Nina Federoff, the president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, talked with EarthSky about the important role science can play in helping different countries work together on the big issues confronting the world. Those issues include food, energy and water. Her own work is in the area of food – and she spoke of scientific solutions to some of the 21st century’s most difficult agricultural challenges. This podcast is part of the Thanks To Chemistry series, produced in cooperation with the Chemical Heritage Foundation. Generous sponsorship support was provided by the BASF Corporation. Additional production support was provided by The Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation, DuPont, and ExxonMobil.

What are the global agricultural challenges? What are the issues?

The issue is very simple. We have grown to be seven billion people on the planet. And the population experts are telling us that we’ll be somewhere between 9 and 10 billion by the middle of the century. The amount of land for growing food hasn’t changed in more than half a century. And we’ve been keeping agriculture alive in many places by pumping ground water from what’s called fossil aquifers. That’s aquifers that don’t get recharged.

At the same time, we have a very productive agriculture right now. We have, until recently, been decreasing the fraction of people who are hungry in the world. But the number of hungry people has suddenly gone up. We are rapidly approaching a crisis in simply being able to grow enough food to supply humanity.

In many places in the developed world, we eat or waste probably twice as many food calories as we really need. We’re wasteful of food. We ship all over the world. We’re now realizing that generating the energy to ship the food around the world is also ruining our climate. As the climate warms, there will be places that will get hotter and drier. We’re seeing that around the world. And that’s going to make it even more difficult to increase the food supply.

Experts are saying that we have to double the food supply by the middle of the century. And we don’t have any more land and water to use. So how are we going to do that? That’s the dilemma.

Image Credit: fishhawk

How many people in the world today are hungry?

Until 2008, there were perhaps between a half a billion and 800 million people that were hungry. Today, it’s over a billion people.

Think about what happened in the last half of the 20th century. Even as the population doubled from three to six billion, we managed to race ahead with all kinds of technological and scientific events in agriculture – from using more fertilizers to mechanization to advanced plant breeding. We managed to stay ahead of things so that we decreased the fraction of humanity that was perpetually hungry from half to about a sixth.

But those advances are not continuing. The number of hungry people is going up. We here in developed countries are used to paying a very small fraction of our income for food. But there are places in the world where people spend to 50 to 70 percent of everything they earn on food. And when the price of basic grains doubles, those folks are in trouble.

You’re a molecular scientist. In the century ahead, what will molecular science have to do with the food we eat? How will it address the global agricultural challenges?

It depends. It depends on whether we allow it to. Over the past 30 or 40 years, we’ve had a molecular revolution. People know the terms genes and genomes and sequencing the genome. Well, that revolution has happened in plant biology as well. Genes are nothing more than instructions for making proteins or other molecules. We’ve learned how to pick the genes we want and add them back into plants or animals to do a specific job. So, for example, molecular biology has been used to introduce a little tiny gene for a protein that is toxic to certain kinds of insects – but not to people. And that’s been introduced into corn and cotton plants. These plants are grown all over the world. That makes it possible to use less toxic chemicals to kill the insects. What a great advantage.

So those are the kinds of things that people have done already. But there are lots and lots of people who have made up their mind that it’s dangerous, that it’s bad and immoral. In many countries – including this country – there are protests against what has come be called genetic modification or genetically modified organisms (GMOs).

Before we talk about GMOs – which is really a touchstone issue – let’s talk about your own work on “jumping genes” in the 1970s. They’ve become fundamental to global agriculture. We understand that jumping genes are linked to mutations that – for example – might make a plant more resistant to insects, drought or heat. Tell us about that.

Jumping genes are little bits of DNA that know how to move around in your chromosomes. And in fact, almost half of the DNA in people is jumping genes. And more than half in some plants is jumping genes.

Jumping genes are fundamental because they’re agents of change. Everybody knows that organisms evolve. What makes them evolve is that their genes are dynamic and in motion. A familiar example is the stripe-y corn – called Indian corn – that you buy in the fall. Those are patterns that are caused by jumping genes inserted into a gene that’s necessary for making the pigment, and then jumping out again. So you have a mixture of colorless and colored tissue. Many of the patterns in nature are caused by transposable elements such as these.

In agriculture, people have taken wild plants that can’t be eaten by people – and turned them into wonderful food sources. And that’s because genomes can change, and people working with plants have picked mutations. Mutations are nothing more than genetic changes. Some of them are caused by transposable elements – or jumping genes – but some of them happen just in the chemistry of the DNA. And people have transformed inedible plants into plants that feed the world.

Here’s a familiar example. The huge ear of corn that we’re so familiar with is not natural. It’s manmade. In fact, the closest relative is a wild grass that makes its seeds at the top. People made those genetic changes. That’s a huge transformation. So the ability of plant genomes to change – which is largely promoted by jumping genes – is essential to the whole process of creating enough food to support this enormous population of people that we have today. And more tomorrow.

