Beakers to the Rescue

Lately, biotech companies are planning to ramp up world output by designing crops to thrive on weak soils and under extreme heat, with a view to bringing millions of hectares of degraded and marginal land in the poorest countries under the plow. One of the most promising frontiers of agriculture is biopharming, or the art of inserting medicinal properties into food and plants. California company Ventria has won an award for placing two proteins in rice, which in trials drastically reduced childhood diarrhea in Peru.

In the shorter term, those worried about the current food crisis are pinning their hopes on six variations of popular strains of rice that have been painstakingly crossbred over decades by the International Rice Research Institute, in Manila, to thrive even after two weeks or more underwater, a dousing that would kill conventional rice. Technically, these new rice strains are not GM crops but they are the product of cutting-edge research known as marker-assisted selection. This method allows breeders to identify seeds that are likely to pass along a desired trait (say, water resistance) and then crossbreed them. In places like Bangladesh or Vietnam's Mekong Delta, where the biggest threat to the rice crop is flooding, Asian farmers will no longer lose up to 50 million metric tons annually from submerged paddies.

India is already field-testing new strains in seven locations, and similar programs are getting started across the region. "We'd like to see 100,000 farmers growing these strains within two or three years," says David Mackill, a team leader at IRRI's Plant Breeding, Genetics and Biotechnology division. "From there it could ramp up quickly." Not quickly enough to ease the current crisis, but perhaps in time to ward off the next one.

With George Wehrfritz in Manila, Christopher Werth in London and Akiko Kashiwagi in Tokyo

© 2008