Will Biotech Solve The Global Warming Drought Problem
November 10, 2004
I hadn’t expected to find the answer to the global warming drought problem at the 2004 World Food Prize awards ceremony in the grandly ornate old Iowa State Capitol building on October 14th. But that’s where I learned biotechnology is making big progress on drought-tolerant food grains.
Drought is already the world’s most important farm production problem, with millions of acres in drought-risk regions like the political tinderbox of the Middle East. Global warming may give the southern U.S. longer droughts, even as it gives the Northern Plains more moisture. Since the natural 1500-year climate cycle currently warming our planet is unstoppable, plant breeding could be an important adaptation to the cycle’s unavoidable-but-moderate climate change.
Inside the Iowa capitol, my hero Norman Borlaug, the 1970 winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, was celebrating his 90th birthday by handing out the “World Food Nobel Prizes.”
One winner was a Chinese rice breeder, who created the first hybrid rice, and has thus added 20 percent to the yield potential of all the world’s rice farmers.
The other winner was a rice breeder from West Africa. He made a new “wide cross” between Africa’s rice varieties and those of Asia. His new, more-vigorous African rice varieties are doubling dryland grain yields on the African continent. That will help protect Africa’s unique wildlife species, because the farmers won’t have to clear so much forest to feed their families.
During the commercial breaks for the ceremony’s TV broadcast, Minnesota geneticist Ron Phillips told me that biotechnology turns the whole grass family into one big gene pool-allowing researchers to achieve things they couldn’t do with standard cross-breeding.
“I’m particularly surprised by the progress on drought-tolerant crops,” he said. “I would have thought drought tolerance involved a whole bunch of genes, but we’re finding that even single genes can make a big difference in plants surviving dryness.”
Back at the office, Egyptian researchers have just announced the world’s first drought-tolerant wheat variety. They moved a single gene from the barley plant to the wheat plant. The “HVA1″ gene allows Egyptian wheat to be grown with one irrigation instead of eight. The gene switch may work in other grasses, such as corn and sugar cane.
The International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center, where Norman Borlaug has led plant breeding for 60 years, has created drought-tolerant wheat with a gene from the wild mustard seed. Not yet approved, the wheat is still being grown under “biosafe” conditions, with each of its flowers covered by a glassine bag to prevent pollen escaping into the environment.
Cornell University isolated a gene that produces a natural, drought-protective sugar from the “resurrection plant”-a moss often sold as a tourist curiosity in Arizona desert towns. The resurrection plant can dry up and look totally dead, but then spring back to life when it’s watered. Cornell has put the trehalose gene into rice plants, and will also try it in corn, wheat, millet, soybeans and sugar cane.
In the California desert, the University of California/San Diego has found the biological Morse code that opens and closes plants’ stomata-the tiny breathing holes through which 95 percent of their water loss occurs. They hope to get the plants closed up more quickly when it’s dry, thus conserving moisture.
The world is 150 years into the Modern Warming, which could last another 600 years. The Mayan cities disappeared in a drought during the cold Dark Ages.
If biotech researchers produce crop plants that broadly tolerate drought, they, too, may soon receive a World Food Prize under the golden dome of the Iowa capitol building.
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