Feeding the world: are biotechnologies the solution?

Despite decades of progress in food production, storage and processing, roughly 1 billion people (15% of the world population) are still starving. The proportion of the population who are starving has of course decreased over the last century, but the population growth projections predict a larger number of starved people and deaths. These alarming projections are generally accepted by international bodies and stakeholders, who together are looking for solutions to this recurrent challenge of hunger. The last two decades have shown huge development and use of new food production techniques, including the use of biotech-derived products such as GMOs. New developments in science such as the availability of numerous sequenced genomes and better acknowledgement of the role of epigenetics in the development of living organisms associated with new technologies such as directed mutagenesis, RNA targeting and transformation could, as for the green revolution, lead to technical improvement of food crop productivity. The proponents of biotech-based food production argue accordingly that these new technologies will lead to a new crop productivity of balanced and healthier food, a position often presented as the main solution. In contrast, opponents argue that production is already enough but cannot solve the famine situation, and therefore predict that the situation will continue. To help understand the varied facets of these disagreements, this chapter examines the several factors involved in famine and starvation as well as the solutions offered by biotech and alternative solutions to feed the world. This discussion is made in the light of technical progress but also from a socio-economic perspective, describing the ‘bottlenecks’ faced by the development of biotech around the world.