The Rural Voice, 2000-11, Page 30SPECIALS
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26 THE RURAL VOICE
News
Farmers need to
share in the biotech
bonanza says
Surgeoner
Biotechnology can create many
miracles but primary producers must
share the benefits, biotech proponent
Dr. Gordon Surgeoner told the
annual meeting of the Grey County
Federation of Agriculture in
Markdale, October 13.
Biotechnology will help fill the
need for double the current food
production in the next 50 years,
Surgeoner said as the world's
population moves from six billion to
10 billion people and people have
higher standards of living, meaning
they want more protein in their diets.
But the past trend of feeding an ever-
increasing population will level off
and the world's population may even
drop, he warned. In the past there has
always been someone who needed
farmers' products, even if they
couldn't afford them, Surgeoner said.
That could change. Farmers will need
to find new markets.
Farmers have been the last to
benefit from increasing technology
that brings higher production,
Surgeoner said. He showed a graph
illustrating that in terms of buying
power for a bushel of grain,
commodity prices hit a peak in 1821
and have generally declined in the
two centuries since then.
"The beneficiary has been the
consumer" who has enjoyed
abundance, quality and price.
Canadians and Americans pay the
lowest cost for food of anyone in the
world and they take it for granted he
said.
In 1950 the average corn yield per
acre in Ontario was 44 bushels. In
1999 it was 122.
Some of the new technologies on
the way will continue the trend of
boosting production, Surgeoner said.
Research is working on relieving
limitations on crops caused by cold,
frost and drought, which cause 70 per
cent of the losses in agriculture.
Scientists are also trying to alter
tomatoes so the Ontario's greenhouse
producers won't have to shut down in
the winter because of lack of light
intensity.
"All that means more production,"
he said. "When people say we're
going to run out of food at 10 billion
people, I say as long as we continue
to innovate my worry is'we're going
to have too much at lower prices. We
need new ways of selling our
products."
One way will be a closer tie
between health and food —
nutritional genomics, Surgeoner
predicted. There will be simple blood
tests through which the chromosome
make-up of the individual will be
recorded and the likelihood of
suffering from various diseases will
be analyzed.
Then a diet will be designed with
foods genetically fortified with the
food traits to deal with the body's
deficiencies. There will be broccoli
that prevents cancer. There are
health/nutrition partnerships being
formed between seed companies like
Novartis with food companies like
Quaker Oats. But who, Surgeoner
wonders, will get the premium for
growing these crops.
Molecular farming, producing
antibodies in plants, will offer
another opportunity for farmers. Take
the gene that makes an antibody for
E. coli 157, for example, and insert it
into a tobacco plant and grow that
plant to mass-produce antibodies in
the plants. This kind of production
could require five to eight million
acres to produce the antibodies at
under $100 a gram, compared to
$1,500 to $100,000 a gram right
now.
The other opportunity for farmers
is in industrial uses for their crops,
Surgeoner says. "In my opinion the
21st century will move from carbon
and hydrogen chains in the ground to
carbon and hydrogen chains from
plants," Surgeoner predicted. While
more efficient production has left
farmers with low -prices from crops
for food, those low prices make
industrial uses more feasible.
Petroleum prices have risen because
oil is harder to find, but on the farm,
productivity has made plant -based
fuels less and less expensive. In
1980 it used to cost $4U.S. to create