Food Crisis Requires “an End to Political Grandstanding”

Posted under Benefits of biotech crops, Blog, climate change, Companies, Diagnostics, Farmer Gene, Food And Agriculture, Funding, global food crisis, Medical Devices, Medical Supply, Pharmaceuticals, Plant biotechnology, Startups, Sustainability, Universities, Videos by biotechnow@bio.org (Biotechnology Industry Organization)

Nature Biotechnology published an editorial in their March edition in which they state that averting a global food crisis will require the deconstruction of several hurdles to the deployment of new strategies in plant breeding.

Last October, just 12 years after the 6 billionth person was born, the United Nations declared that 7 billion people now inhabit the earth. Of these 7 billion, close to a billion are chronically undernourished and another billion are malnourished.

The world’s population will swell to 9 billion in the next 50 years, during which the human race will consume twice as much food as it has since the beginning of agriculture, 10,000 years ago.

As the rate of population growth outstrips the rate of yield growth for crop staples, the world faces a food crisis that will require unprecedented intellectual, financial and material investment. It will also require the full deployment of every plant breeding technology currently available, including the generation of crops via transgenesis.

But even more importantly, it will necessitate a reemphasis on innovation, greater diversification of the agrochemical and agbiotech industry, streamlining and harmonization of regulatory oversight, and an end to the political grandstanding that has characterized the agbiotech debate so far.

Crop improvement will also be key, necessitating the deployment of the best plant breeding technologies currently available.

For more on this issue, click here:  http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/v30/n3/index.html

Biotech Crops Are Winning Over Farmers

Posted under Benefits of biotech crops, Blog, climate change, Companies, Diagnostics, Farmer Gene, Food And Agriculture, Funding, global food crisis, Medical Devices, Medical Supply, Pharmaceuticals, Plant biotechnology, Startups, Sustainability, Universities, Videos by biotechnow@bio.org (Biotechnology Industry Organization)

Fortune magazine’s Marc Gunther wrote a blog this week about the growing adoption of  biotech crops and the debate over their use:

The debate over biotech crops has become predictable. In his 2012 annual letter from the Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, who has a near-religious faith in technology and innovation, argues that an “extremely important revolution” in plant science, i.e., genetically-engineered crops, can help farmers in poor countries by giving them access to new varieties of crops that will better resist disease and adapt to climate change.

Days later, the Center for Food Safety, a Washington watchdog group and persistent critic of Big Ag, pushed back, saying that biotech crops had failed to deliver on their promise to alleviate hunger, and that Gates would do better to support low-cost “agroecological techniques” that don’t depend on patented, genetically-engineered seeds.

…The voices of farmers are rarely heard in these debates. (They’re probably working too hard.) But data released this week indicates farmers, through their actions, are voting for biotech crops. Last year, farmers planted an additional 12 million hectares of biotech crops, an increase of 8 percent over 2010, according to the annual biotech crop report of the ISAAA (International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications).

Why do more farmers every year plant biotech crops? Critics of genetically-modified crops will say they are tricked into it by marketing or lack of knowledge or short-termism, and it’s certainly true that the popularity of a product is not a reliable indicator of its value (ABBA sold more records than the Rolling Stones. People smoke cigarettes.). But if biotech crops didn’t make farmers more productive, or save them time or money, would they spread around the world as consistently as they have?

…click here to read the full article.

Watch a Q&A with Bill Gates in which he discusses biotech crops:

Bill Gates: Embrace Genetic Modification or Starve

Posted under agriculture, Benefits of biotech crops, Blog, climate change, Companies, Diagnostics, economic development, Farmer Gene, Food And Agriculture, Funding, global food crisis, Medical Devices, Medical Supply, Pharmaceuticals, Plant biotechnology, Startups, Sustainability, Universities, Videos by biotechnow@bio.org (Biotechnology Industry Organization)

Bill Gates has a terse response to criticism that the high-tech solutions he advocates for world hunger are too expensive or bad for the environment:  Countries can embrace modern seed technology and genetic modification or their citizens will starve.

When he was in high school in the 1960s, people worried there wouldn’t be enough food to feed the world, Gates recalled in his fourth annual letter, which was published online on January 24 and reported on by the AP in the Huffington Post. But the “green revolution,” which transformed agriculture with high-yield crop varieties and other innovations, warded off famine.

Gates is among those who believe another, similar revolution is needed now. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has spent about $2 billion in the past five years to fight poverty and hunger in Africa and Asia, and much of that money has gone toward improving agricultural productivity.

Gates doesn’t apologize for his endorsement of modern agriculture or sidestep criticism of genetic modification. He told the Associated Press that he finds it ironic that most people who oppose genetic engineering in plant breeding live in rich nations that he believes are responsible for global climate change that will lead to more starvation and malnutrition for the poor.

In his 24-page letter, the Microsoft Corp. chairman lamented that more money isn’t spent on agriculture research and noted that of the $3 billion spent each year on work on the seven most important crops, only 10 percent focuses on problems in poor countries.

“Given the central role that food plays in human welfare and national stability, it is shocking – not to mention short-sighted and potentially dangerous – how little money is spent on agricultural research,” he wrote in his letter, calling for wealthier nations to step up.

For Preventing Hunger, Biotechnology is Key

Posted under agriculture, Benefits of biotech crops, Blog, climate change, Companies, Diagnostics, economic development, Farmer Gene, Food And Agriculture, Funding, global food crisis, Medical Devices, Medical Supply, Pharmaceuticals, Plant biotechnology, Startups, Sustainability, Universities, Videos by biotechnow@bio.org (Biotechnology Industry Organization)

The journal Nature recently published an article authored by Calestous Juma, director of the Agricultural Innovation in Africa Project at the Harvard Kennedy School.

To survive the droughts, wars and other major causes of famine, Africa must embrace technologies that enable it to produce more, better food with less effort.

Juma argues, “if African countries can’t plant genetically modified crops to produce more and healthier food, vulnerable populations will be at risk.”

Indeed, without the advances in molecular biology and other scientific fields that occurred in the second half of the twentieth century, African nations would be much worse off than they are now. Without this Green Revolution, which enabled developing nations to import cheaper grains and grow high-yield seed varieties, analysts estimate that crop yields in developing countries would have been 23.5 percent lower and prices between 35 percent and 66 percent higher in 2000.

Caloric intake would have dropped by up to 14.4 percent, and the proportion of malnourished children would have increased by nearly 8 percent. Put another way, the Green Revolution helped to raise the nutritional status of up to 42 million preschool children in developing countries.

These tools were a great help to African nations in the previous century, but they are not sufficient to help Africa’s agriculture survive what is coming: rising population and loss of productivity brought on by ecological disruptions such as environmental degradation and frequent droughts.

To weather these changes, African nations must be open to new biotechnology tools that allow farmers to grow crops that have even higher yields and a higher nutritional content, and which can withstand biological and physical stresses.

At present, only a few African countries are allowed to grow genetically modified (GM) crops, partly because of restrictive national biosafety policies that impose excessive regulatory barriers to the adoption of agricultural biotechnology. This must change.