Food Science Hindered by Extremists

Canberra Times (Australia), April 4, 2003

'People should be concerned not with genetic engineering but with issues
such as access to and control of it, says Norman Borlaug'

Most agricultural scientists, including myself, anticipate great benefits
from biotechnology to help meet our future needs for food and fibre. In
the past 20 years, biotechnology has developed invaluable new scientific
methodologies and products which need active financial and organisational
support to bring to fruition. So far, biotechnology has had the greatest
impact in medicine and public health. However, there are fascinating
developments in agriculture.

Transgenic varieties and hybrids of cotton, maize and potatoes containing
genes from Bacillus thuringiensis that effectively control a number of
serious insect pests are now being successfully introduced commercially.
The use of such varieties will greatly reduce the need for insecticides.

Considerable progress also has been made in the development of transgenic
plants of cotton, maize, canola, soybeans, sugar beet and wheat. The
development of these plants could lead to a reduction in overall herbicide
use. Not only will this lower production costs; it also has important
environmental advantages.

Good progress has been made in developing cereal varieties with greater
tolerance for soil alkalinity, free aluminium and iron toxicities. These
varieties will help to ameliorate the soil degradation problems that have
developed in many irrigation systems. They will also allow agriculture to
succeed in acidic soil areas, thus adding more arable land to the global
production base.

There are also hopeful signs that we will be able to improve
fertiliser-use efficiency by genetically engineering wheat and other crops
to have high levels of Glu dehydrogenase. Transgenic wheats with high Glu
dehydrogenase, for example, yield up to 29 per cent more with the same
amount of fertiliser.

Other promising genes for disease resistance are being incorporated into
other crop species through transgenic manipulations.

I would like to share one dream that I hope scientists will achieve in the
not-too-distant future. Rice is the only cereal that has immunity to the
Puccinia sp. of rust. Imagine the benefits if the genes for rust immunity
in rice could be transferred into wheat, barley, oats, maize, millet and
sorghum. The world would finally be free of the scourge of the rusts,
which have led to so many famines over human history.

This is the power of new science.

Because most of the genetic engineering research is being done by the
private sector, which patents its inventions, agricultural policy-makers
must face a potentially serious problem. How will those resource-poor
farmers of the world be able to gain access to the products of
biotechnology research? How long, and under what terms, should patents be
granted for bioengineered products?

Furthermore, the high cost of biotechnology research is leading to rapid
consolidation in the ownership of agricultural life-science companies. Is
this desirable?

These issues are matters for serious consideration by national, regional
and global governmental organisations. First and foremost, governments
must establish regulatory frameworks to guide the testing and use of
genetically modified crops. These rules and regulation should be
reasonable in terms of risk aversion and implementation costs.

The world has, or will soon have, the agricultural technology available to
feed the 8.3 billion people anticipated in the next quarter of a century.
The more pertinent question today is whether farmers will be permitted to
use that technology.

Extremists in the environmental movement, largely from rich nations and/or
the privileged strata of society in poor nations, seem to be doing
everything they can to stop scientific progress in its tracks. It is sad
that some scientists have also jumped on the extremist environmental
bandwagon in search of research funds.

When scientists align themselves with anti-science political movements, or
lend their name to unscientific propositions, what are we to think? Is it
any wonder that science is losing its constituency? We must be on guard
against politically opportunistic, pseudo-scientists.

We all owe a debt of gratitude to the environmental movement over the past
40 years. This movement has led to legislation to improve air and water
quality, protect wildlife, control the disposal of toxic wastes, protect
the soils, and reduce the loss of biodiversity. It is ironic, therefore,
that the platform of the antibiotechnology extremists, if it were to be
adopted, would have grievous consequences for both the environment and
humanity.

Had 1961 average world cereal yields (1531kg per hectare) still prevailed,
nearly 850 million hectares of additional land would have been needed to
equal the 1999 cereal harvest (2.06 billion gross metric tonnes). Clearly
such a surplus of land was not available, and certainly not in populous
Asia.

Even if it were available, think of the soil erosion and the loss of
forests, grasslands and wildlife that would have resulted had we tried to
produce these larger harvests with the older, low-input technology.

Nevertheless, the anti-biotechnology zealots continue to wage their
campaigns of propaganda and vandalism. That the European Union, for
example, placed a moratorium on genetically modified imports says little
per se about food safety, but says more about consumer concerns, largely
the result of unsubstantiated scare-mongering.

The fact is that genetic modification began long before humankind started
altering crops by artificial selection. Mother Nature did it, and often in
a big way. For example, the wheat groups we rely on for much of our food
supply are the result of unusual (but natural) crosses between different
species of grasses.

Today's bread wheat is the result of the hybridisation of three different
plant genomes, each containing a set of seven chromosomes, and thus could
easily be classified as transgenic. Neolithic humans domesticated
virtually all of our food and livestock species over a relatively short
period 10,000 to 15,000 years ago.

Several hundred generations of farmer descendants were subsequently
responsible for making enormous genetic modifications in all of our major
crop and animal species. There has been no credible scientific evidence to
suggest that the ingestion of transgenic products is injurious to human
health or the environment.

So far, the most prestigious national academies of science, and now even
the Vatican, have come out in support of genetic engineering to improve
the quantity, quality and availability of food supplies.

The more important matters of concern for civil societies should be equity
issues related to genetic ownership and control and access to transgenic
agricultural products.

One of the great challenges facing society in the 21st century will be a
renewal and broadening of scientific education at all age levels that
keeps pace with the times. Nowhere is it more important for knowledge to
confront fear born of ignorance than in the production of food, still the
basic human activity.

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Norman Borlaug is a plant scientist and the 1970 Nobel Prize Laureate for
Peace.