Last week posts and The Scientist Gardener and The Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog discussed the African preference for white over yellow corn and some of the reasons behind it. Would orange corn, packed full of even more of the healthy vitamin A precursors that give yellow corn its color, be rejected for the same reasons?
Posts under ‘Feeding the world’
India and Bt Brinjal/Eggplant
India decided to delay the approval of insect resistant eggplants, links to various coverage, and how much difference a comma makes.
The Taste of Tomatoes + Tomato Mutagenesis
First, since I didn’t explicitly state it in my previous post, the paper on the longer lasting tomatoes developed by India’s National Institute for Plant Genome Research didn’t report any data on how the RNAi knock-down tomatoes actually taste.* The tomatoes are nearly twice as firm as tomatoes in which these genes are NOT knocked [...]
An Interview with Roger Beachy
Pam Ronald, writing at Tomorrow’s Table points out an interesting interview with Roger Beachy the new head of the National Institute of Food and Agriculture (itself a newly created government organization) in Nature Biotechnology. He talks about everything from restoring support for the, very successful, programs that used to fund the training of plant breeders [...]
Biodiversity and Genetic Engineering Aren’t Mutually Exclusive!
The work of plant breeders and the naturalists who catalog so much of the genetic diversity passed down over 400 generations*, have done far more to feed people than genetic engineering thus far. The reason I spend so much time talking about genetic engineering (and to a lesser extent mutation breeding) isn’t because I think [...]
More on the Good Guys (CGIAR)
CGIAR spending on research targeted at agriculture in Sub-Saharan Africa (178 million dollars a year in 2003) provides 1.3 million people with an escape from extreme poverty (living one dollar a day or less) every year. Simple division would indicate the agricultural research of the CGIAR centers is saving human beings from the trap of extreme poverty at a cost of just under 137 dollars per person. Of course it isn’t that simple, there are both economies of scale** and, eventually, diminishing margins of return*** to consider, but it seems the work of the CGIAR centers in Africa are big enough to have achieved those economies of scale, and, given their calculations on the elasticity on poverty to investment in agriculture, Africa is a LONG way from having to worry about diminishing marginal returns on agricultural investment.
Given the elasticity of poverty reduction to agricultural research spending they calculate (-.22) the marginal cost* of reducing poverty by another person in Sub-Saharan Africa through investments in agricultural research is only $71. (i.e. spending one billion dollars more on agricultural research would save an additional 14 million people from poverty.) This doesn’t consider the additional postive effects of improving local agriculture (for example reducing the incidence of famine).
Read more
Funding the Good Guys
Some changes are happening for CGAIR (the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research). If you don’t know about CGAIR, they’re definitely the good guys. But don’t take my word for it. How would you classify a non-profit organization that’s been working for close to 40 years to fight hunger and poverty by improving the agricultural [...]
BBC Frontiers on Genetically Engineered Crops
Without realizing it I’d begun to fall into the trap of thinking of European positions on genetically engineered plants mostly as they impact countries in the developing world (European donors funding Greenpeace activity in Thailand, or the threat of losing access to European markets being used to discourage the use of genetically engineered crops in [...]
Make Sure Your Voice is Heard
Another positive side effect of extending my stay in Iowa for another week (besides having the chance to work from a room with a view), was getting the chance to see the Pamela Ronald and Raoul Adamchak give a presentation on the same themes are their book “Tomorrow’s Table” here on campus (I’ve reviewed the book [...]
Edible Cottonseed
A professor at Texas A&M has found a way to use genetic engineering to make cotton seeds edible to humans and livestock. It’s a chance to get more benefit (an important new source of protein) from an existing resource (cotton plants). Unfortunately for all those who stand to benefit (especially the poor and malnurished in countries like India and China that lead the world in cotton production), while it’s possible to create edible cotton seeds using natural mutations, the only way to do it so the plants are heavily attacked by insects requires genetic engineering, so any benefits are a decade or more away.