Genetic Maize

Do you have professional experience with writing or interpreting legislation? Please speak up in the comments!

The Global Food Security Act of 2009, S.384 has a few clauses that have anti-biotech activists all worked up. What do the changes really mean? Is the US government really part of a Monsanto-led conspiracy to force the impoverished into a cycle of dependency on patented seed and pesticides?

The Pesticide Action Network of North America sums up their view of the situation in their newsletter:

After its introduction in the Senate a year ago, Bill Gates and Bill Clinton have been quietly pressing for this piece of legislation that aims to fight global hunger with one hand while orchestrating a giant taxpayer subsidy to pesticide and ag biotech companies with the other. The bill, also known as the Lugar-Casey Act — for Senators Richard Lugar (R-IN) and Robert Casey (D-PA) — would refocus aid programs on agricultural development, with a caveat: public funding of genetically engineered (GE) seeds is what this bill means by “agricultural development.”

I don’t know if PANNA actually read the Act, because there’s a lot in there about agricultural development that has nothing to do with genetic engineering, as you’ll see in this post.

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One of the best parts of the Maize Genetics Meeting is the opportunity to have discussions with scientists working in a variety of fields from academia, industry, and NGOs. Conversation this afternoon veered towards intellectual property (IP) and biotechnology for a bit. It’s a contentious subject for a lot of reasons, but some new ideas I’d never thought of before came up today. I don’t have a background in IP, so please feel free share your thoughts and ideas in the comments! (more…)

Field of cotton by Brian Hathcock via Flickr.

We’ve all heard about the tragic suicides of farmers in India, and we’ve all seen blame placed on Bt cotton. Vandana Shiva has been a leading finger pointer, saying that farmer suicides are due to genetically engineered crops (specifically, due to Monsanto), as in the April 2009 post From Seeds of Suicide to Seeds of Hope: Why Are Indian Farmers Committing Suicide and How Can We Stop This Tragedy?, instead of focusing on real problems like the lack of fair credit.

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The farmer suicides in India were studied in depth in an October 2008 report Bt Cotton and Farmer Suicides in India: Reviewing the Evidence by IFPRI (International Food Policy Research Institute). I covered the report over at Genetic Maize in Bt cotton and suicides in India, but I have zero experience in India, so it wasn’t a very in depth post. Happily, I have just found the post I wish I had the experience to write!

Siddhartha Shome writes about India and agriculture (among other things) at Sid’s Blog. His November 2008 post P. Sainath and Farmers’ Suicides in India is as relevant as the day it was written. I hope you’ll take a look. His recent post Frequently Asked Questions about GMOs and Bt-Brinjal is well worth a read as well.

Farmers' Market in Jackson, Mississippi by NatalieMaynor via Flickr.

Visitors to Biofortified may notice some seemingly conflicting messages in our posts. The authors of this blog are generally proponents* of biotechnology. We are also often proponents of low-input high-genetic diversity farming, and proponents of local or regional food systems. How can that be? Well, we don’t think these ideas are conflicting at all. We think biotech** goes hand in hand with sustainability. We’d like to someday see vendors at farmer’s markets proudly displaying the traits they use in their produce to benefit the environment and consumers.

There are many ways that biotech traits can help farmers reduce inputs and have more biodiversity on their farms, and ways to help food be more local. Two great examples are apples and tomatoes. Both of these are extremely popular fruits, are a healthy addition to any diet, and are eaten fresh as well as processed. Both can be grown in a variety of climates, but have a short growing season in most places, meaning that they are often shipped long distances before they get to consumers. There are a lot of specific traits that could be put into locally adapted varieties of apples and tomatoes to help make it easier to grow in a wider variety of places for a longer season, decrease pesticide use, and increase profit margins. (more…)

James, over at James and the Giant Corn, has written a post about the long lasting tomatoes from India: Scientists at India’s NIPGR Create a Longer-Lasting Tomato (Studying The Regulation of Fruit Ripening). He does a great job of explaining cell wall chemistry, which I neglected to cover in I say tomato… I appreciate that he pointed out something that I forgot to mention (emphasis added):

I shouldn’t have to say this, but there are currently no genetically engineered tomatoes on the market. For a short time in the 1990s Calgene sold the Flavr Savr tomato in California grocery stores, but they weren’t able make a profit doing so, so they stopped. The poor taste of most tomatoes for sale in the grocery store today is purely the result of conventional breeding (my post on the subject and Mat_kinase’s).