Steve Kemp explains the benefits of biotechnological innovations in livestock.
Where do you see the most exciting use of biotechnology for livestock?
Since the genome revolution of the 1980s, genetics has tried to understand how genes and gene variation determines the physical characteristics of an organism. We have made significant progress but, until very recently, we have not been able to deliver agricultural impact from this understanding in slow-growing livestock species. The advent of genome editing technologies (e.g. CRISPR-CAS9) provides, for the first time, a toolbox to study the effect of a variant and then to introduce exactly the characteristics that we need into the strains that most need it.
How is this important for ACP regions?
Developing countries are under enormous pressure to improve efficiency of their food production systems to meet burgeoning populations’ demands. It will be difficult for them to do this without adverse environmental impact and increased dependence on interventions to allow livestock to perform in tropical climates. For example, use and misuse of acaricides, antibiotics and toxic drugs allows residues to enter the food chain and encourages the development of resistance. Furthermore, the developing world is a critical reservoir of agricultural diversity. Intelligent biotechnology use offers ways of improving adaptation and hence improving productivity while minimising environmental impact and loss of diversity.
Biosafety policy is a key issue. What other challenges do these regions face in realising the potential of biotechnology?
While biosafety policy is developing well in much of the developing world, the challenge will be for these regions to have the freedom to make their evaluation of the risk-benefit balance of a given technology. Currently, the external pressure to limit, for example, development of GM technologies is coming from rich countries that face completely different circumstances. However, achieving impact in biotechnological advances requires scale-out and delivery of improved strains which is, in some ways, harder than making the purely technical advance. To do so requires infrastructure, public and private sector players and scaled-up, more efficient farming systems which are simply absent in many areas.
What do you think might be the new biotechnology developments for crops or livestock in the coming years?
If we can understand and make-use of functional diversity, we can make much more subtle genetic interventions which maintain diversity so that rather than empirically expanding the one best strain, we can transfer particular characteristics to otherwise well-adapted varieties which will allow us to, for example, have productive livestock which do not require expensive and toxic drugs to survive. For the first time we have an opportunity to use biotechnology to reverse loss of diversity and environmental damage that agriculture has previously driven. I look forward to a detailed repository of genome sequence representing the diversity of livestock and matched with a detailed understanding of its function. This can then be ‘mined’ for new variants and new combinations and will represent an in silico (computer) genebank so that we can respond quickly to new and unexpected demands on our livestock – a virtual genetic safety-net.
