One of the most promising benefits of biotech food production is its potential to reduce the use of added pesticides — many crops are now genetically improved to produce their own bug-killers instead. But if weighing the relative “evils” of agricultural chemicals and “Franken-crops” gives most environmentalists a headache, they might need a serious reality check following the latest news from Great Britain.
The BBC is reporting that rice plants engineered to produce higher yields also produce less methane. You see, methane is a greenhouse gas, lamented by modern environmental zealots as being “responsible for about 20 percent of global warming.” This means that if global-warming enthusiasts’ theories are correct, their best course of action just might entail throwing their support behind genetically engineered rice production.
Researchers in the Netherlands, Germany, and the Philippines collaborated on the discovery and wrote in a recent issue of The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that food technology will soon be able to “mitigate methane emissions by optimizing rice productivity.”
That sound you hear just might be the ice cracking beneath anti-biotech protesters’ collective feet. And the rattling of an aspirin bottle over at Greenpeace headquarters.
