A growing group of scientists and farmers are comfortable that more natural methods of boosting crop production can work alongside biotechnology, including a new wave of GM
Smallholder farmer Mossa Ag Alhousseini of Bagadadji village, Mali, gazes across his lush rice paddies and issues a sigh of contentment. Though he is on the edge of an encroaching Sahara desert, things are better than normal this year. Indeed, he’s doubled his previous yield and, remarkably, he’s done so using less seed and less water, and without any pesticides or chemical fertilisers.
Alhousseini is one of the first farmers in Mali to take up an innovative crop management regime known as the “system of rice intensification” (SRI), which relies on technique rather than technology. He says: “In the beginning, people who didn’t participate in the SRI test treated us like fools. Now they regret not having learned the techniques for themselves.”
Halfway around the world in the US, in a maize field in Bowling Green, Kentucky, Bob Jaynes stands equally excited over an advanced seed technology promising increased yields of a different sort. Agrisure Artesian hybrid seeds, developed by agribusiness giant Syngenta, are supposed to stand a better chance of flowering in severe dry weather.
Full results are not yet in, but this year, amid the warmest 12 months in US history, his maize stalks look promising. “The Artesian corn [maize] stayed greener. It’s pretty obvious, when you look over the top of it, and it’s very obvious when you look at what’s on the ear,” Jaynes says. “It’s a tool in the toolbox we can use when we have a lot of stress and there’s a shortage of water.”
Confronted by increasingly extreme weather but armed with science and technology, farmers such as Alhousseini and Jaynes find themselves in the midst of a global race to create more productive crops.
Already one billion people in the world are chronically hungry, and with the population set to increase to 9 billion by 2050, experts say there is good reason to be alarmed. Within 20 years, global food prices will probably double, according to aid agency Oxfam International. Flat-lining yields, a scramble for fertile land and water, and environmental crises are reversing decades of progress against hunger.
Might the holistic style of management inherent in SRI be just the right sort of simple but revolutionary system to cause the launch of badly needed, and environmentally sustainable, agricultural reform?
Or are biotech seeds offering higher yields the answer?
Mouths to feed
While all commentators agree that food production worldwide will have to increase substantially in the coming years, there remain very different views on how this should best be achieved.
For agribusinesses such as Syngenta and Monsanto, leaders in crop development, the productivity gap represents a significant business opportunity. “Our aim is to put the grower at the centre of our strategy,” says Michiel van Lookeren Campagne, head of biotechnology at Syngenta. There is an urgent need, he adds, for new crop varieties that offer higher yields but use less water, fertilisers or other inputs, and for crops that are more resistant to drought, heat, submersion and pests.
Some of these involve genetic modification; a great many others concern novel breeding technologies, organic chemistry, high-resolution phenotyping and advanced forms of molecular breeding which are gradually taking the industry beyond simple herbicide tolerance and insect resistance traits.
Others differ in their approach, saying true change will only come through the adoption of low-cost, bottom-up technologies such as SRI, which exploit basic and applied science and rely upon locally found inputs.
Such agro-ecological methods can drastically improve yield and they are not necessarily practised in opposition to biotechnology, says Niels Halberg, director of the International Centre for Research in Organic Food Systems (Icrofs). “We can use modern technology to understand biological mechanisms,” Halberg says.
The third way
A third, intermediate camp argues that the challenges are so great that action must be taken today on all fronts – on supply, demand, waste, efficiency and population. It’s not just about how much food we are producing, but what kind of food we are producing, says Sir Gordon Conway, an agricultural ecologist and leading food security expert.
He points out that around the world there are 200 million children who are severely malnourished. “The aim is to try to reduce that number by breeding new varieties of staple foods,” Conway says.
Here, biotechnology may assist with so-called nutraceutical research, whose proponents envisage vaccine-laden bananas and enhanced beta carotene rice. Agro-ecological methods can deliver on this count, but they should do so in concert with other crop systems – including organic, conventional, and possible “hybrid” systems.
The good news is that the technology and know-how are now at our disposal. From genetics and intensified agriculture to crop mixing and improved farmer training, the solutions are out there.
