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Published online 3 December 2008 | Nature 456, 563-568 (2008) | doi:10.1038/456563a
News Feature
Agronomy: Five crop researchers who could change the world
The current crisis in worldwide food prices reinforces the need for more productive agriculture. Emma Marris meets five ambitious scientists determined to stop the world from going hungry.
[image 11 center] The rust hunter
Peter Dodds
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I am very shamed that can not see the mainland of china agricatural scientist Yuan Longping. You know his founds has resolved the problem of hungry of 1 forth of the world. I don't know what's reason the author can not remember this great people.
I do not have much agricultural knowledge, so I am wondering whether it would be more feasible to switch crops in some areas with significant rust losses, instead of investing into developing rust resistance in wheat, etc. As mentioned in the article, a resistant strain already has become infected by a different strain of rust. Could other crops replace wheat and still be profitable? Would such a switch be more efficient than time-consuming and intensive research? Also, on genetically engineering plants to be more nutritious - would this not just deplete the soils quicker, perhaps giving the people more nutrients but inevitably, with time, making them dependent on more fertiliser, especially if the population grows as a result of improved nutrition?
Malthus was right then and he's still right. The human population can be reduced to carrying capacity at the front end or the back end or both. Nature bats last. Domestication of food species was one of humanity's biggest mistakes.
I strongly believed that hungry and poverty appear together in society. The five itens mentioned in this report are related mostly with tecnology, and I also strongly believe that to go out of poverty and out of hungry we must also invest in education, health, infrastruture, information and probably the most important credits, then the tecnology will be effective.
Among the five items mentioned here, some looks very much Feasible in that it could happen by ten years down, like rust resistant wheat and improved cassava. but making perennial wheat, and C4 rice looks very very very far(Endless projects!!!). C3 and C4 are two differernt metabolic pathways and to make C4 we might need to transfer an array of C4 pathway genes in to C3 plant, while making single gene transformed variety itself takes quite lot of time. so what if we keep our aims high!!
It has been noted previously (Sage? Sheehy?) that the longer developing C4 rice takes, the more increasing CO2 makes it irrelevant. I don't know what earth's carrying capacity for humans is (see Joel Cohen's book), but without domestication of crops we would never have developed cities large enough to support universities, scientific publishing, etc. (or adjustable-rate mortgages and nuclear weapons).