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March 2, 2010
· Green fury as EU authorizes GM potatoes
· Biotech crops gain in world-wide popularity
· Small farm outlook brighter than expected
· Legumes could help reduce nitrogen spread
· Plan ‘Bee’ to boost hives in Scotland cities
Green fury as EU authorizes GM potatoes
(Yahoo!
News)
The first approval of genetically modified foods in
"This is a bad day for European citizens and the environment," Friends of the Earth said of the green light given for the Amflora potato to be developed by German chemical giant BASF.
The EU Commission also allowed three GM maize products to be
placed on the European market, though not grown in
The modified vegetables and cereals have long been a matter
of fierce debate in
"We are against the decision taken today by the European Commission," Italian Agriculture Minister Luca Zaia said in a statement.
Prior the potato, only MON 810, a strain of genetically
modified maize made by Monsanto, has been authorised
for cultivation in
The EU Commission said its latest decision was "based on a considerable volume of sound science".
"Responsible innovation will be my guiding principle when dealing with innovative technologies," EU Health and Consumer Policy Commissioner John Dalli assured.
"After an extensive and thorough review of the five pending GM files, it became clear to me that there were no new scientific issues that merited further assessment," he added.
The EU's food safety agency has said the potato is safe for all uses. It is designed to produce industrial starch for use in areas such as paper making.
Amflora is also modified to produce pure amylopectin starch in technical applications.
Conventional potatoes produce a mixture of amylopectin and amylose starch.
But the potato also contains a marker gene resistant to antibiotics, fuelling environmentalists' fears over the risks of contamination for non GMO varieties.
Friends of the Earth said the Amflora potato "carries a controversial antibiotic resistant gene which it cannot be guaranteed will not enter the food chain."
"The new commissioner whose job is to protect consumers has in one of his first decisions ignored public opinion and safety concerns to please the world?s biggest chemical company," said Heike Moldenhauer, the group's GMO spokesperson.
The Greens party in the European parliament said they were "shocked."
Approval of the GMO potato "flies in the face of the 70 percent of consumers who are against GM food, as well as the anti-GM position of the European Parliament," said German Green MEP Martin Hausling.
EU health commissioner Dalli stressed that the GM potatoes would be cultivated at a distance from ordinary crops.
BASF, on its website, said it was "delighted" by the decision "after waiting for more than 13 years," for EU approval.
"We hope, that this decision is a milestone for further
innovative products that will promote a competitive and sustainable agriculture
in
Biotech crops gain in world-wide popularity
(Wire Services) – Because of its contribution to agricultural productivity and sustainable farming, growers around the world continue to choose genetically engineered (GE) crops according to a report released today by the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-Biotech Applications (ISAAA).
The ISAAA report, The Global Status of Commercialized Biotech/GM Crops: 2009, says a record 14 million farmers in 25 countries are using agricultural biotechnology today. Ninety percent (13 million) of these are resource-poor farmers in developing countries.
Sharon Bomer Lauritsen, Executive Vice President, Food and Agriculture for the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO), issued the following statement in response to the report's findings:
"The annual ISAAA report is proof positive that the global adoption of biotech crops - especially corn, soybeans, cotton and canola - increases each year as more and more farmers gain access to this technology. Agricultural biotechnology provides solutions for today's farmers in the form of plants that are more environmentally friendly while yielding more per acre, resisting diseases and insect pests and reducing farmers' production costs.
"When you look at the rising number of acres of biotech crops planted each year (330 million in 2009 compared with 309 million in 2008), and the increasing number of farmers who have chosen this technology (14 million in 2009 compared with 13.3 million in 2008), it's obvious that biotech crops are delivering value to more and more growers around the world.
"In the
"As the world confronts agricultural challenges such as climate change and a higher-than-ever demand for food supplies, advances in biotechnology can provide heartier crops that produce more food, often in areas with less-than-perfect growing conditions. For example, biotech crop varieties with drought tolerance traits and nutrient-enhanced foods offer the greatest potential for future adoption.
"The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization has predicted that feeding a world population of 9.1 billion people in 2050 will require raising overall food production by some 70 percent (nearly 100 percent in the developing countries). The findings of this report prove that biotechnology is a key solution in meeting the growing demand to feed, fuel and heal the world."
Small farms outlook brighter than expected
(AP
via Post-Bulletin)
That seems to be the conventional wisdom. But key
measurements in a new state report indicate farming in
The report, by the state Office of Farmland Preservation, tracks a variety of indicators to see if the state's efforts at supporting agriculture are working.
The idea is to quantify the state of farming, rather than just relying on the gut sense of farmers and officials, said Bob Hart, chairman of the task force behind the report.