All will play a role in the coming decades – the optimum level of productivity increase is likely to be highly context specific. Experts agree that agriculture on the whole is unlikely to resemble anything we now have, though it will certainly adopt elements from the broad range of production systems that exist today.
Green revolution? Bringing about a new green revolution through extensive use of molecular breeding and seed development is now on track to becoming the dominant pathway opted for by governments, foundations and international aid agencies.
In many ways, this strategy is a repeat – or a reinvigoration – of the so-called Green Revolution launched 50 years ago by the Rockefeller Foundation. Aimed at bringing about an industrial transformation of agriculture, the focus then was on high-yielding varieties of wheat, maize and rice, much of which depended on costly inputs. The approach led to impressive yield increases, but as Conway recently noted in a radio interview with Voice of America, it had hugely important limitations.
Data shows that, in both Asia and Latin America, wealthy farmers with larger and better-endowed lands gained the most from the Green Revolution, whereas farmers with fewer resources often gained little. By the late 1990s crop production began stagnating. Moreover, social and environmental drawbacks of the Green Revolution widely manifested themselves through increased inequality in rural incomes, loss of agro-biodiversity, depletion of aquifers, and the erosion of fragile tropical soils.
“It was over-reliant on pesticides and fertilisers,” says Conway, “and only some of the poor benefited. There were many poor left out even in India … and it passed Africa by entirely.”
Fallout, too, was felt in a steep funding drop for the main agency tasked with mobilising agricultural science in the developing world – the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research.
The CG, as it’s known, has struggled to pull the Green Revolution out of its global slump, though in the past five years it has reversed its fortunes, thanks in part to a partnership with the Alliance for a Green Revolution for Africa (Agra), a non-governmental organisation established by the Rockefeller and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundations.
Much of the turnaround at CG can be attributed to Conway’s effort to restructure the organisation in the final years before his departure from the Rockefeller Foundation in 2004.
Conway now says that the priority should be to “produce appropriate innovations – innovations that bring about high productivity but don’t have the side effects that occurred in the past”.
Research focus
In the CG’s revamp there is now a broader focus on initiatives supporting research in agro-forestry, climate adaptation and ecosystem services. Notably, the two pillars of the Green Revolution – new seed varieties and external inputs – remain firmly in place, while three research programmes on rice, maize and wheat take up one-third of the budget.
So-called genetically modified germ-plasm does receive funding support, but according to Judith Chambers, director of biosafety systems at the International Food Policy Research Institute, the amount of spending on GM technology is very low.
“There’s a misperception in some circles that biotechnology is somehow going to supplant breeders,” says Chambers. “In fact, it’s made the value of the breeder more important. Breeding remains the base platform, with a range of biotechnology tools offering the ability to more efficiently introduce genetic information in ways that are different from what has been done in the past.”
An increasing level of plant biotechnology investment is taking place through direct public spending, as has been seen in Brazil where the government has enabled huge leaps in production. On the other hand, public-private partnerships are needed in Africa.
For now, the bulk of the research remains in developed countries, though even in Africa, countries such as Kenya, Uganda, South Africa, Egypt and Nigeria are beginning to make sizable research investments.
CG supporters point to the success of a programme that since 2007 has introduced 34 drought-tolerant maize varieties to farmers in 13 project countries – Angola, Benin, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Mali, Mozambique, Nigeria, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe. An estimated two million smallholder farmers are using the new varieties and have obtained higher yields, improved food security, and increased incomes, according to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Notably, the project used conventional breeding paired with advanced genomic analysis, resulting in a speedier test-to-market phase. Smallholders were included in the field trials, while partners in the programme for developing, marketing, and distributing the seeds included both private companies and publicly funded agricultural research and extension systems.
The CG system does develop all kinds of new technologies and new crops, and typically the way that they interface with farmers is through national programmes. Still, agribusiness companies have a distinct advantage since they have the expertise to bring the products of research to the marketplace.
“[Private companies] not only have an R&D component, but they are a fully integrated business operation so they end up interacting with farmers,” Chambers says. “They have sales people who are on the ground explaining things to farmers in ways that the public sector extension systems were intended to do but – for lack of funding and other reasons – are not adequately addressing.”
