Innovation Europe > News > Innovation EU Vol2-1 > Innovation in agricultural biotechnology

Carel du Marche Sarvaas, Director of Agricultural Biotechnology, EuropaBio

As we enter the second decade of the 21st century, it is refreshing to see that President Barroso is placing new emphasis on technology and innovation as part of his 2020 strategy to pull Europe out of recession. Apart from the global economic crisis, two other major challenges will need to be overcome through a comprehensive strategy of innovative science and technology, namely food security and climate change.

More than a decade of global GM crop cultivation has demonstrated that agricultural biotechnology can, and already does, play a positive role in meeting these challenges. Thanks to the green revolution of the 1960s, the issue of food security still seems irrelevant to most of us in the EU, having escaped the experience of real food shortages and hunger. Indeed, for much of the last 20 years, policy-makers have focused on how to reduce Europe’s grain mountains and wine lakes – we were producing too much, not too little. There has been a shift in focus towards the environmental sustainability of modern agriculture and agricultural biotechnology which has required a change in mentality from the age of subsidies linked to production.

Nevertheless, with a global population that is set to reach nine billion by 2050, there is a general consensus that Europe must play its part in the global supply of food and increase its current agricultural production and agricultural biotechnology has a role. Innovation in crop breeding has allowed farmers to successfully meet this familiar challenge in the past. Now, given the likely impacts of climate change on agricultural productivity and the role played by agricultural practices in contributing to global warming, it is clear that farmers will have to go to greater lengths to produce food in a sustainable manner. Once again, innovation in the agricultural sector, including the development and employment of agricultural biotechnology, can help farmers achieve this goal. It is perhaps no surprise, then, that today more than 14 million farmers around the world have used agricultural biotechnology and are growing around 134 million hectares of GM crops.

One of the major challenges for agriculture in combating climate change will be to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions, which was recognised recently at Copenhagen when 21 countries formed the Global Research Alliance on Agricultural Greenhouse Gases. We cannot hide from the fact that the food we eat has a carbon footprint attached to it: agricultural practices currently account for around a quarter of all greenhouse gas emissions.

By using agricultural biotechnology and cultivating GM crops on a commercial scale, farmers around the world are actively reducing this figure by consuming less fuel and increasing carbon sequestration in the soil of their fields. The widespread adoption of GM crops has allowed farmers to reduce the time they spend in a tractor, therefore cutting carbon emissions considerably. While the insect-resistance trait has led to fewer spray applications during a growing period, herbicide tolerance enables farmers to adopt reduced tillage or no tillage practices. Thanks to agricultural biotechnology farmers can now plant seed directly on to the ground after a harvest, rather than having to go through the arduous process of preparing the field for sowing by cultivating and ploughing. In 2008, this led to global emissions reductions of 14.4 billion kg of CO2 which is roughly the equivalent of taking seven million cars off the road in one year.

Agricultural biotechnology reduces tillage systems which can also play a major role in enhancing global soil carbon sequestration which the European Commission views as being key to any strategy to reduce emissions from Agriculture. Due to the build up of residue on fields, soil quality improves and becomes carbon enriched while less ploughing means that less CO2 is released into the atmosphere. But CO2 is not the only greenhouse gas, and it is worth noting that European agriculture is responsible for 52% of the EU’s nitrous oxide emissions, while leaching of nitrogen fertilisers into the soil and into waterways also continues to be a concern.

Fortunately, plant scientists are breeding plants with yields equivalent to conventional varieties but which require significantly less fertiliser. Although this “Nitrogen Use Efficiency” agricultural biotechnology is only at a development stage, it could offer significant environmental benefits while providing an essential tool to reduce agriculture’s impact on climate change. After all, nitrous oxide has a global warming potential of about 300 times greater than carbon dioxide.

Despite these advancements in agricultural biotechnology, Europe’s decision-makers continue to deprive their farmers of the opportunity to plant the same crops as their global competitors. Currently, only one single GM crop, an insect-resistant maize, is authorised for cultivation in Europe. While this particular GM crop has benefited farmers suffering from corn borer infestations, access to many other GM traits with huge potential economic and environmental benefits is being denied to European farmers due to political inertia.

At a time when Europe’s policy-makers are thinking about including a climate change pillar in a reformed Common Agricultural Policy, Europe’s farmers should, at last, also be given access to safe agricultural biotechnology which they need for climate change adaptation and mitigation and to remain competitive in an increasingly globalised world. As the former EU Agricultural Commissioner Mariann Fischer Boel warned, “we can’t just leave them to sink or swim: many of them would sink, with disastrous consequences for our food production base and our environment.”

Nevertheless, the cutting edge of innovation in agricultural biotechnology is rapidly shifting from the established centres of excellence in the Western world to the leading emerging economies, such as China, India and Brazil. Today, small African countries such as Burkina Faso beat Europe in GM crop cultivation area. Furthermore, many of Europe’s once-leading universities and agricultural biotechnology research institutes have abandoned biotech research, causing a further brain drain to more technology-friendly working environments overseas.

These are pertinent examples of how Europe has become out of step with progress in agricultural biotechnology innovation, which is rapidly advancing in the rest of the world. Europe must open its eyes to embrace the multi-faceted benefits of agricultural biotechnology, before it is forced into a reality check through the damaging consequences of its current GM policies.