Author: Jeremy Cherfas

Posted on

The UK government’s report on the future of food and farming

There’s been widespread interest in the UK Government Office for Science’s final report on The Future of Food and Farming: Challenges and choices for global sustainability. Most of the excitement has centred on the claim that GM foods are essential to feed future populations. I’m not going to go there; that way lies madness. Nor have I had time to read the whole thing, although I did take a pretty close look at the papers on which the final report was based. So I’m grateful to colleagues at the Global Crop Diversity Trust who pointed to a nugget from the Executive Summary. Among its “general priorites” for new science, are:

  • Development of new varieties or breeds of crops, livestock and aquatic organisms, capitalising on recent advances in the biosciences.
  • The preservation of multiple varieties, land races, rare breeds and closely related wild relatives of domesticated species. This is very important in maintaining a genetic bank of variation that can be used in the selection of novel traits.
  • Advances in nutrition and related sciences. These offer substantial prospects for improving the efficiency and sustainability of animal production (both livestock and aquaculture).

The Trust, naturally, lighted on that middle one, but as I read it I found myself humming “Is that all there is?” It isn’t. There’s also “Undernutrition needs to be tackled by direct and by indirect intervention,” promising approaches for which “include biofortification of staple food crops with micronutrients, and the health conditionalities embedded in cash transfers”.

It will be fascinating to see how this extremely comprehensive report influences future policy on agricultural research and development, widely construed, not just in the UK but around the world.

Posted on

What’s that got to do with the price of onions?

Human brains are exquisitely evolved to detect patterns. Mine detected two items with a common theme, separated by only 70 years.

Item 1, from The Economist:

The Indian press is obsessively following the price of onions, which saw a massive spike at the end of last year and the beginning of this one. On Twitter, Indians have noted sarcastically that at one point last week, the prices of a kilo of onions, a litre of petrol and a bottle of beer (presumably in some places, since alcohol taxes vary a lot by state because of state-level taxes) were all the same. Onions get a lot of attention in India partly because many people believe (perhaps rightly, I can’t claim to be sure) that they’re one of the things that even the poorest Indians buy (along with rice or wheat, cooking oil and salt). There’s a stereotypical image of a very poor person in India subsisting on a couple of rotis, a pinch of salt, and some raw onions for flavour.

Item 2, from George Orwell’s diaries:

The onion shortage has made everyone intensely sensitive to the smell of onions. A quarter of an onion shredded into a stew seems exceedingly strong, E. the other day knew as soon as I kissed her that I had eaten onions some 6 hours earlier.

Even more spookily, Orwell immediately goes on to discuss the complex relationships, among price, quantity demanded, supply, and quality of goods.

An instance of the sort of racketeering that goes on when any article whose price is not controlled becomes scarce – the price of alarm clocks. The cheapest now obtainable are 15/- these the sort of rubbishy German-made clocks which used to sell for 3/6d. The little tin French ones which used to be 5/- are now 18/6d, and all others at corresponding prices.

By “racketeering,” does he mean to blame speculators? I certainly hope so.

Posted on

Superduper weeds? Couldn’t happen.

I am having a lot of trouble understanding a press release from the University of Missouri in Columbia, MO. It trumpets “a way to control superweed”. And it helpfully explains what superweeds are. In essence, they are weeds that are resistant to a parcel of weedkillers. The release quoted an article in The New York Times that “noted that there were 10 resistant species in at least 22 states infesting millions of acres of farmland”.

The solution, says the press release, was to put a new kind of weedkiller resistance into crop plants, so that farmers can use a different weedkiller on their superweed-infested fields and thus eradicate the superweeds.

Using a massive genetic database and a bioinformatic approach, Dow AgroSciences researchers identified two bacterial enzymes that, when transformed into plants, conferred resistance to an herbicide called “2,4-D,” commonly used in controlling dandelions. The enzymes were successfully put into corn and soybean plants, and those new plants showed excellent resistance to 2,4-D, including no negative effects on yield or other agronomic traits. Other advantages of 2,4-D include low cost, short environmental persistence, and low toxicity to humans and wildlife.

Stay with me here.

I wonder what the odds are that among the populations of 10 resistant species that infest millions of acres of farmland across 22 states, there might be some harbouring a bit of tolerance to 2,4-D.

Nah. Couldn’t happen. Not in wild carrots. Nor in wild mustard. Superduperweeds? Couldn’t happen.