By Dr. Shanthu Shantharam
One hears a constant din about food and nutritional security in India, a multi-dimensional development challenge for a developing country like India. And, solutions have never been easy.
One thing is for certain that increasing sustainable food production must be secured before one can think of tackling food security challenges. Indian agriculture faces constant challenges to its productivity by both biotic and abiotic challenges coupled with certain drought and high temperature conditions due to the climate change.
Land area for agriculture will not increase and we need to grow more on less land. Saline soils will have to be brought under cultivation. The only way out is to deploy the best possible science and technology that the country can obtain.
After green revolution technologies, the next alternative is to adopt products of modern biotechnology and genetic engineering, viz transgenic or Genetically Modified (GM) crops that are becoming a critical component of world agriculture.
India has embarked on a path to promote and investment in modern biotechnology with much fanfare. However, when it comes to modernizing agriculture with GM crops, it is taking hesitant steps, mostly due to the anti-technology activism. Notwithstanding the virulent campaign against GM crops, they must be considered a critical option for food production in India as they are the products of one of the most refined science and technology of our times. There will always and there have always been detractors and critics whenever a new option is presented.
Green revolution was also accepted rather hesitatingly, and even to this day those who oppose GM crops maintain that green revolution was a big mistake. Agriculture, after the green revolution, has not had any major technological breakthrough until the gene splicing technology (GM technology) presented an opportunity to deploy beneficial traits and characteristics in a hitherto unprecedented fashion.
Our staple foods like rice and wheat, however much we are culturally conditioned to them, lack many micro-nutrients, and need to be fortified to provide balanced diet. Their cultivation faces some serious biotic and abiotic constraints that cannot be overcome with conventional technologies.
External fortification has been tried for decades and has been useful only to a limited extent. The most proficient way of delivering fortified food is to build them into the seeds in a genetically stable fashion.
In fact, in all agriculture, the seed comes first and seed comes last. If the seed is no good, then, there is no hope. No other input or any other technology will help except the transgenic technology based on the gene splicing techniques where we have the means to insert any desirable gene at will, a hitherto unprecedented opportunity.
Conventional approaches to GM have limitations and many beneficial traits cannot be incorporated unless they are genetically compatible. In case of transgenics, it breaks that sexual incompatibility glass ceiling, and sky is the limit to move useful and needed traits and characters with ease resulting in a modern day GM crop.
It must be borne in mind that all crops and animals in agriculture are all genetically modified, albeit using different methods or techniques, and the modern day GM crop is genetically modified using gene-splicing technology, a significant advancement over the existing continuum of crop and genetic improvement sciences. This way, one can breach the genetic glass ceiling and enrich the genetic diversity of our major food crops. E.g. Golden rice in which, beta-carotene gene is expressed in rice to deliver Vitamin A to vitamin deficient people.
India has the largest population of Vitamin A Deficient (VAD) in the world, and its major staple food is rice, which is bereft of any valuable micro-nutrient. This is also true of major staple crops of Africa where there is chronic malnutrition and hunger.
