FEED - August 2006
Contents
- Pharmaceutical rice may sprout in Kansas
- New hope for treating resistant infections
- Drought or not, farmers get drought relief
- Pesticide use increases on engineered cotton in China
- What you can do: Comment on the CAFO rule
1. Pharmaceutical rice may sprout in Kansas
Ventria Bioscience, the company that genetically engineered rice to produce two human proteins, may be on the move again—this time to Kansas. Earlier attempts to plant in California and then Missouri generated a storm of protest from local farmers and others who feared that Ventria's rice would contaminate nearby crops. So Ventria headed for North Carolina, where it aroused further controversy by planting its engineered rice adjacent to a government rice quarantine station. Read more here. Now Kansas officials are offering Ventria money to bring its rice to their state. Ventria is expected to decide soon, according to the Associated Press.
2. New hope for treating resistant infections
A newly discovered compound produced by a soil bacterium cured infections in mice that were resistant to methicillin and vancomycin, the antibiotics of last resort. Though it has not been tested in humans, the new compound, platensimycin, could form the basis for the first major new class of antibiotics in decades and could provide a desperately needed weapon against antibiotic resistance. Read the abstract about platensimycin in Nature. Learn more about antibiotic overuse in livestock here.
3. Drought or not, farmers get drought relief
A U.S. Department of Agriculture program has spent $1.2 billion of taxpayers' money to compensate farmers for, in many cases, nonexistent damages. A series of articles on agriculture subsidies in The Washington Post describes the head-scratching logic that extended the Livestock Compensation Act from a small drought relief program for dairy farmers to a general disaster relief program that spanned entire states, seemingly for the sake of election-year politics. During the two years of the program's existence (2002 and 2003), farmers were compensated for drought in regions that experienced higher-than-average rainfall, for the Columbia shuttle explosion when no debris landed on their properties, and for earthquakes when their animals were unaffected. Read more about it here.
4. Pesticide use increases on engineered cotton in China
In some cases, Bt crops genetically engineered to produce their own insecticide require less pesticide than conventional crops, but scientists at Cornell University found that the effect can be short-lived. Their survey of Chinese farmers revealed that initially the farmers used fewer pesticide applications on Bt cotton. The Bt toxin killed the cotton's primary insect pest, bollworms. But soon the farmers had to apply pesticide to control unexpected outbreaks of other pests that were previously kept in check by both pesticides and an active bollworm population, and seven years after adopting the Bt technology they were using just as much pesticide as growers of conventional cotton. Since engineered seed costs two to three times as much as conventional seed, the renewed pesticide use meant the Bt cotton farmers' earnings fell below those of conventional cotton farmers. Read the study (pdf).
5. What you can do: Comment on the CAFO rule
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is seeking comments on its revised rule governing pollution discharge from concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), or factory farms. Runoff from these operations contaminates drinking water supplies, damages the environment, and causes dead zones and fish kills miles downstream. The EPA's revised rule effectively makes it voluntary for operators to apply for a Clean Water Act permit to release effluent or to create a nutrient management plan. Operators who choose not to take these steps would be subject to penalties only if they were caught discharging. Environmental groups say that the new system "puts the fox in charge of the henhouse." Please tell the EPA to ensure that large CAFOs that discharge pollutants obtain individual permits. You can read more about the issue and find out how to comment on the rule here. The deadline for comments is August 29, 2006.
