Abstracts, Papers &

Resources:
Plant & Animal Breeding

Currently showing only Plant & Animal Breeding Resources
Page 5 of 7

Concepts and strategies of organic plant breeding in light of novel breeding techniques

Nuijten E et al

Publication date: 23/12/2016

In this paper, we describe the development of a set of guiding principles for the evaluation of breeding techniques by the organic sector over time. The worldwide standards of organic agriculture (OA) do not allow genetic engineering (GE) or any products derived from genetic engineering. The standards in OA are an expression of the underlying principles of health, ecology, fairness and care. The derived norms are process and not product oriented. As breeding is considered part of the process in agriculture, GE is not a neutral tool for the organic sector. The incompatibility between OA and GE is analyzed, including the “novel breeding techniques”. Instead, alternative breeding approaches are pursued based on the norms and values of organic agriculture not only on the technical level but also on the social and organizational level by including other value chain players and consumers. The status and future perspectives of the alternative directions for organic breeding are described and discussed.

Resource type: Adobe Acrobat (.pdf)

Legislation & RegulationPlant & Animal Breeding

Should organic agriculture maintain its opposition to GM? New techniques writing the same old story

Wickson F, et al

Publication date: 28/10/2016

HIDE SUMMARY VIEW ON EXTERNAL SITE

Biotechnology is diversifying rapidly through the development and application of new approaches to genome editing and ongoing research into synthetic biology.

Proponents of biotechnology are enthusiastic about these new developments and have recently begun calling for environmental movements to abandon their campaigns against Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) and for organic agriculture to reconsider its exclusion of Genetic Modification (GM).

In this article, we begin by describing the diversity of practices that cluster under both the terms GM and organic and show that although there is a clash of different cultures of agriculture at stake, there is also a spectrum of practices existing between these two poles.

Having established the terms of the debate, we then go on to analyse whether the organic movement should reconsider its position on GM in light of new plant breeding techniques (NPBTs), using the criteria highlighted as important by the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements (IFOAM) in their 2016 draft revised position on GMOs.

Through this analysis, we suggest that given the in-context-trajectory of biotechnology development, the continued narrow framing of agricultural problems and the ongoing exclusion of important socio-economic, political and cultural dimensions, the organic movement is justified in maintaining its opposition to GM in the face of NPBTs.

Link goes to full text and .pdf options.

Resource type: Web page URL

Plant & Animal BreedingScience & Technology

Genome-editing – an ethical view

Nuffield Council on Bioethics

Publication date: 30/09/2016

HIDE SUMMARY VIEW ON EXTERNAL SITE

It seems as though genome editing is everywhere. In a relatively short time, particularly since the emergence of the CRISPR-Cas9 system in 2012, techniques for making precisely targeted
alterations to DNA sequences in living cells have not only preoccupied life science journals, but have also featured in mainstream news. They have been implicated in stories of revolutionary
medical advance and genetically altered food, and in the business pages, where the battle over the intellectual property rights to the underlying technology, and the prospects of companies
developing genome editing treatments and products, have been matters of continual intrigue and speculation.

While the scientific merits are overt, the practical and ethical significance of these recent developments is far harder to discern. While the use of genome editing techniques has spread
across biological research, including microorganisms, plants, animals and human cells, the extent to which the potential applications can be understood in relation to prevailing norms and managed through existing governance measures has not been extensively examined. As a rapidly established (though continually developing) research technique, one that is at the foundation of diverse emerging biotechnologies, there is concern that genome editing science and innovation are moving ahead of public understanding and policy.

The Nuffield Council’s terms of reference charge it “to identify and define ethical questions raised by recent advances in biological and medical research in order to respond to, and to anticipate, public concern.” In 2015, convinced that genome editing had the potential to raise such questions, the Council agreed to undertake a programme of work and established an interdisciplinary working group to gather evidence and to deliberate in relation to these matters. The present publication is the output of the first stage of this work. It addresses conceptual and descriptive issues regarding genome editing and identifies the key ethical questions that arise.

Web page has links to the full report.

