ABSTRACT Food self-sufficiency is an important contributor to food security, and one of the potential solutions to this problem is increased food production productivity through agricultural biotechnology. In this paper, we study the relationship between a country’s genetically modified (GM) food policy and the food self-sufficiency rate (SSR) under conflicting interests, with the example of GM crop regulation and GM maize production in South Africa. We develop a theoretical model of a small open economy and investigate the GM food policy as the outcome of a GM and a non-GM food groups’ lobbying game that follows the model of Grossman and Helpman. The government maximises its payoff by considering the weighted sum of social welfare and contributions from interest groups. Our findings suggest that a lower GM food regulation supports domestic agricultural production, and we offer potential reasons why a country that has a low SSR still has a strict GM food policy regulation. We also find that the food SSR is a biased measure of food availability when both production and consumption change simultaneously.

中文翻译：

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利益冲突下的粮食自给自足和转基因监管：以南非转基因玉米为例

摘要 粮食自给自足是粮食安全的重要因素，解决这一问题的潜在解决方案之一是通过农业生物技术提高粮食生产效率。在本文中，我们以南非转基因作物监管和转基因玉米生产为例，研究了利益冲突下国家转基因（GM）食品政策与食品自给率（SSR）之间的关系。我们开发了一个小型开放经济的理论模型，并研究了作为遵循 Grossman 和 Helpman 模型的转基因和非转基因食品团体游说游戏的结果的转基因食品政策。政府通过考虑社会福利和利益集团贡献的加权和来最大化其收益。我们的研究结果表明，较低的转基因食品监管支持国内农业生产，我们提供了为什么一个低 SSR 的国家仍然有严格的转基因食品政策监管的潜在原因。我们还发现，当生产和消费同时发生变化时，食物 SSR 是对食物可用性的有偏见的衡量。