IRRI photo by Isagani Serrano
GENETICALLY ENGINEERED CROPS
Africa without regard to how much hunger and poverty might be reduced by it.” Whether golden rice – or other crops that focus on the world’s most pressing problems – will usher in a new agricultural era remains to be seen; it’s comforting, perhaps, to believe that a next generation of GE crops will focus on feeding people, rather than killing weeds and bugs. “One of the things we stressed in our study,” said Ervin, “is the need to develop technology to address specific needs that are more of what we call public goods. Because what we’ve had up to this point are basically Monsanto and others rolling out technologies that help farmers reduce costs – and understandably, that’s what their role is – and improve farming conditions. But we haven’t had a lot of research on new
Outside the United States, the world is on the verge of another great experiment with a genetically engineered crop being hyped by many as the answer to world hunger: golden rice (pictured here in comparison to white rice grain).
GE technologies to address issues like climate change and water conservation and things like that, because the benefits from those activities are more broadly spread.” Ervin and Gurian-Sherman agree it’s probably best to go into the next
experiment with eyes wide open, and with the understanding that things – especially genes – are never as simple as we make them in laboratories. “Once you start over-relying on a technology,” said Ervin, “nature is pretty smart, and it will figure out ways to adjust. So [GE crops] are not a silver bullet, but they can be a very effective technology.” Said Gurian-Sherman: “We need to make room for and incentivize the things in agriculture that we know are sustainable and better for society overall and highly productive … If we get caught up in the hype about genetic engineering, to the exclusion of breeding and good agronomy and agricultural ecology, we’re going to be in trouble – because genetic engineering is only going to be able to take us a small part of the way to where we need to go.”
AMERICAN AGRICULTURE
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