Dr Gurdev Singh Khush
Dr Khush is one of the global leaders on crop breeding and a
major brain behind the development of productive rice varieties and the Green
Revolution in plant breeding. Born in the village of Rurkee in Punjab, this son
of a farmer finished his Bachelor of Science from Punjab Agriculture University
and went to University of California, Davis, to do his PhD. He in fact worked as
a laborer in a canning factory in England to earn his money to go to America. At
the age of 25, Dr Khush completed his PhD in genetics in less than three years
after joining the University of California. In 1967, Dr Khush joined the
International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), Manila and he was there till 2000
and since the past few years he has been with University of California, Davis,
as adjunct professor.
Dr Khush, who joined the IRRI after postdoctoral studies on
tomato breeding, became principal plant breeder and head of the Plant Breeding,
Genetics, and Biochemistry Division, and took IRRI to the vanguard of developing
300 new rice varieties and trigger the green revolution in Asia. Dr Khush may
not be a household name. But his rice varieties touch the lips of every person
in Asia. In the last 35 years, he and his team at IRRI in Manila introduced
several varieties like IR8, IR36, IR64 and IR72. IRRI rice varieties and their
progenies are planted in over 70 percent of the world's rice-fields. The rice
production around the world in 1966 was close to 257 million tonnes and today it
has increased to over 700 million tonnes. Thanks to Dr Khush and IRRI.
In less than five years of joining IRRI, Dr Khush became the
head of IRRI's plant breeding department and had developed his own new variety
of "miracle rice", IR36. This was developed using IR8 as a genetic
base and cross breeding it with 13 parent varieties from six nations. IR36 is a
semi-dwarf variety that proved highly resistant to a number of the major insect
pests and diseases. Further, IR36 matures rapidly in about 105 days compared to
130 days for IR8 and 150-170 days for traditional types and produces a slender
grain that is preferred in many Asian countries. The combination of these
characteristics soon made IR36 one of the most widely planted food crop
varieties the world has ever known. However, it was not an easy acceptance
though. According to Dr Khush the farmers were initially skeptical about IRRI's
new grain varieties. It took almost 25 years for Dr Khush's rice initiative to
see excellent results. The rice production doubled to 518 million tonnes in
1990. According to IRRI estimates, IR36 has added about 5 million tonnes of rice
annually to Asia's food supply and accounts for an additional $1 billion
yearly income to Asian farmers. IR64 later replaced IR36 as the world's most
popular variety and IR72, released in 1990, became the world's
highest-yielding variety.
In 1994, Dr Khush announced a new type of "super
rice", which has the potential to increase yields by 25 percent. His final
work on what is called the New Plant Type (NPT) for irrigated rice fields is
complete. Developing NPT almost took 12 years and the plants were yielding
strongly in temperature areas of China and are expected to be ready for farmers
in tropical Asia in 2005. It is a complete redesign of the rice plant from the
roots up, making it higher yielding, more vigorous, and better able to resist
pests and diseases without the use of environmentally damaging pesticides. It is
designed to yield up to 12 tonnes per hectare in irrigated tropical conditions,
but adjusting its genetic characteristics to match tastes and environment
conditions.
"When Gurdev Khush first started to develop rice
varieties 34 years ago, there were few countries in Asia with the research
infrastructure to work with him to adapt new varieties to local
conditions," said former IRRI director general and ex-officio member Ronald
P Cantrell in one of the Annual General Meetings. "But now, almost every
Asian nation has some level of agricultural research capacity." Because of
this, Asian countries have been able to feed their growing populations and, for
the most part, maintain peace and stability. "The true Asian miracle
through the 1970s and 1980s wasn't stunning economic growth. It was keeping
people fed and societies relatively stable," Dr Cantrell said, "And
now, with the new plant type ready for farmers' fields, we are hopeful of
being able to maintain this level of progress."
Dr Khush is one of the most decorated scientists in the
world, winning the Japan prize in 1987, the World Food Prize in 1996, the Wolf
Prize from Israel and the Padma Shri Award from the government of India in 2000,
and the China International Scientific and Technological Cooperation Award for
2001. The World Food Prize, widely regarded as the equivalent of a Nobel Prize
for agriculture, is awarded by the World Food Prize Foundation based at Des
Moines (USA), which he won for his contribution to "advancing human
development by improving the quality, quantity or availability of the world's
food supply." It cited that the increased availability of rice has not only
lowered costs to consumers but also enhanced the nutrition of millions of
people. Caloric intake in almost all Asian nations has improved. For example,
caloric intake in Indonesia increased from 81 percent of the daily requirement
in 1965 to 120 percent in 1990. And all of this happened while the population of
rice consumers was growing by more than two percent annually, and the
availability of rice production land remained stable.
