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  • From: Toby Hemenway <toby@patternliteracy.com>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] [Fwd: [SANET-MG] book review Genetic Glass Ceiling]
  • Date: Tue, 01 Dec 2009 11:24:12 -0800

As the world's population rises to an expected ten billion in the next
few generations, the challenges of feeding humanity and maintaining an
ecological balance will dramatically increase.

There's that old, tired paradigm again, stuck in circular logic (and since when have we been "maintaining an ecological balance?"). We are using oil to produce food far beyond what a solar budget could, to feed more people than can live within the Earth's carrying capacity, so the answer is . . . ta-da! find ways to produce yet more food. Gotta feed those billions, no matter what. Problem is, those billions, when fed, will just breed additional billions. Do you think that's going to end well? Or do we just put off facing that music till our watch is over? It is limits to resources that sets normal limits to population, but we just can't stand the idea that there are limits, so we'll use any technology we can find to get around them. If "the main crops have topped off in their ability to increase" then maybe it's time to back away from "more, more, more" as the paradigm.

I'm a former geneticist, and all the evidence I've seen shows that genetically engineered products (called transgenic now to get around GE's bad associations) use more energy to grow. You can't get around the laws of physics: if you pack more genes into an organism, it takes more energy to make them work. So just how are transgenic crops supposed to produce more food? I suppose by using more fertilizer. Uh . . . see the problem? And so far, the industry has a lousy track record, as all the products created so far are just ways of getting proprietary control over crops, not of feeding the hungry. (I once heard a Cargill scientist refer to a strain of Indian rice as "raw germ plasm," as though the breeding work of 400 generations of farmers meant nothing, but changing one gene meant that Cargill owned it now. But then, Cargill had lawyers, and the farmers didn't)

So lemme get this straight: the same people who destroyed crop diversity with a "one seed fits all" approach are now going to sell diversity back to us, with traits of their choosing and varieties that they own? Yeah, I trust them to do a good job with that.

At some point we're going to have to accept that the Earth's human population has to come down. And could GE have "ecological benefits?" I am sure that genetic manipulation could do all sorts of things to domesticated plants, but if it's being done with the same old mindset--and GE can't be done any other way--we'll continue to create the same kind of ecological problems that industrial civ always has.

Rant, off.

Toby
http://patternliteracy.com



Lawrence F. London, Jr. wrote:
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [SANET-MG] book review Genetic Glass Ceiling
Date: Mon, 30 Nov 2009 16:45:55 -0500
From: jcummins <jcummins@UWO.CA>
To: SANET-MG@LISTS.IFAS.UFL.EDU

I have known Johnny Gressel for over 50 years. We were graduate
students at the same time at the University of Wisconsin , Johnny in
plant physiology and I in Cell Biology where we worked in labs on the
same floor and often shared coffee and gossip. Johnny's book is a
long public relations effort on behalf of the biotechnology industry.
He put together a notion that transgenes are essential to improve crops
because the main crops have topped off in their ability to increase.
The book did not really tackle the quantitative trait loci (QTL) that
are the native genes that govern size, disease resistance , etc. There
was no evidence provided to show that such important traits had topped
off and cannot be improved by selection. Indeed there is growing
emphasis on QTL to provide lasting disease resistance and mass.
Transgenes have not contributed to improving QTL in crops and the
transgenes do not provide much hope , outside of industry boardrooms ,
for improvements in yield and long lasting disease resistance. It is
clear that the glass ceiling has not been proven to exist. That proof
should be brought forward in genetic analysis not in dopey public
relations efforts.

http://www.flipkart.com/genetic-glass-ceilings-jonathan-gressel/0801887194-76w3fagqeb
Genetic Glass Ceilings: Transgenics For Crop Biodiversity
(Hardcover - 2008/02/12)
by
Jonathan Gressel
(Author),
Klaus Ammann
(Foreword By)
Book: Genetic Glass Ceilings: Transgenics For Crop Biodiversity
As the world's population rises to an expected ten billion in the next
few generations, the challenges of feeding humanity and maintaining an
ecological balance will dramatically increase. Today we rely on just
four crops for 80 percent of all consumed calories: wheat, rice, corn,
and soybeans. Indeed, reliance on these four crops may also mean we are
one global plant disease outbreak away from major famine.

In this revolutionary and controversial book, Jonathan Gressel argues
that alternative plant crops lack the genetic diversity necessary for
wider domestication and that even the Big Four have reached a "genetic
glass ceiling": no matter how much they are bred, there is simply not
enough genetic diversity available to significantly improve their
agricultural value. Gressel points the way through the glass ceiling by
advocating transgenics -- a technique where genes from one species are
transferred to another. He maintains that with simple safeguards the
technique is a safe solution to the genetic glass ceiling conundrum.
Analyzing alternative crops -- including palm oil, papaya, buckwheat,
tef, and sorghum -- Gressel demonstrates how gene manipulation could
enhance their potential for widespread domestication and reduce our
dependency on the Big Four. He also describes a number of ecological
benefits that could be derived with the aid of transgenics.

A compelling synthesis of ideas from agronomy, medicine, breeding,
physiology, population genetics, molecular biology, and biotechnology,
Genetic Glass Ceilings presents transgenics as an inevitable and
desperately necessary approach to securing and diversifying the world's
food supply.

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  • Re: [permaculture] [Fwd: [SANET-MG] book review Genetic Glass Ceiling], Toby Hemenway, 12/01/2009

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