Stardate 20021127.1727

(On Screen): At Cornell they've developed a new strain of rice which has the potential to substantially alleviate food shortages in many parts of the world. The process was very advanced and extremely sophisticated.

It turns out that a special sugar called trehalose occurs naturally in many kinds of organisms including, in particular, a kind of plant known as the "resurrection plant". It's a desert specialist which can survive extremely long periods without water, reviving when the rains come again and trehalose seems to be the key. It's long been suspected that trehalose would give other plants that same advantage, but other attempts to add it to plant genomes have failed. Cornell ended up using two different synthesis genes for trehalose from E. Coli fused together, along with an activation sequence which would cause the gene to only express in the stems of rice plants.

The plants bred true and show no harm from the modification. Testing suggests that the gene doesn't actually affect the grain at all (because it's not activated there). But the resulting plants can survive ten days without water, which would kill ordinary rice, and can grow in soil which is far more salty than ordinary rice will tolerate.

The modified rice would therefore permit far higher production than normal rice. Not only can it be grown on land which is currently unusable, but even when grown on the same soil it's far more likely to yield a crop each year than normal rice because of its ability to survive brief failures of the rain in areas with little or no irrigation. And even when growing conditions are optimal, the new rice produces more grain apparently because of more efficient photosynthesis and better utilization of minerals from the soil.

Cornell has patented the procedure but will place it into the public domain. Crops modified in this way will be freely available to the world without payment of any royalty. They will publish the technical details of their procedure and hope to encourage food research laboratories around the world to use it. This has a very good chance of working equally well on other grain crops such as wheat, corn, soy beans and sugar cane, and may possibly work on other kinds of crops.

Unfortunately, no amount of scientific brilliance can overcome bureaucratic inertia. If broadly adopted, crops modified in this way could help relieve famine all over the world. And every such crop would violate EU regulations, and any nation growing such crops would face European boycott if they actually reached the point of having sufficient excess to permit export.

That's no paranoid fantasy; it's reality. It's already happening. And right now, millions of Africans will pay for this EU policy with their lives. Through a combination in various places of drought, mistreatment of the soil, erosion, deforestation, unbelievably stupid government policies and corruption, Africa is facing an unprecedented famine and needs vast imports of grain to avoid literally tens of millions of starvation deaths.

We in the US have contributed huge amounts of corn, hundreds of thousands of tons. But it's grain which was genetically modified. We in the US have been eating it for years with no ill effect. The WHO says that it is completely harmless to humans. And many of the governments in Africa are refusing to accept that grain because, they say, "it's dangerous" but really because if it enters their countries and some is diverted to seed, then their agriculture would be permanently contaminated by genetic modification and they'd never be able to export to Europe again. It seems that they are much less concerned about their people eating the genetically-modified corn than they are about it getting planted. One would think that starvation would be more important, but it doesn't seem to be, and several governments there have chosen to refuse that American corn unless it's been milled first, a process which may well take too long, and which substantially increases the chance of the grain spoiling before it can be eaten. (And if they're concerned about safety, as they sometimes claim, then why would milled corn be any better?)

At least two nations refuse to accept the corn even milled. One government leader refers to it as "poison" and says that Africa should not be used as an experimental laboratory. He ignores the fact that Americans are already eating that particular kind of corn and have been for years.

It was modified to make it resistant to insects, and was just the first step in an upcoming agricultural revolution. The process that Cornell used on rice shows the wave of the future: it is certain that the agricultural advantages of genetically-modified food crops in terms of yield quantity, and far more importantly in terms of yield consistency, will grow as the scientists learn more about plant genetics and as their techniques and tools continue to advance. They will gain more and more capability of learning how certain kinds of plants do useful things, and learning how to make others do the same. It will eventually be possible to create grains which can survive extremely inconsistent rains, and can be grown in very salty soil, with almost no risk at all of destruction by insects or plant diseases. And the holy grail of genetic modification will be when grains can be given the same ability that legumes have of fixing their own nitrogen, virtually eliminating the need for fertilizer.

These new superfood grains will be highly resistant to insects. They will produce more food per plant, and they'll be genetically manipulated so that the resulting food is more nutritionally complete. (Existing grains, for example, don't include all the amino acids we need, and don't provide many critical vitamins.) The result will be grain which is easier to grow, which will produce more food per acre which is more nutritious, with less chance each year of crop failure and which can be grown on land that is currently unusable. Broad use of such crops by the poor nations of the world could seriously reduce the misery they suffer by not only reducing the risk of famine but also by making them self-sufficient in food production. (The benefit to subsistence farmers of a crop which produces food consistently each year can't be overstated.) These new super-grains will be freely available to farmers all over the world with no royalty payment or obligation of any kind, because they will have been developed in universities or government-sponsored laboratories for the express purpose of free distribution.

And standing in the way with its hand held out saying Non! will be the Brussels Bureaucracy, doing everything in its power to force everyone in the world to stay with old-style crops, because they're better. Compared to the new grains, the old strains will produce less food, which is less healthy, and which has a much higher chance each year of failing entirely or of being destroyed by insects. Obviously that's better.

Will Europe continue to enforce its policy banning all genetic modification to food crops when the consequences of that will be to condemn millions in the Third World to slow painful death by starvation? Europe is already doing so, and so far as I know there isn't even any discussion there about changing that policy.