The Future of Food, Genetic Modification and Other Developments in Farming

Last night I watched a program on the television about the developments in farming and food production. I found it quite disturbing, which has prompted this article.

Effectively these broke into two areas:

• Conventional Breeding
• Genetic Modification – Trans-genetics

Conventional Breeding

For thousands of years, way before any formal understanding of genetics, human beings have bred animals and plants to select the characteristics we wanted. This can be seen most clearly in the dog.

Nature selected wolves to be efficient hunters, balancing between different factors to achieve the most efficient maker of more wolves. A powerful jaw is useful but not so powerful that you can't lift your head from the ground. A larger, more powerful wolf may seem a good idea but too large an animal requires more food to support it whereas too small a wolf can't actually bring down a deer. Thus nature produced a carnivore capable of surviving in the forest, optimised for its environment.

Man has taken the wolf and bred dogs ranging from the Yorkshire Terrier to the Great Dane. This range of selection has resulted in many breeds that have reduced life expectancy because the animals have not been selected for life-span but for other traits that pleased man.

When we look at the difference between a wild boar and the pig, we can see this breeding has selected a more docile, efficient meat producing animal. They are still obviously members of the same family.

In the vegetable kingdom, nearly everything we eat has been selected. Carrots were originally white but orange was selected by Dutch breeders some 300 years ago to honour the House of Orange. Just look at the huge range of tomatoes, from marble sized cherry tomatoes to grapefruit sized beefsteak varieties. All are the result of patient selection over many generations.

Two extreme examples of this type of breeding were shown. The first was a cow that has little fat but enormous muscles. The huge beast looked similar to the most steroid pumped body builder you can imagine. To my eyes it was quite obscene but I'm applying an artistic standard based on my expectation of what a cow should look like.

The next example was the humble chicken. Some strains of these have been selected for fast growth over the years to the point where the poor creatures legs often break under their own weight because their legs don't develop as fast as they grow. Now these fast growing poultry produce a lot of body heat. Unfortunately, they can no longer lose that heat as fast as they produce it in warm climates and so they have found a mutant chicken that has no feathers.

Now we are breeding for solutions to problems caused by our breeding them. Once again it looks obscene to my eyes but as with the cow, an aesthetic subjective judgement.

One good thing about this sort of breeding is that it is relatively slow, It takes generations of breeding and even the Yorkshire Terrier is, at heart, a wolf. We are limited by the breeding cycle and so we have time to both accept these things but also to find out any flaws that may not be apparent immediately.

Genetic Modification - Trans-genetics

Our science has reached the point where we are able to take the gene from one species and insert it into another. Now in all the thousands of years of selective breeding, this is the one thing we have never been able to do.

You can physically mate a dog and a cat but there will never be any offspring. Their basic structure has diverged too far to rejoin.

Genetic transfer enables much, much weirder things than that to be accomplished. The first example was a rabbit, an ordinary looking white bunny, that has had a gene inserted from a jelly fish. It's eyes glow green in the dark. Now this may have no practical purpose but it proves that we have reached the point where we can do almost anything we imagine.

Undoubtedly we can conventionally breed things that many of us would find disturbing or offensive but this technology is of a different order.

Golden Rice

One example of this is Golden Rice. Many people in the world rely on rice as their staple food but rice doesn't contain vitamin A. By introducing a gene from the daffodil into the rice it now contains that vitamin and could help prevent millions of deaths and blindness in the poorest parts of the world.

This certainly seems to be a good thing and certainly the scientist who developed it was passionate in his disdain for the Luddites preventing him from helping the poor to better health.

What wasn't mentioned that much of the millions spent on this was spent on marketing and promoting it or that the genetic structure was patented and so all those millions of poor people would have to pay a western company a royalty to grow it.

The risk that worries the 'Luddites' is simply this. If this rice is grown in the wild it may interbreed conventionally with ordinary rice and pass on this daffodil gene.

So what, you may think – would that not actually be a good thing? Now imagine that we find after 10 year or 20 years that this gene causes some illness in people or makes the rice susceptible to a disease of daffodils.

An entire, extremely important crop could be wiped out or millions could die.

Now even if we have a panel of scientists who are not in the pay of the investors in this product say it is safe, should we take the risk? DDT was considered safe before we realised the horrendous results developing over the whole world. DDT was found in Polar bears as well as mothers milk.

On the other hand, by being too scared to grasp the possibilities this technology offers us we may be condemning millions to death who could have been saved.

Remember the promise of electricity too cheap to bother metering that nuclear power offered? That ended in Chernobyl and huge expenses cleaning up the power stations.

Conclusion

I suppose the main conclusion I have reached is that; just because you can do something, it doesn't mean you should do it.

The question of using genetic transfer and modification technology is one that does affect everyone and everything on the planet. It offers the prospect of wonderful things but also the threat of horror beyond imagining.

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