Source: As Reported in the News
Pew Initiative on Food and Biotechnology

GM plants that tolerate harsh environmental conditions
The Guardian (UK)

Agriculture is facing a crisis. Mass irrigation is turning swaths of previously fertile ground into salty wastelands. Already a third of the world's irrigated land has been rendered useless because the soil is now too salty for crops to flourish. And the problem is rapidly getting worse. Each year a staggering 10m hectares (25m acres), suffers a similar fate. If the problem can't be fixed, the world will struggle to provide for its increasing population, reports The Guardian (UK).

Some scientists now think they have the answer to what has become agriculture's greatest challenge. Yesterday a group of world-class researchers in the US announced their company, FuturaGene, has developed the means to make plants fight harder for their survival in harsh environments.

Instead of putting new genes into the plants to help them survive, the scientists have found a way to make certain genes already in the plants go into overdrive, beefing up the plants' defenses to salty soils, cold weather and drought.

If the plants perform as well as the scientists hope, it could have a dramatic impact on agriculture, allowing farmers to sow seeds on land that has long been written off. Regions where crops have never been viable, because of extreme cold or frequent drought, could be turned into useful farmland. "The real goal is not only to be able to plant in places where right now we can't grow anything, but to get more out of the land where we can," said Bruno Ruggiero, the president of FuturaGene.

"Cold, drought and salt significantly damage yields. And if we can get more out of the land, that means limiting the need to cut down forests for farmland and using less water."

The first prototype tomatoes developed by FuturaGene are due to start greenhouse trials within the next two weeks. If all goes well the company will push ahead with variations of rice, alfalfa and corn.

Not everyone is convinced genetic modification is the answer the world of agriculture needs. Critics say the scientists are throwing technology at a problem that could better be solved by thinking about what causes the problem in the first place, says The Guardian.

Saline soils are becoming more widespread largely thanks to irrigation. The worst effects are seen in hot regions where rainfall is scarce. As fresh water is poured on to land, much of it evaporates, leaving behind traces of salts. Ironically, the more the soil is irrigated, the saltier it gets.

"Anywhere it's hot and getting hotter, this whole issue is just going to get worse. It's a really big deal," said Chris Leaver, a plant scientist at Oxford University.

Salty soils damage plants by dehydrating them and playing havoc with their internal chemistry. The best way to prevent soils from becoming too salty is to flush the soil with more water, but at a time when the world is facing an ever-pressing water shortage-some 40% of the world's water is used for irrigation - and using it to flush salt from soils is unsustainable and is rapidly becoming too expensive for farmers to contemplate.

The result is that agriculture is stuck firmly between the rock of less and less land to farm and a hard place of ever more mouths to feed.

The scientists behind FuturaGene, including Ray Bressan of Purdue University in Indiana and Hans Bohnert at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, have patented a suite of genes to make plants more hardy. One of the most significant genes, called SOS1, pumps salt that gets into the plant's roots back out into the surrounding soil before it can do any damage.

According to The Guardian, FuturaGene are not the first to try modifying crops to withstand saline soils. In 2001 a team at the University of California, Davis, developed plants that stored salt where they cannot cause damage.

Unsurprisingly, FuturaGene thinks its method is better. "If you stop the salt getting into the plant in the first place, it will be much stronger," said Dr Ruggiero, who claims his plants can tolerate four times more salty soils than conventional plants.

Ultimately FuturaGene hopes to develop plants so hardy they can be irrigated with sea water, although the reality is a long way off.

But Carlo Leifert, a plant scientist at the Tesco Centre for Organic Agriculture at Newcastle University, says GM is the wrong way to go to solve the problem of our increasingly damaged soils.

"It's by no means a long-term solution," he said. "The Americans are the worst with respect to sustainable soil management. They are creating a problem then looking for a technological fix to get 10 or 20 years more profit out of the same land.

"Instead we should be educating people how to use irrigation more efficiently."

The trials of FuturaGene's plants will reveal whether GM is at least one way to tackle the problem. If the plants perform well, they will have to go through intensive testing with the US food and drugs administration.

Then, public opinion may play the final role in whether the plants are produced commercially.

FuturaGene points out that since they are simply magnifying the effect of existing genes in the plants, instead of introducing new genes from animals or insects, the public will be less concerned about their GM crops, reports The Guardian.

As Reported in the News is a weekday feature that summarizes one of the most interesting stories of the day, as reported by media from around the world, and selected by Initiative staff from a scan of the news wires. The Initiative is not a news organization and does not have reporters on its staff: Posting of these stories should not be interpreted as an endorsement of a particular viewpoint, but merely as a summary of news reported by legitimate news-gathering organizations or from press releases sent out by other organizations.