As readers of Terry Etherton Blog on Biotechnology appreciate, I have written a great deal about the looming World population growth, and the challenges we will confront in feeding the World’s population over the next 40 years.

Recently, the scientific journal, Nature, published an excellent series of articles about this topic (July 29 issue).  This is noteworthy because Nature is the preeminent scientific journal in the World.  It is telling that the leading life science journal in the World focused much of the July 29 issue on this topic.

In the Editorial in this issue, How to Feed a Hungry World, several important issues are presented that must be overcome if we are to produce and distribute sufficient food to feed the projected population of the World in 2050, about 10 billion people (the current World population is approximately 6.9 billion).

The challenges that lie ahead include:

1.  The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations has gone on record as saying that the task of feeding the World’s population in 2050 is “easily possible”.  I find this hard to agree with unless there is large-scale transition of tropical forests and “wildlands”, largely in South America and Africa, to production agriculture.  Doing this comes with a cost that I don’t think many support, not the least of which is the availability of water for animal and crop production, and the destruction of wildlife habitat.  Now what?  The only feasible approach is to increase food production efficiency (for additional information please see my earlier blog Feeding the World and Defending Agricultural Science).

2.  The Editorial champions the idea that that a second Green Revolution is needed. At the core of this recommendation is the urgent need to increase the investment in agricultural science research, which in most countries, including the United States, has been falling since the late 1970s.  There is a pressing need for new crop varieties that produce higher yields per acre, use less water, fertilizer and other inputs.  On the animal “side”, developing and adopting biotechnologies that improve productive efficiency are needed.  The new crop varieties will largely arise from advances made in the application of biotechnology to produce subsequent generations of genetically modified (GM) crops…and these will need to be approved and adopted for use in a timely manner by society.  To date, that has been a daunting challenge.

3.  Science and technology will be important to solve the problem of feeding the World’s population; however, they are not the sole solution.  There are countless contemporary biotechnologies and technologies “on the shelf” that could enhance food productivity and productive efficiency, if implemented, in developing countries, and help reduce the incidence of hunger in the World.  However, this requires money, and raises the question of who is going to pay (see:  The Food System and Feeding the World)?

The Editorial in Nature points out that the FAO has estimated that funding invested in the food system in the developing World must double to about $83 billion a year to meet the  “2050 challenge”.  And, most of this needs to go to improving infrastructure of the food system from production to transportation, as well as storage and processing.

4.  The Editorial also presents the provocative point that countries that pay their farmers subsidies make it difficult for farmers in developing countries to gain a foothold in World markets.  One example that illustrates the magnitude of this problem is that countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development pay subsidies to their farmers that total about $1 billion a day! Solving this will be challenging especially since politicians in many countries are strong advocates for supporting subsidies to farmers (it seems to help them in re-election campaigns).

Back to the “now what” question.  There is a pressing need to launch the second green revolution.  Science will be a core piece of this; however, to position the global village to successfully feed the World’s population by 2050 it will be necessary to develop a strategy that integrates not only scientists and farmers, but also ecologists, economists, food systems experts, social scientists as well as policy makers.  And, over-turning some arcane policy decisions (i.e., farmer subsidies in developed countries) that need to be junked.

First published on the Blog American Thinker on September 18,2010

Ever-Green-View My 1326-ET is the new world milk production record-holder. In the course of one year, she made 72,168 pounds of milk. That’s nearly 8,400 gallons in one year, or 23 gallons per day. The average cow produces 6.5 gallons per day. Ever-Green-View My 1326-ET is the culmination of intense genetic selection, terrific cow management, and the use of technologies like rBST. Genetically, she is a product of artificial insemination and embryo transfer. Her sire is Stouder Morty-ET, and he has over 67,000 daughters in more than 15,000 dairy herds around the globe. The “ET” designation indicates that she was transferred as an embryo from her genetically superior mother to an inferior surrogate cow.

Let’s be optimistic and say that that the agricultural industries are slowly getting better at informing the general public on how and why their food is produced the way it is. The days of assuming we can raise animals any way we want and keep consumers in the dark are OVER! However, we must do a much better job of educating the public to the realities of food production.

