Miracle Plants: Fallacy or New Frontier

As occurs each year, the Norm Bourlag World Food Prize Lecture was accompanied by a poster session. There were posters on a variety of subjects but one in particular caught my eye. A student had a literature review presented as a poster on the subject of whether genetic engineering can help meet food needs in Africa, titled Miracle Plants: Fallacy or New Frontier (despite being a literature review, though, she didn’t have any references listed). Her conclusions were unsurprisingly mixed, finding that genetically engineered traits would have some positive impacts but that they won’t solve all problems.

Substantial equivalence

One important concept that is used in most countries to regulate products of genetic engineering is substantial equivalence. The way to determine substantial equivalence is comparative assessment. What do substantial equivalence and comparative assessment mean? Depending on the source we use, we might find different definitions and different opinions of how useful they are in determining the safety of products of genetic engineering. The USDA provides information on Food Safety Assessment and Considerations as part of their Focus on Food Biotechnologypage at the Food Safety Research Information Office.

What substantial equivalence can do is give us a starting point.

Framing agriculture

Abut 2 weeks ago, I had a conversation on Twitter with Liz of Hyperlocavore about whether biotechnology could possibly fit into sustainable agriculture. I wrote a forum post about it on Biofortified but the ideas hadn’t quite come to full fruition. Well, I’ve had a little time to mull the ideas over and the motivation of achieving a decent grade in Foundations in Sustainable Agriculture. The result is the following paper about framing agriculture in different ways, and how those frames might hold us back from achieving a truly sustainable agriculture. Let me know what you think!

Does the source matter?

If you’re unsure about something, there is probably a non-profit organization (aka special interest group, aka non-governmental organization)  just waiting to tell you what the “facts” are. These organizations all claim to present the most accurate information in their non-peer-reviewed reports, but can we trust them?

Does using GMOs really increase pesticide use?

The Organic Center recently released Impacts of Genetically Engineered Crops on Pesticide Use: The First Thirteen Years by Dr. Charles Benbrook, agricultural economist and “Chief Scientist” of the Organic Center. I can’t help but get the feeling that Dr. Benbrook started with a conclusion and found data to fit rather than starting with a general review then finding significant conclusions. It’s not that I necessarily have any specific problems with the information Dr. Benbrook presents, it’s just that I think he’s leaving some key ideas out of the report that should have been considered. There are also generalizations that just aren’t warranted. There are a lot of problems with this report, but I’m particualrly concerned with the way Dr. Benbrook fails, for the most part, to distinguish between different biotech traits, fails to distinguish and between different pesticides, and fails to consider non-biotech traits that could increase pesticide use.