Agro-ecology
Advocates of the revived Green Revolution point to Brazil as an example of government-led investments in plant biotechnology reaping a boost in crop production. That may be the future course for places such as Africa and India, but for environmental groups such as WWF and Friends of the Earth, Brazil is hardly a model worth emulating.
“The problem with Brazil’s revolution is it depends on large amounts of inputs – pesticides and fertilisers – and has resulted in large-scale riparian pollution and oceanic deadzones and has left little room for nature,” says Duncan Williamson, of WWF UK. “The worry is [Africa] is being targeted by large-scale corporations and countries for land grabs reminiscent of a Brazilian model transposed to Africa.”
Critics of CG and Agra say these public-private partnerships need to do more to support successful agro-ecological alternatives – a grouping of crop production methods aimed at intensifying yield through diversification of land use, enhanced soil life and management to reduce pest pressure. This type of farming minimises input costs and health impacts by avoiding or reducing the use of synthetic fertilisers and chemical pesticides. The use of organic matter, nutrient recycling, and functional biodiversity are among some of the management practices.
The term “agro-ecology” is often used with different meanings, and while for some it is a scientific practice of farming systems building on biological principles, for others it is thought of as a social movement. Both are valid perspectives, according to Icrofs’ Niels Halberg.
“Our main aim is to provide scientific evidence to develop organic and agro-ecological methods for wider adoption, which requires a combination of participatory research on farms, as well as good cross-disciplinary experimental approaches,” Halberg says.
So far, eco-farming projects in 57 nations have shown average crop yield gains of 80% by tapping natural methods for enhancing soil and protecting against pests, according to a 2011 study issued by Olivier de Schutter, the UN special rapporteur on the right to food. If sufficiently supported, agro-ecology, the report states, can double food production in entire regions within 10 years, while mitigating climate change and alleviating rural poverty. Easier said, perhaps, than done.
A new generation of agricultural scientists should be encouraged to work with smallholder farmers. But Halberg says a bias in the CG research system continues to focus on a handful of specific crops, with comparatively few resources allocated to the development of agro-ecological methods in the farmer context.
“The main difference to what one would call the ‘biotechnology approach’ is the simplistic idea that you can just repeat again the Green Revolution by providing packages to farmers that will work everywhere,” he adds.
“I’m not into this talk that biotech is a bad word. I think biotech could be put to use in a lot of beneficial ways using agro-ecological ideas. The question is, how do you spread this to millions of farmers when it is knowledge-intensive and you have very weak extension services?”
Big biotech
The global biotech seed market has been growing at a fierce rate, spurred in large part by the increasing demand for GM seeds. The market is dominated by a handful of large, global players specialising in select crops such as maize and soy, and myriad smaller regional and local players in other crops.
The big three – Monsanto, DuPont and Syngenta – control around 50% of the global seed market. The global value of biotech seed alone was $13.2bn in 2011, with the end product of commercial grain from biotech maize, soy and cotton valued at $160bn or more per year, according to the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-Biotech Applications (ISAAA) in its annual report on biotech seed use.
Much of the focus is still directed towards the US, the lead producer of biotech crops globally with 69m hectares,with maize and cotton experienced strong growth in 2011. While the US boasts biotech maize, soy, cotton, rape seed (canola), sugarbeet, alfalfa, papaya and squash, in Latin America biotech crops are so far limited to soy, maize and cotton. India had 10.6m hectares planted to cotton in 2011 and Canada had 10.4m hectares planted with canola, corn, soybeans and sugarbeet.
In crop protection technologies (herbicides and insecticides) Syngenta is a market leader, followed by Bayer, Dow Agroscience and Monsanto. Worth roughly $48bn in 2011, the market is expected to reach $71bn by 2018, with the majority of growth coming from the Asia-Pacific region.
Flat-lining yields, a scramble for land and water, and environmental crises are reversing decades of progress
From genetics and intensified agriculture to crop mixing and improved training, the solutions are there
“Brazil’s revolution depends on large amounts of inputs resulting in large-scale riparian pollution and oceanic deadzones” Duncan Williamson, WWF UK
Eco-farming projects in 57 nations have shown average crop yield gains of 80%