BIOTECH IN THE NEWS

Developing countries will need to develop and implement effective approaches to assess and manage the potential benefits and risks of genetically engineered crops. Costly regulatory delays can compromise technology delivery and hinder the commercialization of public-sector developed products. This view was forwarded  by Jose Falck-Zepeda and colleagues in Delivering genetically engineered crops to poor farmers: Recommendations for improved biosafety regulations in developing countries, a policy brief published by the international Food Policy and Research Institute.

Flexible, efficient, and innovative approaches for cost-effective risk assessment should be considered by policy makers and regulators in developing countries. The authors recommend that developing countries should explore and assess all available options (including both established agricultural practices and emerging technologies) and integrate them into efficient, locally adapted farming systems.

A project that aims to improve the capacity for yam research-for-development in West and Central Africa (WCA) has received a €750,000 (USD 1 million) grant from the European Union-African, Caribbean and Pacific Science and Technology Program (EU-ACP). The project, tagged Strengthening Capacity for Yam Research-for-Development in Central and Western Africa (SCYReC), will be managed and implemented by Nigeria-based International Institute for Tropical Agriculture (IITA) in collaboration with a team of national partners in 13 research institutions in the six countries. IITA said in a press release that the program is expected to benefit six WCA countries: Cameroon, Benin, Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana, Nigeria and Togo.

"We are hopeful that the project will tackle the many challenges facing increased yam production," said David Annang, project coordinator. According to the IITA, yam faces a plethora of limitations despite its contribution to food security. These include high costs of planting material and of labor, decreasing soil fertility, inadequate yield potential of varieties, as well as the increasing levels of field and storage pests, and diseases associated with intensification of cultivation.

Drought tolerant corn is expected to bring tremendous impact to the drought-prone areas of Africa. Thus, Tim Dalton, an international development specialist of the Kansas State Research and Extension, will be conducting studies to calculate the potential economic impacts of drought-tolerant corn and will estimate the distribution of those benefits in target African countries. "Corn is an incredibly important food source in many African countries," he said, adding that about 50 percent of the calories consumed in some African countries come from corn-based products. In addition, about 40 percent of the area planted to maize is produced in dryland areas in Africa which is prone to drought without irrigation.

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has called for the development of a global map of banana and plantain diseases. Such a map is needed in order to stem damage to banana crops that could reach US$4 billion by next year, the FAO says. The agency says banana bunchy top disease and banana bacterial wilt threaten the food security of 70 million people in sub-Saharan Africa, and two other diseases, black leaf streak and fusarium wilt, are also spreading. "All four diseases merit far greater investment in public awareness, basic and applied research, and farmer training and production services to growers," according to an FAO report presented last month at the Fourth Session of the Sub-Group on Bananas in Rome. Hein Bouwmeester, a researcher at the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA), explains that to create a global disease map researchers must locate banana and plantain production areas, define diseases they are looking for, and systematically sample crops for the diseases or use existing information. Other activities such as monitoring spread to non-affected areas and creating buffer zones can then follow. The process is time-consuming and expensive, Bouwmeester said. The article can be viewed online at the link below.

Industrial farming, with its heavy use of pesticides, synthetic fertilizer, and irrigation, is exhausting the environment, and with billions more people to feed in the coming decades, the problem will only worsen unless the efforts of organic farming and genetic engineering are combined, says Pamela Ronald, a plant scientist in the U.S. who has been working to develop genetically modified (GM) rice, and her husband Raoul Adamchak, an organic farmer and former president of California Certified Organic Farmers. While organic agriculture has less of a negative environmental impact per acre farmed, it also requires more land to achieve the same yield, says Ronald, who is a geneticist at the University of California, Davis. "The worst thing for the environment is farming . . . It doesn't matter if it is organic. You have to go in and destroy everything," she comments. The challenge, says Ronald, is to find a way to retain the productivity of conventional agriculture without the negative environment impact typically associated with it. Ronald and Adamchak say GM crops are needed to meeting this challenge. For example, farmers have quickly adopted cotton genetically engineered to produce a protein called Bt: a natural insecticide that is also heavily used by organic farmers. More important is the future promise that GM crops offer to allow farmers to maintain or increase yields while working with a selection of organic techniques to reduce external inputs and improve soil health, they say. Crops that more efficiently use nitrogen or water will go a long way toward achieving sustainable, industrial models of agriculture, the couple says. One obstacle, according to Ronald and Adamchak, is the current negative attitude towards GM technology in the organic farming community and an organic certification system in the U.S. that prevent GM crops from being eligible for "organic" status. They say they would like to see a new national sustainable certification established. The article can be viewed online at the link below.

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