MORE SUSTAINABLE FEEDS FOR AQUACULTURE-NEW AUSTRALIAN INITIATVE

Shrimp is a delicacy enjoyed by people all over the world though its price has been escalating continuously during the last few years. Besides countries like India earn substantial foreign exchange through large scale exports of frozen shrimp. World wide shrimp consumption is estimated at over 7 million tons out of which about 40% is produced through aquaculture. Top shrimp producing countries include China, Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia and India. As the supply from natural sources like sea has been dwindling due to over exploitation, shrimp farming became an instant success with thousands of such farms supplementing the catch from the sea. Even for maintain the man created shrimp growing facilities, feed materials are required to be made from smaller fish from the sea which are converted into formulated feeds making it unsustainable in the long run. It is in this context that the new development in Australia which enables microorganisms to be used in formulating efficient feed substitutes without using fish as the base material. Here is a take on this path breaking research break through with far reaching implications for this planet.  

"CSIRO researchers have been trying to grow marine microbes as alternative food for farmed prawns for at least a decade. Farmed prawns are usually fed pellets, which are highly unsustainable to make because their key ingredient is fish caught in the wild. Dr Nigel Preston says his team found a way to grow marine microbes in controlled environments, which mimic conditions of mangroves and estuaries. The microbes are then harvested and turned into a food additive called Novacq. "We have developed a game-changing technology that will allow the industry to grow in a far more sustainable way," he told AAP. "It's better for consumers, the environment and prawn farmers."

Biotechnology has provided solutions to many problems in the past to help mankind to live in a more sustainable manner and this is another instance of its out reach for increasing food supply. It is unfortunate that Biotechnology is getting negative publicity because of its over stress on genetically modified foods while there are hundreds of more impact making developments in many other areas. Mirobes are touted as the future friend of man because of their versatility and variety. There are many substances of food as well as non-food importance made through fermentation and the future of mankind is firmly linked to microbes without which life can never be livable!  

V.H.POTTY
http://vhpotty.blogspot.com/
http://foodtechupdates.blogspot.com

BIOTECHNOLOGY-REGULATORY BODY IN THE OFFING

GM foods, presented often as biotechnologically developed foods, are shunned by many people on many grounds including their safety but in countries like the US, Canada etc these foods and ingredients based on them have crept into the food plates of the consumers unannounced and unrecognized. The regulatory authorities in these countries, invariably pro-industry, depended very heavily on safety data generated by the genetic food companies while not insisting on mandatory labeling provision. In contrast European Union has been more cautious in dealing with GM foods and even to day no commercial GM food crops have been cleared. The recent Bt Brinjal episode in India brought out the enormous clout the GM food industry enjoys with governments, even the democratic ones and Bt Brinjal would have become a reality but for the hostile reaction from the public articulated all over the country. Now comes the news that Indian Government is on the threshold of enacting a Bill for regulation of Biotechnology Industry and since the government has a majority in the Parliament, it is a question of time before GM crops are cleared by the so called regulatory body mostly managed by "Sarkari" babus like the food safety agency. Here is a take on this controversial issue.

After vocal protests over the commercial introduction of BT-Brinjal in the country over the last few months, activists fighting against Genetically Modified foods in Madhya Pradesh have now called the proposed Biotechnology Regulatory Authority of India (BRAI) bill an effort to stifle anti-GM voices in the country. The bill, which is likely to be approved by the cabinet next month and tabled for passage in the budget session, will bring about wide ranging changes in the process of regulating the research, transport, import, manufacture and use of GM products in the country. According to activists, the bill serves to override State-specific concerns by making the proposed authority solely responsible for releasing and controlling GMOs throughout the country and envisages only an advisory role for States. According to Section 81 of the Bill, the Act will have an over-riding effect (over other State-level acts). Activists allege that this ignores the constitutional powers that State governments have over their Agriculture & Health.

