If this process is simple to scale then we absolutely do need it. There is little chance of us fixing our food waste problem and increasing the efficiency of foreign aid in a timely manner. If more and larger crops could be grown on even more marginal land closer to where people desperately need the food then it is a solution we should use. I'm assuming that we'd aim for making these modified plants easily available to any farmer that wishes to grow them.
> If more and larger crops could be grown on even more marginal land closer to where people desperately need the food then it is a solution we should use.
That's not going to happen. People that desperately need the food don't have a problem of not growing enough rice or potatoes because of the nature of the crop. It's not why they are hungry. It's any other reason, politics, weather, logistics, economics, you name it.
The only things this will do is allow some company to patent this, and then sell it under restricted conditions that will be unfavorable to those who are hungry.
Yield increase is not really a winner if you have no water, if you are at war, if you don't have money/land, or if corporations own your society.
We reached a state in humanity development where any improvement in agricultural yield for basic food is not only unnecessary, but will lead to more problems than solution.
I agree that patents on this are likely to stifle most of the advantages, but not that this would create more problems than solutions.
For one thing, it greatly changes the calculus of a Mars mission. A long–term Mars mission needs food, and growing that food on Mars seems like an obvious choice at first glance. But reliably growing food on Mars requires some fairly sophisticated technology: LED lighting, fine automatic control of atmospheric gasses (otherwise the O₂ from the plants would rapidly become a huge fire risk), similar for the water, refrigeration, and an extra large power plant to run it all. Up until now it looked like it would be cheaper to make regular shipments of food and water from Earth to Mars than it would be to make regular shipments of spare parts to keep all of that machinery working. A 50% increase in calories per square foot means that you only need 67% as much machinery, and therefore only 67% as many spare parts.
Even if this created no other benefits, which I find hard to believe, it would be worth it just for a successful Mars mission.
> Yield increase is not really a winner if you have no water, if you are at war, if you don't have money/land, or if corporations own your society.
Very much true. We eliminate the global hunger if we can eliminate food wastage in US supermarkets alone.
US supermarkets literally throw away enough food to feed all of famine struck countries, and probably even twice.
> We reached a state in humanity development where any improvement in agricultural yield for basic food is not only unnecessary, but will lead to more problems than solution.
I push for an idea of unification of the world under a single global democratic government.
The solution to the global problems, must be global.
Foreign aid isn't the problem. It's the problem of the market pushing out local production and making countries entirely dependent on imports from hypercapitalist countries. What countries need is industrial and technical support to be more self-sufficient with aid filling the gap rather than replacing their entire economy.
This means trade barriers, tech-transfer, and not bombing the shit out of places.