Resource type: article: Web Page

Plant & Animal BreedingScience & TechnologySustainability

Organic farmers are not anti-science but genetic engineers often are

Elizabeth Henderson

Publication date: 24/05/2016

HIDE SUMMARY VIEW ON EXTERNAL SITE

At one of the public brainstorming sessions for the New York Organic Action Plan, an organic farmer made an impassioned plea for support for “independent science” and told us that with 8.5 billion mouths to feed by 2050, we will need genetic engineering to prevent starvation.

I would like to examine these words carefully to decipher what they mean, how those words are used by this farmer and by others, and suggest how the movement for locally grown organic food in this country should respond.

What is the meaning of ‘independent science’? As co-chair of the Policy Committee for the Northeast Organic Farming Association of New York (NOFA-NY), I have been an active participant in the coalition that is campaigning to pass GMO labeling legislation in NY State. In this capacity, I have spoken at public meetings, to the press and on radio interviews. A question that I have heard from proponents of biotechnology is “why do you organic farmers oppose science, like the climate deniers?”

The first time I heard this, I was startled and felt defensive. Had I ever opposed science? I searched back through things I had written and reviewed all the policy resolutions the members of NOFA-NY had passed over the years. I found a few places where I criticized reductionist science and defended “indigenous knowledge” (that is things like composting and crop rotations that people who practice a craft know and pass on to their children that has not been proven by research at a university). But nowhere could I find any statement opposing science.

Resource type: article: Web Page

Citizen StakeholdersPlant & Animal BreedingScience & Technology

New gene-editing techniques could transform food crops – or die on the vine

Stephen S Hall

Publication date: 01/03/2016

HIDE SUMMARY VIEW ON EXTERNAL SITE

The CRISPR revolution may be having its most profound – and least publicized – effect in agriculture. By the fall of 2015 about 50 scientific papers had been published reporting uses of CRISPR in gene-edited plants, and there are preliminary signs that the U.S. Department of Agriculture, one of the agencies that assesses genetically modified agricultural products, does not think all gene-edited crops require the same regulatory attention as “traditional” genetically modified organisms, or GMOs. With that regulatory door even slightly ajar, companies are racing to get gene-edited crops into the fields and, ultimately, into the food supply.

Will consumers agree? Or will they see CRISPR crops as the latest iteration of Frankenfood—a genetic distortion of nature in which foreign (and agribusiness-friendly) DNA is muscled into a species, with unpredictable health or environmental consequences? Because CRISPR is only now being applied to food crops, the question has not yet surfaced for the public, but it will soon.

Resource type: article: Web Page

Legislation & RegulationPlant & Animal Breeding

New plant breeding techniques – ethical considerations

Federal Ethics Committee on Non-Human Biotechnology (ECNH)

Publication date: 01/03/2016

HIDE SUMMARY VIEW ON EXTERNAL SITE

Even before the advent of modern genetic engineering, to many people it was important whether a plant was created “naturally” (usually under-stood as “using conventional cross-breeding techniques”) or “artificially” (usually understood as “genetically engineered or altered in a non-natural way”).

Put simplistically, “natural” is associated with “better” and “artificial” with “worse”, or vice versa, depending on the viewpoint. Regardless of the connotations given to “natural” and “artificial”, these notions involve moral evaluations. Although often implicit only, such evaluations have an influence on the risk assessment of NPBTs.

This report critically considers this differentiation and its implicit effect on the discussion of risk as well as other urgent issues around NPBTs.

Resource type: Adobe Acrobat (.pdf)

Citizen StakeholdersLegislation & RegulationPlant & Animal BreedingScience & TechnologySustainability

Opinion: The complex nature of GMOs calls for a new conversation

Maywa Montenegro

Publication date: 07/10/2015

HIDE SUMMARY VIEW ON EXTERNAL SITE

What are the conditions under which GMOs might work more effectively? Can they be compatible with the needs of farmers, eaters and their communities, not only with the aims of corporations and biotech scientists?

