We like to embrace different points of view here ourselves, though we also like to think there’s a certain consistency to most of what we say and do. Maybe that’s why I find it strange that a single blog, on a single day ((Admittedly 1 April.)) can feature two such divergent posts. One — Homegrown Solutions to Alleviating Hunger and Poverty — is a thorough look at the role of indigenous fruit and vegetable crops in delivering a healthy and nutritious diet. The other — Breeding for Climate Change — links, almost without comment, to a report on the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s project to deliver just two (one conventionally bred, one genetically engineered) drought-resistant maize varieties to sub Saharan Africa.
I have no doubt that genetic engineering, precision farming and other high-tech tools of modern intensive farming can supply all the calories the world will need even when it hosts 9 billion people. I do doubt that the 9 billion will actually get those calories. And I know that calories alone are not enough. People need nourishment, not merely calories.
To me, we must nurture as many solutions as possible because the exact solution(s) needed in each area will vary. We need breeding/engineering, we need crop diversity, we need creative methods… I don’t think there’s any conflict in embracing all of them.
Also, a slight correction: the Gates Foundation is working on two traits in maize which can/will be bred into many varieties. This is not the same as delivering just two varieties. As I wrote in Stress tolerant maize for the developing world – Challenges and prospects on Biofortified, there’s a lot of work being done to collaborate with farmers to develop locally adapted varieties of maize with the qualities that farmers want and need.
That’s all well and good, at least the first paragraph is, and you know that I agree. My worry is that the people who control the purse strings, especially those in some of ministries of countries that most need agricultural development, are seduced by the shiny baubles of high-tech science to the detriment of some of the more homely, but ultimately more promising, approaches.
And if it is so easy to breed a trait into many varieties of maize, why bother with engineering in the first place? Especially when you know that, for whatever misguided reason, some people just don’t like the idea.
I would like to see independent evidence of the superiority of transgenic corn under drought. The only published data I’ve found comes from tests by Monsanto, the company that developed it. I will be discussing this topic in greater depth in my forthcoming book: “Darwinian agriculture: where does nature’s wisdom lie?”
As drought tolerant corn is likely to be released in the next couple of years (I forget which year it’s slated for… I believe 2012, but this could be wrong) independent evidence will likely be available in 2012/2013 – with adoption/non-adoption of the trait in 2012-2015 timescale probably being the best indicator of trait efficacy (it’s not peer-reviewed science, but what farmers put in their fields is a pretty decent indicator of whether efficacy/cost effectiveness is there or not – although depending on the price structure this may take a little time to figure out – Monsanto got slammed in terms of market penetration for doing what was perceived as ‘the right thing'(tm) in pricing their last 2 new releases at market value rather than the usual model of discounted trait to get growers to use it – adoption and subsequent utilization after prices inflate to ‘true price’ is probably the best marker to watch for this.
I think it’s also worth keeping in mind that while there is a natural tendancy to distrust data about a product which the company producing the product generates, there is an arguement to be made that Monsanto, or any company releasing a transgenic crop, would be commiting pretty serious financial suicide to fake the data just to get a product initially accepted – farmers aren’t dumb, if you tell them your product is going to work, and they purchase it, and it tanks, then congratulations to the competition, because that’s one farmer who isn’t going to trust his seed rep as far as he can throw him (likewise my assumption would be that the data shown is data generated during internal trials of the product – a year or two of bad data and the product would never have made it to commercialization)
Jeremy – I don’t want to put words into Anastasia’s mouth, but ‘breeding a trait into’ a variety can (I believe) mean either breeding in a ‘natural trait’ from one variety to another (ie your drought locus) or breeding in a transgene, my take is that the two traits are split between these two areas, one is breeding sourced, the other transgene sourced (and one would hope that the two would work additively or synergistically down the line)
The ease of breeding a trait into maize, and the ease of developing the trait in the first place, are completely unrelated – my assumption is that it is relatively easy to breed a trait in (assuming you’re a breeder…… in the same way it’s easy for an olympic athelete to run 100m in ~10s) but that discovering/selecting for the trait in the first place is a bit of a bloody nightmare, hence if you have multiple avenues to persue the same goal it seems rather odd not to persue them all just because some people don’t agree with how you’re doing it.
