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

[Robert Bradbury]

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

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.  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.  (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!

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.

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.)  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).

Robert
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