Are biotechnology and sustainableagriculture compatible?

Agricultural biotechnology has been largely opposed by advocates in the sustainable agriculture movement, despite claimsby the technology’s proponents that it holds the promise to deliver both production (economic) and environmental benefits,two legs of the sustainability stool. We argue in this paper that participants in this polarized debate are talking past eachother because assumptions about biotechnology and sustainability remain simplistic and poorly defined. Geneticallyengineered (GE) herbicide-resistant and insect-resistant crop varieties are the most visible current forms of agriculturalbiotechnology, and thus the form of biotechnology that many in the sustainability movement react to. However, thesecrops represent a biotechnology option that has paid insufficient attention to the integrated and systemic requirementsof sustainable agriculture. In particular, common definitions of sustainable agriculture reinforce the need to includeconsideration of socio-economic distributive or equity effects into any assessment of sustainability. However, theframeworks that have been proposed to assess the potential for GE crops to enhance sustainable agriculture generallyneglect this essential socio-economic dimension. We present an analysis that augments the sustainability frameworks toinclude the full suite of environmental, economic and social impacts. A review of the latest science on each impact categoryreveals that crop biotechnology cannot be fully assessed with respect to fostering a more sustainable agriculture due to keygaps in evidence, especially for socio-economic distributive effects. While the first generation of GE crops generally hasmade progress in reducing agriculture’s environmental footprint and improving adopting farmers’ economic well-being, weconclude that these early products fall short of the technology’s capacity to promote a more sustainable agriculture becauseof the failure of those developing and promoting the technology to fully engage all stakeholders and address salient equityissues. To realize the sustainability potential of biotechnology will require fundamental changes in the way public andprivate research and technology development and commercialization are structured and operated. We identify newapproaches in these areas that could make this powerful biological science more compatible with sustainable agriculture