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29.04.2021 — Ryszard Laskowski (Jagiellonian University): How to feed the world: pesticides or GMO?
With the ever growing human population, we continue straggling to feed the world. Our population is approaching 8 billion people now, and is predicted to reach 9.7 billion by 2050, according to the UN projections. Even if the growth rate is slowing down, the population will continue to increase until the end of the century and, perhaps, beyond. In recent two centuries we proved that we are able to fulfil the growing demand for food by improving our agricultural practices, developing new, more productive crop varieties and expanding farmland at the cost of natural environments. This last option seems, however, to approach its limits as already now the destruction of natural ecosystems brought massive decrease in biodiversity, compared by some scientists to the largest five extinctions in the Earth history.
Despite the impressive achievements of modern agriculture, huge losses in crops are still caused by weeds, diseases and pests. Insect pests alone can cause loses reaching 70-80% of the harvest, in particular in tropical countries. To prevent these, various techniques were used for centuries but only two modern ones proved to be efficient enough to indeed prevent major damage to crops – these are pesticides and genetically modified organisms (GMO). With the needs and limits drafted above, i.e. the growing demand for food and limited farmland area, we have to realize that in the coming years, perhaps centuries, we will depend on such means to secure yields large enough to feed the world. The question is, thus, not whether we should use pesticides or GMO, but which the better choice is. GMO in particular have gained bad press in recent years, and whole regions or even countries have been declared “GMO-free”. During this seminar I will briefly present the challenges facing us in terms of securing food for the growing population and discuss the advantages, disadvantages and fears associated with using pesticides and GMO. After the presentation, I would like the participants to engage in a vivid yet scientifically grounded discussion, hence I recommend preparing for it beforehand by looking through some publications on the topic.
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