WASHINGTON -- Developing countries have, according to this story, called on the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) -- an influential federation of agricultural research centresQto develop guidelines for the research, trial and commercialization of genetically modified (GM) crops.

At a meeting in Washington last week, hosted by CGIAR and the US National Academy of Sciences, agricultural researchers and research administrators appealed to CGIAR to provide guidance to help poorer countries address the global debate over the application of agricultural biotechnology. The story says that even the most powerful developing countries are seeking help from CGIAR, a network of 16 major agricultural centres sponsored by the World Bank, the Food and Agriculture Organization and the United Nations, which spent $340 million last year on agricultural research.

Manju Sharma, secretary for biotechnology at India's Ministry of Science and Technology, was cited as calling on CGIAR to publish guidelines on scientific research, field trials and commercialization to help governments set policies on agricultural biotechnology.

Speakers at the meeting also said that developing countries will depend on CGIAR to help counter the influence of the private corporations that control patents and information on transgenic crops. Villoo Morawala-Patell, a professor at the University of Agricultural Sciences, Bangalore, India, was cited as saying that public resistance is "not so much to GM food as to big industry". She called on CGIAR to "set up a parallel and alternative technology base" to that established by the corporations "in which the status of the farmer is protected". CGIAR demonstrated its influence on the global GM food debate earlier this year, when it called on developing countries to boycott the 'Terminator' gene technology, which Monsanto has since abandoned.

The story says that CGIAR held the meeting of several hundred of its centres' officials and other interested parties to help develop its approach to transgenic crops.

Older biotechnology tools, such as genetic markers in plant breeding, are firmly established in the centres. But less than ten per cent of their work currently involves transgenics, say officials. The extent to which the publicly funded CGIAR network should support either field trials or the commercialization of GM crops was fiercely debated. Brian Johnson of English Nature called for a moratorium on commercialization, and Fred Gould, an ecologist at North Carolina State University, warned that developing countries are ill-equipped to cope with unforeseen environmental problems that may arise from the crops. But supporters of transgenic technology, such as Klaus Leisinger of Novartis, accused detractors of delaying nutritional improvements that could save thousands of lives.

Leisenger attacked what he termed "bio-McCarthyism". But Mark Sagoff, an ethicist at the University of Maryland, accused Leisinger of "fundamentalism" and argued that poverty is the real cause of malnutrition.

There was agreement with Sagoff's point that the 'safety' of GM crops is not the primary issue. As James Cook, a plant pathologist at Washington State University who represented the US National Academy at the meeting, put it: "This whole debate isn't really about safety. Safety is the card which is played to get the deeper political and economic issues on to the table." These issues include the fact that none of the first-generation transgenic crops are of much use to farmers in poor countriesQrather, they will extend the productivity advantages enjoyed by heavily subsidized farmers in industrialized countries.

Another issue is the lack of technical knowledge in poor countries. But the most pressing concern is the imbalance of negotiating strength between the corporations that pioneered transgenic crops and farmers, scientists and governments in poor countries.

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