Using gene editing against the Ukraine wheat crisis
Russia and Ukraine together produce 31% of the common wheat on the market globally and 32% of barley. The ongoing conflict has already stopped much of the food destined for foreign countries, either because of international sanctions, in the case of Russia, or because of the blockades of ports in Ukraine. However, not only limited exports are worrying but also the possibility of having new crops, especially in Ukraine, given that many fields are becoming battlefields due to the Russian advance.
With the war in Ukraine the world risks to run out of fertilizers Russia, Belarus and Ukraine are among the main exporters. The war is causing an increase in prices which, after two years of crisis linked to the pandemic, could have catastrophic consequences for food security in many areas of the planet Read the article Import-export Ukraine supplies the European Union with 57% of its maize imports, 42% of rapeseed and 47% of sunflower seeds, destined to become animal feed. Along with cereals, the cost of fertilizers, of which Russia, Belarus and Ukraine are major producers, has also almost doubled, aggravating the situation in the agricultural sector.
Italy is not directly heavily dependent on Russian and Ukrainian wheat. According to the Institute of Services for the Agricultural Food Market (Ismea), last year our country imported from Russia and Ukraine only 3.2% of the soft wheat and 2.5% of the durum wheat it receives from 'abroad. However, our country is not autonomous in the production of cereals, importing over 60 per cent of the durum wheat it consumes in a year and over 40 per cent of the soft wheat. In addition, 20% of the maize we use to feed farm animals comes from Ukraine.
The whole agricultural industry, and livestock in particular, is heavily dependent on imports of feed, fertilizers, fuels . If these consequences are seen more in countries like Turkey, Egypt or Tunisia, and in general in many Middle Eastern and African nations that rely more on Ukrainian imports, the war is also pushing European states to think about how to improve their food security.
For example, to reduce dependence on foreign markets, the European Union is already taking steps to restore millions of hectares of land to cultivation. These decisions are seen by more than someone as a derogation, if not a reverse, from the latest EU policies, such as the Farm to Fork strategy which, applying the principles of the Green new deal, provides for more uncultivated land, a reduction in the use of pesticides and a greater share of organic products.
Agriculture is the new frontier in the fight against global warming It is called carbon farming and it plans to "sequester" the carbon in plant biomass. But there is a risk of fraud Read the article The ban on GMOs The technologies to improve crop yield without taking too many steps backwards on sustainability have already existed for years, but until now the Union has held them back, they now argue some agricultural experts and producers.
The Union bans the cultivation of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) on its soil, also discouraging research, but it imports millions of tons of corn every year from the United States and South America and transgenic soy as feed for farmed animals. An ambiguous position that should be overcome, say the supporters of GMOs and new biotechnologies in the agricultural field.
"Agricultural genetics would allow plants to improve in a short time" explained Vittoria Brambilla, researcher at the University of Milan, during a webinar on the topic of wheat and new technologies organized by the Slow News platform and the Luca Coscioni association. The scholar specifically referred to genome editing or genome editing. This technique, which dates back to ten years ago, allows you to modify the DNA of a plant in a targeted way, inserting small mutations inside it to obtain better characteristics, making it for example more resistant and productive. The system underlying genome editing, called Crispr / Cas9, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry to its two discoverers in 2020.
Unlike traditional GMOs, which involve the grafting of a gene than another plant, genome editing has a much smaller impact on DNA, according to the researchers. However, the plants produced in this way have been equated to GMOs by a ruling of the European Court of Justice in 2018.
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Arrow Gene editing A 2020 opinion from the European Food Safety Authority (Efsa), compared genome editing to mutagenesis that occurs in nature by physical or chemical means. For this reason the supporters of the new practice ask that it no longer falls under the European directive number 18 of 2001 which regulates GMOs, exempting mutagenesis.
The situation of food instability could now give a turning point in the approval of the genome editing and reopen the debate also on "old GMOs". According to Brambilla, in fact, “the most desirable thing for scientists would be to use both genome editing and GMOs, without ideological preclusions” because, especially at this moment, “we cannot afford not to use the weapons we have”.
The fear that a practice such as genome editing is not sustainable is unfounded, argued the agricultural entrepreneur Deborah Piovan: "It is precisely organic productions that would benefit from the use of these techniques which can reduce the use of insecticides, ”he added. "If the goal is to reduce crop protection products, what better choice than to use crops that protect themselves" agreed Brambilla.
The European Commission itself embraced this position in a study published at the end of April 2021 , in which he supported new genomic techniques (ngt). The document, received with concern by environmental associations, found the new biotech practices capable of contributing to a more sustainable food system in line with the objectives of the Farm to Fork strategy. Techniques such as genome editing can create crops that are less prone to disease and the effects of climate change, it says. By implementing NGT, according to the commission, it will be possible to obtain greater harvests with a lower use of pesticides.
In Italy there could be many uses, from viticulture to the development of plants resistant to fungi or bacteria such as xylella which is infesting olive trees in the South, but at the moment our country still seems to be lagging behind in the discussion around old and new GMOs.
In a questionnaire attached to the Commission's study on NGT, Italy was one of only two European states, together with Cyprus, to answer that they do not have "examples or concrete data" on the benefits of research on these technologies - which, albeit few, there are - and we do not know if the position of the new Ecological Transition ministry has now changed. Italians are also among the least informed on the subject. According to a 2019 Eurobarometer survey, 8% had heard of genome editing compared to 21% of the EU average, and only 13% of respondents were concerned about plant diseases, compared to an average of 45%.