As per Section 24 of the Food Safety and Standards Act, 2006, FSSAI is supposed to regulate GM foods but once the NBRAI comes into existence, the Section could in all probability be diluted as the latter will be a single regulatory body for all GM-related issues in the country. It is presumed that all aspects regarding crops, food and vaccines may be regulated by the NBRAI except for food-labeling. The proposal for setting up the NBRAI was prepared by the Department of Biotechnology, under the ministry of science & technology in 2008. It was in 2004 that a Task Force on the Application of Agricultural Biotechnology was set up and according to its recommendations, an autonomous, statutory and professionally-led National Biotechnology Regulatory Authority should be set up with distinct wings for dealing separately with one responsible for food and agricultural biotechnology and the other with medical and pharmaceutical biotechnology. The avowed objective of NBRAI is for "generating the necessary public, political, professional and commercial confidence" in the science-based regulatory mechanism in place in the country. There is a sneaking suspicion that GOI wants to bring in GM technology in a big way into the country, probably under American pressure, and NBRAI would only be a fig leaf to cover this agenda. As the anti GM movement in the country is pretty strong, unless the technology is really beneficial to the country, it will be difficult to imagine that transnational companies with large financial stake in GM technology propagation, would be able "to do an America" on India!

V.H.POTTY
http://vhpotty.blogspot.com/
http://foodtechupdates.blogspot.com

MULTI-COUNTRY COOPERATIVE FOOD RESEARCH-A NEW INITIATIVE

Hunger abatment amongst poor people, where ever they live, is a major pre-requisite if world peace is to be ensured. This realization is slowly dawning on many of the rich nations and substantial aid money is being promised to strengthen the food production systems in many impoverished countries in Africa and Asia. It is true that supplying food to the needy ones from the surplus available in some of the rich countries does help to bring solace to millions starved of foods qualitatively and quantitatively but this cannot be a long term solution. New seed technologies ans sustainable food production only can enable the poor countries to attain self-sufficiency to any meaningful extent. There is a devious attempt to hook aid receiving countries on to the GM crop technology which can never be a sustaining proposition. Recent announcement by the UK to fund research in biotechnology area for solving world's food problem with financial support by an American private foundation has roped in India also to lend some respectability to their project labeled as a "cooperative" endeavor. It is not clear as to the institutions involved as the promoters claim it as a capacity building exercise as if such capacities do not exist in India. As the emphasis is on biotechnlogy, it will not be wrong to assume that focus will be on GM technology and how far this will be acceptable to the consumers is another matter.

"The new initiative will place particular emphasis on improving the sustainable production of staple food crops across sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. These include cassava, maize, rice, sorghum and wheat. By placing significant emphasis on these crops the initiative partners expect to be able to improve food security and quality of life for the largest possible number of people. The initiative also aims to maximise the impact of the research funded by supporting a more comprehensive approach to improving productivity and yield, for example by tackling crop resistance to drought or flood. By funding international researchers tackling problems across different countries and regions promising research from one country can easily be shared and tested more widely in different regions and conditions to provide the widest possible benefit. Professor Douglas Kell, BBSRC Chief Executive, said: "Global society faces huge challenges in the coming years and securing safe, affordable and nutritious food for everyone is one of the biggest. Scientists and organisations across the world have the capabilities and expertise to make a real difference in meeting the global food security challenge but no single organisation or country can do this on its own. By working together and by coordinating our activity we can maximise the impact of our investment and of international science. The joint programme that we are announcing today is a groundbreaking example of how we can do so." Each project funded under the initiative will include partners from the UK and a developing nation. This approach, used by BBSRC and DFID in previous programmes, aims to build scientific capacity in developing countries, with the aim of developing research teams and projects that tackle other local scientific challenges".

As far as India is concerned capability already exists in the country as proven by the Green Revolution achieved decades ago making the country self-sufficient and if the aim is to 'train' personnel from poorer countries in technologies that will increase the yield of staple crops, the project may be relevant. On th other hand if it is intended to help India achieve any break-through in grain production, sufficient expertise as well as funds are already available in India.

V.H.POTTY
http://vhpotty.blogspot.com/
http://foodtechupdates.blogspot.com

"BIOFORTIFICATION"-WHAT IS THE ROUTE?

Food fortification is an issue assuming importance in modern days because the food processing industry invariably causes much depletion of nutrients during conversion of raw foods into ready to eat end products. It is well known that even the basic processing techniques like milling of food grains removes major part of the nutrient "treasure" that is naturally endowed. If most of the foods in the market to day are fortified or enriched, one must thank the food industry. But it is another matter that these externally added nutrients may not be as readily absorbed by the human body as that present in natural grains. A typical case is iron supplementation where no matter what form of iron compound one adds in the food during processing, the efficacy of absorption is very low. Biofortification therefore is considered more efficient since the nutrients are generated through biotechnical means with better chance of utilization by the body. However the mode of achieving this goal will decide whether the new products will be acceptable to the consumer or not.

