Brazil is blazing a trail with its impressive growth in agricultural production. But getting the balance between biotech and other techniques is tricky

Brazil became the first country in the world to commercialise its own biotech seed when in 2007 it agreed a deal with BASF to develop herbicide-tolerant soy. Through public research funding provided by Embrapa – the Brazilian Agricultural and Livestock Research Company – the seed was first planted in 2011, adding one more impressive benchmark to Brazil’s booming agribusiness industry.

Though it still ranks behind the US in total biotech crop hectarage, Brazil is the engine of growth globally, increasing biotech crops more than any other country in the world – a record 4.9 million hectare increase in 2011, equivalent to an impressive year-over-year increase of 20%, according to the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-Biotech Applications.

Corn and soybean dominate the market – with the vast majority being genetically altered. Second and third generation biotech crops that avoid the GM label have promise but either remain in the experimental stage, or are being double- or triple-stacked on top of a single GM crop variety. Stacking means that a new non-GM technique is applied, altering a GM variety. Therefore the vast majority of biotech crops still largely include GM technology.

Gene revolution

Governments of all stripes now back an assortment of biotech seed products, but it’s the Brazilian public-private partnership model that is a trend line suggesting a new biotech leadership emerging among developing countries.

More than 13 million farmers now plant biotech crops – mostly involving GM – on 125m hectares worldwide, triple the area planted with GM in 2000. Twenty of the 25 countries sowing GM seeds are emerging markets. India and the Philippines are investing government money into the gene revolution, while on the African continent South Africa is now the world’s eighth largest producer of biotech crops.

India is the world’s fourth-largest grower of GM cotton, and China is the biggest investor in agricultural biotech after the United States. After years of balking, Beijing last year launched a $2.9bn plan to develop a line of GM crops over the next decade, including roughly 30 varieties of GM rice presently available for distribution.

Yet it’s Brazil that remains the model, owing to its immense export power. Brazil stands as the fastest growing producer of agricultural products, with production estimated to grow by more than 40% between 2010 and 2019. Some NGOs are concerned that Brazil has moved too fast, without concern for biodiversity and the environment. WWF UK’s Duncan Williamson argues that overuse of fertilisers and pesticides in Brazil has led to widespread serious river and ocean pollution, for example.

But what’s important to take note of – if Brazil is to be held up as a model – are the farming policies the Brazilian government has put in place.

“One, they tried very hard to maintain a balance between large-scale commercial farming and small-scale family farming,” says Dr Camilla Toulmin, director of the International Institute for Environment and Development. Typically, the small family farms serve domestic markets while the larger farms are more geared towards exports.

Second, says Toulmin, was former Brazilian president Lula da Silva’s commitment to cut hunger. “By providing basic incomes to the poorest members of society, he provided them with a buying power that could then accelerate – and pull further growth and development from – the agriculture sector. It was not exactly innovative, but it was very important in terms of providing market incentives and return for global agricultural demand.”

But as Barbara Stocking, the recently departed head of Oxfam GB, points out, Brazil is a huge country where the big farms are often larger than 20,000 hectares. In Tanzania, for example, the same space can be occupied by as many as 12,500 farmers. Clearing the latter to make way for a commercial farm would have disastrous human and environmental consequences.

Business has a role to play in helping farmers grow and develop, either by working with producer organisations or through direct agronomical training, says David Croft, head of food technology at Waitrose.

It’s a distinctly different perspective from that of an agribusiness company, but nevertheless there’s convergence over matters such as seed selection and plant sciences.

Selective plant breeding

Croft gives an example: “Things like rapid hybrid seed assessments to help farmers identify varieties to better suit their circumstances.” He adds: “We are supportive of plant breeding that helps that happen. That said, we need to take some care around things like seed selection as we are aware of creating dependencies on monoculture that are potentially problematic in the future.”

Niels Halberg of the International Centre for Research in Organic Food Systems (Icrofs) agrees that farmers can be engaged and made a part of the solution. “The innovation potential is enormous,” he says, pointing to the experience of farmers in Uganda and Tanzania carried out between 1993 and 2008 by Export Promotion of Organic Products from Africa (Epopa), a programme that involved 80,000 farmers in certified cash crop production and which generated about $15m in yearly sales.

