{"id":22751,"date":"2014-10-08T02:53:49","date_gmt":"2014-10-08T00:53:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/feedproxy.google.com\/~r\/BiotechNow\/~3\/dKCN26a8Uho\/is-the-next-green-revolution-right-around-the-corner"},"modified":"2014-10-06T17:24:15","modified_gmt":"2014-10-06T15:24:15","slug":"next-green-revolution-right-around-corner","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/next-green-revolution-right-around-corner\/","title":{"rendered":"Is the next \u201cGreen Revolution\u201d right around the corner?"},"content":{"rendered":"

National Geographic<\/a><\/em>\u2019s\u00a0<\/em>October issue contains an in-depth article, \u201cThe Next Green Revolution\u201d on how plant biotechnology will be one part of a\u00a0multifaceted\u00a0solution to feeding a rapidly growing population in the face of climate change.<\/p>\n

Climate change and population growth will make life increasingly precarious for small farmers in the developing world \u2013 and for the people they feed. For most of the 20th century humanity managed to stay ahead in the Malthusian race between population growth and food supply. Will we be able to maintain that lead in the 21st century, or will a global catastrophe beset us?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The United Nations forecasts that by 2050 the world\u2019s population will grow by more than two billion people. Half will be born in sub-Saharan Africa, and another 30 percent in South and Southeast Asia. Those regions are also where the effects of climate change\u2014drought, heat waves, extreme weather generally \u2013 are expected to hit hardest.<\/p>\n

Last March the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned that the world\u2019s food supply is already jeopardized:<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the last 20 years, particularly for rice, wheat, and corn, there has been a slowdown in the growth rate of crop yields,\u201d says Michael Oppenheimer, a climate scientist at Princeton and one of the authors of the IPCC report. \u201cIn some areas yields have stopped growing entirely. My personal view is that the breakdown of food systems is the biggest threat of climate change.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Norman Borlaug was an American biologist, humanitarian and Nobel laureate. He received his B.S. in\u00a0Biology 1937 and Ph.D. in plant pathology and genetics from the University of Minnesota in 1942. He took up an agricultural research position in Mexico, where he developed semi-dwarf, high-yield, disease-resistant wheat varieties.During the mid-20th century, Borlaug led the introduction of these high-yielding varieties combined with modern agricultural production techniques to Mexico, Pakistan, and India. As a result, Mexico became a net exporter of wheat by 1963. Between 1965 and 1970, wheat yields nearly doubled in Pakistan and India, greatly improving the food security in those nations.<\/p>\n

These collective increases in yield have been labeled the Green Revolution, and Borlaug is often credited with saving over a billion people worldwide from starvation. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 in which the citation read, \u201cMore than any other person of this age, he helped provide bread for a hungry world.\u201d<\/p>\n

To keep doing that between now and 2050, we\u2019ll need another green revolution. There are two competing visions of how it will happen. One is high-tech, with a heavy emphasis on continuing Borlaug\u2019s work of breeding better crops, but with modern genetic techniques.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe next green revolution will supercharge the tools of the old one,\u201d says Robert Fraley, chief technology officer at Monsanto and a winner of the prestigious World Food Prize in 2013. Scientists, he argues, can now identify and manipulate a huge variety of plant genes, for traits like disease resistance and drought tolerance. That\u2019s going to make farming more productive and resilient.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Monsanto is not the only organization<\/span>\u00a0that believes modern plant genetics can help feed the world. Late on a warm February afternoon Glenn Gregorio, a plant geneticist at the International Rice Research Institute, shows me the rice that started the green revolution in Asia.When the green revolution began in the 1960s, it was before the revolution in molecular genetics: IR8, the first miracle rice, was bred without knowledge of the genes that blessed it with high yields. Breeders today can zero in on genes, but they still use traditional techniques and ever more complex pedigrees. That\u2019s how they\u2019ve created rice varieties adapted to rising sea levels\u2014including Swarna-Sub1, popular in India.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

However farmers farmers in\u00a0sub-Saharan Africa, do not see genetically modified crops\u00a0as the best solution right now to combat the affects of climate change. Nigel Taylor is a geneticist at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center in St. Louis, Missouri. There he and other researchers are in the early stages of developing genetically modified cassava varieties that are immune to the brown streak virus. Taylor is collaborating with Ugandan researchers on a field trial, and another is under way in Kenya. But only four African countries\u2014Egypt, Sudan, South Africa, and Burkina Faso\u2014currently allow the commercial planting of GM crops.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn Africa, as elsewhere, people fear GM crops, even though there\u2019s little scientific evidence to justify the fear. There\u2019s a stronger argument that high-tech plant breeds are not a panacea and maybe not even what African farmers need most\u2026<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I ask Janet Maro, an organic famer in Tanzania, if genetically modified seeds might also help those farmers, she\u2019s skeptical. \u2018It\u2019s not realistic,\u2019 she says. How could they afford the seeds when they can\u2019t even afford fertilizer? How likely is it, she asks, in a country where few farmers ever see a government agricultural adviser, or are even aware of the diseases threatening their crops, that they\u2019ll get the support they need to grow GM crops properly?\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

BIO encourages you to Tim Folger\u2019s\u00a0The Next Green Revolution<\/a> in its entirety.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“Modern supercrops will be a big help. But agriculture can’t be fixed by biotech alone.”
\nNational Ge…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","nova_meta_subtitle":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5572],"tags":[],"supplier":[2194,8199,3345,494,1929,19476],"class_list":["post-22751","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bio-based","supplier-biotechnology-innovation-organization-bio","supplier-donald-danforth-plant-science-center","supplier-intergovernmental-panel-on-climate-change-ipcc","supplier-monsanto-company","supplier-national-geographic","supplier-united-nations-un"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22751","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22751"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22751\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22751"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22751"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22751"},{"taxonomy":"supplier","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/renewable-carbon.eu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/supplier?post=22751"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}