Image Credit: Tracy O

Even before the 20th century, people were very observant. Spontaneous changes happened because we’re constantly bombarded by radiation from outer space. People were observant and picked mutations when they happened spontaneously. In the 20th century, we learned how to make those mutations through our understanding of genetics. We did that with radiation. We did that with chemicals. We would treat seeds or pollen of plants with chemicals or irradiate them and then plant out lots and lots and lots of plants – and look for things that were an improvement.

For example, ruby red grapefruits are a favorite at Christmastime. Everybody ships them to their relatives. Those were created by sending little shoots of grapefruit off to Brookhaven National Laboratories, irradiating them, and then sending them back to Texas, and planting them out and looking for mutations. That’s how it was done in the 20th century.

Toward the end of the 20th century – because of the genetic revolution, the genomic revolution, the sequencing revolution – we could get down right into the genes and understand what they do. We can now take a gene for what we want it to do – and put it in another place where we want it. It’s the biggest advance in being able to change plants exactly as we want them that’s ever been made.

And just at this juncture people have said, oh my goodness, that’s not right. That’s messing with nature. We’ve been messing with nature for 10,000 years to create our current crops.

Where do you fit into the picture that you just painted?

When I started working on plants, no genes had been cloned. There was no molecular biology of plants. My laboratory developed some of the basic procedures that we now use in every laboratory to clone and sequence genes. I did some of the first DNA sequencing that was done. That was only a few decades ago. This has all happened very, very rapidly. We’ve had a real revolution in biology.

Let’s get back to genetically modified foods as a touchstone issue. What would you say to people who are against growing or eating genetically modified foods?

The simplest answer is that there’s virtually no food that isn’t genetically modified. Except, you know, wild blueberries, or wild fish, are not genetically modified. But everything that’s grown in fields – that is the vast majority of what we eat – has all been genetically modified. It’s just that we’ve gotten better at it now.

Let’s look at it carefully. Let’s put experts together to help regulate it, and go forward.

Over the last 25 or 30 years we’ve accumulated immense amount of experience with GMOs. The European Union is quite against GMOs, but the EU has invested more than 300 million Euros in biosafety research. They recently published a summary of the 25 years of research that they’ve done, and basically their conclusion was that these methods are no more than dangerous than any of the other methods used throughout history to modify plants, and to make them better crop plants.

And yet we’re stuck in this place where a lot of people are against it. And it’s not easy to see how to get unstuck.

I’d like to end on a positive note. I have spent the last year looking at different growing techniques in a number of different countries. And I’m very optimistic. The most productive facilities I’ve seen – particularly very modern greenhouse facilities – can grow five to 10 times as many vegetables and fruits as open-field agriculture, using sometimes as little as a tenth as much water.

So there’s lots of room for what’s called agricultural intensification. But one of the biggest challenges is how to raise the grain crops, the soybeans, the corn, the wheat that will thrive in a much harsher climate. And that’s the challenge of the future.

What is the most important thing you’d like to say to EarthSky’s global audience?

It’s that science really matters. And what individuals do really matters. Truth really matters. And in today’s age of the Internet, we seem to be trapped in all kinds of urban legends and myths and beliefs – and yet all of the information that we need is there. We really need to be attentive to reality. And the reality going forward is that our climate is changing. We’ll need to use the most up-to-date science and technology, not only to address that problem directly, but to adapt our agricultural techniques and our medical techniques to cope with the consequences of climate change.

Listen to the 90-second and 8-minute podcasts of EarthSky’s interview with Dr. Nina Fedoroff on global agricultural challenges (see top of page). For this and other free science interview podcasts, visit the subscribe page at earthsky.org. This podcast is part of the Thanks To Chemistry series, produced in cooperation with the Chemical Heritage Foundation. EarthSky is a clear voice for science.

More in the Thanks to Chemistry series:
Robert Langer on targeted drug delivery for future medicine

Overeating might cause brain aging while eating less turns on a molecule that helps the brain stay young.

That’s according to a team of Italian researchers at the Catholic University of Sacred Heart in Rome, who have discovered that this molecule, called CREB1, is triggered by “caloric restriction” (low caloric diet) in the brain of mice. They found that CREB1 activates many genes linked to longevity and to the proper functioning of the brain.

Via The Daily Beast

This work was led by Giovambattista Pani, researcher at the Institute of General Pathology, Faculty of Medicine at the Catholic University of Sacred Heart in Rome, directed by Professor Achille Cittadini, in collaboration with Professor Claudio Grassi of the Institute of Human Physiology. The research appears the week of December 19, 2011 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA (PNAS). Dr Pani said:

Our hope is to find a way to activate CREB1, for example through new drugs, so to keep the brain young without the need of a strict diet.