“Agribusiness companies assume that the problem of drought and climate change should be solved by focusing on a specific crop such as maize and making it drought tolerant, rather than helping farmers to develop their farming system to be drought tolerant – by diversifying their crop choices, by making water harvesting systems, by improving soil fertility, and thereby soil’s capacity to retain water,” says Halberg.

The point is not to get hung up on the organic label as such, says Halberg. But, at the same, recognise that developing using “organic” techniques can provide significant benefits.

“There are many NGOs in Africa and India that promote these methods, not necessarily to become certified organic, but because it works.”

Camilla Toulmin agrees with this assessment, though she cautions that a combination of the two approaches is what’s needed. “We need some kind of combination of clever science plus building on what farmers now understand themselves.”

Rice boost  

The biggest breakthrough in food security could come in boosting rice yields, the staple for many countries in the developing world.

Hybrid varieties that can tolerate flooding, drought, higher temperatures and salt water are all now being developed – by private companies and through publicly funded organisations such as the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines, which is part of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research.

One project, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, is attempting to boost the rate of photosynthesis in rice plants, but scientists say it could take 20 years before a commercial variety is available.

Meanwhile, on the agro-ecological side, the System of Rice Intensification (SRI) is gaining ground throughout Asia and parts of Africa.

“SRI was not invented by scientists, but its results speak for themselves,” says Sudeep Karki, from the Norwegian University of Life Sciences and an SRI specialist in Nepal. “SRI is the counterpart in agricultural development of a viral idea in social media, imposing its way from the ground to the top.”

A central element of SRI is that rice seedlings are not propagated in a continuously flooded field, says Norman Uphoff, a professor of government and international agriculture at Cornell University and a senior adviser at SRI-Rice, an international network and resource centre coordinating and publishing reports on SRI methodologies.

Only one seedling is planted per “hill”, in a wide, square-grid pattern in good quality soil, which is kept moist but not wet, and with enough organic material to support increasing biological activity. Well-tended, rich soil is the basis of good SRI productivity, and the wide spacing avoids competition, encouraging larger root and canopy growth.

First put forward in the 1980s by a Jesuit priest in Madagascar, under the premise that “less is more”, SRI is now promoted by governments in China, India, Indonesia, Cambodia and Vietnam, and the spread is accelerating, says Uphoff.

Uphoff is spearheading research on adapting the same methods to wheat cultivation. He says a big part of the success of SRI comes from the roots of the crops. More fully developed root systems make crops more resilient in times of drought, because the plant can access moisture deeper in the soil.

Another successful agro-ecological method is “push-pull” technology for integrated pest, weed and soil management. To date, more than 25,000 smallholder farmers in East Africa have adopted the method and maize yields have increased threefold. The technology is based on locally available plants and involves intercropping maize with a repellent plant – whose chemical composition drives pests away – and an attractive trap plant that serves as a border crop to host and withstand attack, explains Prof Zeyaur Khan, an entomologist with the International Centre of Insect Physiology and Ecology.

Peer learning

Research began in 1997 with farm trials that were then disseminated by training a network of farmer-teachers that involved thousands of smallholder farmers testing and experiencing the push-pull technology on their own farms.

Critical to the effort was advanced biotechnology involving molecular testing on the nature of the plant chemicals attracting and repelling stemborer moths. “This involved very high level research applying biotechnology to farmer field school practices,” says Icrofs’ Halberg.

“We could work miracles,” he adds. “But it means smallholder farmers have to become a part of the innovative system – rather than passive receivers of blanket technology which they may not even afford.”

Ultimately, what Halberg and others say is needed is an approach that moves away from the hard-line ideology of an organic-versus-biotech debate. At present there’s a paucity of funds for agro-ecological research. That needs to change – and then, perhaps, the best features from all agricultural systems, and biotechnology, can be utilised in a multifaceted approach, based on complementary ideas from each camp.

It will involve not just biologists, agronomists and farmers, but also ecologists, policymakers and social scientists. A hybrid system will emerge, and when it does, the world may just be able to produce more food at affordable prices – while reducing environmental risk and ensuring farmers’ livelihoods.