Is the Next “Green Revolution” Right Around the Corner?

October 17, 2014

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by Caitlin Kennedy (Biotech NOW) National Geographic’s October issue contains an in-depth article, “The Next Green Revolution” on how plant biotechnology will be one part of a multifaceted solution to feeding a rapidly growing population in the face of climate change.
Climate change and population growth will make life increasingly precarious for small farmers in the developing world – 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?
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To keep doing that between now and 2050, we’ll 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’s work of breeding better crops, but with modern genetic techniques.

“The next green revolution will supercharge the tools of the old one,” 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’s going to make farming more productive and resilient.”

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However farmers in sub-Saharan Africa, do not see genetically modified crops as 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—Egypt, Sudan, South Africa, and Burkina Faso—currently allow the commercial planting of GM crops. READ MORE and MORE (National Geographic)