" I heard it through the AgLine"

January 19, 2011

 

 

·       The genius behind the Green Revolution

·       Whole Earth Catalog founder extols GM food

·       GM plants developed to resist intense drought

·       Insect-to-insect disease squeezes citrus industry

·       Citrus greening disease spreads to Texas

 

 

The genius behind the Green Revolution

 

(Forbes) – Noel Vietmeyer’s excellent, meticulously researched biography of Norman Borlaug, the plant breeder known as the Father of the Green Revolution, Our Daily Bread, portrays sympathetically one of the great figures of the 20th Century.

 

Borlaug’s life was one of extraordinary paradoxes: A child of the Iowa prairie during the Great Depression who grew up on a dirt-poor farm, attended a one-room school and flunked the university entrance exam but went on to become one of most renowned plant breeders in history – and went on to receive the Nobel Peace Prize for averting malnutrition, famine and the premature death of hundreds of millions.  (That was at a time when the award meant more than political correctness.)

 

Borlaug introduced several revolutionary innovations.  First, he and his colleagues laboriously crossbred thousands of wheat varieties from around the world to produce some new ones with resistance to rust, a destructive plant pest; this raised yields 20% to 40%.

 

Second, he crafted so-called dwarf wheat varieties, which were smaller than the old shoulder-high varieties that bent in the wind and touched the ground (thereby becoming unharvestable); the new waist or knee-high dwarfs stayed erect and held up huge loads of grain.  The yields were boosted even further.

 

Third, he devised an ingenious technique called “shuttle breeding”– growing two successive plantings each year, instead of the usual one, in different regions of Mexico.  The availability of two test generations of wheat each year cut by half the years required for breeding new varieties.  Moreover, because the two regions possessed distinctly different climatic conditions, the resulting new early-maturing, rust-resistant varieties were broadly adapted to many latitudes, altitudes and soil types.  This wide adaptability, which flew in the face of agricultural orthodoxy, proved invaluable, and Mexican wheat yields skyrocketed.

 

Similar successes followed when the Mexican wheat varieties were planted in Pakistan and India, but only after Borlaug convinced politicians in those countries to change national policies in order to provide both improved seeds and the large amounts of fertilizer needed for wheat cultivation.

 

In his professional life, Borlaug, who died in 2009 at the age of 95, struggled against prodigious obstacles, including what he called the “constant pessimism and scare-mongering” of critics and skeptics who predicted that in spite of his efforts, mass starvation was inevitable and hundreds of millions would perish in Africa and Asia.  His work resulted not only in the construction of high-yielding varieties of wheat but also in new agronomic and management practices that transformed the ability of Mexico, India, Pakistan, China, and parts of South America to feed their populations.

 

How successful were Borlaug’s efforts?  From 1950 to 1992, the world’s grain output rose from 692 million tons produced on 1.70 billion acres of cropland to 1.9 billion tons on 1.73 billion acres of cropland — an extraordinary increase in yield per acre of more than 150 percent.   India is an excellent case in point.  In pre-Borlaug 1963, wheat grew there in sparse, irregular strands, was harvested by hand, and was susceptible to rust disease.  The maximum yield was 800 lb per acre.  By 1968, thanks to Borlaug’s varieties, the wheat grew densely packed, was resistant to rust, and the maximum yield had risen to 6000 lb per acre.

 

Without high-yield agriculture, either millions would have starved or increases in food output would have been realized only through drastic expansion of land under cultivation — with losses of pristine wilderness far greater than all the losses to urban, suburban and commercial expansion.

 

Borlaug recalled afterwards without rancor the maddening obstacles to the development and introduction of high-yield plant varieties: “bureaucratic chaos, resistance from local seed breeders, and centuries of farmers’ customs, habits, and superstitions.”

 

The need for additional agricultural production and the obstacles to innovation remains, and in his later years, Borlaug turned his efforts to ensure the success of this century’s equivalent of the Green Revolution: the application of gene-splicing, or “genetic modification” (GM), to agriculture.  As Borlaug and other plant scientists realized, the use of the term “genetic modification” to apply only to the newest genetic techniques is an unfortunate misnomer, because plant scientists had been using crude and laborious techniques to obtain new genetic variants of wheat, corn and other crops for decades, if not centuries.  Products now in development with gene-splicing techniques offer the possibility of even higher yields, lower inputs of agricultural chemicals and water, enhanced nutrition, and even plant-derived, orally active vaccines.

