Lepton number violation in supersymmetric grand unified theories

We argue that the nature of the global conservation laws in supersymmetric grand unified theories is determined by the basic vacuum configuration in the model rather than its Lagrangian. It is shown that the suppression of baryon number violation in a general (R-parity violating) superpotential can naturally appear in some extended SU(N) SUSY GUTs which, among other degenerate symmetry-breaking vacua, have a missing VEV vacuum configuration giving a solution to the doublet-triplet splitting problem. We construct SU(7) and SU(8) GUTs where the effective lepton number violating couplings immediately evolve, while the baryon number non-conserving ones are safely projected out as the GUT symmetry breaks down to that of the MSSM. However at the next stage, when SUSY breaks, the radiative corrections shift the missing VEV components to some nonzero values of order M/sub SUSY/, thereby inducing the ordinary Higgs doublet mass, on the one hand, and tiny baryon number violation, on the other. So, a missing VEV solution to the gauge hierarchy problem leads at the same time to a similar hierarchy of baryon vs lepton number violation