Sarah Grossman - New Scientific Discovery Could Be Key To Tackling Poverty And Hunger
Science just came
through in a big way for small farmers in developing countries.
Researchers from
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory have found a way to boost crop yields from maize,
according to a release from the lab. By altering a gene mutation that
controls stem cell growth, they were able to increase the number of kernels
produced by individual ears of maize by almost half.
This discovery could
make a huge difference to help tackle the global challenge of feeding a growing
world population. What’s more, it could help small-scale farmers in the
developing world to produce more food on small amounts of land. “There’s great concern
that we won’t be able to feed everybody in the coming years,” lead researcher
David Jackson told Bioscience
Technology. “I think that by producing higher yields, we can not only
guarantee to feed the growing population, but also to hopefully [...] improve
sustainability, and be required to use less land for agriculture.”
An estimated 2.5
billion people are involved full- or part-time in smallholder farming,
according to the UN. These smallholder farmers provide almost 80 percent of the
food consumed in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. This new research
provides a promising solution for these smallholder farmers, and the families
and communities who depend on them: a new way to increase yields from staple
crops, such as maize, without increasing the amount of land needed to grow
them.
The science behind it
works like this: Researchers discovered the precise gene mutation — the fea3
mutation — that causes plants to grow excess stem cells, and thus extra seeds,
according to Gizmodo.
By manipulating that mutation to grow just the right amount of stem cells —
more than the average maize plant, but not so much as to stunt the growth of
the plant — they were able to create a crop with 50 percent more kernels than
the average maize crop.
This could have a huge
impact on poverty and hunger in the developing world. One study showed that for
every ten percent increase in farm yields, there was a seven
percent reduction in poverty in Africa, and a reduction of over five
percent in Asia, according to the UN. But it could also have
a huge impact on the world at large: The current world population is 7.3
billion, according to the UN, and by 2050 it’s expected to reach 9.7 billion. This rapid population growth will put increased
pressure on our food systems, as well as the land and environment
needed to produce food. These high-yield crops would relieve some of that
pressure by making farming more sustainable, by requiring it to use less land
to produce more food.
“If the yield
increases we have seen in our lab strains hold out when used in agricultural
maize strains, this would lead to a significant boost in yields, potentially
improving agricultural sustainability by requiring less land be devoted to
agriculture,” Jackson told Gizmodo. The next
step for the scientists is to see if the results can apply to other
strains of maize and other crops — and most importantly, if the results they
found in their lab can be replicated in the field, under unregulated growing
conditions.
