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CLIMATE CHANGE AND FOOD PRODUCTION Glenn Stone Part 2 1

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Global Warming and Agriculture 1.Will GW lead to reduced global food production? Possibly. 1.Will GW lead to less nutritious food? Almost certainly. But industrial agriculture has been making our food less nutritious for many years anyway. 2.Will GW lead to isolated food crises? With absolute certainty; in fact it already is. The worst problems will come not from agriculture being backward, but the lack of safety nets. 3.Will agricultural technology companies meet the challenges of GW? Probably not. Industrial agriculture will continue to contribute to GHG emissions and promote input- intensive agriculture. 2

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FACE (Free Air Carbon dioxide Enrichment) Experiments 3 So can we count on agricultural science to develop ways to reverse the declining nutrients? Maybe with breeding or genetic modification?

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MICRONUTRIENTS DECLINE as crops are bred for raised production Garvin, D. F., Welch, R. M., & Finley, J. W. (2006). Historical shifts in the seed mineral micronutrient concentration of US hard red winter wheat germplasm. J. Science of Food and Agriculture, 86, 2213-2220. Agricultural science has been making foods less nutritious anyway 4 Fe, Zn and Se in U.S. wheat through time PROTEIN TOO Scientists developed technology to make bread with lower-protein wheat, which allowed them to increase wheat yields. This benefitted the producer but "it was as if the customer unconsciously adapted his taste to the type of bread best suited to mass production and rapid turn-over". Breeders always say they breed for quality but it is for certain qualities. (paraphrase of pp. 118-22, L Busch, W Lacy, J Burkhardt, L Lacy 1991 The Political Biology of Wheat. In Plants, power and profit: social, economic, and ethical consequences of the new biotechnologies. Blackwell, Cambridge MA.)

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MICRONUTRIENTS DECLINE PROTEIN DECLINES Isnt this just science doing its best to raise production to feed America? I dont think so. Some of the biggest drops were during the 1930s when there were wheat surpluses and also grinding poverty

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Daviss team studied changes in 13 key nutrients in 43 garden crops (basically vegetables) over the last 50 years. The results: breeding for rapid growth led to significant decline in 6 nutrients ranging from 5-38%. J Am Coll Nutr. 2004 Dec;23(6):669-82. 6

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Consider economic animal changes Salmon mostly raised in offshore farms Fed ground up fish which concentrate toxins And increase toxins in nearby wild fish And produce much lower levels of healthy Omega- 3 fatty acids And higher levels of Omega-6 fatty acids And develop pale flesh that is colored by feeding fish synthetic pigment (canthaxanthin) Color picked by SalmoFan And how are salmon being genetically modified? 7

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Global Warming and Agriculture 1.Will GW lead to reduced global food production? Possibly. 1.Will GW lead to less nutritious food? Almost certainly. But agricultural technology developers have been developing less nutritious foods for a long time. 2.Will GW lead to isolated food crises? 3.Will agricultural technology companies meet the challenges of GW? 8