pests.”

Still, Savage stressed that biotechnology is a must for meeting global food challenges. The good news is that there is good science and scientific effort supporting ag biotechnology. However, Savage stressed that the most important job is to talk about the critical role of farmers in making biotechnology work and actually delivering the technology that produces benefits.