The ruler was given an official reception, where the national anthems of UAE and Russia were played
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Rapidly multiplying salmon, wheat which is drought resistant, and rice that releases limited amount of methane — all these could soon be feeding the growing global population, according to an expert who said that genetically modified food holds the key to future food security.
Dr. Daniel Kovich, who serves as a Science Advisor at the United States Department of Agriculture, was speaking in Dubai as part of the international food safety conference on the topic of biotechnology and how it could feed 10 billion people by 2050.
He gave the example of low methane rice and drought-resistant wheat, both of which are now in the experimental stage. “Rice production produces a lot of methane,” he said. “With one gene insertion from barley plant, that changes the way the plants interact with the soil to decrease methane production. Another example is wheat, which is resistant to drought by inserting a gene from the sunflower plant.”
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A genetic modification in salmon could cause an increase in its growth rate — a method, he said, has already been commercialised. “It grows much faster with the same feeding points as conventional salmon,” he said, adding it was the first animal application of this technology.
Dr Kovich said the genetically modified Bt corn has become increasingly popular in the US with over 92 per cent of the current agriculture land growing corn having this genetically modified variant.
He explained that scientists noticed that there was bacteria in the soil that had gene which produced very strong effects against insects. “Through trials, they added the gene to the corn plant with the result that the plant became resistant to insects like European corn borner and corn rootworm,” he said. “This dramatically decreases insecticide use and increases corn production.”
He also gave examples of roundup ready soybeans and rainbow papaya, both of which increased agricultural production significantly. He said, when such crops are introduced and farmers are given access, they prefer it over the regular variants because of the monetary benefits.
Despite giving such promising results, Dr. Daniel explained there were still several challenges.
“The reality is that rDNA technology presents huge dividends, but comes at a very high cost,” he said. “There are huge costs on the development side and the deployment side. The regulations are very stringent. It means that this technique is affordable only when huge amounts of the crop is grown globally.”
He said the new technology of genomic editing looked potentially very promising for the future. “It overcomes the challenge of getting the genetic change into the organism,” he said. “You can put it in relatively easily and cheaply exactly where you want it. This has the potential to allow this technology to be used much more widely.”
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