 

Borlaug observed that the enemies of innovation might create a self-fulfilling prophecy: “If the naysayers do manage to stop agricultural biotechnology, they might actually precipitate the famines and the crisis of global biodiversity they have been predicting for nearly 40 years.”  After slowing the progress of gene-splicing technology by advocating excessive regulation, filing lawsuits to prevent the testing and commercialization of gene-spliced plants and even vandalizing field trials, activists have had the audacity to accuse the scientists and companies of having over-promised technological advances.

 

Borlaug’s story is a saga of American 20th Century exceptionalism – of opportunity, individuality, tenacity, courage and monumental achievement.  He strove to exploit new technology in a way that was based on good science and good sense.  Although he worked under the auspices of the Rockefeller Foundation, this was no pampered boffin working in sparkling, state-of-the-art labs; Vietmeyer’s account describes vividly the primitive and sometimes dangerous conditions that Borlaug endured in Mexico and how, lacking animals — let alone tractors — he and his few Mexican helpers plowed experimental plots harnessed like beasts of burden.

 

I was privileged to know Norman Borlaug personally during the last two decades of his life.  As remarkable as his scientific and humanitarian accomplishments were, Borlaug’s modesty, guilelessness, and desire to contribute to society were also among his salient qualities.

 

Borlaug’s world-view was shaped by his roots and by his experiences as a young man. He applied throughout his professional life what he had learned during the late 1930's when he saw Iowa corn farming transformed by the advent of new hybrid corn seeds and appropriate amounts of fertilizer. These advances boosted yields from the traditional ceiling of 30 bushels per acre to an astonishing state average of 75, which in turn transformed Iowa farming from subsistence to a more assured, civilized existence.

 

Borlaug had been shocked by what he saw when he arrived at the University of Minnesota as a freshman in the fall of 1933: “I saw these people out there on the streets in the cold, mostly grown men and whole families too, sleeping on newspapers, hands out, asking for a nickel, begging for food.  This was before the soup lines.”  Perhaps as a result of having gone hungry himself often during his childhood and college years, Borlaug’s modus vivendi might be summed up in several observations that he made about the importance of food and the application of science to feeding the hungry.

 

First: “There is no more essential commodity than food.  Without food, people perish, social and political organizations disintegrate, and civilizations collapse.”  Second: “You can’t eat potential.”  In other words, you haven’t succeeded until you get new developments into the field and actually into people’s bellies.  And finally: “It is easy to forget that science offers more than a body of knowledge and a process for adding new knowledge.  It tells us not only what we know but what we don’t know.  It identifies areas of uncertainty and offers an estimate of how great and how critical that uncertainty is likely to be.”

 

Jonathan Swift wrote, “Whoever could make two ears of corn or two blades of grass grow where only one grew before, would deserve better of mankind than the whole race of politicians put together.”  Norman Borlaug was such a person.

 

Henry I. Miller, a physician and former director of the FDA’s Office of Biotechnology, is the Robert Wesson Fellow of Scientific Philosophy and Public Policy at Stanford University‘s Hoover institution.

 

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Whole Earth Catalog founder extols GM food

 

(JournalStar.com) – Ten years ago, Greenpeace activists unfurled a banner at the top of the Aurora Cooperative elevator that underscored the organization's opposition to genetically modified corn, soybeans and other crops of similar origin.

 

"This Is Your Food On Drugs," the banner said. "Ban Genetically Engineered Drug Crops."

 

Stewart Brand, who recently gave a Heuerman Lecture on "Green Ag Biotech" at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, thinks consumer anxiety toward food with genetically engineered ingredients has been calmed considerably in the past decade.

 

"I think time goes on and people get used to things," he said in an interview. "That's typically how these things go. Americans have been eating GMO foods now for over a decade and with zero effects."

 

Brand, founder of the Whole Earth Catalog in the 1960s, doesn't like to be portrayed as having reversed his position on technology that remains controversial in Europe and other overseas markets. But he does admit to some attitude adjustment.

 

"My enthusiasm about GMOs has had cause to grow over the years," he said.

 

One reason for his endorsement is rapidly increasing world population and his belief that food needs can't be met without embracing laboratory work that endows crops with such traits as insect resistance and drought tolerance.

 

Watch for China and Africa to assert themselves in that realm.

 

"It's mainly playing out in the developing world now, where the real needs for vastly improved crops are there."

