Can GE be sustainable?

"We do have a few examples that have happened and are happening to help us consider the potential for biotechnology working in harmony with sustainable agricultural methods.


Flood tolerant rice and orange maize are great examples of what’s possible. Now, I need to be clear – the final flood tolerant rice and orange (aka high-pro-vitamin A) maize that are being distributed are not genetically engineered (unless you count marker assisted breeding as genetic engineering), but the way they have been developed and distributed can be be a model for future biotech traits. Both flood tolerant rice and orange maize were developed with public funding with the intent to distribute the seed at low or no cost to famers that might benefit from these special traits. Both traits were developed with farmers in developing countries in mind but may also be useful in developed countries.


Is biotechnology going to be useful for traits that can be achieved with breeding (even if it takes way longer and doesn’t work as well)? Maybe, maybe not. Kevin Pixley, of the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), writes on the Harvest Plus blog that breeding and biotech are like the tortoise and the hare. Even though the tortoise is slower, sometimes he wins. For high pro-vitamin A maize, the tortoise won, even though biotech had long ago produced varieties that have far higher levels of the vitamin. Ingo Potrykus, developer of Golden rice, thinks the problem is regularly hurdles that NGOs can’t climb on their own.


The traits that can be changed with breeding, even if it takes some Herculean efforts, are certainly interesting – but what about traits that can’t be changed by breeding, or at least traits for which we haven’t yet found a source of genetic diversity? Golden rice is an example of such a trait, because rice doesn’t have the genetic variability in pro-vitamin A content that maize has. Other examples include nematode resistance conferred with RNAi and pest resistance conferred with special proteins such as snow drop lectin.


All of these traits have the potential to be helpful to farmers large and small as well as their neighbors and consumers. Can they be sustainable? Yes, if they are developed with sustainability in mind. Like the flood tolerance trait in rice and the pro-vitamin A trait in maize, sustainable biotech traits have to be bred into varieties that farmers will actually use, with no restrictions on seed saving for low-income farmers, even if high-income farmers are charged for seed in order to recoup development costs. Those development costs could be decreased with more unified regulatory systems that are science-based."

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