Ewan,
I hope you are right, that no corporation would over-hype a product in advance of release, for fear of long-term consequences to the corporation’s reputation. But I can think of a few recent counter-examples, from software to financial derivatives. One problem is that the people doing the hyping may benefit in the short-term, then move on to another corporation.
I assume the corn really is at least somewhat drought-tolerant. The question is what the tradeoffs are. Is it just an oversight that they didn’t publish yields under nondrought conditions?
I don’t believe it is just long-term consequences that are a concern. As far as I am aware for a trait to be a commercial success requires multiple years of sales – the traited seed market doesnt work the same way as the examples you give – if I sell you software that doesn’t do what it says on the box then it doesn’t matter to me in terms of units of that piece of software sold whether you like it or not as I don’t expect you to buy multiple copies of the software, however if I sell traited seed I categorically expect farmers to buy the same product, hopefully in increased volume, next year, and probably the year after and will have factored this into the business model on how to make profit from the trait (I’m probably also banking on the farmer purchasing other traits, and other seeds, for use in other fields)
The concern that a handful may benefit from the hype and then move also falls apart somewhat in terms of the release of a biotech trait – in my mind there are just too many people involved at all stages of product development for this to work, a succesful gene goes through about a decade of yield testing, works its way through multiple different teams, with different members, and is scrutinized every step of the way, it’s not like a single bench scientist makes the initial plasmid, transforms it into agro, then into the crop, then runs a field trial or 10, then analyzes the data himself, then sells the product to farmers – it boggles the mind to think how many man hours go into the scrutiny of a gene that makes it from conception through final commercialization (it boggles the mind further to think how many man hours go into the scrutiny of genes that make it absolutely nowhere)
The question of tradeoffs is a good one, I do know that for a gene to be succesful it has to show yield parity under normal agronomic conditions, and so am not sure why there was no yield data under these conditions – I’m not sure I’ve even seen the report you are discussing, and would have to take a peek to see what the scope etc was (knowing corporate research it could well be something as banal as someone deciding that the pertinent information was the yield under drought info, and that there was no need to disclose other info around the gene) – would one necessarily expect a visible tradeoff in terms of end of year yield? There’s an arguement that modification to increase yield may be somewhat foolhardy as if evolution ain’t done it yet, then the tradeoffs must be such that it isn’t advantageous – but there must (I think) be some modifications which simply aren’t accesible to “higher” (euch) plants simply due to where they sit in the adaptive landscape – in this respect I view modification as building bridges between peaks, although in likely 999 cases out of 1000 you end up with a famed bridge to nowhere, particularly when it comes to bacterial genes like CspB and Bt (Bt is a far better case to look at in terms of this aspect of the conversation – plants *could* have evolved the exact same protein, but one would expect that if they had it would essentially be useless now due to arms race dynamics, however insertion of the winning gene from one arms race, into another circumvents the need to gradually build towards an awesome protein (starting from scratch) – although admittedly this arguement falls apart somewhat in terms of CspB because there is no arms race against the environment, here you you have to make the rather bold assumption that to get CspB from where plants are now (or from a common ancestor) would require a reduction in fitness step making it unobtainable.
Ewan,
I hope you are right, that biotech companies are different from software companies, insurance companies like AIG, etc., and don’t over-hype their products.
The paper I was referring to was by a bunch of Monsanto scientists, published in 2007 (PNAS 104:16450) as “Plant nuclear factor Y (NF-Y) B subunits confer drought tolerance and lead to improved corn yields on water-limited acres.”
I generally agree with your comments about tradeoffs, bridges between adaptive peaks, etc. And I would add that tradeoffs that prevented past natural selection from making some improvement are sometimes tradeoffs we are willing to accept. That’s the theme of my book. For example, crop water-use efficiency involves lots of tradeoffs, but they don’t necessarily result in tradeoffs between yield in wet versus dry environments. See my recent blog post on this topic:
http://blog.lib.umn.edu/denis036/thisweekinevolution/2010/02/tradeoff-free_drought_resistan.html
Bacterial RNA Chaperones Confer Abiotic Stress Tolerance in Plants and Improved Grain Yield in Maize under Water-Limited Conditions (plant physiology 147:446-455 (2008)) Castiglione et al
covers the Csp genes, and also only covers drought conditions. My assumption would be that the purpose of these papers is not to illustrate the agronomic utility of these transgenes, but to illustrate the effect these genes have under drought conditions – which is why you don’t have the yield under normal conditions information, it isn’t pertinent to the scope of the article – it appears that both papers have approximately the same scope – so I’d expect the same paucity of normal conditions data for anything new published in the area – although one would hope as commercial launch approaches a more comprehensive data publication might come about.