The numbers may be surprising:
• The number of farms in
• Ninety percent of the farms are owned by individuals or families.
• There has been an increase in local food processors in the last few years, which helps lower transportation costs for small farmers, and thus helps keep agriculture economically viable.
• Net farm income is higher than it's been in nearly 20 years, rising 192 percent since a low in 1999, the report states.
• The number of farmers markets has more than doubled since 1998.
"I think farmers have always felt like they're on the short end of things," said Jacob Anderson, a member of the task force. He concedes, however, that "there seems to be a lot of good news."
Exhibit A in those trends could be Siri Erickson-Brown and her Local Roots farm in Carnation.
After a master's degree in public administration and several desk jobs, she decided to change careers, interning at a small farm in 2006.
The next year, she started farming on leased land and has
been selling vegetables at farmers markets and to a number of
Not long ago, this wouldn't have been possible, Erickson-Brown believes.
But with the surge in interest in "local food," and consumers' increasing desire to know what's in their food, she and her husband, who has a law degree, have managed to build a "moderately successful" business. Both work full time on the farm.
"I basically felt like there was a ready market," she said, citing the bustling farmers-market scene. Small farmers like her, she added. "aren't finding it too hard to sell what we grow."
Not everything is perfect. While the number of farms has increased, the number of acres in farming has decreased.
It's getting harder and harder for newcomers to buy land and increasingly enticing for farmers to sell to developers.
And not everyone is seeing that increase in net farm profits.
"If you talked to the average farmer, I don't know that he'd say the value of my crop has gone up 192 percent," said Josh Giuntoli, with the Farmland Preservation office. Most small farms take in less than $10,000, according to the Washington State Department of Agriculture.
It's important to note that not all farms are created equal, said Lee Faulconer, with the department. "There's always some segments doing well while others aren't," he said.
For instance, when the price of corn went up, the cattlemen saw hikes in the price of feed.
In most farm families, one member works off the farm, to ensure not only a steady paycheck, but health insurance and other benefits.
Meanwhile, the average age of farmers has steadily increased over the decades. With many of the state's farmers nearing retirement, their children aren't necessarily interested in taking over.
Legumes could help reduce nitrogen spread
(Stanford University via ScienceDaily.com) – Nitrogen is vital for all plant life, but increasingly the planet is paying a heavy price for the escalating use of nitrogen fertilizer.
Excess nitrogen from fertilizer runoff into rivers and lakes
causes algal blooms that create oxygen-depleted dead zones, such as the 6,000
to 7,000 square mile zone in the
But new findings by Stanford researchers that reveal the inner workings of nitrogen-producing bacteria living inside legumes such as soybeans could enable researchers to blunt those negative effects and aid efforts to make agriculture more sustainable.
"We have discovered a new biological process, by which leguminous plants control behavior of symbiotic bacteria," said molecular biologist Sharon Long. "These plants have a specialized protein processing system that generates specific protein signals. These were hitherto unknown, but it turns out they are critical to cause nitrogen fixation."
The ability of legumes to capture nitrogen from the air and turn it into plant food, or "fix" it, also leaves the soil enriched through the plant matter left after harvesting, creating a natural fertilizer for other crops, which is the basis for crop rotation. Alternating legumes with other crops has been a major component of agriculture around the world for thousands of years. Yet until recently, little was known about how nitrogen fixation worked, or why some legumes are efficient at fixing nitrogen and others poor.
The key part of the process that Long's research group uncovered is a plant gene that triggers a critical chemical signal. Without the signal, no nitrogen gets fixed by the bacteria. Dong Wang, a postdoctoral scholar in Long's lab who pinned down the gene, is first author of a paper describing the work, published Feb. 26 in Science. Long, a professor of biology, is senior author.
Do-it-yourself nitrogen fixing
The beneficial bacteria in question reside inside the nodules of legumes such as peas, beans, alfalfa and clover, where they pluck molecules of nitrogen from air in the soil and turn it into ammonia, which feeds the plant. It sounds simple, but it is a complicated and poorly understood process. Only bacteria that contain a special enzyme are capable of this sort of "nitrogen fixing" using airborne nitrogen -- no other type of living organism can do it. All other plants have to get their nutrients from using already fixed nitrogen in the soil.
This special ability allows legumes to flourish in nitrogen-poor soils, whereas other plants require applications of manufactured nitrogen fertilizer to grow well. But even legumes can't flourish without the right symbiotic bacteria.
"When you deal with a natural soil, you are dealing with a lot of complexity. Everything we learn about what makes symbiosis work gives us a tool to understand why, sometimes, symbiosis fails," Long said. "Plant breeders who are trying to help develop better-adapted plants can now analyze traits such as this. We've given them a new tool."
