“…a change in the right direction, but it has not transformed the world into a Utopia”
One of my science heroes was a biologist and agricultural innovator. To some, one of the greatest human beings ever to have lived, to others a source of inequality and supporter of western agribusiness. He is estimated to have saved over a billion lives yet almost nobody has heard of him. He died in September 2009 and his name was Norman Borlaug.
His program (dubbed the Green Revolution) began in the 1940s when he worked to develop a more robust and high yielding wheat to grow in Mexico. By the 1960s his team had made enough progress that they introduced their wheat to India and Pakistan. In 1970 Pakistan produced 8.4 million tonnes of wheat (up from 4.6 million in 1965) and India increased its production to 20 million tonnes from 12.3 million five years earlier. In the 1980s, the technology was embraced by China which is now the world’s largest wheat producer.
What he did was selectively breed varieties of wheat choosing those that had favourable traits and crossing them. The ‘offspring’ were then tested for disease resistance and hardiness. After countless generations and meticulous trials he finished with some strains of wheat that could be grown in places where yields had always previously been very poor.
His critics usually target two areas of concern, either a distaste for tampering with the genetic code of plants or concerns about the environmental impact more intensive farming will have on countries in Africa.
- Firstly, there is a tendency in countries where food is plentiful to distrust crops produced by genetic engineering (of which cross-breeding is a variety). It may not be the hi-tech gene splicing available today but it is still seen by some as being ‘against nature’.
- Secondly, he was seen by some as promoting westernised intensive farming relying on lots of fertilisers and sprays. These of course would be supplied by US or European companies hence the claim that he was more interested in supporting western business than really helping the hungry.
Although initially heavily supported by wealthy philanthropic organisations (groups that use their wealth to do good works for their fellow human beings) pressure from environmental groups meant that the funding began to dry up.
“The environmental community in the 1980s went crazy pressuring the donor countries and the big foundations not to support ideas like inorganic fertilizers for Africa”
Professor Borlaug’s response was…
“Some of the environmental lobbyists of the Western nations are the salt of the earth, but many of them are elitists. They’ve never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for fifty years, they’d be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things.”
Biotechnology will continue to be incredibly important in the years ahead if we are to feed an increasing population with dwindling resources. Further examples of where genetically modified crops may have a role to play is in vitamin A enriched rice (Golden Rice) or vitamin A enriched bananas (read more here). About half a million children die every year from vitamin A deficiency and about another quarter of a million are made blind by a shortage of the nutrient.
There is a large lobby promoting organic agriculture as a way of feeding the population healthily and reducing the impact to the environment of pesticides and fertilisers. A recent article in New Scientist pointed out that…
“farming is the second largest source of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide, only slightly behind heating and electricity. And while it’s relatively easy to cut emissions from electricity by switching to solar, reducing emissions from farming is a tougher nut to crack”
Organic farming produces food that is no healthier for you and has a higher carbon footprint. Many organisations that run or promote organic farming are also very opposed to genetic modification even though it might be possible to produce crops that absorb greater quantities of carbon dioxide, require fewer pesticides and will grow in poorer soils. The arguments are nicely summarised in the following video from New Scientist.
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Questions…
- Give an example of (a) an organic acid (b) an inorganic acid.
- A gene is a code, but into what is that code converted inside a living cell?
- What is the main dietary component of wheat and rice?
- Vitamins are one of the micronutrients needed in the diet. The other group is minerals. Name a mineral essential to health, a food in which it can be found in good supply and the benefit that this nutrient offers.
- Name a ‘greenhouse gas’ and its human-caused source.
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