Caloric restriction means the animals can only eat up to 70 percent of the food they consume normally, and is a known experimental way to extend life, as seen in many experimental models. Typically, caloric-restricted mice do not become obese and don’t develop diabetes; moreover they show greater cognitive performance and memory, are less aggressive. Furthermore they do not develop, if not much later, Alzheimer’s disease and with less severe symptoms than in overfed animals.

Many studies suggest that obesity is bad for our brain, slows it down, causes early brain aging, making it susceptible to diseases typical of older people as the Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. In contrast, caloric restriction keeps the brain young. Nevertheless, the precise molecular mechanism behind the positive effects of an hypocaloric diet on the brain remained unknown until now.

The Italian team discovered that CREB1 is the molecule activated by caloric restriction and that it mediates the beneficial effects of the diet on the brain by turning on another group of molecules linked to longevity, the “sirtuins”. This finding is consistent with the fact that CREB1 is known to regulate important brain functions as memory, learning and anxiety control, and its activity is reduced or physiologically compromised by aging.

Moreover, Italian researchers have discovered that the action of CREB1 can be dramatically increased by simply reducing caloric intake, and have shown that CREB is absolutely essential to make caloric restriction work on the brain. In fact, if mice lack CREB1 the benefits of caloric restriction on the brain (improving memory, etc.) disappeear. So the animals without CREB1 show the same brain disabilities typical of overfed and/or old animals. Dr. Pani said:

Thus, our findings identify for the first time an important mediator of the effects of diet on the brain. This discovery has important implications to develop future therapies to keep our brain young and prevent brain degeneration and the aging process. In addition, our study shed light on the correlation among metabolic diseases as diabetes and obesity and the decline in cognitive activities.

Bottom line: A team of Italian researchers at the Catholic University of Sacred Heart in Rome has discovered a molecule – turned on by eating less – that helps the brain stay young. Called CREB1, the molecule is triggered by “caloric restriction” (low caloric diet) in the brain of mice. The scientists found that CREB1 activates many genes linked to longevity and to the proper functioning of the brain.

People who eat baked or broiled fish on a weekly basis might be improving their brain health and reducing their risk of developing mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and Alzheimer’s disease, according to a study presented today at the November 30, 2011 meeting of the Radiological Society of North America.

Cyrus Raji, M.D., Ph.D., from the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center and the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, said:

This is the first study to establish a direct relationship between fish consumption, brain structure and Alzheimer’s risk. The results showed that people who consumed baked or broiled fish at least one time per week had better preservation of gray matter volume on MRI in brain areas at risk for Alzheimer’s disease.

In Alzheimer's disease, there is an overall shrinkage of brain tissue. The grooves or furrows in the brain, called sulci (plural of sulcus), are noticeably widened and there is shrinkage of the gyri (plural of gyrus), the well-developed folds of the brain's outer layer. In addition, the ventricles, or chambers within the brain that contain cerebrospinal fluid, are noticeably enlarged. Via American Health Assistance Foundation

Alzheimer’s disease is an incurable, progressive brain disease that slowly destroys memory and cognitive skills. According to the National Institute on Aging, as many as 5.1 million Americans may have Alzheimer’s disease. In MCI, memory loss is present but to a lesser extent than in Alzheimer’s disease. People with MCI often go on to develop Alzheimer’s disease.

For the study, 260 cognitively normal individuals were selected from the Cardiovascular Health Study. Information on fish consumption was gathered using the National Cancer Institute Food Frequency Questionnaire. There were 163 patients who consumed fish on a weekly basis, and the majority ate fish one to four times per week. Each patient underwent 3-D volumetric MRI of the brain. Voxel-based morphometry, a brain mapping technique that measures gray matter volume, was used to model the relationship between weekly fish consumption at baseline and brain structure 10 years later. The data were then analyzed to determine if gray matter volume preservation associated with fish consumption reduced risk for Alzheimer’s disease. The study controlled for age, gender, education, race, obesity, physical activity, and the presence or absence of apolipoprotein E4 (ApoE4), a gene that increases the risk of developing Alzheimer’s.

Gray matter volume is crucial to brain health. When it remains higher, brain health is being maintained. Decreases in gray matter volume indicate that brain cells are shrinking.

The findings showed that consumption of baked or broiled fish on a weekly basis was positively associated with gray matter volumes in several areas of the brain. Greater hippocampal, posterior cingulate and orbital frontal cortex volumes in relation to fish consumption reduced the risk for five-year decline to MCI or Alzheimer’s by almost five-fold. Dr. Raji said:

Consuming baked or broiled fish promotes stronger neurons in the brain’s gray matter by making them larger and healthier. This simple lifestyle choice increases the brain’s resistance to Alzheimer’s disease and lowers risk for the disorder.

The results also demonstrated increased levels of cognition in people who ate baked or broiled fish. Dr. Raji said:

Working memory, which allows people to focus on tasks and commit information to short-term memory, is one of the most important cognitive domains. Working memory is destroyed by Alzheimer’s disease. We found higher levels of working memory in people who ate baked or broiled fish on a weekly basis, even when accounting for other factors, such as education, age, gender and physical activity.

