The first three agricultural revolutions allowed the human population to blossom by the billions, but they also hadโin the words of Nobel Laureate Steven Chuโโunintended consequences.โ
โThere should be more efficient ways of doing this,โ he said of feeding humanity, โand we really need a fourth agricultural revolution:
- โWe need improved crop yields with less fossil-based fertilizers and pesticides.โ
- โThere’s an opportunity to restore carbon in the soil which we have been depleting since the beginning of agriculture.โ
- There is a need for plants that are more resistant to heat and drought.
- There is a need for substitutes for beef and milk. โIf beef and dairy cattle were a country,โ Chu said, โtheir roughly five gigatons of co2 equivalent per year would be more emissions than any other country except China, and, well, actually they’re equal to the U.S. (emissions) at the moment.โ
- And if fallow fields are used to grow biomass for carbon capture, Chu said, those plants should be optimized for growth through genetic engineering.
โUnfortunately the GMO has a very bad reputation based on Roundup-Ready crops,โ he said, referencing crops genetically modified to resist Monsantoโs herbicide Roundup, which had the unintended consequence,ย according to Harvard University, of producing Roundup-Ready โsuperweedsโ that are much harder to control.
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GMOs could have enjoyed a better reputation had their fame rested on genetically-fortified golden rice or on eggplant and cotton genetically modified with bacillus thuringiensis (BT) to resist pests.
โSo that’s unfortunate,โ Chu said. โYou can’t undo history, but I’ll go back to what Norman Borlaug said: We’ll need GMOs to feed a population of 11 billion.โ