So a decade ago scientists began experimenting with a different approach: What if they tinkered with crops so that they naturally contained iron, zinc or vitamin A? And that's where our hero, the sweet potato, comes in. Orange sweet potatoes on our Thanksgiving tables are full of beta carotene, which the body turns into vitamin A. But our sweet potatoes don't grow well in Africa. Africans eat an estimated seven million tons of sweet potatoes a year, but theirs are white ones that lack vitamin A. So scientists cross-bred sweet potatoes until they came up with vitamin A-rich orange varieties that grow well in Africa. Hard-bitten health specialists go weak-kneed over them. More than 170,000 Ugandan and Mozambiquan families are now growing these sweet potatoes. And the sweet potato is just the first of a number of crops that have been bred or engineered to address micronutrient deficiencies. This mix of agriculture and nutrition is called biofortification, and it's one of the hot words in the global poverty lexicon. Also in the works are rice and wheat packed with zinc, pearl millet and beans with iron, bright orange corn and golden cassava that give people vitamin A. These crops are all in various stages of testing by HarvestPlus, a nonprofit based in Washington. The alliance is financed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the World Bank, aid agencies from Canada, Britain and the United States, and the aim is to produce cheap seeds in the public domain. "Biofortification is slow, but it has a huge impact in the end," said Howarth Bouis, director of HarvestPlus. One of the questions, though, is this: Will rural Africans want to eat orange sweet potatoes? Iron and zinc don't change the color or taste of foods, but foods that produce vitamin A are often an unearthly orange.

Natural breeding is an accepted practice and if the food production has been able to keep pace with the population growth, it is largely due to hybridization technology of marrying high yielding varieties with traditional ones, though the process takes years to fructify. The green revolution in India has been achieved through this route. The process can be expedited through genetic engineering also which takes much less time but there are safety issues that come in the way of universal acceptance of GM foods. Indisputably the new emerging technologies like genetic engineering hold promise for future in many areas of food production but there has to be a consensus regarding their safety credentials which can be achieved through global cooperation at governmental level in stead of through profit driven private interests.

V.H.POTTY
http://vhpotty.blogspot.com/
http://foodtechupdates.blogspot.com

ANIMAL "FREE" MEAT-A PEEP INTO FUTURE

Can a meat not derived from life size animals be called a vegetarian? There are plant-derived meat substitutes made by texturizing the proteins to give a product with almost same textural characteristics as meat but this type of products are not generally targeted at vegetarian population, their clientele being low income non-vegetarian consumers, not able to buy the real meat. Most of the time they end up as meat extenders, enabling the consumers to get a higher mileage for the meat they can buy. Probably in highly spiced food preparations as in India, the extent of substitutes used may not make much of a difference in the ultimate eating quality. The reported success of Bio-technologists in developing rudimentary meat muscle tissues through stem cell proliferation technique may open up new avenues to make meat-like products for use at least in products based on ground meat.

"Dr. Jim Musick, Vitro's CEO, said, "We are pleased to be involved with this ground breaking opportunity to extend stem cell technology to development of alternative food sources. Cellular immortality as reflected in continual stem cell proliferation (self-renewal) has potential to provide limitless cells that when differentiated to muscle, for example, become the primary ingredient of meat. This reflects the basis of alternative food derived from stem cells that is now being developed. We intend to use our expertise in stem cell media development and commercial manufacture to provide appropriate media formulations to support this nascent technology. Our VITROGROW(TM) Brand of stem cell media has been demonstrated to result in superior performance to competing products in the growth of human adult stem cells and is now utilized in high performance, bio-luminescent test kits (Lumenesc-Hu(TM) and LumiSTEM(TM)) for measuring the quality and potency of mesenchymal and induced-pluripotent stem cells. We anticipate contributing to this exciting new field and plan to further develop cellular immortalization procedures that may be crucial to economic production of stem cell-derived meat." Kedar Challakere, MD, of Mokshagundam Biotechnologies stated, "The in vitro meat products developed thus far have used fetal bovine serum with which to grow their stem cells. The product currently being developed through our contract with Vitro is a synthetic, animal free medium which is anticipated to replace a living organism, the brine shrimp, from the food chain of aquatic creatures."

Probably vegetarians may find it difficult to accept the product as not derived from animals as the researchers used Fetal Bovine Serum for proliferation of the stem cells. Even if animal-free medium is used for proliferation eventually, the starting material, the stem cells still have to come from animal sources. Of course if the technology reaches the stage of commercial exploitation, the meat industry will never be the same as it is to day. The two major criticisms the meat industry is facing to day are massive generation of environment polluting CO2 by the live stock industry and less than 15% conversion of feed grains into meat by the animals, considered a wasteful practice.

V.H.POTTY
http://vhpotty.blogspot.com/
http://foodtechupdates.blogspot.com

THE "GREEN" ENERGY-POTENTIAL BIOTECHNOLOGICAL BREAK-THROUGH

Frenetic pace at which energy scientists are pursuing alternate sources of energy, to meet the the contingency arising out of the eventual drying of fossil fuel wells in not distant a future, seems to have taken them to areas not chartered hitherto. It is likely that modern biotechnological tools may yet convert the unheralded single cell organism Algae into a real hero in the coming years. Algae belonging to different varieties are known to be excellent converters of solar energy into different biological constituents such as proteins, colorants, fat, micro nutrients etc and to day it is better known as a health supplement, attributing to it many virtues including longevity. The latest romance with Algae by the fuel scientists is opening up new opportunities as a fuel source capable of replacing fossil fuels that can be used for meeting the modern transportation needs.

"Foreign genes are being spliced into algae and native genes are being tweaked. Different strains of algae are pitted against one another in survival-of-the-fittest contests in an effort to accelerate the evolution of fast-growing, hardy strains. The goal is nothing less than to create superalgae, highly efficient at converting sunlight and carbon dioxide into lipids and oils that can be sent to a refinery and made into diesel or jet fuel. "We've probably engineered over 4,000 strains," said Mike Mendez, a co-founder and vice president for technology at Sapphire Energy, the owner of the laboratory. "My whole goal here at Sapphire is to domesticate algae, to make it a crop." Dozens of companies, as well as many academic laboratories, are pursuing the same goal — to produce algae as a source of, literally, green energy. And many of them are using genetic engineering or other biological techniques, like chemically induced mutations, to improve how algae functions."

It has been known for some time that Algal cells can be manipulated at the gene level to yield hydrocarbons just like the petroleum hydrocarbons but the viability of the bio-conversion route was not established because of low yields. The above studies have been able to show the potential of some Algal variants to be a significant source of hydrocarbons and the findings, though at a laboratory level, are pregnant with far reaching significance to the energy starved humanity. Of course there are many hurdles in realizing the potential and in stead of working in isolation research organizations must pool their resources and experience for evolving a universally acceptable alternate source to fossil fuels and such an achievement will spare precious food resources like grains, sugar beets and sugarcane for meeting the food needs of human beings.

V.H.POTTY
http://vhpotty.blogspot.com/
http://foodtechupdates.blogspot.com

BIOTECH "GLAMOUR"-SHIELDIG THE GM FOODS!

The GM FOOD debate is hotting up with hardening attitudes amongst people holding diametrically opposite views. Latest salvo was fired by one of the doyens of Biotechnology in India with pronounced interests in pharmaceutical area declaring that Bt Brinjal is evolved based on a "safe science" and therefore by inference passing her judgment that it is safe for human consumption. Of course if one asks the same question to Monsanto company the answer would not have been different. Here is a take on the issue.

"However, she was quick to be countered by food policy expert Devinder Sharma, who said Mazumdar was only interested in 'making money' and therefore does not mind 'lying'.Speaking for Bt brinjal and the use of biotechnology in agriculture at a curtain raiser event for Bangalore Bio 2010, Shaw said, "There is a danger of false propaganda against Bt, especially at a time when it is going commercial".She said, "We need to tackle this on a scientific basis. Bt is a very safe science and we are all very responsible stakeholders".

It is the tone of the declaration that is amusing because all those opposing including scientists, environmentalists, activists, safety experts and farmers groups have been tarred with the brush "false propaganda". A clear sign of intolerance of others' views which does not bode well for this country.

V.H.POTTY
http://vhpotty.blogspot.com/
http://foodtechupdates.blogspot.com