Bayer Norden: Safeguarding the supply of food

18-Feb-2010
Research & Innovation
Safeguarding the supply of food
The demand for food and energy is growing. Bayer CropScience is meeting these challenges with new active ingredients and breeding methods, and is making a major contribution to a second green revolution.

Breeding: Modern breeding methods enable high-yielding, tasty vegetable varieties to be produced rapidly. Tomato farmer Francisco Martinez Granero in southern Spain is cultivating a new variety obtained this way. It is resistant to disease and keeps extremely well.

Arable land is disappearing. Extreme weather conditions caused by climate change are turning fields to dust. Entire harvests are being destroyed. At the same time, the number of people in the world is growing.

This development puts a stronger focus on the need for a second green revolution, which entails new solutions from the fields of classical plant breeding and plant biotechnology. “It is vital if we are to achieve our goal of providing enough food to feed the world,” says Professor Friedrich Berschauer, Chairman of the Board of Management of Bayer CropScience.

Integrated breeding producing high-yielding and tasty vegetables

One of Bayer’s new solutions is integrated breeding. This is a particularly rapid method for producing high-yielding and tasty vegetable varieties. Molecular biologists and their colleagues study thousands of plants in order to identify those which bear the desired characteristics, or traits. It is not even necessary to grow the vegetables first.
DNA sequences responsible for giving tomatoes a particularly long shelf-life or making them resistant to diseases, for example, can be isolated from the cells of existing varieties. Once these genes have been identified, plants with the appropriate traits can be used for further breeding experiments.

Seed lines with built-in protection

This approach has already succeeded in stopping the spread of various tomato viruses which in the past were capable of rapidly laying waste to entire tomato harvests.

Today Nunhems , the Bayer CropScience subsidiary active in the vegetable seed business, has seed lines with built-in protection against such catastrophes. “Their genetic material already contains natural resistance to the responsible viruses,” explains Dr. Johan Peleman, Nunhems’ Head of Research.

Better stress protection for plants

Crops are also at increasing risk of the emerging consequences of climate change. Drought, heat, frost and excessive rainfall can cause terrible harvest losses. This is why Bayer CropScience is investigating stress resistance in plants .

Chance can be a useful element here. Scientists have discovered an interesting side effect of a fungicidal substance which has been in use for years. They observed that cereal and corn fields treated with trifloxystrobin were suddenly more luscious and greener than before. And these plants also seemed to cope better with a lack of water than untreated plants. Moreover, the harvested cereals contained particularly high levels of starch and protein. The experts now hope that in the future it will be possible to use crop protection products specifically to boost yields.

Urgent need for sustainable ways of safeguarding the food supply
However, these substances can only have the desired effect if the weeds, for example, are not resistant to them. Biochemists use state-of-the-art molecular biology techniques to examine the genetic material of plants for possible resistance.

It is evident to Friedrich Berschauer that genetic engineering must also play a major role in the second green revolution . He views the responsible use of this technology as “a moral obligation” in view of the “ urgent need for sustainable ways of safeguarding the food supply."