Frankenstein food wins the game

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African science awakens.

A dozen genetic editing projects for crop plants are being put at the forefront of a technology that European countries have been repressing for 20 years due to pressure from some environmental groups and, above all, uncritical acceptance by a large part of rich societies. of their opinions contrary to science.

As Norman Borlaug, the father of the green revolution, told me in an old interview, “environmentalists oppose GMOs because their bellies are full.”

My beloved Greenpeace made the biggest mistake in its history by turning its opposition to GMOs into one of its main campaigns, at the same level as the one they maintain, quite rightly, against radioactive waste, ocean pollution and climate change. climate.

All scientists have been pointing out this anomaly for decades, but the directors of Greenpeace have insisted on standing on the side of irrationality, even after a hundred Nobel Prize winners accused them of crimes against humanity for it.

Fortunately, this is changing, and right where it is most needed.

Sorghum is an essential crop in many African countries, and not only for food but also as building material, but 60% of the continent's fields are suffering from a devastating invasion of '

Striga hermonthica

', a parasitic plant sometimes called weed. witch ('

witchweed

').

Striga attaches itself to the roots of sorghum and sucks the water and nutrients until it destroys the entire crop due to starvation.

African scientists have solved the problem with CRISPR, the groundbreaking gene editing technique that has revolutionized biology laboratories in recent years.

Field trials will begin this year.

Molecular biologist Steven Runo, from the University of Kenya in Nairobi, announced this at the Animal and Plant Genomes Conference held in mid-January in San Diego, California.

CRISPR has two advantages over its transgenic predecessors.

First, it is cheap and easy to use, allowing any country to modify seeds to solve its local problems, be they pests or nutritional deficiencies, instead of depending on those generated by a few multinationals such as the defunct Monsanto, whose commercial practices were the main cause of environmental rejection.

What we are talking about now has nothing to do with Monsanto, but with human health and the development of poor countries.

Second, CRISPR does not require adding foreign genetic material to solve agricultural problems.

In fact, it can introduce into the plant a genetic variant that already exists in nature and that, therefore, could be obtained through conventional crosses that farmers have used for 10 millennia, and to which no one has the slightest ethical objection.

Obtaining the desired hybrid, however, is a frustratingly slow process, at least compared to the pressing needs of low- and middle-income countries.

CRISPR does the same in the blink of an eye.

This is exactly the case of the sorghum that Runo has created in Kenya.

While Europe debates whether CRISPR deserves to be excluded from a ban on genetically modified plants that it imposed 20 years ago without the slightest scientific argument, African countries are demonstrating greater rationality in their regulation.

Kenya, Nigeria and Malawi have approved since 2022 that plants edited with CRISPR be considered like any conventional variety, and Uganda and Ethiopia are in the process of doing the same.

Sorghum is just the beginning.

Regardless of what the European Union stipulates, African and Asian countries will use genetic editing more and more, because they have perceived that it will be useful to improve the nutrition of their population and their livestock.

As far as we know so far, they have projects, their own or in collaboration with Western scientists, to generate corn that is resistant to necrosis, pearl millet that is not ruined by oxidation shortly after grinding it, peanuts that are refractory to infection by carcinogenic fungi and, going from the plant world to the animal world, cows that produce more milk despite the high temperatures.

I have known Greenpeace executives for decades, and I know perfectly well that they are very good people with the best intentions.

I personally support most of their campaigns.

If Greenpeace did not exist, it would have to be invented.

But we all make mistakes sometimes, and it is best to recognize it to stop confusing the public and delaying vital advances for disadvantaged populations.

I hope they do.

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