[extropy-chat] GM Food [was: World map of human ES cell andnuclear transfer policies]

[Brett Paatsch]

Robert Bradbury wrote:

  On 12/6/05, Dirk Bruere <dirk.bruere at gmail.com> wrote:

    There is plenty of food for everyone on the planet.

  I tend to agree with  Samantha -- I'd like to see hard data that backs up this claim.
You could work it out pretty easily.. 

Food is energy (joules or calories). Food is also vitamins, minerals, nutrients. 

You can come up with an average daily energy requirement - say 10MJ per person and  multiply it by the population then see if there is that much food produced. 
I haven't checked but I'm pretty sure there is. 

You could do the same with vitamins, minerals and nutrients using recommended daily allowances etc. 


  It would be safe to say there is *not* plenty of food for everyone on the planet at a price that everyone can afford. 

Perhaps, but it would be a huge leap to infer that because food isn't currently available at prices all people can afford that making it cheaper to produce would solve the problem for those people who can't afford to buy enough currently.

To avoid having anyone starve its necessary for the people and the food to be in the same place.  

   It is also safe to say that there will not be plenty off food in the future if current unsustainable agricultural practices continue.  (Sufficient water and fish protein are two problems which immediately come to mind where overharvesting has created shortages and will create more significant problems in the future.)



    If the starving poor cannot access or pay for normal food then GM food will certainly not solve the problem.

  It will if it makes the cost of producing the food cheaper!

To avoid having anyone starve its necessary for the people and the food to be in the same place.  

  If I have two choices (a) make hundreds of millions or billions of people richer or (b) make more/cheaper food then (b) wins every time because it has lower inertia.

What do you mean by "inertia"?  The word as I understand it isn't applicable in this case. 


    I can produce the seeds (or bacteria) required to totally transform an agricultural system in only a few years.  It is impossible to transform an economy in a similar time frame. 
   India and China are providing good examples but they have been at it for years and it is only successful in limited areas of those countries (northern India and rural China have not experienced significant economic improvement).

  I would suggest that you consider the biology.  Bacteria can have doubling times as low as 20 minutes, eukaryotic cells have doubling times of ~24 hours, large organisms (crop grains, fish, farm animals, etc.) have growth and doubling times measured in months to years.  I can grow a quantity of "GMO-bio-gruel" in a solar pond significantly faster than I can grow the same quantity of rice, corn, ham, beef, etc. 

But can you do it in sufficient scale Robert? You don't have a solution unless you actually manufacture your gruel in sufficient amounts.  

   (In fact bacteria are doing most of the essential chemical conversions necessary to allow you to grow the meat at all.)  I can easily engineer the GMO-BG to produce more protein which is one of the major reasons people consume meat (or fish or poultry).

  Fundamental point -- if I can grow it faster using the available resources more efficiently it is going to be cheaper than products produced using traditional methods.  Would this have been possible 20 years ago -- no.  Then the only solution one could envision was making people wealthier to allow them to be able to pay more for the food.  Now the biotechnology knowledge base and its industrial infrastructure are sufficiently robust that they enable alternate solutions for these problems (famine, starvation, malnutrition, losses during production, etc.).

  Now many people might not like the idea of consuming GMO biogruel. 

  But if you had your choice of eating biogruel or becoming a prostitute with significant risk of contracting HIV (quite common in parts of Africa, India, Thailand, etc.) *which* would you choose?

    If you want to choose the "economic development" path I *challenge* you to show me how growing the economies in those countries by building the schools, educating the people, creating the entrepreneurs and investors to finance them and having them become wealthier so they can afford sufficient food is *faster* than the "GMO development path" which simply makes the food cheaper!

You haven't given enough information to provide a comparison. How *much* bio-gruel can you produce? Would your bio-gruel be safe to eat or contaminated because of
the way you produced it? Would food authorities have to trust you that it was safe or would you have to produce your bio-gruel under the same testing regimes as other food producers? 

  This isn't something I'm uneducated about.  The Hunger Project has been around for ~25 years and for many of those years I supported their efforts to pursue what could be called the "economic development" path.  After I became more educated about microbiology and biotechnology it became clear that the GMO route would be much faster and save many more lives.

See above comments. Your bio-gruel has to be made somewhere on earth and in sufficient quantities. 

It looks completely impractical to me. 

  Thinking about this problem requires some deep thought about how long it takes to educate people and uplift an entire economy vs. how long it takes to build solar ponds and seed them with engineered GMOs with doubling times of 20 minutes.  (Doubling times of 20 minutes allow bacteria to grow to the mass of the Earth within 2 days -- *if * they can be fed sufficient resources.)

Thats an excellent point - what are you going to feed your bio-gruel producers to make them grow (and contain the right nutrients)?   Bio-gruel maybe? :-)
(What was the movie that solved the problem by inventing Soylent Green ?) 

    To solve the nutrition problem for humanity requires combining the machinery of existing genomes (that are capable of many chemical transformations) with the ability of humans to collect, concentrate and transport resources (C, H, O & N along with trace elements).

Certain schemes are just not practical because they cannot be done politically. 

For food to provide nourishment it has to be at the same place as the the people that have to eat it - that's the problem. 

Would you have you saving Africans or whatever sprinkle bio-gruel into local puddles? They don't have that much control over that much real estate. 

Starvation is a political phenomenon. 

Brett Paatsch
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