 

Europe will pay the price for hanging back, he said.

 

"It just means that they're getting left behind in one agricultural revolution after another now for awhile."

 

Nebraska farmers have not been hanging back.

 

Virtually all soybeans now fit the genetically modified profile, as does more than 80 percent of the corn crop, said Tom Clemente, a plant science innovation specialist at UNL.

 

But wheat is an example of an important human food crop that has yet to break through the biotechnology barrier.

 

Brand cites its complex genetic makeup. Clemente points to the high cost of government review.

 

"The ability to get a biotechnology trait on the market is still enormously costly," Clemente said. "So there's still a tremendous amount of technology sitting on the shelf because of regulatory hurdles."

 

Brand also addressed climate change, the importance of which, he said, has been clouded by political debate between "the denialists and the calamitists."

 

His attention is on multi-year drought in Texas, Oklahoma and other states, he said.

 

"(Drought) is more significant to me than whether hurricanes are happening or not, because droughts are classic things that any kind of (global) warming causes."

 

The widespread absence of snow in Nebraska in mid-January is not necessarily a sign of global warming, Brand said.

 

"Anything less than 10 years is not climate yet," he said. "It's just weather."

 

Meanwhile, Greenpeace thinking on genetic engineering remains at odds with Brand, Clemente and others.

 

The Greenpeace website includes a picture of farmers in Spain marching behind a "GMO-free agriculture" banner.

 

"These genetically modified organisms can spread through nature," the organization warns, "and interbreed with natural organisms, thereby contaminating non 'GE' environments and future generations in an unforeseeable and uncontrollable way."

 

Greenpeace continues to campaign for labeling of products with GMO ingredients.

 

Although all seems quiet on the Nebraska GMO front, the Aurora episode was not the only sign of a more troubled scene in the years leading up to and away from the new millennium.

 

In 1999 and 2000, the StarLink seed corn controversy attracted nationwide news attention after a product licensed for the livestock feed sector, and not the food sector, turned up in food supply lines in Nebraska and other states.

 

Food allergies were another concern of that time.

 

Corn farmers launched a lawsuit and eventually shared in a $70 million settlement with StarLink creator Aventis SA and its marketing partners.

 

That gave rise to the term "Frankenfoods."

 

Brand described that choice of words on Tuesday as "crystallizing the irrationality of our fears."

 

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GM plants developed to resist intense drought

 

(NoCamels.com) – Israeli agro-biotechnology company, Rosetta Green, has developed a new technology to develop plants that are better able to withstand prolonged periods of severe drought. The company aims to develop new plant varieties resistant to harsh climatic condition, maintaining an increased yield.

 

The company, based in Rehovot, Israel, experimented on tobacco plants that were irrigated with seawater instead of freshwater. The genetically modified plants created by the company were able to grow under seawater irrigation, as opposed to the control group of plants.

 

According to the company’s CEO, Amir Avniel, “the frequent droughts afflicting the world in recent years and the motivation to expand to arid lands containing brackish water require the development of plant varieties resistant to drought and irrigation with salt water.”

 

Rosetta Green is using a technology that can identify MicroRNAs, which are short RNA molecules that play an important role in the regulation of key genetic traits in major crops. The MicroRNAs identified by the company were used to develop prototype plants with significantly improved drought tolerance. The genetic modification was performed by plant tissue culture methods that result in genetic transformation, and this “improved trait” survives from one generation to another, according to Avniel.

 

Plants that were modified by this micro-RNA gene and control plants that did not undergo such modification were irrigated with salt water with triple the salinity level of seawater. Subsequently, both plant groups were put back on a regular irrigation conditions. Researchers found that only the genetically modified plants were able to recover from the severe stress and continued to grow, while control plants completely wilted.

 

The company’s CTO, Rudy Maor, told NoCamels that “the extreme conditions under which the experiment was conducted reinforce the importance of these genes and their advantage over other techniques used to improve plants.” Maor added that “agricultural areas constitute only about 10 percent  of global land area and the development of advanced technologies that may render plants capable of growth in additional areas, such as deserts, is critical for food supply to the ever growing world population.”

 

CEO Avniel added: “This experiment is another step in the company’s progress towards production of improved plants that will provide farmers with excellent yield even in drought conditions, and allow the growth of crops in wide areas that are currently unsuitable due to soil salinity and weather conditions.”

