Forty thousand children die each day from hunger and hunger-related illnesses. The number of mouths to feed worldwide increases by 90 million each year. Agricultural researchers struggle to keep pace with an exploding population.
For George Norton, an agricultural economist, that is the nightmare.
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| Composite image: Barbara Corbett; mother and child, Randy Stith; children, James Littlefield; world, Glen Duncan. |
It’s today. The unreality of those figures to millions of people in the world’s developed countries is also part of the nightmare: A world inured to the suffering not of millions of people, but of billions. A world in which the pitiful scratching for a meager meal by a child in Africa is lost in day-to-day worries about mortgages, car payments, getting the kids to little league practice, and all the rest.
By 2020, the world’s population is expected to reach eight billion, a 40 percent increase over today’s 5.8 billion people.
Norton counts himself an optimist when it comes to looking into the future. He sees hope in the trends. Nearly 800 million people are malnourished, but that is down from 950 million people in 1970. In 1970, one in every three people on the planet was severely malnourished; today it is ‘just’ one in six.
But “with a 40 percent increase in population, we can’t become complacent,” Norton says. “We can probably handle it if we keep the research going. What makes me uneasy is that the commitment to research today seems very shaky.”
Glenn Buss, a professor of crop and soil environmental sciences, personifies the need for continued, consistent support for research. A new variety of soybean that he releases for use by farmers today is the fruition of research that began 10 or more years ago.
He and other plant breeders at Virginia Tech do their work in the traditional manner of crossing varieties of plants, trying to combine the best traits of both parents to produce a superior new variety. Often, the traits being sought, such as pest or disease resistance, drought tolerance, or more efficient use of nutrients, result in increased yield.
Buss, who retired in 2002, says each new incremental increase is smaller than in the past. He says that in the future, nutritional quality will be a major focus.
Biotechnology
New tools — such as biotechnology — are making plant breeders’ work more precise and increasing the pace of their work, Buss says.
M.A. Saghai Maroof is developing some of the basic understanding of the workings of genes and the means of adjusting those workings to more precisely select desirable traits in crops. A professor of molecular genetics, Saghai Maroof is using biotechnology to identify genes and create genome maps.
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| Photo by Bob Veltri |
“Years from now, we will be able to identify and catalog tens of thousands of genes in crop plants,” he says. “Understanding the genetic basis of traits of agronomic importance will allow us to isolate genes and transfer them from one plant to another. For example, we could transfer a gene from a disease-resistant plant to a more productive but susceptible plant” — work he and colleagues are already doing to create corn resistant gray leaf spot disease.
Knowing the location of genes that produce a desired trait will allow researchers in a laboratory to isolate that gene in a matter of hours. That gene can then be spliced into the chain of genetic information for the target plant. Years of trial-and-error work by traditional plant breeders can be bypassed. The potential even exists to transfer desirable traits from one species to another, such as from a bacterium to a corn plant.
“This new technology has the potential of letting us do what we were doing before, but doing it faster and more precisely,” Saghai Maroof says. “And we will to do things we couldn’t do before, and answer questions we couldn’t answer before. With the kind of population that is expected, there has to be a tremendous increase in yield, and for that we need to be constantly researching.”
Food preservation and delivery
Cameron Hackney, head of the food sciences and technology department at Virginia Tech, says that even if there is not a tremendous increase in yield, research focusing on preserving and packaging has the potential to provide more food to more people.
“There is a tremendous amount of food that goes to waste,” he says.
One of the major causes of starvation is the inability of governments to get food to their citizens. Hackney points to Russia. That massive country produces enough food, but poor distribution systems – including an unreliable transportation network and institutions struggling to tame the new free market – are constantly defeating efforts to get the bounty to people before it spoils. The situation is worse in some developing countries.
Norton sees the same problem. Many countries simply lack any reliable system for moving food from farms, through processors, and to consumers. Often the problem stems from a lack of infrastructure — the transportation system is inadequate, or the key steps in the farm-to-table process are missing.
Often, though, the problems are political.
“There is enough food in the world today to provide every person with enough to eat,” he says. “It just isn’t distributed evenly. In regions where there is the most malnutrition — where there is outright starvation - there is probably an unstable political situation.
“One of the frustrating things about this whole problem is that there are so many pieces to the puzzle. There’s the infrastructure issues, the political issues, and the technology issues. It takes gains in all those areas to really address this matter satisfactorily.”