While it may be appealing to many to return to the days of small low-tech farms, the fact is we just can’t feed the world with those techniques. In less than 40 years the world population is expected to increase 33% to an incredible 9.15 billion people. At the same time per capita income in developing countries will increase significantly. By the year 2050 some experts are predicting an overall food demand increase of 70% and a 100% increase in demand for animal products.

One of the more interesting presentations at the recent national animal science meetings in Denver was a presentation by Dr. Jude Capper of Washington State University. She first compared our beef production efficiency in 2007 versus 1977. In that 30-year time span the industry produced 13% more beef products while slaughtering 13% fewer animals; clearly more consumable products for mankind while using fewer resources.

Consider the current buzz words being applied to most industries, i.e., “decreasing our carbon footprint”. Comparing 2007 to 1977, the beef industry can claim the following reductions per pound of beef produced:

• 18% fewer total carbon emissions
• 9% less fossil fuel energy
• 10% less feed energy
• 20% fewer feedstuffs
• 30% less land
• 14% less water

Not a bad record is it? While many think the solution to all our problems lies in turning to an all grass-fed system it’s hard to support that notion with the facts. Dr. Capper pointed out that the average “days to finish” in feedlot cattle is 219; for grass-fed systems, 431. And for producing an equivalent amount of beef it takes about 3.5 times more land base for grass-fed versus feedlot. It’s simply a matter of energy density- “concentrates” have that name for a reason! This should in no way cast dispersion on those devoted to grass-fed beef systems; we just can’t begin to feed the world if the whole industry adopts that method.

Bottom Line-“Confinement” and even “feedlot” are evil words in many circles these days but have we really thought it through? As long as animals are humanely cared for aren’t we using LESS of the world’s open and /or wild spaces by concentrating animals on a smaller land area? Food for thought!

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This article was originally published in the American Agriculturist magazine.

By Stephen Budiansky
Published: August 19, 2010

IT’S 42 steps from my back door to the garden that keeps my family supplied nine months of the year with a modest cornucopia of lettuce, beets, spinach, beans, tomatoes, basil, corn, squash, brussels sprouts, the occasional celeriac and, once when I was feeling particularly energetic, a couple of small but undeniable artichokes. You’ll get no argument from me about the pleasures and advantages to the palate and the spirit of eating what’s local, fresh and in season.

But the local food movement now threatens to devolve into another one of those self-indulgent — and self-defeating — do-gooder dogmas. Arbitrary rules, without any real scientific basis, are repeated as gospel by “locavores,” celebrity chefs and mainstream environmental organizations. Words like “sustainability” and “food-miles” are thrown around without any clear understanding of the larger picture of energy and land use.

The result has been all kinds of absurdities. For instance, it is sinful in New York City to buy a tomato grown in a California field because of the energy spent to truck it across the country; it is virtuous to buy one grown in a lavishly heated greenhouse in, say, the Hudson Valley.

The statistics brandished by local-food advocates to support such doctrinaire assertions are always selective, usually misleading and often bogus. This is particularly the case with respect to the energy costs of transporting food. One popular and oft-repeated statistic is that it takes 36 (sometimes it’s 97) calories of fossil fuel energy to bring one calorie of iceberg lettuce from California to the East Coast. That’s an apples and oranges (or maybe apples and rocks) comparison to begin with, because you can’t eat petroleum or burn iceberg lettuce.

It is also an almost complete misrepresentation of reality, as those numbers reflect the entire energy cost of producing lettuce from seed to dinner table, not just transportation. Studies have shown that whether it’s grown in California or Maine, or whether it’s organic or conventional, about 5,000 calories of energy go into one pound of lettuce. Given how efficient trains and tractor-trailers are, shipping a head of lettuce across the country actually adds next to nothing to the total energy bill.

It takes about a tablespoon of diesel fuel to move one pound of freight 3,000 miles by rail; that works out to about 100 calories of energy. If it goes by truck, it’s about 300 calories, still a negligible amount in the overall picture. (For those checking the calculations at home, these are “large calories,” or kilocalories, the units used for food value.) Overall, transportation accounts for about 14 percent of the total energy consumed by the American food system.

Other favorite targets of sustainability advocates include the fertilizers and chemicals used in modern farming. But their share of the food system’s energy use is even lower, about 8 percent.

The real energy hog, it turns out, is not industrial agriculture at all, but you and me. Home preparation and storage account for 32 percent of all energy use in our food system, the largest component by far.

A single 10-mile round trip by car to the grocery store or the farmers’ market will easily eat up about 14,000 calories of fossil fuel energy. Just running your refrigerator for a week consumes 9,000 calories of energy. That assumes it’s one of the latest high-efficiency models; otherwise, you can double that figure. Cooking and running dishwashers, freezers and second or third refrigerators (more than 25 percent of American households have more than one) all add major hits. Indeed, households make up for 22 percent of all the energy expenditures in the United States.

Agriculture, on the other hand, accounts for just 2 percent of our nation’s energy usage; that energy is mainly devoted to running farm machinery and manufacturing fertilizer. In return for that quite modest energy investment, we have fed hundreds of millions of people, liberated tens of millions from backbreaking manual labor and spared hundreds of millions of acres for nature preserves, forests and parks that otherwise would have come under the plow.

Don’t forget the astonishing fact that the total land area of American farms remains almost unchanged from a century ago, at a little under a billion acres, even though those farms now feed three times as many Americans and export more than 10 times as much as they did in 1910.

The best way to make the most of these truly precious resources of land, favorable climates and human labor is to grow lettuce, oranges, wheat, peppers, bananas, whatever, in the places where they grow best and with the most efficient technologies — and then pay the relatively tiny energy cost to get them to market, as we do with every other commodity in the economy. Sometimes that means growing vegetables in your backyard. Sometimes that means buying vegetables grown in California or Costa Rica.

Eating locally grown produce is a fine thing in many ways. But it is not an end in itself, nor is it a virtue in itself. The relative pittance of our energy budget that we spend on modern farming is one of the wisest energy investments we can make, when we honestly look at what it returns to our land, our economy, our environment and our well-being.

I never cease to be amazed at the political process in Europe that keeps hindering adoption of safe and effective ag biotechnologies.  The latest folly occurred on July 7, 2010 when Members of the European Parliament (MEP) renewed their appeal for a ban on food from cloned animals when they voted on novel foods legislation.  At this time, there are no European Union (EU) rules to specifically allow or ban dairy products and meat from cloned animals.  While the Commission and Council wanted to have cloned meat covered by novel food rules that are already in place, MEPs instead called for new legislation to expressly prohibit the sale of meat from cloned animals and their descendants.

This decision is astonishing given that in July 2008 the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) announced its final scientific opinion that food from cloned cattle and pigs is safe, and there are no implications of animal cloning on the environment!

As I have written in previous blogs, this is another EU decision that is based on politics not science – more of the Luddites at the Gate phenomena that I have written about previously!

The decision the EU has reached is contrary to that reached by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).  Based on a risk assessment “Animal Cloning:  A Risk Assessment“, a report written by FDA scientists and issued in January 2008, FDA concluded that meat and milk from cow, pig, and goat clones and the offspring of any animal clones are as safe as food we eat every day.

The FDA Risk Assessment was based on an extensive evaluation of the available data that did not identify any evidence of any subtle hazards that might indicate food consumption risks in healthy clones of cattle, swine, or goats.

The idea that a trade dispute could ensue arises from the reality that the EU and the U.S. have reached opposite decisions about the safety of food from cloned animals.

The regulatory (and political) problem the EU is confronted with is that there is no way to identify a cloned animal or meat from a cloned animal by any laboratory assay!  Thus, it is not possible to verify whether meat of semen imported into the EU from the U.S. is from cloned animals!  The only way the Europeans can “verify” is to simply ban imports of all meat animal foods and semen from the United States.  If this decision is made by the EU, then the likelihood of a trade dispute escalates dramatically, and the trade war is launched!

“Effectively what that means is we’ve voted for a complete ban,” said Stevenson. “You can imagine this could trigger a trade war. I remember the banana war and the problems that caused, this could be 100 times bigger.”

The EU currently imports nearly £2 billion ($3.1 billion) of bovine meat and £30 million of semen from the U.S. every year.

An interesting news release from Europe came across my desk.  A group of farmers from Spain, Portugal and Romania traveled to Brussels, Belgium to convey to the European Commission that they are upset that they can not us genetically modified (GM) crops.  They urged that laws be passed to enable them to plant GM crops!

The press release follows with a link to the full report in Spanish.

Brussels, Belgium, July 13, 2010 — Farmers from Spain, Romania and Portugal presented to the members of the parliament (MPs) and representatives of the European Commission (EC) in Brussels a manifesto stating that “Biotechnology, a Tool for Agro-Food cannot be Ignored”. The manifesto points out that the rejection (by the EC) of positions and decisions about GM crops are not based in science. The report goes on to underscore that the safety of GM crops is guaranteed by the strictest and independent scientific assessment.

The  farmers pointed out that previous decisions made to not approve GM in Europe is unfair with respect to agricultural production.  The group called for scientifically-based decisions so as not to discriminate against farmers who want to grow GM crops. Spanish farmers also have attested their experiences in planting GM crops saying that the cultivation of transgenic corn yields more in a cost-effective way with higher quality and using less resource. These technologies which are available in other parts of the world should be enjoyed by other farmers in the European Union.

See the full report in Spanish at:

http://fundacion-antama.org/consumidores-cientificos-agricultores-y-empresas-espanolas-piden-en-bruselas-un-acceso-mas-justo-a-los-cultivos-transgenicos-y-tecnologicos/.

When surveys don’t give you the overwhelming result you’re looking for, there’s only one thing left to do — cook your numbers. This was the tactic employed by the Consumers Union (CU), the non-profit publisher of Consumer Reports, after it conducted a poll recently on genetically engineered crops.

The CU was miffed by a USDA draft environmental impact statement (EIS) on GE alfalfa which in the CU’s words, “indicated that consumers and organic farmers don’t care if their organic food is GE contaminated.”

The CU created a poll to refute USDA’s EIS findings, but unfortunately for them, the results fell short of expectations. So apparently they turned the numbers over to the shrewdest and most ruthless manipulator of data they could find — their marketing department.

Consequently, on March 2, the poll results were released with a headline that blared, “Two-thirds of organic food consumers concerned with genetically-engineered contamination.”

Michael Hansen, senior scientist with the CU, declared that the CU poll contradicted USDA’s position, and showed that “consumers care greatly,” about potential GE contamination.

The CU news release went on to say, “Given the popularity of alfalfa sprouts among health-oriented eaters, Consumers Union urges USDA to consider the overwhelming consumer concern before deciding to allow GE alfalfa on the market.”

Closer examination reveals trickery afoot.

To its credit, the CU provided this link to the survey results, Organic Food Poll, perhaps hoping that few people would actually take a peek inside. I did, and discovered that I could use the exact same numbers to arrive at a completely different conclusion.

I began with an assertion in the CU news release that “58 percent of all respondents were extremely concerned, very concerned or somewhat concerned with GE contamination.”

I found that in actuality, only 24 percent of all respondents were in the very concerned and extremely concerned categories, while 34 percent said they were only somewhat concerned. A whopping 41 percent claimed they were not concerned at all. To me, being somewhat concerned is a whole lot closer to being not concerned than it is to being very concerned or extremely concerned. In fact, if I tell a pollster I’m somewhat concerned, I might be saying I don’t much care at all. So my personal take would be that 75 percent were not very concerned or not concerned at all about GE contamination.

As to the CU’s claim that two-thirds of organic consumers were concerned about GE contamination, again it’s a matter of how you crunch the numbers. A surprising 33 percent of those who buy organic products were not concerned about GE contamination and 35 percent were only somewhat concerned. My conclusion therefore would be that 68 percent of organic consumers had very little or no concern about GE contamination.

So there you have it, two steaming plates of statistics, each half-baked to suit the taste du jour — with alfalfa sprouts on the side.

e-mail: erobinson@farmpress.com

The International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications (ISAAA) released their annual report on global adoption of genetically modified (GM) on February 23, 2010.

