Food’s Frontier: the Next Green Revolution

Over the past half century, the United States has sent billions of tons of food to famine-stricken countries and that is one reason many remain in a dire struggle to feed themselves. Dumping our surplus grain depressed the prices of locally grown grain, pushing farmers in those countries out of business explains environmental writer Richard Manning, author of "Food's Frontier: the Next Green Revolution", a new book on efforts to establish sustainable agriculture in developing countries around the globe.

The situation is critical. Industrial agriculture, mostly developed in the 1960s "Green Revolution", has reached its production limit. In some areas, the combination of monocropping and heavy fertilizer and pesticide use has actually reduced the land's capacity to produce. Meanwhile, the population of developing countries is expected to double by 2020.

The second green revolution is a revolution not only in biological science, but also in information distribution among scientists, farmers, and consumers. "Food's Frontier" documents the Minneapolis-based McKnight Foundation's Collaborative Crop Research Program, which has funded research and training in agricultural science in nine developing countries in Africa, Latin America and Asia. Each project is headed by scientists from the developing country, who identify the agricultural problem they want to tackle and put together interdisciplinary teams of scientists such as biologists, economists, and anthropologists. Each team collaborates with counterparts in U.S. universities.

"We're realizing that economic and cultural factors are as important as biology, soil and climate in developing a secure global food supply", – Manning said. "Certainly, you have to understand the biology behind the interaction of, say, a chickpea and a pod borer if you want to reduce the damage the pest does to the plant. But you also need to figure out how to help Ugandan farmers learn about a method of planting that protects sweet potato from weevils, or how to convince Mexican wholesalers that there's a potentially strong market in the United States for blue corn".

McKnight-funded research in areas like polyculture – the planting of several crops amongst each other – and the discovery of natural protections against pests in disease in wild relatives of common crops, also stand to benefit U.S. farmers.

"The Midwest is strewn with rural ghost towns whose small farmers were driven away by huge agricultural firms farming thousands of acres of a single crop. And the oversupply of grain has promoted widespread usage of high-fructose corn syrup in processed foods, contributing to the epidemic of obesity ", – Manning said. The McKnight project researching an ancient Aztec polycropping system, still used by Mexican peasants, called "milpa", could provide a solution for reversing monoculture in the U.S.

Experiments underway in New York, Chile and Brazil crossing domestic potatoes, plagued by a range of insect pests, with wild relatives of potatoes, whose sticky leaves trap insects, are revolutionizing the economics of potato farming both in the U.S. and worldwide.

"The intensive use of pesticides and herbicides has contaminated our water and depleted our soils. It costs between $60 and $200 per acre per year to spray potatoes with insecticide. A grower in upstate New York typically gets about $6 for a hundred pounds of these potatoes, while organic market pays $30 a hundredweight for pesticide-free potatoes," – Manning said.

Three projects described in "Food's Frontier" involve genetic engineering: in Nanjing, China, creating scab-resistant wheat; in India, increasing the efficiency of production and nutritional value of chickpea; and in Shanghai, China, eradicating viral rice disease by eliminating the ability of a plant hopper insect to transmit the virus.

Recognizing that modern biotechnology has the potential to contribute much to the solutions of agricultural problems in the developing world, Manning dismisses the argument that genetic engineering is unnatural.

"From lop-eared rabbits to wine grapes, artificial form of life as a result of human-engineered selection surrounds us. Every form of life we call domestic has a genetic makeup that is artificial as a result of human activity", – he said.

The biggest danger to the public regarding genetic engineering, Manning feels, is when profit-motivated companies rush to patent and market an untested technique. In contrast, McKnight-funded research remains in the public domain, available to all who need it, and is carefully tested by scientists who live among the farmers where the techniques will be used.

Manning found that Robert Goodman, a University of Wisconsin plant pathologist who oversees the Collaborative Crop Research Program, has his own doubts about the value of genetic engineering.

"We'll eventually have the same problem with genetically engineered plants as we do with more traditional approaches – the pests and diseases we are trying to repel are going to develop their own defenses", – Goodman said.

The alternative is not to look only at a single gene, but at the entire sequence of genes in a particular plant, as well as the sequence of genes in the organisms living in the surrounding soil and air. With this information, scientists, rather than transferring single genes from one plant species to another, can manipulate a plant's own genes to stimulate certain interactions with the other organisms in its environment. Goodman predicts this practice, called "genomics", will render genetic engineering obsolete within a matter of years.

"By the end of the decade we're going to look back at current genetic engineering technology, with its parlor tricks like sweeter tomatoes, as being primitive and almost arcane," – Goodman said. "We are finally recognizing that nature is unimaginably complex. To survive, we need to learn to respect and harness that complexity, because at a fundamental level, genetic improvement is integral to human society".

"No one ever said feeding a planet of six billion people would be without consequences," – Manning said.

"But helping third world scientists feed their own people ensures sensitivity to culture and environment that we missed in the first green revolution".

The McKnight Foundation Collaborative Crop Research Program, begun in 1993, seeks to increase food security in developing countries. The total financial commitment is $53,5 million over 15 years.

Words and Expressions to remember:

famine-stricken – голодающий

dire – страшный, ужасный, жуткий, внушающий ужас

surplus – излишний, избыточный, добавочный

monocropping – выращивание одной культуры

to collaborate – работать совместно, сотрудничать

chickpea – нут, турецкий горох

a pod borer – стручковый сверлильщик (червь)

a weevil – долгоносик

to strew – разбрасывать, разбрызгивать

obesity – тучность, ожирение

sticky – клейкий, липкий, вязкий, тягучий

to contaminate – пачкать, загрязнять, марать, портить, отравлять

scab-resistant – устойчивый к парше

to eradicate – искоренять, вырывать с корнем, истреблять

viral – вирусный

to repel – подавлять, сдерживать

a gene – ген

obsolete – устарелый, старый, немодный

arcane – тайный, скрытый, темный, загадочный, потайной, секретный

to harness – использовать

Поиск по сайту: