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As farmers, ranchers, and biotech companies work together to keep America strong and well-fed, they need supportive policy, an expert from the Biotechnology Innovation Organization (BIO) told the American Farm Bureau Convention.
“The American food system and agricultural system has been the best in the world for decades,” said Sylvia Wulf, BIO’s Interim Head of Agriculture and Environment. “We look forward to continuing that.”
In a Jan. 25 fireside chat at the American Farm Bureau Convention in San Antonio, Wulf touched on a range of subjects, including biotech’s contribution to food security and national security, how agricultural biotech aids nutrition and health, growing acceptance of genetic engineering, biobased manufacturing, biofuels, and the need for policy and improved regulation to support biotech.
Wulf was interviewed by Joby Young, the American Farm Bureau Federation’s Executive VP. In his introduction, Young noted the importance of biotech to agriculture in increasing productivity and enabling sustainability.
Young also mentioned how biotech contributes “intangibles like the time in the day that you gain back by having new tools in the tool belt, the food security, the disease resistance — all of these pieces that come together that stem from the value of these advancements in technology.”
Benefits of biotech
A topic that came up frequently was consumer acceptance and appreciation of the benefits that biotech brings to our food supply—and our food.
Regarding genetically modified organisms (GMOs), Wulf said that after 50 years of consuming GMOs, many Americans have grown to understand they are safe and valuable.
“We have seen a continued acceptance of GMOs, particularly in younger demographics. They like technology, and if you can help them understand why you did it, they embrace it,” she said. “Why do we use GMOs? Because we need to make sure that we continue to produce more food on less acres.”
Today, many biotech advances in crops and livestock are focused on very precise gene editing, which simply achieves the benefits of crossbreeding, only faster, by turning genes that already exist in a plant or animal on or off, Wulf said.
“Biotechnology accelerates what would take nature 300 years to do,” she said. “Given the challenges that we face right now—whether it is extreme weather events, different pests, weeds, disease—we’ve got to come up with those solutions a whole lot faster. And that’s where biotechnology can help.”
Wulf listed some specific benefits being achieved:
“We can actually edit produce to be nutritionally better for us and to last longer, but still taste really good,” she said. “Then there are other things, like what can we introduce to the soil that makes it better for you to farm or provides better feed alternatives for ranchers. We’re looking at biotechnology as a way to create those solutions.”
Policy priorities
Making sure we have a plentiful, sustainable supply of food is a national security priority, which is why U.S. leadership in agricultural biotechnology is so important, Wulf said.
“But if we look at what’s happened, we are now at the lowest spending level since 1970 in terms of agricultural research. China outspends the U.S. two times in this area. They want to replace the US as the leader in biotechnology—a stated goal,” she said. “What we want to do is make sure that this administration and Congress understand what they need to do, which is funding agricultural research so that we can continue to lead the world.”
Along with funding research, our leaders in Washington can help ensure the effectiveness of private funding for development through deregulation, something the Trump Administration has said it wants in many areas of government.
“One of our priorities at BIO is really shortening the time to approval,” she said.
Wulf is Board Chair at AquaBounty, which uses biotech to improve fish farming. She said gaining Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval for her company’s innovations took 25 years, a long time for a small company to wait to earn revenue. She noted similar regulatory hurdles at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).
“It takes a lot of money to get these products through FDA-EPA-USDA,” she said. “What we want to do is regulatory reform to create efficiency so that we can bring those cost savings to you.”
Other priorities shared by members of BIO and the Farm Bureau include the need to encourage bio-based manufacturing, a federal preference for purchasing goods produced with biotechnology, and the use of biofuels to help ensure energy independence, according to Wulf.
In general, she said, farmers, ranchers, and the biotech companies helping them need to work together to make sure leaders in Washington to pay attention.
“One of the things that I have seen to really matter when we go into those offices on Capitol Hill are the personal stories of farmers and ranchers,” she said. “This has been a horrible year for agriculture and everybody knows it. That can’t continue.”
“We need to partner with organizations like the American Farm Bureau Federation so that we take that story to the Hill,” Wulf added. Lawmakers need to be told: “You’re putting your whole population at risk if we don’t have food.”
