Monsanto Plans to Double Grain Yields by 2030

By: TraderMark Thursday, June 05, 2008 12:20 PM

Symbols: MON, SYT

Email Article
Bookmark:
Font Size
Print Article

Monsanto plans to increase its grain yields gradually, Grant said, as the company introduces new strains of crops. The company will use advanced breeding techniques to develop heartier, more fruitful crops. At the same time, it will use genetic engineering to give the plants the ability to withstand pests like corn worms.

Some commentators in this NYTimes story have their doubts

Much of what is in the commitment are things the company was doing anyway. But Monsanto’s chief executive, Hugh Grant, said in an interview Wednesday that the company wanted to make the goals public “so this isn’t just a bound report on some library shelf.”
Soybeans, corn and cotton that have been genetically engineered to provide herbicide tolerance, insect resistance or both are widely grown in the United States and several other countries. But they are largely shunned in Europe and some other areas because of concerns about potential environmental and health effects. (that has already begun to change due to economics - as with the environment once costs hit a certain price level, non economic considerations get thrown out the door)
James E. Specht, a soybean genetics expert at the University of Nebraska, said he doubted it could be done. “The hype-to-reality ratio of that one is essentially infinity,” Mr. Specht said. “Seeing an exponential change in the yield curve is unlikely.” Mr. Specht said that on irrigated farms in Nebraska, soybean yields have been increasing by about 0.6 bushels an acre every year. At that rate it would take 83 years for yields to double from the 50 bushels an acre recorded in 2000.
But Monsanto executives say that a new technique called marker-assisted selection could double the rate of gain made from breeding. That technique does not involve altering crops by putting in foreign genes. Rather it uses genetic tests to help choose which plants to use in conventional cross-breeding, vastly speeding up the process.
Moreover, the company is not talking about the United States alone. In some countries, output could be increased dramatically just by introducing modern hybrid corn, whether or not that corn is genetically engineered, Mr. Grant said.
Bill Freese, a science policy analyst at the Center for Food Safety, a Washington group critical of biotech crops, said some studies had shown that genetic engineering can actually reduce yields. He and other critics also say that the biotech crops developed so far have mainly been aimed at feeding livestock in wealthy countries, not improving the staple crops grown by small farmers in poor countries.
While Mr. Grant said that skeptics might say Monsanto was exploiting the food crisis to win acceptance for its technology, other people “will say it’s long overdue, and thank goodness the companies are stepping up.”

Related Stories