An executive summary of Global Status of Commercialized Biotech/GM Crops: 2009 – The first fourteen  years, 1996 to 2009 presents highlights of the amazing growth in the global adoption of GM crops.  Impressively, GM crops are being readily adopted by developing and developed countries.

Some highlights from the report:

• Small and large farmers in 25 countries planted 134 million hectares (330 million acres) in 2009, an increase of 7 percent or 9 million hectares (22 million acres) over 2008
• In 2009, the number of biotech famers worldwide increased by .07 million to 14.0 million, 90% of those were small and resource-poor farmers in developing countries.
• For the first time, biotech soybean occupied more  than three-quarters of the 90 million hectares of soybean globally, biotech cotton almost half of the 33 million hectares of global cotton, biotech maize over one-quarter of the 158 million hectares of global maize and biotech canola more than one-fifth of the 31 million hectares of global canola
• While 25 countries planted commercialized biotech crops in 2009, an additional 32 countries, totaling 57, have granted regulatory approvals for biotech crops for import for food and feed use, and release into the environment since 1996.

The report from ISAAA also discusses important developments in biotech growth over the past year, including China’s landmark decision last November to issue biosafety certificates for its nationally-developed proprietary Bt rice and phytase maize. The report also delves into the future of biotech, and the need for biotech to help us reach the UN Millennium Goals through investments in research and commercialization of Golden Rice and drought tolerant crops.

The Opinion-Editorial published in the New York Times was passed along to me earlier today.  As readers of Terry Etherton Blog on Biotechnology appreciate, I have written about a variety of topics across the landscape of science and agriculture; defending science, as well as attempting to counter attacks on, and misrepresentations of production agriculture .

In the article below, Mr. Shriver paints a picture of animal agriculture that presents some perspectives that don’t reflect the reality of practices used in contemporary animal production.  Moreover, a paradox is presented about science – use transgenic farm animals that have been engineered so they can tolerate “pain and suffering” that he asserts is caused by “factory farming”.

My experiment, you ask?  Rather than my writing an initial blog about this Op-Ed piece, I am opening up comments, and wish to moderate the discussion of your opinions and knowledge about animal agriculture and science as framed in the story by Mr. Shriver.  I will share my perspectives after I “gather” your comments.

Not Grass-Fed, but at Least Pain-Free

St. Louis

IN the 35 years since Peter Singer’s book “Animal Liberation” was published, jump-starting the animal rights movement in the United States, the number of animals used in cosmetics testing and scientific research has dropped significantly, and the number of dogs and cats killed in shelters has fallen by more than half. Nevertheless, because the amount of red meat that Americans eat per capita has held steady at more than 100 pounds a year as the population has increased, more animals than ever suffer from injuries and stress on factory farms.

Veal calves and gestating sows are so confined as to suffer painful bone and joint problems. The unnatural high-grain diets provided in feedlots cause severe gastric distress in many animals. And faulty or improperly used stun guns cause the painful deaths of thousands of cows and pigs a year.

We are most likely stuck with factory farms, given that they produce most of the beef and pork Americans consume. But it is still possible to reduce the animals’ discomfort — through neuroscience. Recent advances suggest it may soon be possible to genetically engineer livestock so that they suffer much less.

This prospect stems from a new understanding of how mammals sense pain. The brain, it turns out, has two separate pathways for perceiving pain: a sensory pathway that registers its location, quality (sharp, dull or burning, for example) and intensity, and a so-called affective pathway that senses the pain’s unpleasantness. This second pathway appears to be associated with activation of the brain’s anterior cingulate cortex, because people who have suffered damage to this part of the brain still feel pain but no longer find it unpleasant. (The same is true of people who are given morphine, because there are more receptors for opiates in the affective pain pathway than in the sensory pain pathway.)

Neuroscientists have found that by damaging a laboratory rat’s anterior cingulate cortex, or by injecting the rat with morphine, they can likewise block its affective perception of pain. The rat reacts to a heated cage floor by withdrawing its paws, but it doesn’t bother avoiding the places in its cage where it has learned the floor is likely to be heated up.

