An
article in The
Economist describes the history of wheat. It’s a marvelously written piece worth reading in its entirety, but I
have quoted below a just few paragraphs that I think make some good points
about modern farming, genetic modification and the need for high yields. All bold is mine.
The
article starts with a brief description of what “wheat” really is - an
artificial mutant incapable of living uncultivated in the wild:
Strange
is the word, for wheat is a genetic monster. A typical wheat variety is
hexaploid—it has six copies of each gene, where most creatures have two. Its 21
chromosomes contain a massive 16 billion base pairs of DNA, 40 times as much as
rice, six times as much as maize and five times as much as people. It is derived from three wild ancestral
species in two separate mergers. The first took place in the Levant 10,000
years ago, the second near the Caspian Sea 2,000 years later. The result was a
plant with extra-large seeds incapable
of dispersal in the wild, dependent entirely on people to sow them.
Like
many artificial crops, wheat would not survive in the wild, a point that should
be remembered when calculating the risks of genetic engineering and
“superweeds”.
The article
describes the history of farming from its start roughly 9,000 years ago. First the ancient farmers used manure from
their cattle to fertilize their fields, but when this became insufficient and nutrients
were depleted, the voices of doom predicted mass starvation. Mechanization in the form of sowing and
threshing machines were introduced. These were initially opposed but later accepted as being normal and
necessary. Later on, tractors helped increase
yields still further. But it was
artificial fertilizer that replaced manure (and the animals needed to produce
it), that eventually allowed enough crops to be grown. However, it was Norman Borlaug and his dwarf
wheat that really made the difference:
India
was on the brink of mass famine. Huge shipments of food aid from America were
all that stood between its swelling population and a terrible fate.
...
Borlaug
refused to be so pessimistic. He arrived in India in March 1963 and began
testing three new varieties of Mexican wheat. The yields were four or five
times better than Indian varieties. In 1965, after overcoming much bureaucratic
opposition, Swaminathan persuaded his government to order 18,000 tonnes of
Borlaug's seed.
…
Eager
farmers took it up with astonishing results. By 1974, India wheat production had tripled and India was
self-sufficient in food; it has never faced a famine since. In 1970 Norman
Borlaug was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for firing the first shot in what
came to be called the “green revolution”.
Other
breeds followed. The interesting thing is
how they were produced:
Today
scientists use thermal neutrons, X-rays, or ethyl methane sulphonate, a harsh
carcinogenic chemical—anything that will damage DNA—to generate mutant cereals.
Virtually every variety of wheat and
barley you see growing in the field was produced by this kind of “mutation
breeding”. No safety tests are done; nobody protests. The irony is that genetic
modification (GM) was invented in 1983 as a gentler, safer, more rational and
more predictable alternative to mutation breeding—an organic technology, in
fact. Instead of random mutations, scientists could now add the traits they
wanted.
In
2004 200m acres of GM crops were grown worldwide with good effects on yield
(up), pesticide use (down), biodiversity (up) and cost (down). There has not
been a single human health problem. Yet,
far from being welcomed as a greener green revolution, genetic modification
soon ran into fierce opposition from the environmental movement.
Compare
the earlier methods for producing hybrids with the more surgical genetic
engineering methods that allow just specific genes to be altered. Also compare the current opposition to genetic modification, to the earlier opposition to
the plough, the threshing machine and the tractor; also consider the opposition
to Borlaug’s dwarf wheat.
The
article goes on to describe how the world population appears to be about to plateau. The key
difference is in developing countries where the number of children born per
woman has fallen from six to three.
Human
beings may be the only creatures that have fewer babies when they are better
fed. The fastest-growing populations in the world over the next 50 years will
be those of Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, Somalia, Uganda and Yemen. All except in
Yemen are in Africa. All are hungry. All remain untouched by Borlaug's green
Revolution: all depend on primarily organic agriculture.
We
can speculate on the reasons for this. Better education and equal rights for women (and birth control) are
likely to be a part of it. But it seems
likely that the reduction in subsistence farming, where families have to grow
their own food to live, has reduced the need for couples to have large families
to tend their land for them. Ironically,
poverty seems to encourage large families; in rich countries, people want fewer
children.
The
article ends on the need to grow even more food for the estimated ten billion
people still expected by 2050, and what this implies for farming:
That will mean either better yields
or less rainforest—which is why fertilisers, pesticides and transgenes are the
best possible protectors of the planet.
As I
have said before, a challenge will be to feed those extra people, but a bigger
challenge will be to feed them without chopping down more forest, and without losing
more waste-land to cultivation.
Today
we celebrate the birthday of 
Recent Comments