September 29, 2003
by Dennis T. Avery
Biotechnology has just produced another massive breakthrough for world food security—a blight-proof potato. Researchers used biotechnology to insert a gene from a wild Mexican potato to create the first high-yield potato with complete resistance to late blight.
Late blight is the terrible epidemic disease that starved a million Irish farmers to death in the 1840s and drove another million refugees to America. The disease can turn a field of potatoes to wilted black mush in a few days. Today, late blight represents an even bigger threat to global food security as Asia is becoming dependent on the potato’s ultra-high food production per acre and has tripled production.
In the first wave of publicity, the British Broadcasting Corporation got the news wrong, again, due to its European anti-biotech bias. The BBC said, “Scientists have discovered a gene which protects potatoes from blight.” Plant explorers actually discovered the blight-resistant wild potato nearly fifty years ago! But plant breeders couldn’t successfully cross it with the domestic varieties that tasted good, baked well, and/or made golden French fries.
Only biotech could turn the wild gene into protection for future harvests. Both the University of Wisconsin and the University of California/Davis have now engineered the wild blight resistance into commercial potatoes. The UC/Davis team hopes to begin field tests next year. Wisconsin says it may be five years from farmers’ fields.
The discovery of a blight-free potato will now force the potato industry to confront the anti-biotech activists along with corn, soybean, cotton, and dairy farmers. U.S. potato growers have had pest-resistant and low-fat biotech potatoes available since 1999, but French fry processors told growers not to plant them. The processors feared anti-biotech protests against restaurants selling the low-fat fries. (They weren’t much concerned that customers would protest the lack of a low-fat product they’d never heard about.)
But the blight-resistant potato is too important to suppress, biotech or not. Potato growers all over the world live in constant fear of the blight, which can destroy a whole region’s crop quickly. Most potato growers spray repeatedly with expensive fungicides to prevent blight from getting a foothold.
China now grows more than sixty million tons of spuds per year. Smaller Bangladesh grows about three million tons, and still continually teeters on the edge of hunger. Both governments live in fear of a phone call reporting a blight epidemic. Such countries will not risk at-home replays of the Irish potato famine if they have a simple, economic new technology. Nor are near-hungry Asian consumers likely to reject disease-resistant crops that undergird their children’s nutrition.
In America, meanwhile, obesity has become a front-page issue, and it looks as though the anti-biotech campaign is about to collide with the anti-fat campaign. The low-fat biotech potatoes have 35 percent more starch, so they absorb less fat during frying. Ergo, a lower-calorie, lower-fat biotech French fry. These “leanfries” should solidify the French fry’s place in the global twenty-first century, if the fry processors and drive-ins can find the courage to sell them.
Even the fast-food restaurants may now be more afraid of lawyers waving obesity lawsuits than of people dressed like corn ears, and loudly claiming to protect us from non-existent “superweeds.”
The anti-biotech activists, being at least nominally environmentalists, may be slightly impressed by the amount of pesticide spraying the biotech potatoes could forestall. Potato growers will likely cut their currently heavy fungicide and insecticide use by 80 percent with the biotech potatoes. Idaho growers have recently been spraying their crops more than twenty times per year, with more than 1.6 million pounds of fungicide and insecticide.
Most of the sprays are aimed at controlling blight. In addition, however, the new biotech potatoes protect against the hugely destructive Colorado potato beetle, potato leafroll virus, and the destructive potato virus Y.
This technological leap will ultimately allow us to produce still more food from even less land, using fewer chemicals. So in the crowded, affluent world of the twentieth century, there’ll be a bit more room for the wildlife the activists (and the rest of us) are pledged to protect.
With the advent of famine-proof, low-fat biotech potatoes, the question is no longer whether biotech crops are good for the planet and its people. The question is now what the activists, being activists, will object to next.
Dennis T. Avery is based in Churchville, VA, and is director of the Hudson Institute's Center for Global Food Issues.
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