But this bursting of the financial bubble hasn't in any way lessened Ridley's taste for the bubble biotech, as the following article makes clear. Its opening paragraph alone is testament to this: "Imagine you could wave a magic wand and boost the yield of the world's crops, cut their cost, use fewer-fossil fuels to grow them and reduce the pollution that results from farming. Imagine, too, that you could both eliminate some hunger and return some land to rain forest." And it's not only future promises that Ridley deals in, the article is also full of unrestrained claims such as, "Genetically modified crops are proving to be an unmitigated environmental miracle".
Those in the developing world who've ended up on the receiving end of this "miracle" often have a very different story to tell. Take, for instance, what's been happening in Latin America, where massive GM soy expansion has caused the destruction of not just millions of hectares of rainforest, but has lead to violent land grabs, displaced indigenous peoples, dramaticaly increased use of toxic pesticides with resulting health problems, all as the result of the creation of vast unsustainable GM monocultures.
http://www.gmwatch.org/component/content/article/11626-gm-farming-in-latin-america-resources
But the ears of Ridley and The Economist seem deaf to the plight of poor campesinos and indigenous communities in Paraguay and Argentina. Ridley, after all, gained his post at Northern Rock by following in the footsteps of his father, Viscount Ridley, who held the Chairmanship before him. According to Berkeley technology historian, Iain Boal, "Ridley's father was a young colonial officer in Kenya who would have helped to administer the brutal counter-insurgency against the Mau Mau uprising, since he was aide-de-camp to the Governor, and if Ridley snr (Viscount Ridley) was still there in late 1952, that would be Sir Evelyn Baring. It is now estimated that the Kenyan death-toll was 50,000 to 100,000; the Brits officially admitted to less than two thousand. The number of white settlers killed was, if I recall, 26. Ridley junior's biofuel bonanza would surely mean no less dispossession and death."
George Monbiot has an excellent piece on Matt Ridley, Libertarians are the True Social Parasites.
For why Ridley is wrong about GM being the answer to the coming nitrogen crisis, click here.
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The new NUE thing
Nitrogen-use efficiency, the next green revolution
Matt Ridley
The Economist, Nov 13 2009
http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14742733
Imagine you could wave a magic wand and boost the yield of the world's crops, cut their cost, use fewer-fossil fuels to grow them and reduce the pollution that results from farming. Imagine, too, that you could both eliminate some hunger and return some land to rain forest. This is the scale of the prize that many in the biotechnology industry now suddenly believe is within their grasp in 2010 and the years that follow. They are in effect hoping to boost the miles-per-gallon of agriculture, except that the fuel in question is nitrogen.
In the 19th century, the world fed its expanding population by finding new acres to plough””in the prairies, the pampas, the steppes and the outback. In the 20th century, food supply more than kept pace with population by getting more out of each acre thanks to fossil fuels: tractors freed land to grow food that once fed horses, and fossil fuels fixed nitrogen from the air to make ammonium-based fertiliser. Yields doubled and doubled again. Today roughly half the nitrogen atoms in an average human body have come through an ammonium factory. Had they not, rain forests would have been even more devastated than they have been; and famines worse.
But about two-thirds of the nearly $100 billion of nitrogen fertiliser spread on fields each year is wasted. Either it is washed out of the soil by rain, and then suffocates the life out of lakes, rivers and seas by causing dense algal blooms””vast "dead zones" lie off the mouth of the Mississippi and in the Baltic Sea . Or it turns to nitrous oxide in the soil, a gas with roughly 300 times the greenhouse-warming potential of carbon dioxide, pound for pound. Some of that waste is avoidable with sensible agronomic measures: timing the application of fertiliser carefully, for example. Countries such as Denmark have halved their nitrogen inputs without hurting yields in recent years. By contrast, fertiliser subsidies encourage futile over-use of nitrogen in parts of China.
*Genetically modified crops are proving to be an unmitigated environmental miracle*
But there is now a high-tech solution too. One day in 1995 in Allen Good's laboratory in Edmonton, Alberta, a student made a serendipitous mistake: she forgot to add nitrogen when she watered some experimental canola (rapeseed) plants. Some of the plants had been given an "over-expressed" version of a gene from a barley plant for an enzyme called alanine aminotransferase in the hope of making them better at tolerating drought. Whereas the other plants suffered for lack of fertiliser, the plants with the over-expressed gene flourished.
A company called Arcadia Biosciences in Davis , California , acquired the licence to use the gene and signed agreements with other firms that are now testing it in rice in China , wheat in Australia and many other crops. The results, says the firm's chief executive, Eric Rey, are not just encouraging; they are astonishing. In experimental plots the plants often need less than half as much nitrogen to achieve the same yield””or get 25% more yield for the same nitrogen.
If (and it remains a mighty big if) the technology achieves even half this gain in average conditions once commercialised, probably from 2012, the effect could be dramatic. Food would get cheaper, reducing pressure on rain forests and other wild land. Water would get cleaner, reviving fisheries and nature reserves. Greenhouse-gas emissions would fall by the equivalent of taking all the cars in America , Germany and Britain off the road.
Environmental pressure groups will scoff. But they scoffed at insect-resistant biotech crops too. There is now unambiguous evidence that wherever genetically modified insect-resistant cotton and maize are grown, insecticide applications have been reduced””by up to 80%. Since such crops came in, some 230m kg of insecticide-active ingredient have not been used that otherwise would have been. That saves not only wildlife, but also money.
The organic movement will scoff, too, saying synthetic fertilisers can be replaced by manure and legumes. But both require land. According to Vaclav Smil, author of the book "Enriching the Earth", to replace existing synthetic fertiliser with manure would require quintupling the world's cattle population from 1.3 billion to maybe 7 billion-8 billion; where are these to graze?
Genetically modified crops are proving to be an unmitigated environmental miracle. Herbicide-tolerant plants are now grown with minimum tillage, which reduces the soil erosion that results from ploughing. Drought-tolerant plants are nearing the market and salt-tolerant ones are not far behind. Within a decade there may be crops that are no-till, insect-resistant, omega-3-enriched, drought-tolerant, salt-tolerant and nitrogen-efficient. If they boost yields, then the 21st century will see more and more people better and better fed from less and less land.
Matt Ridley: writer on science and evolution; author of "The Rational Optimist" (to be published by HarperCollins in 2010)