Eating fried fish, on the other hand, was not shown to increase brain volume or protect against cognitive decline.

Bottom line: The first study to establish a direct relationship between fish consumption, brain structure and Alzheimer’s risk suggests that eating baked or broiled fish weekly, or more often, can prevent Alzheimers as well as lesser forms of memory loss associated with aging.

Global food demand could double by 2050, and agricultural practices around the world need to change in order to avoid environmental challenges, according to a new analysis reported this week (November 21, 2011) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The analysis suggests that richer nations will need to help poorer nations learn to grow higher-yield crops, in contrast to clearing more farmland, in order to keep environmental effects to a minimum as global population moves from 7 billion today to a projected 9 billion by 2050.

Scientists David Tilman and Jason Hill of the University of Minnesota (UMN) and colleagues found that producing the amount of food needed by 2050 has the potential to cause significant increases of the levels of carbon dioxide and nitrogen in the environment. That increase, in turn, could cause the extinction of numerous species.

Their study also indicates that if poorer nations continue current practices, these nations will clear a land area larger than the United States (two and a half billion acres) by 2050. But if richer nations help poorer nations to improve yields, that number could be reduced to half a billion acres. Tilman said:

Our analyses show that we can save most of the Earth’s remaining ecosystems by helping the poorer nations of the world feed themselves.

Global food demand could double by 2050.

These scientists point out that options for growing more food include increasing productivity on existing agricultural land, clearing more land, or a combination of both. To minimize environmental effects, they feel, the option of increasing productivity might be best.

They also consider various scenarios in which the amount of nitrogen use, land cleared, and resulting greenhouse gas emissions differ. Tilman said:

Agriculture’s greenhouse gas emissions could double by 2050 if current trends in global food production continue. This would be a major problem, since global agriculture already accounts for a third of all greenhouse gas emissions.

Saran Twombly, program director in the National Science Foundation (NSF)’s Division of Environmental Biology, which funded the research, said:

Ever increasing global demands for food pit environmental health against human prosperity.

Twombly added:

These assessments show that agricultural intensification, through improved agronomic practices and technology transfer, best ensure the latter with minimal costs to the former.

The results challenge wealthy nations to invest technologically in under-yielding nations to alter the current global trajectory of agricultural expansion. Identifying the economic and political incentives needed to realize this investment is the critical next step.

The research shows that adopting nitrogen-efficient “intensive” farming can meet future global food demand with much lower environmental effects, vs. the “extensive” farming practiced by many poor nations, which clears land to produce more food. For example, in 2005, crop yields for the wealthiest nations were more than 300 percent higher than yields for the poorest nations. Hill said:

Strategically intensifying crop production in developing and least-developed nations would reduce the overall environmental harm caused by food production, as well as provide a more equitable food supply across the globe.

Bottom line: A new analysis reported this week (November 21, 2011) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) suggests that global food demand could double by 2050. The analysis looked at environmental effects that would occur from various farming practices. It suggests that clearing more land for agriculture will cause more damaging effects than increasing crop yields on existing acreage.

How many hungry in a world with 7 billion?

The holiday season for us in the U.S. is supposed to mean family, love, warmth … and food. All that extra holiday food often means spectacular amounts of waste. In the United States, we generate an extra 5 million tons of household waste each year between Thanksgiving and New Year’s, including three times as much food waste as at other times of the year, according to the Worldwatch Institute of Washington D.C. That’s in contrast to our total food waste of 34 million tons each year. With the holidays upon us, here are 10 simple steps from the Worldwatch Institute to help make this season less wasteful and more plentiful.

Before the meal: Plan your menu and exactly how much food you’ll need.

1. Be realistic. The fear of not providing enough to eat often causes hosts to cook too much. Instead, plan out how much food you and your guests will realistically need, and stock up accordingly. LoveFoodHateWaste.com can help you figure out your perfect portion size.

2. Plan ahead. A shopping list will reduce the risk of impulse buys or buying unnecessary quantities, particularly since stores typically use holiday sales to entice buyers into spending more.

Image Credit: Deborah Byrd

During the meal: Control the amount on your plate to reduce the amount in the garbage.

3. Go small. The season of indulgence often promotes plates piled high with more food than can be eaten. Here’s a tip: try smaller serving utensils or plates.

4. Encourage self-serve. This helps to make meals feel more familiar and also reduces the amount of unwanted food left on guests’ plates.

After the meal: Make the most out of leftovers.

5. Store leftovers safely. The U.S. Department of Agriculture recommends that hot foods be left out for no more than two hours. Store leftovers in smaller, individually sized containers, making them more convenient to grab for a quick meal rather than being passed over and eventually wasted.

