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Food crisis almost over, people starving as usual

Agriculture related press releases continue to start with a sentences like “The current crisis in world food prices…”. Take these three of yesterday’s posts on this blog: the above quote is from the article discussed in Great Expectations; we need induced mutations because: “The global nature of the food crisis is unprecedented”; and it is also a reason to go forth and grow halophytes: “There’s a real urgency to addressing the issue of rising food and fuel prices.”

Haven’t they noticed that the crisis is (almost) over? Supply is up and speculators are retracting. The first stories about complaining farmers are coming in. Perhaps I am missing the point of the long term trend of dearer oil (fertilizer) and climate change?

Either way, in a couple of months we’ll be back to business as usual. Cheap food, and,

every day, almost 16,000 children that die from hunger-related causes — one child every five seconds.

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Do the right thing


Dan Barber waxes lyrical about foie gras. Not, you might think, the most agrobiodiversity-laden topic in the world. And entirely inappropriate given that a billion people don’t have enough to eat. Hear him out, though, and then decide whether what he says makes sense.

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Induced mutations? Nein danke.

We briefly nibbled SciDev.Net’s take on a press release from the International Atomic Energy Authority, advocating “Nuclear Science for Food Security”. It’s an old story; bombard seeds with radioactivity to induce more mutations, from which breeders can select wonderful new varieties. But as a correspondent reminds us:

There’s really nothing inherently wrong with it. Because it’s a totally random, “shotgun” approach to generating new variations, it lacks the benefits of natural selection to sort out not only what’s viable, but also what’s somehow well-adapted to growing in the environment and have other desirable traits.

Radio-induced mutagenesis was a popular technique decades ago, and some improved varieties were produced as a result. But I think that a much more logical approach would be to more fully assess and exploit the vast amount of extant diversity currently languishing unstudied in genebanks and farmers’ field, material that has already passed through the filter of many centuries, if not millennia, of natural and human selection. Radio-induced mutation is really just a shot in the dark. Better to focus more attention on the existing crop diversity that has yet to be exhaustively collected, characterized or evaluated, before resorting to such an aleatory approach.

Do you agree? Is inducing extra mutations — by chemistry, radioactivity, whatever — a good way to generate more diversity for breeders (and farmers?) to select from. Or should we focus on understanding the diversity we already have? It isn’t binary, of course, but I wonder where the balance should be?

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Go forth and grow halophytes

That seems to be the plea Jelte Rozema and Timothy Flowers make in a Science paper that’s just out. 1 But, frankly, I found the paper disappointing, not least because it is short on clear recommendations. For example, what is one to make of this?

Because salt resistance has already evolved in halophytes, domestication of these plants is an approach that should be considered. However, as occurred with traditional crops such as rice, wheat, corn, and potatoes, domestication of wild halophytic plant species is needed to convert them into viable crops with high yields. Such a process can begin by screening collections for the most productive genotypes.

Are they telling us that domestication of new species is a more profitable approach than trying to breed salinity-tolerance into existing crops? I think so, in which case it would be an interesting view, but I’m not altogether sure that’s in fact the point they’re making. It could have been better phrased. I mean those first two sentences could be summarized as

Domestication of halophytes should be considered. However, domestication of wild halophytes is needed.

Not sure how the editors at Science let that one by. There was also no explicit reference in the paper to the International Centre for Biosaline Agriculture and its genebank. Or to the possible role of crop wild relatives in breeding for salinity tolerance. All around, an opportunity missed.