Long Live the Revolution.............
this article is a portion of a discussion on biotechnology, world agriculture etc,,,,,...i have not seen a lot of discussion on agricultural biotech. don't you all think that it might be easier to approve biotech products for plants before humans? i have followed monsanto for a while and wonder what you take is on the investment possibilities in this field.
Agricultural victories save billions of lives
By THOMAS G. DOLAN
Like a marathon runner overcome by the size of his task, the Green Revolution has slowed in the endless race against starvation. The biologists who developed the new strains of rice, wheat and corn that ended Third World famine report that the greatest miracle of the scientific age is pausing for breath, not halting the race for good. But they also say that fear and misunderstanding have made it more difficult for them to resume the pace.
Take a quick look backward. In 1969, the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization said that more than half the human race was getting less than 2,200 calories a day. Prospects seemed grim. Author Paul Ehrlich made his famous prediction that "most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born."
Most of the extra people born in the doubling of the world's population since World War II did not die. Instead, their lives got better because food production tripled. Only about 10% of the world's people now subsist on less than 2,200 calories per day.
The most renowned reason was scientific. Plant biologists bred new varieties of wheat, corn and rice. They used this form of genetic engineering to create dwarf plants with thick stalks capable of holding heavier clusters of grain. They also bred in genes for resistance to disease and other desirable traits.
Some of the new wheat plants were 10 times as productive as those raised before, and yields of corn and rice increased almost as much. Introduction of new wheat almost certainly averted famine in the aftermath of the 1971 war between India and Pakistan, and both nations now raise enough grain to meet internal demand without imports.
Changing Wind
Now, how much good news can we take? How much more good news can we expect? Lester Brown, a neo-Malthusian who heads the Worldwatch Institute, periodically issues papers warning that the scientific revolution in agriculture is about out of steam.
"Business as usual -- the current situation -- won't continue much longer," he warns. "The economic trends cannot continue indefinitely if the resource base upon which they rest continues to deteriorate." Brown cites soil erosion, depletion of underground water supplies, pollution of air and contamination of surface water as disturbing signs that world grain production is reaching a natural limit, even as world population grows.
These opponents of the Green Revolution, often inaptly called environmentalists, object to any more good news in agriculture. They have pressured foundations and governments not to fund high-yield agricultural methods, especially in Africa, the last frontier of scientific farming, where starvation is still a realistic threat. "World Bank fear of green political pressure in Washington became the single biggest obstacle to feeding Africa," says Norman Borlaug, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for his work on high-yield wheat. The institutes that do the research still need more money.
If there is to be a second phase of the Green Revolution, it will employ advanced forms of genetic engineering. The new science speeds up breeding by allowing selection of desired traits directly from the gene map. Even better, it allows insertion of desirable traits from other species. A gene from a common natural pest-fighting bacterium has already been successfully inserted into corn, potatoes, rice and cotton. Another promising feat of genetic engineering is the development of strains of plants that ignore aluminum poisoning in soil -- essential to opening a wide part of Brazil to farming and taking development pressure off the rain forests elsewhere in the country. |
