TWC lesson 7

Summary

Today’s lesson started with a recap of what is technology and how the vast majority of organisms are made out of the same building blocks. Breakthroughs in Biotechnology is usually incorporated in the Biomedical field first, then BioAgriculture and lastly Biotechnology field. The biotechnology is classified under red, blue, green and white areas. We are going through the blue, green and white areas this lesson.

We are becoming increasingly urbanized. Urban population is going to continue to increase as more people shift towards urban environments. When people shift from rural to urban environments, your consumption pattern changes. Your demands as well as your consumptions will increase. There are many benefits but there are also flipsides. Examples are overcrowding and an increased exposure to diseases. With this trend, more and more people are leaving their farms and moving into cities. Interestingly, food productivity has increased almost 10 times despite the fact that there are less people working in the fields.

The next part of the lesson moved into discussing about key biobusiness opportunity areas for the white, blue and green BioTechnology areas. Some interesting areas are organic food and GM food. The next slide brought us back to the valley summit diagram again. Currently many of the smaller scale farms are producing goods that are valley opportunities. One of the methods to answer the second part of Yali’s question is to come out with methods to lift such valley opportunities to summit opportunities. We then watched a video on Biotechnology regarding the application of enzymes in industrial products. Prof then talked about an interesting topic on food security. And that everyone has the right to adequate food and to be free from 

hunger.

Some of our food development is moving into the wrong direction. Many food that are developed out there are not helping with the situation of lack of food. Money is spent on developing food like fast food to increase its appeal and taste. These funds are being wasted and not used on researching for more productive and nutritional food production methods.

Interesting key points and observation

For the issue about GM food labelling, I believe we should label it as it should be a right for people to choose what they want to consume. Genes of interest are being extracted from many different organisms and inserted into the cultivated plants and animals. Hence it creates some issues that if the GM food is not labelled, what if that particular GM food has genes which I am trying to avoid eating or that I am allergic to? For example, if a growth hormone gene from a pig is being extracted and inserted into potatoes, most people wouldn’t mind the difference but vegetarians and Muslims would definitely want to know. We should label GM food so that people can choose what they want and avoid what they do not want to consume.

It is interesting to note that farmlands are more productive if they are grown on a large scale with machineries. Traditional farming methods where many farmers work on different small plots of land are unproductive as their process is slow and their knowledge of BioArgiculture is minimal. As urbanisation occurs, more people shift towards urban areas and farmlands are sold to others. This allowed people to buy over large plots of land to carry out Mechanisation to greatly increase productivity. Mechanisation in farming could be the use of large scale irrigation systems to water plants or the use of Combine Harvesters to increase productivity in cultivating the fruits and vegetation. It is imperative for farmlands to employ such technology as our population is growing, yet our farmlands are shrinking. There is a need for productivity to increase in order to meet the needs of the growing population.

Regarding JingHui’s presentation, I believe that there are really many complications in solving world hunger. Although there is definitely no doubt that there is enough food for everyone in the world, complications like politics and personal interest. It’s a real pity that we have enough food to end world hunger, yet there is no means to distribute this food in a fair and proper manner. The production of larger amounts of food does not mean that world hunger can be solved. The more important factor is how we can allocate these excess food that we do not need to the people that need it more. Personally, I have seen huge amounts of food being wasted during my army days. Pots and pots of rice and food are thrown away in the food house in army bases. I have seen my men throw away untouched boxes of ration given to them just because they did not feel like eating it. The key to solving world hunger, in my opinion, is to come out with effective means to allocate food in a fair and proper manner.

Key takeaways

We are going to see 2Billion more people joining our population by 2050, a huge percentage of the lower income population is going to move up to the middle income levels by 2050 as well. Both of these trends would greatly increase the demand for food, energy and many other products. This would mean that we will have to increase our production of goods to cater to the new demands from these movements. The summit opportunities for the near future could be methods that solves these problems.

Issues for further discussion

I was wondering about how efficient/effective these BioTechnology really are. I’ve read some articles regarding the implications of farming sugar cane as a form of energy, and how these reduced arable farmland for agriculture. Some discussion about the limitations of the technology discussed would provide a broader perspective of the issue.

Rating

I would give this lesson a 9/10 as we had sufficient time to discuss issues in class. The issue of BioBusiness was sufficiently discussed and informative data was provided.