 

According to Maor, part of the de-regulation process ensures that the modified crops will not lose on quality. As to the pricing of these crops, the company explains that their business model relies on licensing their technology to large seed companies who will be responsible for commercialization. Therefore, the pricing and marketing of the new product will be done by the seed companies.

 

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Insect-to-insect disease squeezes citrus industry

 

(Scientific American) – If orange juice is a part of your breakfast, you might be in trouble. A debilitating disease has citrus growers questioning the future of the orange industry in Florida and other parts of the U.S., and new revelations about how it spreads is making prospects look even worse. According to recent research, the insects that transmit the disease don't just spread it from tree to tree—they spread it amongst themselves as well.

 

In 2006 Florida citrus growers found the bacterium Candidatus Liberibacter asiaticus (Las) in their trees. Las causes a disease known as huonglongbing in Asia and citrus greening in the U.S.—and no matter what it is called, it spells big trouble for citrus crops. Infected trees produce bitter, lopsided fruit that often fails to ripen. (Las causes the biggest problem in oranges, but it can infect all citrus plants.) There is no cure, and slowly the whole tree turns yellow and dies. "This is the most important disease affecting citrus production in the world," says Lukasz Stelinski, an entomologist at the University of Florida.

 

For several years, citrus growers thought that removing infected plants could stop the disease. The ailment is transmitted by a flying insect called the Asian citrus psyllid. It drills into plants leaves and stems, and sucks out food through its strawlike mouth, or proboscis, transmitting the Las bacteria from tree to tree during feeding, similar to the way infections are spread via shared needles among humans. Until now, it was thought that the malady could only be picked up from an infected tree, but Stelinski's recent work, published in PLoS ONE, showed that the insects not only passed the bacteria to new plants, but that they could also pass Las to one another during mating. So psyllids that pick up the bacteria from one plant can transfer it to other psyllids who have never themselves come in contact with an infected tree. Therefore, although a grower can remove infected trees, a neighbor's sickly saplings could serve as another Las source. This is the first time scientists have documented a bacteria being transmitted sexually between insects, Stelinski says.

 

When citrus greening was first discovered in Florida in 2006, "it was total doom and gloom," says David Hall, and entomologist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Many growers left the business, sold their land and gave up. Controlling the psyllid requires using lots of pesticides, which is expensive, toxic and does not solve the problem if infected psyllids are getting in from nearby groves. Removing sick trees was difficult and costly. Everyone thought: "There's no way that the citrus industry as we know it today would exist," Hall says.

 

The future of citrus production remains unclear, Hall says, but for now, the citrus industry is spending much of its resources and money to find a solution for citrus greening. Each year it commits about $16 million to research aimed at fighting the disease. From genetically engineering citrus trees and psyllids to finding parasites that attack the bugs, "everything that you might dream of that might lead to a solution is being investigated," he notes. Some growers are simply trying to buy time by feeding infected trees extra nutrients to extend their productive lives. Eventually that cost will creep into supermarkets, Hall says. "All of that gets charged back to the consumer."

 

"I don't think many Americans realize what a threat this disease is posing to citrus production in the U.S.," Stelinski says. If an effective management strategy is not discovered soon, the industry will have a hard time maintaining productive yields and some growers might opt to sell their land. The doom-and-gloom situation Hall described is still a very real possibility, he adds. "I'm not sure you can actually say that isn't going to happen."

 

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Citrus greening disease spreads to Texas

 

AUSTIN, Texas (Reuters) - Agriculture inspectors in Texas have detected the plant disease citrus greening in an orange tree, bringing to five the number of states where the tree-damaging disease has been confirmed, state and federal officials said on Wednesday.

 

The disease leaves the fruit safe to eat and poses no threat to human health but attacks a tree's vascular system, reducing fruit size and affecting color, sometimes causing fruit to drop before ripening, according to the Texas Department of Agriculture.

 

The disease has also been detected in Florida, Georgia, Louisiana and South Carolina and has damaged citrus industries in Florida, Africa, Asia and South America, the department said.

 

Texas ranks second among the states -- behind Florida -- in grapefruit production and third in orange production -- behind Florida and California.

 

Texas agriculture authorities imposed a five-mile quarantine around one affected tree discovered in an orange grove in San Juan in South Texas, the primary citrus-producing region in Texas' $140 million industry.

 

Citrus greening is caused by a bacterium typically transmitted by an insect called the citrus psyllid. There is no cure for infected trees.

 

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