The more efficient that legumes can be made and the wider the range of environments they can thrive in, the more they can help reduce the need for chemical nitrogen that runs off into water or sinks into the groundwater or decomposes into a gaseous form. Long said
The gene's the thing
The legume that Long's team worked with is called barrel medic, a forage plant similar to alfalfa. They tracked down the newly discovered gene by studying mutant plants that were failing to produce healthy nodules on their roots.
While bacteria inside normal nodules will thrive, in the defective nodules of this plant those bacteria can't provide the benefit they are wired to deliver. Long said that the mutant "contained perfectly good bacteria, but was making these lousy nodules."
Wang found that the mutant plants generated the proper precursor to the protein needed to nudge the bacteria into fixing nitrogen. But the critical enzyme for processing that precursor into the final signal was missing. So the bacteria simply sat, the nodules didn't develop and no nitrogen got fixed.
By comparing the genome of the mutant plants with normal plants, the group found a gene that was missing from the mutants. Suspecting that gene might be the culprit, the researchers took a functional version of the gene from normal plants and put it into the mutants. The mutant legumes then began fixing nitrogen the same as normal ones, "proving that we found the right gene," said Wang.
How less is more
Since 1960, the use of nitrogen fertilizer in the
"That might make things more expensive for American farmers and increase food prices for consumers, but this is going to wipe out people in developing countries, whose soils are perhaps most in need of fertilizers," Long said. "This is a crucial issue. And nitrogen fixation is a key to sustainability."
Costs aside, the production of chemical fertilizer also adds to the problem of global warming, both by way of the fossil fuels used in production of chemical fertilizer and through the impact of leftover fertilizer that degrades into nitrous oxide, a highly potent greenhouse gas.
With the planet's ever-growing population, Long said there is going to be increased need to keep productivity going on lands that are starting to become marginal because of drought, temperature or salinity problems, among others.
"The rhizobium bacteria are a critical partner in whether that kind of extension of serviceable land can occur," she said. "In order for us to take existing symbioses and help make them better, optimize them for being productive even when conditions start to deteriorate, tools such as understanding how to improve nitrogen fixing in legumes are crucial."
Joel Griffitts and Colby Starker,
also authors on the paper, contributed to the research when they were graduate
students or postdoctoral scholars in Long's lab. Griffitts
is now an assistant professor at
Plan ‘Bee’ to boost hives in Scotland
(The Scotsman) – URBAN beekeeping could be a "vital tool" in reversing declines in honeybee populations, the Co-operative claimed as it rolled out a scheme to encourage more people to keep hives in Scottish towns and cities.
Last year the Co-operative, which has 600 hives on its
farmland around the country, piloted a scheme to train would-be beekeepers on
allotments in
Now the company is rolling out the idea to other areas in
The scheme, in which people attend a free two-day course, are provided with free kit, bees and an easy-to-use plastic "beehaus" hive if they are interested in keeping bees, is being run with the aim of getting 300 new beekeepers in the city centres.
An extra £225,000 announced today for Plan Bee will help fund the beekeeping scheme for city gardens and allotments, along with financing more research into the causes of bee declines.
It brings the total funding by the Co-operative for the programme, which was launched in January 2009, to £475,000 – this includes research, raising awareness of the honeybee's plight and efforts to encourage people to plant bee-friendly wildflowers.
Funding has gone to research into the potential impacts of pesticides known as neonicotinoids on bees. The research programme has also sponsored efforts to map where the native British black honeybees – believed to be hardier than the Italian honeybees most often used in hives – are found, so they can be used to breed tougher queens.
The company will also be giving away hundreds of thousands of packets of wildflower seeds, containing bee favourites such as poppies, cornflowers, white campion and corncockle.
Paul Monaghan, head of social goals at the Co-operative, said: "Nature's number one pollinating machine appears to be breaking down and no-one knows for sure why.
"Urban beekeeping is becoming increasingly popular and
could be a vital tool in the reverse of honeybee decline in the
He added: "Through our projects we want to show people that you don't have to have acres of land to take up beekeeping."
Last year the
The agency also backed the launch of the "beehaus" design of beehive and called on people to support bees – including wild bumblebees – by planting insect-friendly plants in their gardens.
Bees play an important role in agriculture, with the value of commercial crops that benefit from bee pollination estimated at £100 million to £200m a year while honey is worth £10m-£30m.
But bee populations face a growing number of threats including pests and diseases such as the varroa mite and a lack of habitat providing food sources such as wild flowers.
Numbers of honeybee colonies have fallen by between 6.7 per cent and almost 12 per cent a year over the past three years, according to government figures.
End Transmission