Stories Untold
10 December 2008 Pulling together the lists for this issue was a fun job – collaborating with experts from all areas of ag is a great way to get a feel for what is on the mind of the industry, and where the future is likely to take us.
But a few stories were left off the list. Here are 10 more I offer for consideration – my list of the headlines that missed the cut, but could have far-ranging influence in the years to come.
10. Completion of Navstar. In 1993, the 24th Navstar satellite was launched by the US Department of Defense, completing the constellation of satellites that would lead to commercially available global positioning systems (GPS). This paved the way for modern precision ag by making guidance systems possible.
9. Nanotechnology. Another cutting edge science already in limited use, nanotech is just now being researched for its potential contribution to agriculture, where it could lead to products with high efficacy and zero toxicity.
8. Harmonized registration. One of the hurdles faced by the ag-chem industry is the enormous cost of registering products in different markets. Thanks to efforts to create a standardized international system for registration, these costs could be reduced substantially.
7. Biologicals. Biological products have grown in use due to a number of factors, including organic production, integrated pest management (IPM) systems, and the ability to use the products late in the season on crops where maximum residue limits (MRLs) make conventional products unusable.
6. Golden Rice. No, Golden Rice still isn’t on our tables. But it is providing a defense of biotechnology to even the most staunch critics. It should be enough to point out the increase in crop yields and profit for farmers in poor countries as reasons to accept biotech, but for groups that profit from consumer fear, it often isn’t. Golden Rice offers a humanitarian cause in support of biotech – one which even the most radical biotech critic has difficulty refuting.
5. Food Scares. On the other side of that coin are the rash of food scares, including Mad Cow Disease, Foot and Mouth Disease, and Avian Influenza as well as biotech rice and Starlink maize appearing in the food chain unapproved. Just as Golden Rice gives the industry a positive story, these scares – particularly in the EU – provide fuel for anti-agriculture and anti-biotech groups.
4. Indian Patent Regime. Last year saw the onset of a new patent regime for India as a condition of the country’s 1995 accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO). While many worried that the change would cause prices to soar and generic manufacturers to be crippled, the Indian industry is adjusting to product patents. Many see this as key to India’s gradual transformation from ag-chem producer to global R&D hub.
3. RNA Interference. At presstime, two US researchers were just announced the winners of the Nobel Prize for Medicine for their work on RNA Interference (RNAi). Also called “gene silencing,” RNAi has gone from theory to common practice in a span of eight years, and could be fundamental to the next generation of ag biotech products (see “Spanning the Globe,” p. 6, for an example of RNAi already used in agriculture).
2. South American Royalties. One story that may be murky for years to come is the clash between South American farmers and producers of biotech seed. While Roundup Ready soya dominates South America’s fields, no solution has yet been agreed upon, and the war of words between grower groups and suppliers – primarily Monsanto – is not over yet.
1. US Farms Transform. An effort to stem inflation in the 1980s led to an agricultural debt crisis in the US which caused a huge change to the composition of US farming. Many family farms were forced to sell their fields to large landholders. By the 1990s, for the first time in the nation’s history, less than 2% of the US population worked in agriculture.
With the change from family farms to business farms came more attention to efficiency. As ag becomes an ever-more international industry driven by global competition, one wonders how far away the rest of the world is from the same fate
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