Times of
India

Mr Green Thumb

Peter H Raven, President, American Association for the Advancement of Science, and TIME's 'Hero of the Planet', has devoted his life to biodiversity and environment studies. The Missouri Botanical Garden, St Louis, has become "a microcosm of the wide green world'' under his directorship. In Delhi to deliver the 20th Coromandel lecture on Friday on "World of Nature: Future of Mankind'', Raven speaks to Narayani Ganesh on depletion of biota worldwide, the importance of promoting co-evolution of plants and animals to conserve biodiversity, the recent breakthroughs in biotechnology and what it holds for sustainable development:

Why do you call the 21st century "the age of biology''?

The 20th century was the age of physical sciences, of physics and chemistry, when the power of the atom was unleashed. Most of the fundamentally important discoveries in the field of biology have been made in the second half of the 20th century. Starting with the postulation of the double-helical structure of the DNA by Watson and Crick in 1953; the first transfer of the gene from one unrelated kind of organism to another by Herb Boyer and Stan Cohen in 1973, and ending the century with the decoding of the genomes of a couple of dozens of species of organisms including the human genome and a plant genome, biology has been centre-stage.

We are therefore poised to take advantage of biology as a series of individual productive systems, communities and eco-systems in a way that we could never do before.

How can we use the principles of biology to promote sustainable development?

By producing plants that can more effectively be used in agriculture and forestry, to produce plants that can make their own insecticide, to accelerate the process of breeding to produce other kinds of plants and animals that will have in-built vaccines, medicines, to get plants and animals that can resist drought, get by with the minimum water, be more nutritious, to make possible sustainable agriculture. Also, to reclaim lands that are overgrazed, use plants, animals and microorganisms to come together to form more sustainable ecosystems.

Will the advantages of the biotech revolution will outweigh the disadvantages?

The major thing we have to look for is sustainability - systems that will be able to go on into the future without using up resources faster than they can be regenerated. Increasing population, consumption patterns, and diminishing natural resources in India and the world over in the 50 years need sustainable solutions; productivity alone is not enough. A combination of biological, physical, social forces can help.

For instance, the Green Revolution brought new techniques that helped increase food production through hybrid varieties of wheat, maize etc. However, the gains in productivity were not sustainable because the lands, the water, countryside, resources have degraded all along.

So is the Green Revolution losing its shine now?

Gordon Conway, President, Rockefeller Foundation put it this way: "We need a doubly green revolution''. We need to not only fix the productivity at high levels but ensure that it stays that way.

We need to address social and economic factors. People need access to credit; they need to be respected; we need to have crops growing with characteristics that will not take away the fertility of the land. Too much fertiliser over too many years has made many lands saline. Fertile lands become deserts.

Integrated pest management for example has to allow for natural surroundings of the field - hospitable to birds, herbs, medicinal plants, etc. So you'll want to use not only traditional plant breeding methods but also modern methods like genetic modifications that create transgenic crops.

But won't large-scale introduction of GM technology homogenise plant varieties, reducing the genetic pool?

I see the entire world benefiting from the new technology. Though agriculture started barely four generations ago, we now have an area as large as South America under cultivation, worldwide. Nothing can be more damaging to biological diversity. Agriculture prompts ridding fields of animals, insects, weeds - the very goal of farmers is to get rid of biodiversity.

India with all of its universities, the ICAR, advanced biotechnology, and scientists, now needs to be careful of its own germ plasm and the right to own its own genetic diversity. The recent tussle over patenting of basmati, neem etc shows that India needs to formulate and effect laws to protect its rich biodiversity.

The Green Revolution didn't evoke as much opposition as the GM crops. Why?

The introduction of any new strain is bound to be received with some suspicion. The GM crops themselves don't limit biodiversity any more than conventional agriculture does. Farmers buy advanced strains of anything for they believe they are buying the seeds that will grow into better-yielding crops. In the US alone, 400 varieties of soyabeans are being grown -- all of them are genetically modified. So where is the question of homogenisation? That GM crops produce just one kind, is a myth.

The reason for introducing crops that produce their own pesticide is to avoid spraying them in the fields. In the US every year, on agricultural land, pesticide spraying kills around 85 million birds, tens of billions of insects, cause 130,000 cases of sickness in humans, and 10,000 extra deaths. By engineering human-safe pesticides into crops, we hope to avoid this. You have to look at ecological impacts in the right context.

In India you have in place a very good system of testing, deploying and using agricultural crops; you are an economically strong and scientifically very advanced country; perfectly able to get along with the testing and proper use of GM crops on your own terms. Transferring genes from one kind of organism to another is not a dramatic violation of the laws of nature any more than cultivating an area the size of South America for agricultural purposes. We need to appropriate modern science for our own use in our own way, in our own time -- but we also need to give people the time to get used to this. Labelling might help people make an informed choice. For more than a decade since GM crops have been in use, there has been no case of poisoning or any untoward outcome.

How do you rate India's biodiversity?

India has six per cent of the world's biodiversity, one-third of which is found nowhere else. You are one of the ten most rich countries in biodiversity. There are three important areas - the western ghats, the Northeast and Kashmir. The last two are unfortunately wracked by unrest which can adversely affect biodiversity. India has to enhance state and national level efforts to protect its biodiversity. Not only government but also NGOs, private sector and the people themselves have to be involved in this effort.

Empowering rural-folk, especially women and children is vital. The other problem is increasing global urbanisation. Greater awareness and knowledge will enable people to make informed choices. Saving the planet is really in the hands of the people, individuals.