“We could make crops that are self-fertilizing”
Ted Cocking
Our challenge:
...to feed around 9.8 billion people by 2050, on roughly the same area of land we use today, whilst
using fewer fertilizer inputs. In other words…we need to ‘sustainably intensify’ agriculture.
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Fig. 1 A plant growing out of a pile of synthetic ammonia
fertilizer (Source: www.wisegeek.org)
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The solution: genetically engineered (GE) crops?
Could we genetically engineer crops to make them more
resource efficient? The John Innes Centre
is currently running a project called “Engineering Nitrogen Symbiosis for
Africa” (ENSA). This is attempting to genetically engineer key cereal crops (such as maize, rice and wheat) to fix their own nitrogen directly from the atmosphere, a characteristic currently limited to legumes. If successful, it would make our staple food crops self-fertilizing! This could achieve in the 21st century what the Haber-Bosch breakthrough managed for the 20th, without the serious environmental drawbacks!
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Fig. 2 A field of healthy maize… could we make this field 'self-fertilizing'?!
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Issues:
1. This is no easy task, and there is no guarantee it will work.
1. This is no easy task, and there is no guarantee it will work.
2. People tend to perceive GE crops as bad for the environment and for human/animal health, even though these claims are arguably unfounded. Therefore many resist their development and use.
Hi Becca! From your post, it does seem that GM may offer a solution to the world's food security. However, GM has such a bad reputation, with many people refusing to contemplate eating GM crops: if GM is to play a significant role in the future of food, how do you recommend government/policy makers etc. deal with this in a democratic way?
ReplyDeleteAlso, I think you will find a recent George Monbiot article very interesting: http://www.monbiot.com/2017/12/13/we-cant-keep-eating-like-this/
However, he says the way to address global food shortages is to go vegan! This indeed seems a lot more controversial for the average person than a GM diet.
I agree that GM has gotten a bad reputation and that this is limiting its potential. However, I believe that this reputation is largely unfounded. Therefore, I recommend that, to change public opinion, government/policy makers should better publicize the facts about GM. People generally don’t eat GM foods because they think they are dangerous. However, as Mark Lynas explains, “in over a decade and a half with three trillion GM meals eaten there has never been a single substantiated case of harm. You are more likely to get hit by an asteroid than to get hurt by GM food”!!!! (This is the link to the article http://www.fwi.co.uk/arable/mark-lynas-why-i-became-pro-gm.htm)
ReplyDeleteThe question of diet raised in the George Monbiot article is interesting and topical, but a somewhat separate issue. Yes, reducing our meat and dairy consumption may help improve the resource efficiency of our diets. BUT (1) we shouldn’t place all our hopes on the entire global population suddenly becoming vegan. We should look at a variety of different ways to improve resource efficiency simultaneously and (2) even if we only ate plants, if these plants were grown conventionally we would still need a shedload of artificial fertilizer. I’m talking about GM crops, not GM animals! GM crops could allow us to produce more plant-based food, using less artificial fertilizer.
Perhaps we should all become vegans, but vegans who eat GM plants…