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More bad news: the eco-crunch

The other day, Luigi suggested investing in watermelons now that the credit crunch has made banks go bust and stocks worthless. Hold on. Maybe the watermelons will also go belly up, as the BBC reports that we are also heading for an eco-crunch. This unwelcome news is based on The Living Planet Report, produced by the WWF, the Zoological Society of London and the Global Footprint Network. “The global footprint exceeded the earth’s biocapacity by 25% in 2003, which meant that the Earth could no longer keep up with the demands being placed upon it.”

I am torn. Yes, we are depleting our resources. Yes, it is scary. But this is also déjà vu all over again. The predictions made in Limits to Growth, The Population Bomb, and many other gloomy predictions from the 1960-70s, have turned out to be incorrect. Human creativity has outsmarted perceived physical limits; but there are real physical limits too…. Have we really reached them?

In The Population Bomb, Paul Ehrlich predicted that in the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people would starve to death. Not a strange prediction given the famines that occurred in the years before the book was written. But it never happened; we got the Green Revolution instead.

Food shortages, or at least high food prices, were all of a sudden back on the front pages this year. Is the end near then? Not yet. Now that speculators are retreating, and farmers have responded to higher prices by producing more (25% more wheat produced in Europe! Perhaps largely because the ‘set-aside’ subsidized fallowing policy expired?). Food prices are tumbling again. For how long?

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Berry go Round

The latest Berry go Round — Number 10 — is up at 10,000 birds, whose proprietor, Mike, definitely gets it:

I love plants. You do too, whether you’re in touch with your vegephilia or not. Everything you eat or smoke and practically everything you drape on your body or put in your car to make it go derives directly or indirectly from the vegetable kingdom.

And for once, I’m not going to winge about the paucity of agricultural interest. There’s masses. Neglected species, citrus taxonomy, wild relatives, recipes, the whole enchilada. Check it out.

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Maize and genetic engineering: why bother?

I was talking to Greg Edmeades tonight. Our conversation coalesced on the topics of the recent posts on maize water stress tolerance and on the usefulness of engineering purple tomatoes.

For many years, Greg led the maize crop physiology group at CIMMYT. He says that one of the main reasons for their success with drought tolerance is their long term institutional commitment to it: 35 years and counting. A particularly impressive feat is the widespread adoption of their maize varieties in southern Africa. For example, ZM623, selected from South African parents by Marianna Bänziger, is grown on about a million ha, says Edmeades.

His take on biotech for drought tolerance is, sure, “use whatever works, but if you are an African agricultural research institute, then, why bother?” Monsanto is reporting 10-15% yield increase under drought stress, and says it will make their technology freely available for use in Africa. Edmeades reckons that you can get a similar yield increase in about 7 years of conventional breeding and selection. And less when using molecular markers. If that is the case, it may not be worth it to deal with the complexities of genetic engineering.

Unless, perhaps, the approaches are entirely additive and you get a combined yield benefit of 30%. I think that’s unlikely. Drought tolerance is about making best use of the available water. It does not increase the amount of water.

Later:
Greg told me that I had been a little harsh in suggesting that he would not advise national programs in Africa to use a transgenic approach to drought tolerance. He would only advice against transgenes if “they had access to a steady stream of good germplasm improved for drought tolerance, and there was no regulatory framework for transgenes in place in that country. If regulatory frameworks exist, and there is no facility of improving their own varieties (or newly released commercial varieties) for drought tolerance in a systematic way, then certainly I’d take the transgenic option, especially since it is being offered on a royalty free basis.”