Rebooting food to feed the future : The Tribune India

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Rebooting food to feed the future

Banana trees that fit in a test tube.

Rebooting food to feed the future

Illustrations: Sandeep Joshi



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Banana trees that fit in a test tube. Fish farmed in the desert. Robots picking fruit. Welcome to the brave new world of food, where scientists are battling a global time-bomb of climate change, water scarcity, population growth and soaring obesity rates to find ways to feed the future.

With one in nine people already short of enough food, supporters pushing for a Second Green Revolution argue without major changes hunger will become one of the biggest threats to national security and human health.

Scientists are looking to the future to find innovative ways to produce food. But they admit getting billions of farmers globally — and consumers — to change will be a battle.

“You need a revolution in the agriculture and food system within the next decade because without it, we're never going to achieve any of the really important (global) goals that we’ve set,” said Bruce Campbell, director, CGIAR Research Programme on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security. 

A visit to United Nations-backed laboratories 35 km outside Austria’s capital Vienna provides a glimpse into the food of tomorrow's world. Here, in labs and greenhouses packed with genetic sequencing machines, robotic equipment and plants and insects of all sizes, scientists are using nuclear technology to spur disease-resistant banana trees.

Scientists are also working on other innovations — from gene editing of crops to lab-grown meat — that could fundamentally change how food is grown, distributed and eaten.

“Our agri food system is at a critical stage. It must be re-shaped,” said Shenggen Fan, director general of the Washington-based International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). 

The first Green Revolution, which peaked in the 1960s, dramatically boosted harvests and helped stave off famine in poor parts of the world. But the industrial farming era it spurred, critics say, has led to a food system that cripples the environment.

Of the world’s 7.6 billion people — a population projected to reach 9.8 billion by 2050 — about 815 million people go hungry daily. Globally, about 40 per cent of adults are overweight and 13 per cent obese, says the World Health Organization. Technology is also helping meet the growing demand for meat, without more emission-producing livestock. The ideas hark back to predictions former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill made in a 1931 essay. “Fifty years hence we shall escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing by growing these parts separately under a suitable medium,” he wrote.

MI6 breaks stereotypes

The waters are deep and still, the atmosphere tense. A shark glides in from the dark depths and circles menacingly. The footage is about MI6 spies and the next scene should be of an action James Bond type in a dramatic fight for survival. Instead, the camera pans out to show an aquarium and the visitors; a woman reassuring her alarmed child.

MI6’s first ever television advertisement is aimed at attracting recruits from ethnic minority communities and breaking stereotypes. The message is that the officer from the Secret Intelligence Service is not a macho white man, but the young black mother.

MI6 are in the process of relaxing their rules of entry to reach the new recruitment pools. There are no problems with getting people to join, say MI6, with 800 more staff due to be taken on to add to the current strength of 2,700. 

The aim of the campaign is to reach people who may not see the Secret Intelligence Service as a natural career. MI6 have won a number of awards in recent years for promoting gender and ethnic equality. Latest figures, however, show that progress needs to be made on both racial and gender balance. Overall, women make up 24.1% in the senior civil service grade and 37.8% among the non-senior category. There is not a single black or other ethnic minority member of the service's senior staff and that group makes up just 6.8% of the non-senior workforce.

The advertisement will be first shown on Thursday evening. Alex Younger, the MI6 Chief, said: “Regardless of background, if you have the skills we need and share our values, I want you to consider a career in intelligence in a service that reflects today’s society.”

UK’s tryst with LSD

In the kind of clipped BBC English that more frivolous generations associate with comic Harry Enfield’s Mr Cholmondley Warner, the narrator explained how the LSD was given to the Royal Marine Commandos “in a cup of wartah.”

“Twenty-five minutes latah, the first effects of the drug became apparent. The men became relaxed and began to giggle.” The footage from 1964 shows the hitherto ferociously well-drilled servicemen lying flat on their backs, helpless with laughter, intoxicated by the hilarity of it all, and by the acid.

“One hour and ten minutes after taking the drug,” intones the narrator, “With one man climbing a tree to feed the birds, the troop commander gave up, admitting he could no longer control himself or his men.

“He himself then relapsed into laughter.”  Perhaps bizarrely, the whole thing was considered something of a triumph.

Ultimately, though, this field exercise conducted by the government’s secretive Porton Down chemical weapons research establishment was the first in a series that would culminate in failure.

Half a century ago this year, the military’s experimentation with acid ended with the chairman of the Chemical Defence Advisory Board declaring that the idea of using LSD as a weapon of war was “more magical than scientific”. That the British military gave up on LSD in 1968, at the very moment the sixties counterculture was enthusiastically embracing it, is but one of the ironies.

Unraveling space mystery

Scientists have spotted one of the most detailed looks at the universe in the history of astronomy. The breakthrough observation allowed scientists to receive radiation from deep in space, and could shed light on the fast radio bursts (FRBs) that are one of the most mysterious signals we have ever received on Earth. The discovery is an unprecedented look at the distant universe. The observation is equivalent to looking out from Earth and seeing a flea on the surface of Pluto.

The observation was possible because scientists actually saw two stars orbiting each other, and working to propel the radiation through the universe and down to Earth. The two stars are a mere 20 km apart — but they are around 6,500 light years from Earth.

One of the stars is a cool, lightweight star called a brown dwarf. The other is an energetic, strange and spinning star known as a pulsar. The gas coming out of the brown dwarf appears to be magnifying the energy from the pulsar, and sending out a bright streak of radiation.

The discovery could help explain fast radio bursts, the intense blasts of radiation that are occasionally sent down to Earth. Those powerful signals are until now entirely unexplained — and have prompted suggestions that they are the result of either undiscovered physics or even artificial technology.

— Sources: Thomson Reuters Foundation & The Independent

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