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In Brief
- By 2050 or so, agriculture will need to produce about 50 percent more food than it currently does because of the expanding population. Traditional crops and farming methods could not sustain that much productivity.
- Representatives from the agricultural industry defend genetically modified crops as one of several tools that should be used to help farmers in developing countries become more productive.
If environmental and economic sustainability is ultimately a matter of balancing the human race’s consumption and productivity, then the agricultural industry leans heavily on both sides of that scale. Its drain on the earth’s resources is enormous: it claims 70 percent of all freshwater taken by our species and more than 40 percent of the planet’s solid surface (nearly all the arable land), with attendant casualties in biodiversity. Yet modern agriculture is also the only reason we can produce enough food to nourish our population of 6.8 billion—a number slated to reach more than nine billion by midcentury. Keeping up with that steeply rising demand thus defines the challenge of sustainability not only for agriculture but for humanity.
Agriculture depends on many technologies, but biotechnology might be the most influential among them. To find out how the industry perceives its prospects for raising both global crop productivity and sustainability, contributing editor John Rennie spoke with representatives of four leading agricultural biotechnology companies. What follows here is an abridged version of their edited conversation. —The Editors
This article was originally published with the title Biotech's Plans to Sustain Agriculture.
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8 Comments
Add CommentBiotechs Plans to Sustain the Agriculture should have been titled:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBiotechs Plans to Kill Us All while Making a Ton of Money!
I suggest you have a counter article with T. Colin Campbell, PhD (The China Study), Joel Fuhrman, MD (Eat to Live), and Dean Ornish, MD (Reversing Heart Disease) about why the real problem is not how to grow more crops, the real problem is who eats them animals or humans! Please invite the Prsident's top doctor for the US! Do our country and great service!
Lab studies in the India, repeated in the US and elsewhere show that as the percent of protein we eat coming from animals increases, the death rate from heart disease, cancer and diabetes. And population eating habit studies (The China Study and WHO chart attached) show that as we increase the consumption of unrefined plant protein, these diseases dramatically decrease.
The solution then to needing more food because of population growth and the health care crisis looming around the globe can both be addressed with the same solution eat less animal protein far less less than 5% of your calories based on the studies. Here in the US we have the second worst death rate in the world based on World Health Organization statistics (attached).
As a vegetarian of thirty plus years, (I'm 71 now) and recently converted to being a vegan, I am often told I look like I'm in my 50's. I still mountain bike and also meditate... the three legs of Doctor Dean Ornish's reversing heart disease formula: diet, exercise and meditation - for reversing heart disease (which I fortunately do not have).
These well know facts (Diet For New America by Robbins) have been ignored and our health here in the US has suffered as a direct result. During World War II, when we were rationed on animal protein, 19 major diseases decreased very dramatically until after the war when we were allowed to eat meat, eggs, and dairy without rationing - then the rates of those 19 major diseases increased back to even higher levels than prior to the war, as we made up for the "sacrifices" we made for our troops.
Why - special interest and the ton of money made - it is the tobacco interest all over again.
Bob Gallagher
Aurora, IL
I totaly agree with you because a lot of food is needed to feed the animals and it is also drestroying the planet(more energy is used for food/meat production then most of the other)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAnd to the GM companies it isnt about making food cheaper and more avaible to other's but to make more money(did any search on monsanto, they only care about money, and so much that if u buy the crop seeds from them and u dont use then, the seed will self-terminate) why make it if u worry about helping farmers?
I would recommend as well the same thing "bob gallagher" said, eat less meat or not meat. I am Locto-vegetarian as well with my entire family.
Monsanto does not use the terminator crops, they did purchase the company that created the technology though. Please verify statements before you mindlessly repeat them. "I heard Obama is a secret muslam terriss!"
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisUgh, well I'm not a subscriber, so I can't see the specifics in this article, but it's disappointing to see that SciAm is continuing to shill for the biotech industry.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisProducing 50% more food is not a problem at all. First, even using current technology, as land becomes scarce, market forces will drive up the cost of meat, which is vastly more land-intensive than vegan food (it takes something like 5-10 times as much land to make a calorie of meat). The resulting reduction in meat consumption would solve the problem. Also, ending ethanol production would save a lot of land.
Second, traditionally grown crops (i.e., organic crops) have been shown time and time again to have similar or even superior yields to biotech crops, so such technologies don't even help. The reason why biotech dominates the US agriculture industry is that biotech farming is less knowledge-intensive because all you have to do is dump a bunch of fertilizer and seed on the land and then drench it with pesticides, rather than think carefully about how to plan the crops to sustain soil fertility endogenously and fight pests with biodiversity.
Save the planet. Eat more meat and die young!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf ten times more energy is required to produce the same nutritional content in meat, why are not the veggies 10x cheaper?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this@mo98
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBecause currently the cost of land (and, by extension, the cost of the solar energy soaked up by plants on the land) does not dominate the price of food. With unlimited land, animal calories are cheaper than plant calories, because all you have to do to collect them is let the animals roam free and eat the plants, and then once they've done the work of concentrating energy from the plants into their flesh, you eat them.
Essentially, the animals are performing free labor by "harvesting" the plants into their flesh into a concentrated source of energy that is easy to eat a lot of calories of. However, there is a huge loss of the original solar energy from the plants the animals eat because the animals are burning a lot of energy running around and beating their hearts and such things.
How is it that a scientific magazine can publish a so-called scientific article and not present the overwhelming wealth of knowledge on the other side of the GMO and biotech industry? How is it that there is not one mention of all the legal issues and controversy that Monsanto (as well as other seed manufacturers) is at the center (note: research by independent agencies)?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThere is much information that points to the issue not being of food production or capacity, but food efficiency (who's eating what we grow: humans or animals?). Further, food safety is a huge issue that was not addressed in an impartial way (GMO's are very controversial and banned in many areas of the world).
For a scientific and supposedly impartial source of information to not include information on the opposite side of the argument is disappointing and misleading. After all, all we have to risk is our safety.......