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An Indian
woman plants paddy saplings in the fields on the outskirts
of Hyderabad on July
20, 2011 (AFP/File, Noah Seelam)
|
PARIS —
Japanese biotechnologists on Sunday said they had developed a rice plant with
deeper roots that can sustain high yields in droughts that wipe out
conventional rice crops.
It is the
third breakthrough in new cereal strains in less than two years, boosting the
quest to feed the world's spiralling population at a time of worsening climate
change.
Writing in
the journal Nature Genetics, a team led by Yusaku Uga of the National Institute
of Agrobiological Sciences in Tsukuba describe how they found a remarkable gene
in a rice plant cultivated in the dry uplands of the Philippines.
This rice
strain, also called cultivar, is called Kinandang Patong. Its big
characteristic is roots that are deep and grow straight downwards, delving into
parched soil for water, as opposed to root systems that are shallow and grow
out sideways in typical water-rich paddy fields.
The gene
for this, called Deep Rooting -- dubbed DR01 -- was spliced into a cultivar
called IR64, a paddy rice plant that is grown around Asia.
The team
then put the new plant through its paces, planting it and standard IR64 in
upland fields in three kinds of conditions -- no drought, moderate drought and
severe drought.
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Indian
farmers carry young rice plants on
their heads in Canning village, south of
Kolkata on July 29, 2012 (AFP/File,
Dibyangshu Sarkar)
|
But IR64
with the DR01 gene was almost unaffected by moderate drought. In severe
drought, yield fell -- but not catastrophically -- by around 30 percent.
"Based
on our results, this variety can be adapted to upland (agriculture) without
irrigation," Uga said in an email exchange with AFP.
"We
are also evaluating the DRO1 performance under rain-fed lowland with the
International Rice Research Institute," he said. "If we can get
positive results in farmer's fields, we hope to release the variety for Asian
countries. We are also going to introduce the DRO1 into leading varieties in
Latin America with CIAT," the International Centre for Tropical
Agriculture, he said.
Without
genetic technology, it would have been extraordinarily hard to have pinpointed,
and then inserted, the right gene, said Uga.
"Development
of GM rice plants is... one of (the) useful strategies to improve drought
resistance," he said.
In January
2012, scientists in Britain and Japan said they had developed a fast-track
technique, called MutMat, that identifies useful genetic variants, or
mutations, in rice plants. They used it to derive a strain from Japan's
Hitomebore wild rice that is resistant to salinity -- a boon for farmers whose
fields have high salt content through irrigation.
In March
2012, researchers in Australia said they had bred durum wheat with a
salt-loving gene whose yields were up to 25 percent greater than ordinary
counterparts when grown on saline fields.
The world's
population is expected to reach 9.6 billion by mid-century, from 7.2 billion
today, according to UN estimates. By 2100, the tally could be 10.9 billion.
To feed
this rising number at a time of worsening drought and flood will require a
campaign against food waste, smarter use of land, water, fertiliser and
pesticides and agricultural innovation to select higher-yield or
climate-resistant strains of cereals, according to the UN's Food and Agricultural
Organisation (FAO) and France's National Institute for Agricultural Research
(INRA).
Improvements
in rice strains -- leading to a short, stubby "semi-dwarf" plant with
a full head of grain -- unleashed the Green Revolution of the 1960s, boosting
harvests in China and other rice-dependent countries that used to teeter
perpetually on the brink of famine.
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“… New ideas are things you never thought of. These ideas will be given to you so you will have answers to the most profound questions that your societies have had since you were born. Inventions will bring clean water to every Human on the planet, cheaply and everywhere. Inventions will give you power, cheaply and everywhere. These ideas will wipe out all of the reasons you now have for pollution, and when you look back on it, you'll go, "This solution was always there. Why didn't we think of that? Why didn't we do this sooner?" Because it wasn't time and you were not ready. You hadn't planted the seeds and you were still battling the old energy, deciding whether you were going to terminate yourselves before 2012. Now you didn't…. and now you didn't.
It's funny, what you ponder about, and what your sociologists consider the "great current problems of mankind", for your new ideas will simply eliminate the very concepts of the questions just as they did in the past. Do you remember? Two hundred years ago, the predictions of sociologists said that you would run out of food, since there wasn't enough land to sustain a greater population. Then you discovered crop rotation and fertilizer. Suddenly, each plot of land could produce many times what it could before. Do you remember the predictions that you would run out of wood to heat your homes? Probably not. That was before electricity. It goes on and on.
So today's puzzles are just as quaint, as you will see. (1)How do you strengthen the power grids of your great nations so that they are not vulnerable to failure or don't require massive infrastructure improvement expenditures? Because cold is coming, and you are going to need more power. (2) What can you do about pollution? (3) What about world overpopulation? Some experts will tell you that a pandemic will be the answer; nature [Gaia] will kill off about one-third of the earth's population. The best minds of the century ponder these puzzles and tell you that you are headed for real problems. You have heard these things all your life.
Let me ask you this. (1) What if you could eliminate the power grid altogether? You can and will. (2) What if pollution-creating sources simply go away, due to new ideas and invention, and the environment starts to self-correct? (3) Overpopulation? You assume that humanity will continue to have children at an exponential rate since they are stupid and can't help themselves. This, dear ones, is a consciousness and education issue, and that is going to change. Imagine a zero growth attribute of many countries - something that will be common. Did you notice that some of your children today are actually starting to ponder if they should have any children at all? What a concept! ….”
Let me ask you this. (1) What if you could eliminate the power grid altogether? You can and will. (2) What if pollution-creating sources simply go away, due to new ideas and invention, and the environment starts to self-correct? (3) Overpopulation? You assume that humanity will continue to have children at an exponential rate since they are stupid and can't help themselves. This, dear ones, is a consciousness and education issue, and that is going to change. Imagine a zero growth attribute of many countries - something that will be common. Did you notice that some of your children today are actually starting to ponder if they should have any children at all? What a concept! ….”
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