Johan Schut pulled a folding knife from his hip pocket, inserted the tip into the base of a bright, crispy head of romaine lettuce and severed it in two.
“See there, the little brown specks with black legs?” He lifted one of the busy beasts onto the tip of his blade. “It’s a family of aphids. This is a non-resistant lettuce.”
Gotta love the New York Times ledes (as we ex-reptiles call them). This one certainly got me reading, and probably would have done even if I weren’t interested in “entrepreneurs and scientists [who] are trying to use all available techniques, including genetic modification, to improve agriculture around the world.”
It’s all there; cisgenesis, AFLP and MAS, arms races, private-public partnerships, options up the wazoo. Go Wageningen!
Judging from the picture accompanying the piece on the Helvetas proposal, the grain in question is maize. And maize does indeed suffer from inbreeding depression if seeds from too few individuals are saved, but I’m not aware of any evidence that experienced maize farmers don’t understand this. Does Helvetas have evidence that inbreeding depression is a real problem? Or is it, perhaps inadvertently, promoting a view that one reason subsistence farmers don’t have Swiss bank accounts is that they don’t know what they’re doing?