6. Compost food scraps. Individual composting systems can be relatively easy and inexpensive, provide a happy home for vegetable peels, eggshells and other scraps – and ultimately provide quality inputs for garden soils. Check out HomeCompostingMadeEasy.com for tips on how to compost.

7. Create new meals from table scraps. Check out Love Food Hate Waste’s creative recipes to see if your food scraps can be used for new meals. Vegetable scraps and turkey carcasses can be boiled down for stock and soups, and bread crusts and ends can be used to make homemade croutons.

8. Donate excess. Food banks and shelters gladly welcome donations of canned and dried foods, especially during the holiday season and colder months. The charity group Feeding America partners with over 200 local food banks across the United States, supplying food to more than 37 million people each year. To find a food bank near you, check out the Feeding America in your Community tool in the right-hand column of their homepage.

9. Support food-recovery programs. In some cases, food-recovery systems will come to you to collect your excess. In New York City, City Harvest, the world’s first food-rescue organization, collects approximately 28 million pounds of food each year that would otherwise go to waste, providing groceries and meals for over 300,000 people.

Throughout the holiday season: Consider what you’re giving.

10. Think before you give. When giving food as a gift, avoid highly perishable items and make an effort to select foods that you know the recipient will enjoy rather than waste. The Rainforest Alliance, an international nonprofit, works with farmers and producers in tropical areas to ensure they are practicing environmentally sustainable and socially just methods. The group’s certified chocolates, coffee, and teas are great gifts that have with long shelf-lives, and buying them helps support businesses and individuals across the world.

According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, roughly one-third of all food produced for human consumption – approximately 1.3 billion tons – is lost or wasted each year. Consumers in developed countries such as the United States are responsible for 222 million tons of this waste, or nearly the same quantity of food as is produced in all of sub-Saharan Africa.

Thank you for reading this! Have a warm and waste-reduced holiday season this year.

Antimicrobial resistance – which most people hear about as antibiotic resistance – is a type of drug resistance where a microorganism is able to survive exposure to the medicine meant to treat it. Standard treatments become ineffective, and infections persist and sometimes spread. In aquaculture, the farmed fish often receive large doses of antibiotics to protect them from disease, and today there are many publications investigating antimicrobial resistance and aquaculture. Keith Hayse-Gregson spoke to Felipe Cabello of New York Medical College – who has published papers in this area – about this issue.

You’ve worked in the area of antimicrobial resistance in salmon aquaculture. How did you get interested in it?

My interest in the use of antimicrobials in salmon aquaculture was the result of becoming aware that in Chile – the second largest producer of farmed salmon in the world after Norway – the industry uses hundreds of metric tons of antimicrobials each year, including quinolones, florfenicol and tetracyclines.

Fish farm in Chile

The use of these large amounts of antimicrobials by this industry dwarfs their use in human medicine and other veterinary activities in Chile. It constitutes a powerful selective pressure for antimicrobial resistant bacteria and antimicrobial resistance genes in the environment.

This injudicious use of antimicrobials needs to be corrected and aquaculturists educated regarding the potential problems that this use has for animal and human health and for the environment.

Can the use of antimicrobial drugs in animal food production hinder the treatment of infections in humans?

Initially, people did not believe that using antimicrobial drugs in animal food production could hinder the treatment of infections in humans.

However, some bacteria are zoonotic. That means they can infect humans as well as other animal species. In the late 1960s, English scientists first realized that using antimicrobials in cattle production was causing an increase in antimicrobial resistant salmonella that could infect humans.

For many years people did not want to believe that antimicrobial resistance selected in animals could find its way into human pathogens. With time, it has become clear that not only have some antimicrobial resistant human pathogens originated in animals, but have also gotten their antimicrobial resistant genes from animal pathogens.

Drug resistant staphylococcus bacterium. Image Credit: DR KARI LOUNATMAA/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY

For example, it is now accepted that Staphylococcus aureus resistant to semi-synthetic penicillins possibly acquired the gene for this resistance from S. sciuri an animal pathogen. Another example of such a phenomenon is that resistant Campylobacter, a human pathogen, have been shown to originate in industrially farmed chickens.

What about drug resistance from aquaculture? Fish are not mammals and so how could antimicrobial resistance in aquatic bacteria and fish pathogens affect humans?

It’s true that, at first, it seems unlikely that antimicrobial resistant aquatic bacteria and fish pathogens – which exist in aquatic environments and in cold blooded animals – could impact human pathogens living in warm blooded organisms.

No one doubts that when antibiotics are used in aquaculture, the facilities and their surrounding environment harbor antimicrobial resistant bacteria and fish pathogens selected by this antibiotic use. The question is, can this impact human health? Many studies have found that antimicrobial resistance genes and genetic elements from bacteria in the aquatic environment can be shared by terrestrial bacteria including human pathogens.

