By Mac Margolis NEWSWEEK
Published Jun 27, 2009
From the magazine issue dated Jul 13, 2009
A funny thing happened on the way to the next green revolution. The world's biggest biotech corporations have deployed the latest in genetic science to pump up yield, ward off crop disease, make food more nutritious and fundamentally reengineer what we plant and eat, and no one is complaining. Environmental groups are not shouting about the perils of "Frankenfoods." There's no rabid French cheese maker with a bad mustache leading foodies on a rampage through high-tech farms. Prince Charles is quiet. Has the war over the world's dinner table finally ended?
Not quite. Europe, much of Asia and parts of Africa fiercely resist filling the larder with genetically modified groceries, and many in agribusiness despair that they always will. So instead, they're trying to woo them with distinctly non-GM varieties. Crop scientists, seed companies and clever farmers are using the most advanced tools of science to reinvent native breeding—the age-old technique of selecting the best crops and then painstakingly breeding and crossbreeding them to make more and better food. These discoveries are remaking the world's farms by boosting productivity, creating more-nutritious food and steeling harvests against diseases and inclement weather. And yet because the new methods do not require gene splicing, they circumvent the conflict between Big Biotech and the Cassandras of food that has roiled for decades. In part, this is also a recognition that early claims for the coming genetically modified utopia were overstated.
Don't call it retro farming. Behind the revival of "traditional" farming techniques are many of the same breakthroughs in genetics, computerization and plant physiology that have driven the biotech revolution. The difference is, instead of food fashioned in the laboratory by lifting DNA from one species to another, scientists are working to unlock the secrets bundled inside each plant itself.
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