New wheat disease threatens Europe’s crops

This has been fantastic at reducing the number of people required to work in agriculture, and at producing more food than ever before on the same amount of land. It’s fair to say that our current world population would be entirely unsustainable without industrial agriculture.

There are big systemic risks and unaccounted external costs though (to farms and ranches, to the local environment, to people living nearby, and to the planet), in e.g. using water from aquifers at above-replacement rate; topsoil erosion at faster than replacement rate; large-scale use of a tiny number of plant varieties; widespread use of pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers which run off into local waterways; promoting crops with less nutritional value because they have improved size or durability or prettier appearance; feeding animals large quantities of antibiotics and potentially breeding resistant bacteria; et cetera.

(P.S. we owe an awful lot to hundreds of generations of Mexican peasant farmers. Corn, tomatoes, squash, pinto beans, chilies, avocados, chocolate, tobacco, ... they ate a substantially healthier diet than most people in Europe at the time and supported larger cities and higher population density, despite the lack of draft animals.)

Thats why many of them live on the land instead ... and smoke all the time to make up for lack of smog ;)

- Monoclonal cultures are highly suceptible to diseases like this one - there is a much higher pesticide usage associated with GMO fields around the world (for what reason whatsoever) - people have been sued because their crops contained genes from GMO companies

I am not really against GMO (I studied biotechnology) but I can understand why people have massive problems with them. And if Monsanto says that they want to monopolize food production around the world, I will oppose them, even if they do sometimes good things. It is not GMO that is the problem, its monopoles and big corporations that are associated with that and thats what people fear and rightfully fear.

>Organic food is just for rich countries who can afford to produce food inefficiently in order to feel good about themselves.

The organic label is bullshit and has no consistent meaning. However, there is a difference between the farmer who grows for maximum yield and the artisan who tries to maximize taste.

I think many people confuse the label organic with higher quality foods, hybrids, and heirlooms or more generally quality.

GMO just affects how the first plant(s) of a variety are obtained; in the case of GMO, you shoot a gene gun (or use some other technique) to modify one or more starting seeds. In non-GMO crop development, you simply observe an interesting individual (or cross some number of existing varieties and look for interesting individuals among the offspring). A math teacher of mine once found an exceptionally fuzzy soybean plant he thought might be insect resistant.

What happens next is what affects the genetic diversity of the crop.

So you have one special plant. How do you turn that into a field?

Well, you breed it and hope its offspring are also special. Some plants are self-fertilizing; you may do that, to try to avoid introducing non-special genes into the germ-line. You may also use the pollen from your special plant to pollinate a large number of other plants and hope at least some of their offspring are special. In the case of GMO, you might use your gene gun to shoot the same modification into a reasonably diverse set of initial seeds.

Your goal as a seed breeder - GMO or non-GMO - is to get the genes that produce the characteristics of the variety you are trying to produce (flavor or size or color of the fruit; speed of growth; hardiness or resistance) as uniformly as you can into a breeding population of plants, so that all of the offspring of all of the plants can reasonably be expected to express the traits.

There will necessarily be a weak point there: if a new virus attacks the gene that is needed to make your new corn variety super-delicious, all the plants will inherently be susceptible to that disease, regardless of how that gene got there. This sort of susceptibility isn't too troubling, however, because it's always there: corn shares a great number of genes with other corn; that's what makes it corn and not wheat or beans.

What will vary is how much diversity will be in the rest of the plant's genome. There could be very little, if you simply breed your exemplar starting plant against it self, and then its children against themselves, over and over until you have enough seeds to plant a field. There could be a lot, if you can find or produce a number of unrelated exemplars or you first breed your exemplars against a more diverse gene pool.

This second sort of a lack of genetic diversity is more troubling, but it isn't a product of genetic engineering: it's a result of going through a population bottleneck in the recent past; this can happen to non-GMO varieties just as easily.

And last but no least: I have no idea how most product should become cheaper that way, as canadian supermarkets are mostly more expensive than european. You wont get a litre of milk in Vancouver for 47 cent, nor good bread or eggs for the prices offered around here. Bananas and other import products are cheaper, but that is not the market Canada targets, I assume. The prices would go up if it wasn't all that much subsedized, something that might actually happen under CETA.