Engineered crops necessary to deal with climate change

Capital Press

Researcher Pamela Ronald, a prominent voice in agricultural biotechnology at the University of California-Davis, says the realities of climate change require the world to overcome lingering hostilities toward genetically engineered crops.

Ronald and several other researchers have co-authored an article in the Feb. 12 edition of Science magazine, a research journal, describing biotech as the answer to future challenges of producing food for growing populations.

"Global warming will alter the pattern of diseases among crops and also cause intense, periodic flooding," Ronald said in a statement. "The good news is that we have the ability, through conventional breeding and genetic engineering, to generate new varieties of our existing food crops that can better adapt to these environmental changes."

Ronald has attracted attention as an advocate of combining genetically engineered crops with organic farming methods as the best means of feeding the world sustainably.

Her lab is developing crops that can resist diseases and tolerate stresses like flooding.

"There is a critical need to get beyond popular biases against the use of agricultural biotechnology and develop forward-looking regulatory frameworks based on scientific evidence," the co-authors wrote in the Science article.