The search for a global economic beacon is turning to biotechnology, and specifically, agriculture’s potential role in the recovery. Over the past year, the spotlight has continually fallen on farming to lead the planet out of the financial downturn.
And that’s bound to intensify, following a new report from the Organization for Economic Development and Cooperation (OECD).
The report, entitled The Bioeconomy to 2030: Designing a Policy Agenda, says biotechnology could help address the most serious challenges to world economies and societies. Providing food, water, energy and healthcare to the mushrooming population, which is expected to grow to 8.3 billion by 2030, are among the biggest challenges. And every one of these imperatives involves agriculture.
“Research into agronomic traits to improve yields and resistance to stresses such as drought, salinity and high temperatures has increased rapidly since the early 1990s,” says the report.
It goes on. “A detailed analysis of…field trial data indicates that research will lead to improved crop varieties with agronomic traits reaching the market between 2010 and 2015, particularly for major feed and food crops such as maize and soybeans.”
The OECD, which helps countries around the world develop policy, says way too much of the global investment in biotechnology – more than 80 percent -- has gone to health applications, such as therapeutics and diagnostics.
That, it claims, is out of whack, given its prediction that three-quarters of biotechnology’s economic contributions will come from agriculture and industry.
Those contributions will be reflected in the bioeconomy, which is likely to involve renewable biomass (straw, grass, forest waste, etc.) and bioprocesses for sustainable production, advanced knowledge of genes and complex cell processes to develop new products, and integrated biotechnology knowledge and applications across sectors.
So from a policy perspective, how about integrating a health and agriculture strategy? It would mean that policy development and regulatory matters in health-related areas would not fly in the face of agriculture, and vice versa.
For example, policies around renewable fuels, which are generally put forward as being healthier for humans, animals and the environment, would be accompanied by agricultural policies that would support their sustainable development.
To drill down on that a bit deeper, agricultural policies would be created to ensure measures were taken to maintain or enhance soil health, if biomass that was formerly being put back into the soil to replenish it was instead directed towards renewable fuel production.
The timing is superb. Here’s a chance to create policy that is actually aligned with global priorities, rather than it being full of regional, political and departmental compromises. The worldwide challenges it’s built on – food, water, energy and health care – are the same ones farmers face daily. We know what they are, we know what needs to be solved, and we can predict some biotechnology applications that will address them.
Biotechnology lets us gaze into the future. The OECD says it requires a mile of regulatory requirements that leave a lengthy data trail, so you can watch products and processes develop. Biotechnology also takes existing products – fuels, plastics and crop varieties – and turns them into something that resembles the original, but contains new “parts” that can be observed.
From a regulatory perspective, someone has to watch biotechnology progress, and some people say the nation’s universities, with their depth in research and education, are perfect for the role. This approach would get some regulatory functions out of Washington and Ottawa, where they’re fraught with bureaucracy and politics. Instead, research-intensive universities with their active legions of graduate students and professors would apply the latest knowledge and techniques to questions such as biotechnology products’ safety and performance.
This would help ease universities’ funding crunch, by contributing much-needed operating money and capital to labs and facilities. And it would help a much broader segment of society learn about and prosper from biotechnology – which looks like an increasingly versatile approach to current and future challenges and opportunities.
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