Horizontal gene transfer

Human pathogens, fish pathogens, and microbial communities in general are in more genetic contact than once believed. Scientists are discovering that microbes can share genetic material even between unrelated species by a process called horizontal gene transfer. It is hard for many people to believe that bacteria living in environments that are as distinct as the human gut and a fishpond can possibly exchange genetic material. The reality is that these exchanges do occur.

For example, a fish pathogen, Yersinia ruckerii, shares similar antimicrobial resistance genes with bacteria that produce bubonic plague in humans. Additionally, some quinolone resistance genes are beginning to emerge in human pathogens that appear to have originated in aquatic bacteria such as Shewanella, Aeromonas and Vibrio.

Unlike more advanced organisms, it seems that bacteria have access to a mobile pool of genetic material including antimicrobial resistance genes, which they share with one another. Scientists are finding that antimicrobial resistance can develop almost anywhere from the intestine of animals, including fish and humans, to free-living bacteria in the environment. Few obstacles block genetic transfer of these antimicrobial resistance elements between different bacterial species, especially in the presence of environmental antimicrobials as is the case in the aquatic environment of aquaculture facilities.

How long do antimicrobials persist in the environment?

Antimicrobials can persist in the environment for months or years. This means that scientists have no way of knowing when their selective effects will be exerted. A recent concept called, the resistome, indicates that antimicrobial resistance genes are present in bacteria in the whole biosphere and may potentially find their way into animal and human pathogens via the mobility of bacterial genes and genetic elements by horizontal gene transfer.

It must be noted that it will be difficult to prove directly that antimicrobial use in aquaculture directly influences the appearance of antimicrobial resistance in human pathogens since the pathways of horizontal gene transfer between aquatic bacteria and terrestrial bacteria are complex and may involve many intermediary species.

These two factors may leave a faint trail for scientists to follow and science may never uncover the smoking gun linking antimicrobial use in an aquaculture facility to antimicrobial resistance in human pathogens. However, this link has been confirmed repeatedly for terrestrial animals and it may be just a matter of time and effort before links between bacteria from aquaculture environments and human pathogens are firmly established.

How does industry need to adapt to prevent resistance occurring?

First, hygienic conditions of fish can be improved by stocking fish at lower densities to diminish stress and increase fish immune system strength. The space between cages and farms can also be increased so that diseases cannot spread quickly between cages or facilities.

Vaccinating juvenile fish before they are put into cages lowers the chance of disease outbreaks and reduces antimicrobial use.

Lastly, good veterinary and epidemiological management of antimicrobial use is required.

Norway is a good example of an aquaculture industry that has reduced antimicrobial use by improving aquaculture practices. In Norway, regulatory officials collect data on antimicrobial use and can use this data to predict how and where diseases will emerge and spread and to track them epidemiologically. They are then able to inform other aquaculturists so that the outbreak can be contained with minimal environmental and economic costs and without excessive therapeutic and prophylactic antimicrobial use.

The problematic relationship between aquaculture and antibiotics

On or around October 31, 2011, the global population is predicted to reach 7 billion. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations – there are over 1 billion people in the world today who do not get enough food to eat. That’s one in 7 people on Earth don’t know where their next meal is coming from.

Hunger in the 21st century means the same thing it has always meant: not getting enough food to be healthy and lead an active life.

How much of the world lives in energy poverty?

Where are these people? We in the developing world rarely see people who are hungry, although the FAO and other sources say hunger also exists in developed countries like the United States.

Most of the world’s hungry people live in developing nations. In absolute terms, Asia and the Pacific have the largest numbers of hungry people. In terms of percentages, Sub-Saharan Africa has the highest prevalence of hungry, with more than one in three people being undernourished, according to the FAO.

The FAO says that the world currently produces enough food for everybody. Overall, around the world in recent decades, a green revolution has taken place. It has allowed Earth’s food supply to keep pace with our world’s growing population, for the most part. So why are there still hungry people? According to the FAO, lack of access to food is the problem. High domestic food prices, lower incomes and, in 2011, increasing unemployment due to the global economic situation means many people cannot afford to buy the food they need.

Hunger experts use the terms “food secure” or “food insecure” to speak of hungry people, and nations with many who are hungry. These experts agree that poverty is a root cause of food insecurity. Food insecure nations tends to have large numbers of very poor people. Natural disasters, war and other conflicts, poor agricultural infrastructure and over-exploitation of the environment also play a role.

Meanwhile, a food secure country can produce, store or import the food it needs and distribute it equitably. The FAO lists four key factors for achieving food security in a given country:

1. There must be enough food to ensure that each person’s daily energy and nutrient needs can be met.
2. Even in a country with adequate food supplies, people must have access to that food.
3. The food supply must be stable. Factors causing instability of food supplies include droughts, floods, sharp price increases or seasonal unemployment.
4. Cultural acceptability – use of certain foods, food combinations or handling methods can be preempted by religious or cultural taboos.