We can start by broadening the conversation around human health to include social science and natural science perspectives, and encompassing the ripple effects of technologies packaged with GMOs. we can open the floor to engaged citizens and laborers across the food system. We also need better regulatory oversight. We can bring GM research and development into the public sphere.

A nonreductionist evaluation of GMOs can push us toward thinking about effects at multiple scales and time spans. Such an evaluation can get us to think deeply about who benefits from technologies, who controls their availability and access, and who makes such decisions. We get to think about the entanglements of politics, the media and public interest in shaping scientific validity and “consensus.”

In short, we are invited to think socially and ecologically — indeed agroecologically — about the utility and value of engineered seeds. “If GMOs can survive such scrutiny and emerge as a beneficial tool, ” writes the author “I’m certainly not anti-GMO”.

Resource type: Web page URL

Plant & Animal BreedingScience & TechnologySustainability

Seeing GMOs from a systems perspective: the need for comparative cartographies of agri/cultures for sustainability assessment

Herrero A, et al

Publication date: 20/08/2015

HIDE SUMMARY VIEW ON EXTERNAL SITE

Over the past twenty years, agricultural biotechnologies have generated chronically unresolved political controversies. The standard tool of risk assessment has proven to be highly limited in its ability to address the panoply of concerns that exist about these hybrid techno/organisms. It has also failed to account for both the conceptual and material networks of relations agricultural biotechnologies require, create and/or perform.

This paper takes as a starting point that agricultural biotechnologies cannot be usefully assessed as isolated technological entities but need to be evaluated within the context of the broader socio-ecological system that they embody and engender.

The paper then explores, compares and contrasts some of the methodological tools available for advancing this systems-based perspective. The article concludes by outlining a new synthesis approach of comparative cartographies of agri/cultures generated through multi-sited ethnographic case-studies, which is proposed as a way to generate system maps and enable the comparison of genetically modified (GM) food with both conventional and alternative agri-food networks for sustainability assessment.

The paper aims to make a unique theoretical and methodological contribution by advancing a systems-based approach to conceptualising and assessing genetically modified organisms (GMOs) and proposing a synthesised methodology for mapping networks of relations across different agri/cultures.

Link goes to full text and .pdf options.

Resource type: Web page URL

Plant & Animal Breeding

Feasibility of new breeding techniques for organic farming

Andersen MM, et al

Publication date: 01/07/2015

HIDE SUMMARY VIEW ON EXTERNAL SITE

Organic farming is based on the concept of working ‘with nature’ instead of against it; however, compared with conventional farming, organic farming reportedly has lower productivity. Ideally, the goal should be to narrow this yield gap.

In this review, we specifically discuss the feasibility of new breeding techniques (NBTs) for rewilding, a process involving the reintroduction of properties from the wild relatives of crops, as a method to close the productivity gap.

The most efficient methods of rewilding are based on modern biotechnology techniques, which have yet to be embraced by the organic farming movement. Thus, the question arises of whether the adoption of such methods is feasible, not only from a technological perspective, but also from conceptual, socioeconomic, ethical, and regulatory perspectives.

Resource type: Adobe Acrobat (.pdf)

Plant & Animal Breeding

A Proposal to Modify Plants Gives GMO Debate New Life

Kolata G

Publication date: 28/05/2015

HIDE SUMMARY VIEW ON EXTERNAL SITE

What’s in a name?

A lot, if the name is genetically modified organism, or G.M.O., which many people are dead set against. But what if scientists used the precise techniques of today’s molecular biology to give back to plants genes that had long ago been bred out of them? And what if that process were called “rewilding?”

That is the idea being floated by a group at the University of Copenhagen, which is proposing the name for the process that would result if scientists took a gene or two from an ancient plant variety and melded it with more modern species to promote greater resistant to drought, for example.

“I consider this something worth discussing,” said Michael B. Palmgren, a plant biologist at the Danish university who headed a group, including scientists, ethicists and lawyers, that is funded by the university and the Danish National Research Foundation.

They pondered the problem of fragile plants in organic farming, came up with the rewilding idea, and published their proposal Thursday in the journal Trends in Plant Science.

Resource type: article: Web Page