Bt beats bugs
How much of the world's maize crop is lost to insect pests each year? Almost ten percent says the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications (ISAAA). Can we put a figure on the loss? According to the ISAAA, it's $5.7 billion, with a further $550 million spent on insecticide. The effect on poor countries, where maize is mostly used to make animal feed, is significant. But it need not be because Bt is at hand. Bt is short for Bacillus thuringiensis, a natural bacterium that fights many serious plant pests: caterpillars, mosquito larvae and simuliid blackflies that cause horrible river blindness in Africa. But there's a slight complication.
The thing is that it is possible to genetically modify maize and engineer the Bt delta-endotoxin gene into it. Death to the pests says the plant! The ISAAA reports that trials of maize modified with Bt increased yields by up to 24 percent in Brazil and up to 40 percent in the Philippines. Good news surely for the poor countries and their struggling farmers that the well-off, well-fed citizens of the first world profess to care so much about. Except, of course, that endorsing genetically modified (GM) food would stick in the craws of many of these people. After all, many of them have nice little earners demonizing GM food. But that's not all. The production of maize in poor countries is growing rapidly and is predicted to top that of wheat and rice by 2020. Why? Well, as mentioned above, maize is used to make animal feed and animals are used to make meat. When poor countries get less poor, meat consumption rises. "They ate meat three times a day!" was an awe-struck comment I remember from my own childhood in rural Ireland. Poor people aspired to that state of grace.
Many who have progressed from poverty to affluence and from meat eating to vegetarianism, seem to have short memories and very selfish genes. It will be interesting to see how they spin this one because it's win-win for the developing world: less pesticide, less hunger, better environment, better world.
Diarist of the day: H. D. Thoreau, 11 November 1851" 'Says I to myself' should be the motto of my journal. It is fatal to the writer to be too much possessed by his thoughts. Thing must lie a little remote to be described."
