[Mubin Khan:] You recently attended COP27. Could you speak about the discussions there surrounding food security and how biotechnology can play a role in addressing food insecurity?

[International Rice Research Institute’s Martijn Pakker]: There were a number of key takeaways: adapt or starve, help poorer countries help themselves, find out what works and replicate it, and get more involvement from the private sector. So there’s really a number of key things where biotechnology can actually fit into those pieces of the puzzle.

Biotechnology in all its forms – whether we talk about accelerated breeding, transgenics or genome editing – are all ways to improve both the nutritional content of crops but also their resistance to what we call abiotic stresses – to the stresses of climate change, increased resistance to pests and diseases, drought-resistance, salinity resistance.

I think a lot of the misconceptions also come from the fact that a lot of previous GM products – transgenic products rather – have generally come from a sector that was purely profit-driven. When we look at golden rice, when we look at a number of the products that have been developed by research institutes such as IRRI, the product becomes much more altruistic.

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