I am more worried about ‘homegrown solutions’ than GM maize in Africa. Kofi Annan and the Gates Foundation is on to this local/indigenous bandwagon: African crops are, of course, better for Africa than introduced crops: Wrong. And it needs saying repeatedly.
The first thing is that introduced crops ‘do better’ than local crops because they escape local pests and diseases. The more different they are from local crops the better they escape.
The next thing is that Africa is very poor in groups of crops like roots and tubers and also fruit trees, and not all that rich in vegetables. To follow the ‘indigenous’ dogma and miss out of the vast number of fruits and roots and tubers from Central and S. America and the diversity of vegetables and fruits from South and S.E. Asia is posturing folly verging on criminality.
The third thing is that is you are worried about drought in Africa then what about introduced groundnut and tepary bean and Vigna aconitifolia?
Fortunately farmers know better.
But there is a bottleneck in two areas: seed supply – best addressed by the private sector like East West Seeds; and also recipes. Just how do you prepare strange foodstuffs from strange crops.
Two examples. While working in highland Philippines I asked the locals how they prepared the root of chayote (Sechium edule – normally eaten as a vegetable fruit). Nobody knew it was edible, never mind it was a prized root in C. America. Second, while stationed in CIAT I was treated to an entire multi-course meal prepared from cassava by an indigenous family from the Colombian Amazon. This was a miracle that could not ever have been prepared in Africa as the knowledge of preparation and cooking does not exist (although steamed cassava leaves in Kigale tastes good). There is a vast need in Africa for many more species of exotic fruits and vegetables coupled with a major transfer of food preparation knowledge.
Crop nationalism can make people hungry: a national focus on ensete and tef in Ethiopia when potato and maize would be a faster way of increasing food supply.
Well I’m not sure about roots and tubers, but I don’t think you’d get many people agreeing with the proposition that Africa is poor in fruits and vegetables. They just haven’t been studied or promoted as much as in other continents.
Luigi: They certainly haven’t been studied and promoted as much as they should have been. But there have been a series of filters acting in the past, going back possibly to the movement of continental plates. For humans there is the gathered/cultivated filter. If it is easy to collect – why cultivate/domesticate it? Once cultivated on a local scale, did the crop get more widely distributed? There are several good Ethiopian crops (exception coffee) that did not pass this filter. Perhaps the biggest filter was what the colonial powers did with African fruits and vegetables: very little, it seems – and they had all the technology to do it – Wardian cases, tropical botanic gardens, and ‘Tropical Institutes’ at home to back up the person in the field (and eventually CABI).
After all this effort at several different scales only a few fruit and vegetable crops crops made it out of Africa. For fruits examples, oil palm, ackee (Blighia sapida) and roselle (Hibiscus sabdariffa). Ackee is interesting as a favoured in the West Indies among the African diaspora in ackee and salt cod – both from somewhere else (washed down with roselle juice).
But far more has gone the other way. Apart from the obvious pineapple/papaya/avocado from the Americas, there are factories on the Kenya coast processing cashew nut (but not using the delicious fruit) and, a surprise to me when I found a factory off the beaten track, anetto (Bixa orellana), this for direct export to the Far East.
And if we want to find new fruits to domesticate in Africa, then follow the fruit bats – they must thrive on something nutritious: they certainly do in India, where they were a pest in my garden on guava and mango.
But there is nothing anywhere in Africa to compare with the large range of local fruits in Central America (maintained in field genebanks at CATIE, Summit in Panama and Lancetilla in Honduras – thanks to United Fruit), all the Amazonian small fruits, and the Andean Solanum juices. Some of these were moved by the Spanish across the Pacific to the Philippines and onwards. Sapodilla/chico sapote (Manilkara achras) is all over the place in S.E. Asia. Perhaps the closest African success is okra.
But Africa seems head and shoulders above other areas for cereals: sorghum, millets (lots), tef, African rice, and for dozens of widely important pasture grasses.