12:06AM
Drought-resistant GMOs: a key to managing the impact of global warming
Wednesday, May 12, 2010 at 12:06AM 
Bloomberg BusinessWeek piece on Monsanto and Dupont working on drought-resistant GMOs. Dupont predicts 150m acres of such drought-resistant corn will eventually be planted worldwide, or 10% of the global seed market and one-third of corn grown globally.
Monsanto CEO Hugh Grant says, "The biggest single issue in farming going forward is . . . water availability."
Monsanto hopes to be marketing the world's first drought-resistant seed in 2012. It is also working on a cotton variant, which is crucial because of the large water requirements.
Global warming's impact on ag will be mostly about droughts, so this work is very important stuff to making farming sustainable in the Gap in coming decades.
Reader Comments (1)
Actually I would argue that global warming is essentially irrelavent to this discussion. Yes, it may affect rainfall etc., but drougths are nothing new in agriculture (ever here of the dust bowl?). I expect that the real driver behind this development is that our global population is now so large the impact of even historic drought patterns can have catostrophic consequences, and with this technology we can greatly reduce our vulnerability. It's really no more complicated than that.