This post was originally published on Forbes on October 12, 2016.
Post written by Dr. Robert T. Fraley. Dr. Robert T. Fraley is executive vice president and chief technology officer at Monsanto.
GMO Answers launched its third annual ‘Get to Know GMOs’ month this October to answer consumers’ most pressing questions about GMOs. Throughout the month, GMO Answers will post a series of five articles designated to ‘Get To Know GMOs’ month. This post is our second installment.
It has been 20 years since companies like mine first began selling genetically modified (GM) seeds to farmers – soy and cotton in 1996, corn in 1997. If you had told me then that by 2016, 20 seasons later, GM cotton, soybean and corn products would be widely planted by millions of farmers throughout the United States and around the world, I simply would not have believed you. And, if you had also told me that by 2016, GMO crops would be planted in 30 countries and used on an area the size of Alaska, I would have wondered whether you also believed in porcine flight.
No, none of us who were there from the start with GMOs ever dreamed they would be this successful. We knew we had something with considerable potential to improve agriculture, but who would have predicted that our biotechnology advances would be the most rapidly adopted innovation in recent agricultural history?
Likewise, did we ever dream that our innovation would be resisted and vilified the way it has been? Or that companies like mine would be demonized in some sectors of society for all manner of alleged impacts on human health and the environment?
No, none of us would have thought such attitudes would take hold when a strong scientific consensus supported GMOs. A consensus 1) that foods produced with GMOs pose no risks to human health and 2) that their cultivation helps farmers conserve topsoil and water, reduce polluting runoffs, increase biodiversity, slash greenhouse gas emissions and grow more food on the same or less acreage – in short, reduce the environmental footprint of agriculture.
All of which leads to the conclusion that predictions about the future of GMOs are a risky business. The following should probably be taken with a boulder of sodium chloride.
But here it is: I expect GMOs and other advanced biotechnology tools to have an even bigger impact on agriculture in the next 20 years than they have had in the last two decades. I expect that to be the case even if the global regulatory climate does not improve; obviously, I hope (and believe) it will.
I have at least two main reasons for thinking this.
First, our world is facing challenges that can only be met by increasing the pace of innovation. So far, agricultural innovation has enabled farmers to keep pace with increasing global demand, but critical habitat for biodiversity has declined. To achieve sustainability goals, we need to increase biodiversity and make crop land more productive. And we need to do this as climate volatility increases, growing conditions worsen, and attacks from pests and disease intensify. Meanwhile, the global population, which now stands at 7.3 billion, will climb to nearly 10 billion in just the next three decades, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. That’s like adding another couple of Chinas!
So we’re going to need a lot more food and habitat at a time when our changing climate is making it harder to grow crops and attacks from pests and diseases are intensifying. That means we need to farm smarter – using all available technologies in ways that will enable us to value crop productivity and biodiversity equally.
As a result, the perception of innovation as a nice-to-have benefit will increasingly be replaced by the realization that it is an absolute necessity for society as a whole. The sustainable intensification of farming will be – and is – critical to meeting both food security and environmental challenges.
The other reason I expect to see an even greater impact from GMOs is the accelerating pace of innovation. Consider what’s happened just in the past few years, with the development of breakthrough biotechnology advances like gene editing. We’re now better able to discover the functions of individual genes and to make changes to literally every DNA base-pair in a crop genome. The ever-increasing knowledge of genetics combined with the digitalization of agriculture are producing improvements in traditional breeding techniques and delivering new insights for the future of farming. So science is going to keep offering us more and more innovations.
We’re already knocking at the door on some very important ones. Plant diseases, for example, are central to the enterprise of agriculture, and often mark our own fates: Consider the impact of the Irish potato famine, which was caused by a strain of a mold called Phytophthora infestans. Or consider the threat today to the world’s banana crop, a threat caused by a fungus.
Helping plants resist diseases through genetic improvements has long been on science’s to-do list, but progress has been slow to date. Now, however, we appear to be on the cusp of major advances. They’ll be fueled through a combination of advanced traditional breeding techniques as well as gene editing and genetic modification. Importantly, these tools will improve crop yields…and reduce food waste!
The real question, in my mind, is whether we’ll take full advantage of our capacity for innovation. For that to happen, scientists and companies, like my own will need to do a better of communicating with the public – both listening and reaching out – to earn their support for these advances in the same way biotechnology- and GMO-based drugs and therapeutics are widely accepted today in human medicine.
I think we will. And as we do that, I think people will increasingly realize that conditions demand many innovations, GMOs included.
So, yes, it’s hard to make predictions. But I’m optimistic that as time goes on, the importance of GMOs will only grow.