More from the FAO: How can hunger be reduced?

Read about hunger in the world today from the FAO’s 2009 publication The State of Food Insecurity in the World.

The FAO has a new website about hunger.

There’s also a huge repository of documents about the issue of global food and global hunger here.

According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the chart at least shows that “2009 was a devastating year for the world’s hungry, marking a significant worsening of an already disappointing trend in global food security since 1996. The global economic slowdown, following on the heels of the food crisis in 2006–08, has deprived an additional 100 million people of access to adequate food. There have been marked increases in hunger in all of the worlds major regions, and more than one billion people are now estimated to be undernourished.”

Joel Cohen: Top 10 population trends on Earth with 7 billion

Two-pronged path to sustainable world with 7 billion+ humans

EarthSky award for excellence in population reporting in the year of 7 billion

Population challenges to the year 2050: A compilation of articles on population from the award-winning EarthSky team

Kampachi Farms, an aquaculture company based in Hawaii, is embarking on one of the most ambitious aquaculture projects in the United States. Their 2011 Velella Research Project involves an unanchored cage of fish that freely moves with currents and winds in water over two miles deep and up to 150 miles off the Hawaiian coast.

The goal is to farm fish as sustainably as possible — namely, moving cages offshore to reduce many of the environmental impacts of aquaculture. The cost of anchoring cages in waters that are extremely deep, and the need to significantly scale the production of fish without impacting local water quality and seafloor biodiversity, make drifting cages offshore an attractive alternative to traditional near-shore cages.

The system is the first American project to raise fish in cages not tethered to the ocean bottom. This is possible because of Pacific Ocean currents form large eddies behind the Hawaiian Islands. When the cages are released off-shore, they spiral behind the island in a relatively predictable region, even cycling back to near-shore zones. It’s called Velella because that is the scientific name of a harmless free-floating marine organism related to the Portuguese man-o-war.

The Velella Project addresses two of the major environmental critiques of cage culture: negatively impacting the seafloor below cages, and infecting local fish populations with disease.

A free-floating cage adrift off the coast of Hawaii. Image Credit: Kampachi Farms

The open ocean has very low biodiversity; it’s the equivalent of a terrestrial desert, making it an ecologically safe place to farm fish, keeping cage remains far from highly diverse near-shore coral reefs. Additionally, the incredibly deep water means that the cages will have virtually no impact on the ocean floor; currents and organisms will disperse and consume cage waste long before it can reach the bottom. This design makes the Velella system the most ambitious fish farming system yet developed within American waters.

Satellite image showing how the cages drift in the eddies. Image Credit: Kampachi Farms

The offshore marine waters are under federal jurisdiction and, as such, have no clear rules for permitting of aquaculture operations. However, they include a vast area that has potential for producing seafood in a way that will conflict far less with other human uses of the area than is true for near-shore cages and pens.

The main issue with sustainability of these systems is whether they can be economically viable, given the high costs of infrastructure, as well as transportation of feed and fish between the cages and land-based operations. Velella addresses this with a ship that remains attached to the cage to perform routine operations, thus reducing the need for regular movement between land and sea-based locations. They also seem to have reduced the capital cost and probably improved the regulatory environment by not permanently attaching cages to the seafloor. Whether the company can be profitable remains to be seen, but overall this experiment is a promising idea for new, low-impact aquaculture systems in offshore areas.

Bottom line: Kampachi Farms is experimenting with unanchored fish-farm cages that float in eddies off the coast of Hawaii. The goal of the 2011 experiment — the Velella Research Project — is to reduce the environmental impacts of aquaculture.

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A team of researchers from Canada, the U.S., Sweden and Germany has come up with a global plan to double the world’s food production while reducing the environmental impacts of agriculture. Their findings were published October 12, 2011, in the journal Nature.

The problem is stark: One billion people on Earth don’t have enough food right now. As of October 15, 2011, the U.S. Census Bureau estimates the world population at 6.97 billion. It’s estimated that by 2050 there will be more than nine billion people living on the planet.

Meanwhile, current agricultural practices are among the biggest threats to the global environment. Without the development of more sustainable practices, the planet will become even less able to feed its growing population than it is today.

Percentage of land used for crops. Image Credit: Navin Ramankutty and McGill University

By combining information gathered from crop records and satellite images from around the world, the research team created new models of agricultural systems and their environmental impacts that are truly global in scope.

McGill geography professor Navin Ramankutty, one of the team leaders on the study, credits the collaboration between researchers for achieving such important results:

Lots of other scholars and thinkers have proposed solutions to global food and environmental problems. But they were often fragmented, only looking at one aspect of the problem at one time. And they often lacked the specifics and numbers to back them up. This is the first time that such a wide range of data has been brought together under one common framework, and it has allowed us to see some clear patterns. This makes it easier to develop some concrete solutions for the problems facing us.