Recently, scientists have learned to genetically engineer animals so that they lack certain proteins that are important to the operation of the anterior cingulate cortex. Prof. Min Zhuo and his colleagues at the University of Toronto, for example, have bred mice lacking enzymes that operate in affective pain pathways. When these mice encounter a painful stimulus, they withdraw their paws normally, but they do not become hypersensitive to a subsequent painful stimulus, as ordinary mice do.

Prof. Zhou-Feng Chen and his colleagues here at Washington University have engineered mice so that they lack the gene for a peptide associated with the anterior cingulate gyrus. Like the animals given brain lesions, these mice are normally sensitive to heat and mechanical pain, but they do not avoid situations where they experience such pain.

Given the similarity among all mammals’ neural systems, it is likely that scientists could genetically engineer pigs and cows in the same way. Because the sensory dimension of the animals’ pain would be preserved, they would still be able to recognize and avoid, when possible, situations where they might be bruised or otherwise injured.

The people who consumed meat from such genetically engineered livestock would also be safe. Knockout animals have specific proteins removed, rather than new ones inserted, so there’s no reason to think that their meat would pose more health risks for humans than ordinary meat does.

If we cannot avoid factory farms altogether, the least we can do is eliminate the unpleasantness of pain in the animals that must live and die on them. It would be far better than doing nothing at all.

As readers of my blog have observed, I have not posted a blog for a few months.  About all that could be written about the battle over application of rbST in the dairy industry in the United States, and defending the freedom of dairy farmers to use safe and effective technologies has been discussed.  The stories currently being written by opponents of this biotechnology are simply a rehash of a rehash…nothing new.  This all has been chronicled in Terry Etherton Blog on Biotechnology.

There are other issues confronting society and agriculture that are enormous challenges and merit debate about how to solve them.  One pressing issue that looms on the horizon pertains to how the global village is going to feed a growing world population.  Projections are that between now and 2050, the world’s population will grow from 6.5 billion to about 10 billion people  (International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-Biotech Applications – ISAAA).  Another “metric” that hammers home the challenge that lies ahead is that the amount of cultivable crop land for food production (on a per capita basis) is plummeting.  In 1966, there was about 0.45 hectares (ha) per person in the World – in 2050 the projections are that this will be approximately 0.15 ha (ISAAA).

The shrinking land base (on a per capita basis) is very problematic.  Many presume that climatic conditions will be stable and not adversely affect food production.  That is not a given, however.  In addition, geo-political strife is ever present, and affects food production and distribution.  Moreover, it is not easy to predict future conflicts and what impact they might have on the food system.  The other “wild card” that has a huge potential impact to up heave food production is a targeted strike on food production via a bioterrorism attack.

The question society confronts is very simple – how are we are going to feed the growing World population?  I don’t think many would endorse the idea of chopping down more rain forest to expand acreage for food production.  Science and new innovations are needed – new technology-based products will have to be developed and applied.  A key target for application of new science-based solutions will be to improve food production efficiency, i.e., more apples per tree, more milk per unit of feed consumed by a dairy cow, etc.

An “ugly” reality intertwined in this issue is the cost of discovering and developing the science, and distributing the new technologies (and food) to both developed and developing countries.  This will be enormously challenging!  Will developed countries be willing to cover the costs to do this?  Is there the political “will” to do this?

The current world-wide economic crisis is a daunting problem.  A March 5, 2009 editorial in the New York Times (The Crisis at Home and Abroad) observed that the European Union’s wealthy members rejected calls for a bailout from its poorer members.  This is not encouraging illustration that rich countries will provide assistance to poorer or developing countries.

Another emerging challenge is that there is evidence that cereal crop reserves are decreasing.  If there are a couple of “bad” food production cycles in the World, the amount  of food reserves becomes critical.

These issues are going to be the ones that I focus on in my blogs over the next few months.  The issue of feeding the growing World population is complex.  In addition, many consumers in developed countries simply don’t see the “problem” because their grocery store shelves are full.  I wonder what would happen in America if consumers went to the grocery store and only half of the food was there?