The green gene revolution in India

GM giant Monsanto may be the bete noire of the anti-GM movement, but its scientists, particularly in India, are moving ahead with the Green Revolution. The Green Revolution saw India avoid massive famine in the 1960s and 1970s and almost miraculously become a net exporter of wheat. After the miracle of the Green Revolution, however, India is now slipping back into a grain deficit and must double its grain yields by 2050 to feed its rapidly growing population, according to Indian molecular geneticist Dr Jagadish Mittur.

With more than a billion people already, India will overtake China as the world's most populous nation around 2025, en route to a peak population of around 1.6 billion people in 2050. The country's economy is growing at eight per cent a year.

Mittur, who worked with CSIRO Biomolecular Engineering in Melbourne for a decade before being appointed director of the Monsanto Research Centre in Hebbal, Bangalore, told the recent ABIC conference that India had already lost 16 per cent of its former forest cover and faced the prospect of losing a third of its tropical ecosystems if it cannot double grain production by mid-century.

"We lack reliable food sources," he said. "We don't have enough new land for agriculture, we don't have sufficient fresh water and we're already suffering major problems with soil degradation, salinity and biocompetition [weeds, and crop pests and diseases].

"We have multiple planting seasons, suffer from low productivity and huge post-harvest losses of stored grain.

"Even though mechanical labour has replaced much of our human labour, agriculture is still labour-intensive."

Green and gene revolutions

The Green Revolution has played a massive part in lifting a billion people, most of them subsistence farmers, out of poverty, Mittur said. Without the revolution, at 1950's yield, around half of the 41.4 million square kilometres of global forest would have been cleared. And according to the architect of the Green Revolution, American cereal breeder and Nobel Laureate Professor Norman Borlaug, the rest would have been lost in the next 30 years.

The Green Revolution conserved millions of acres of wild land, but according to Mittur, agriculture's Gene Revolution must now maintain the status quo.

More productive agricultural systems and the continuing application of agricultural biotechnology would help arrest the mass-migration of the rural poor to India's crowded cities in search of work.

India is in the remarkable position of having 540 million young people in its current population, many of whom are being attracted into the booming outsourcing industry in the major cities. It has 18 per cent of the world's population and 15 per cent of its livestock.

Monsanto has operated in India for 55 years, selling hybrid crops such as cotton, sorghum, rice, millet and sunflower. In the past decade, of course, it has found itself cast as the international anti-GM movement's bete noire.

Mittur, however, said he believes the company's business can only succeed if farmers are successful.

"Monsanto's vision is one of abundant food and a healthy environment. Its mission is to meet the world's growing food and fibre needs, conserve natural resources and improve the environment."

Monsanto's business model is in the areas of crop protection. Seeds carrying crop-protection traits like herbicide tolerance and insect resistance, and genomics, are the largest - and growing - part of the company's business.

Bt and the developing world

Monsanto has competition in India from Bt cotton varieties developed locally and in China. It has also licensed its crop-protection genes to 15 other companies that sell their own hybrid cotton varieties, in competition with Monsanto. Farmers can now buy any one of 59 Bt hybrid varieties.

Mittur said the first Bollgard II cotton varieties, carrying dual protection against crop pests in the form of independently acting Bt endotoxin genes, are being grown for the first time in India this year, following the success of single-gene Yieldgard varieties in recent seasons.

The practice of introducing one or more genes into a crop is called 'stacking'. Stacked cotton varieties carry two Bt genes and the Roundup Ready herbicide-tolerance trait.

Mittur said there were five phases in the development of a crop-protection gene product: discovery, early development, advanced development (which includes experimentation with different gene promoters that ramp up gene expression or fine-tune expression to specific tissues), followed by field trials to generate data for regulatory approval, and finally, seed increase for commercial release.

"We screen thousands of genes. From tens of thousands of leads, we might end up with only one that makes it to market after eight to 10 years, at a cost of $100 million or more. That cost is increasing rapidly."

Monsanto is now introducing Roundup Ready Flex varieties with increased herbicide tolerance that allows them to be sprayed almost up to the time of harvest.

The original RR technology provided protection only until the four-leaf stage, after which spraying with glyphosate destroyed the crop's pollen. Monsanto researchers solved the problem by 'tweaking' the RR gene with a promoter that extended expression to the pollen.

Rest of the world

Bt and RR genes have been introduced into soybean and are providing effective control of lepidopteran caterpillar pests in Brazil and Argentina. After opposing GM soy, Brazil has now embraced the crop after farmers smuggled pirated varieties across the border from Argentina.

Mittur said that, before the introduction of RR soy varieties in Brazil, the nation spent $200 million a year spraying crops with broad-spectrum pesticides that killed many beneficial and non-target insects.

Bt maize, carrying YieldGard dual protection against the industry's two most destructive pests - corn rootworm and the European corn borer - now dominates production and is working well in the North American corn belt and total US plantings will top 10 million this year.

Bt corn gives growers a 10 to 20 bushel advantage over conventional, pesticide-sprayed corn, and a 25 per cent advantage in drier seasons in US states like Illinois.

Monsanto's next major targets are drought tolerance and nitrogen utilisation.

"Agriculture is responsible for 70 per cent of the world's freshwater consumption," Mittur said. "In India, it takes 5000 litres of water to produce two kilograms of rice - if we could reduce that to 2500 litres, or even 1000 litres, it would be tremendously beneficial.

"Genes that improve tolerance to water deficits or heat stress are receiving a lot of attention in the company. We've already introduced some into rice, and we plan to put them into other crops, like corn. We can achieve yield improvements through tolerance to water deficits and heat stress." He said Monsanto has many potential leads for increased nitrogen efficiency. "We can manage yield variability, reduce fertiliser use and nutrient runoff. A number of our leads have demonstrated nitrogen-use efficiency gains of up to 10 per cent.

"As with crop-protection traits, the outstanding advantage of GM seeds is that the technology is in the seed. It's agriculture's magic chip."