The researchers recommend this five-point plan for feeding the world while protecting the planet:

1.  Halting farmland expansion and land clearing for agricultural purposes, particularly in the tropical rainforest. This can be achieved using incentives such as payment for ecosystem services, certification and ecotourism. This change will yield huge environmental benefits without dramatically cutting into agricultural production or economic well-being.

2.  Improving agricultural yields. Many farming regions in Africa, Latin America and Eastern Europe are not living up to their potential for producing crops -– something known as yield gaps. Improved use of existing crop varieties, better management and improved genetics could increase current food production by nearly 60 percent.

3.  Supplementing the land more strategically. Current use of water, nutrients and agricultural chemicals suffers from what the research team calls the “Goldilocks’ Problem”: too much in some places, too little in others, rarely just right. Strategic reallocation could substantially boost benefits.

4.  Shifting diets. Growing animal feed or biofuels on prime croplands, no matter how efficiently, is a drain on the human food supply. Dedicating the land to crops that humans eat could boost calories produced per person by nearly 50 percent. Even shifting nonfood uses such as animal feed or biofuel production away from prime cropland could make a big difference.

Growing animal feed or biofuels on prime croplands is a drain on the human food supply. Dedicating the land to crops that humans eat could boost calories produced per person by nearly 50 percent. Image Credit: IDS.photos

5.  Reducing waste. One-third of the food produced by farms ends up discarded, spoiled or eaten by pests. Eliminating waste in the path that food takes from farm to mouth could boost the food available for consumption by another 50 percent.

The study also outlines approaches to the problem that would help policy-makers reach informed decisions about the agricultural choices facing them. Lead author Jonathan Foley, head of the University of Minnesota’s Institute on the Environment, said:

For the first time, we have shown that it is possible to both feed a hungry world and protect a threatened planet. It will take serious work. But we can do it.

Researchers looked at a wide range of data, identified clear patterns, and developed concrete solutions for the problem of feeding the world while protecting the natural environment. Image Credit: Tim Green

Bottom line: An international team of researchers has created a global plan to double the world’s food production while reducing the environmental impacts of agriculture. Their findings were published October 12, 2011, in the journal Nature.

Via McGill University

Animated map of global agricultural land use changes

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World Food Day on October 16 targets volatile food costs

Today — October 16, 2011 — is World Food Day, a global event for increasing awareness of hunger and creating year-round action to alleviate hunger problems. This year’s theme is “Food prices — from crisis to stability.” Organizers plan to shed light on the volatility of food prices and what can be done to mitigate its impact on the poorest populations, who are hit hardest by price upswings.

According to the World Bank, rising food costs during during 2010-11 pushed nearly 70 million people worldwide into extreme poverty.

The video below, created by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), explains the root causes of high and volatile food prices and what can be done about it.

Danielle Nierenberg, director of Worldwatch Institute’s Nourishing the Planet project (which evaluates sustainable agricultural innovations to alleviate hunger), said:

Food prices have continued to rise since 2007, and this has led to millions of people being unable to meet their daily food needs. The price hikes unfortunately also have meant that there is less money for food aid at a time when it is most vital.

On October 16, 2011, World Food Day events are raising money to support initiatives that will ease population growth, boost incomes and prepare farmers to protect their harvests against the negative effects of climate change, among others. Image Credit: Julie Carney, Gardens for Health, Inc.

According to the Worldwatch Insitute, the number of undernourished people worldwide has decreased since 2009 to nearly one billion, a number that is still unacceptably high. The FAO reports that one-third of the African population is undernourished and one child in Africa dies every six seconds because of undernourishment.

Robert Engelman, president of the Worldwatch Institute, said:

There’s something wrong with a world in which a billion people can’t get enough to eat for normal health while a different billion people threaten their health by overeating. World Food Day is [a] day for thinking hard about how to see the problem of access to nutritious food … as a shared global responsibility for us all.

Since 1981, World Food Day has been observed on October 16 in recognition of the founding of the FAO. On October 16, 2011, World Food Day events are raising money to support initiatives that will ease population growth, boost incomes and prepare farmers to protect their harvests against the negative effects of climate change, among others.

According to the World Bank, rising food costs during during 2010-11 pushed nearly 70 million people worldwide into extreme poverty. Image Credit: daveeza

Bottom line: World Food Day is October 16, 2011. This year’s theme is “Food prices — from crisis to stability.” Organizers are addressing the volatility of food prices and what can be done to mitigate its impact on the poorest populations, who are hit hardest by price upswings.

Read more at Worldwatch Institute

FAO World Food Day

State of the World 2011: Innovations that Nourish the Planet

Ken Cassman on water for food

Can organic farmers be tech savvy?

Jon Foley envisions a hybrid of industrial and organic farming

Nina Fedoroff on science for global agricultural challenges

Feeding the world while protecting the planet