"GM Crops Can
Contribute In Several Ways,"
asserts Dr Gurudev S Khush
 The
BioSpectrum series on Biotech Gurus continues with Dr Khush who has joined
the pantheon of eminent scientists from India who have made the world
their home. Dr Khush was in Bangalore as a keynote speaker at Bangalore
Bio in July this year. N Suresh and Ch. Srinivas Rao caught up with him to
know the importance of bioagri products. Excerpts from the interview.
How important are GM crops?
I think GM crops can contribute in several ways. One is in
introducing durable resistance to diseases and insects. That's very
important and that's where the progress has been made until now. The
second area is developing the crops, with drought tolerance and salinity
tolerance and what we call the tolerance to abiotec stresses. Thirdly, GM
crops can contribute to the improvement of the nutritional quality like
improvement of vitamin A, iron and zinc content. The fourth area is the
improvement in the yield potential. This is going to be the most
difficult. So the progress is more in diseases and insect resistance
crops, the drought tolerance is coming and in the nutritional content, we
have the vitamin A rich rice and the yield potential is going to come
later.
But there is stiff opposition
to GM crops ...
I think it is just that the public has been so much confused with this
anti-GM propaganda. They don't look at things in the right perspective
and the average people read the information and cannot understand and sort
out the science of the GMOs. So the public is generally confused. But if
you see the records, there are 67 million hectares of transgenic crops
grown world over and they have been consumed. Nobody has even had a
stomach ache and nobody has had an adverse effect. So my answer is they
should be properly regulated, biosafety tests done properly for food
safety and environmental safety and if they are found to be safe, then we
should go ahead and release these crops and consume them.
How can the industry counter this opposition?
If you are worried about the risk, then you can't release any
technology. Why are you driving cars? Anybody can get killed on the roads.
If you are worried, you can't release any pharmaceutical. How do we know
what this pharmaceutical can do after 20 years? We may sometimes find that
one of these pharmaceuticals had some side effects. If you think of any
technology, which has happened in the last 20 years, nothing could have
been released if we did not take the risk.
How can the industry get this
message across to the public?
This is a problem. I am going to say a few words on that. There
was a meeting at the Royal Society and they invited some people from the
media, from science groups and from NGOs and the feeling was that the
scientists should be more proactive and that they should talk to the media
and the media should give out the right kind of information. So, I think,
we have to get this idea across as most of the general public is confused
about this. The scientists must develop skills to communicate with the
media and public. The public must be able to recognize how scientific
process takes place and understand relative risks. The governments should
be involved in regulating the application of science but should not be a
stumbling block.
Is the opposition to GM crops
largely because the crops have been released mostly by giant multinational
companies rather than public companies?
I think the agenda of the anti-GM group is to go against all
this and criticize it whether it is released by the public sector groups
or the private sector. So I don't think that's going to make too much
of a difference.
What are the major challenges
facing both global and Indian agriculture?
The challenge for the Indian agriculture is to produce more
food. Although, we seem to be in a good shape now, you see there are 250
million people who go to bed hungry everyday. If they have the purchasing
power, then we will have a shortage of the food situation. And our
population is increasing at a fast pace. We are adding 18 million people
every year. So the food production must continue to increase at about the
same rate. Otherwise we will run into problems that we had in the 1950s
and 1960s. Further investments in irrigation has virtually ceased and good
land is being lost to industrialization. If present trends continue, it
will not be possible to meet future demand for food.
GM crops will be helpful here. We can use both
conventional methods as well as the biotechnology. Both should be used,
wherever there is application. Globally there is a lot of work going on.
The food security seems to be adequate. Only developing countries have
some problem but most of the European countries have got good food
security.
What is the status of the
global agricultural production?
It has slowed down. It's not as good as in the 1970s and the
1980s. The rice grain and wheat were increasing at the rate of 2.5 percent
in the 1970s, by 1980s this was down to 2 percent and in the 1990s it was
down to 1 percent and it is now 1percent or less than 1 percent. So the
rate of increase has declined primarily because the steam out of the green
evolution has run out. |
