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Welcoming the new Green Revolution

BY ROBERT B. GOLDBERG

April 22 marked the 36th year of Earth Day, a time to celebrate the Earth’s goodness and pledge to protect its fragile ecosystems. Amid the rejoicing we can easily forget that more food will need to be produced in the next 50 years than in mankind’s entire history. And this will have to be done on a rapidly shrinking amount of land suitable for agriculture.

Los Angeles illustrates this point dramatically. In the 1920s, the county was one of the most productive agricultural areas, thanks partly to what was then the new southern branch of the University of California, now known as UCLA. Its agricultural college provided assistance and new technology to local farmers, educated a generation of agriculturists and plant scientists, and helped launch the California avocado industry that thrives to this day.

Fast-forward to the present. Agriculture has vanished from L.A. County, with housing developments, freeways and shopping malls replacing the fertile fields of the past. A similar story is unfolding across California and the United States. Ironically, since 1920, national food production has increased almost 300%, and Americans spend 25% less on food.

How was this achieved and what are the implications for the future? About 100 years ago, the science of genetics was born, leading to the development of high-yielding crop varieties that produced more food on less land, aided by other technological advances such as fertilizers and chemicals to fight off pests and weeds. To meet today’s challenge of producing food, we must place greater reliance on the plant sciences. Plant genomics is uncovering genes that confer resistance to drought and pests, increasing yields significantly. This has the potential not just to create another green revolution but to spawn new industries, especially those that produce biofuel to replace our dependence on oil and reduce the harmful environmental effects of burning fossil fuels.

Sadly, an ideological battle is slowing to a snail’s pace the transfer of exciting laboratory discoveries to the field. Opponents of the latest green revolution proclaim that the same genetic engineering technologies that have given us miracle drugs should not be used to produce new crop varieties because they are not “natural.”

Yet agriculture has never been natural. Most food in a grocery store comes from land cleared of trees, fortified with manure or fertilizers, and irrigated with piped water. This has been going on since agriculture was invented 10,000 years ago and is the result of a simple biological fact — plants need land, light, water and food to grow. Most crops that we use as food have been bred for thousands of years not to grow in the wild but in the artificial environment we call a farm.

An agriculture that is both sustainable and productive needs all the scientific tools and discoveries at our disposal, including genetic engineering. In a future of rising populations and shrinking natural resources, turning our backs on modern science’s potential would be a major tragedy for us, our children and our wonderful planet Earth.

Goldberg, professor of molecular, cell and developmental biology, is a member of the National Academy of Sciences. A modified version of this article was published in the Los Angeles Daily News.