Session 7

This week's lesson covers the BioBusiness Revolution: Agribiology, Environmental Life Sciences and Industrial Biotechnology (Past, Present and Future) 

We talked about the cases of poeple exploiting and consuming a lot of non-renewable resources. Hence, we have to try to create and grow the resources that we need, then we will finally be on the road to sustainability. If not in the near future, there will be a scarcity of food supply and people will starve. Moreover, we have to think about how to grow the natural resources now to find solutions as it would be too late if the resources are depleted.

Prior to year 2008, most of the parts of the world are rural environment. Strategies were to deal with rural and lack of space. However, with the increasing of the Urban environment, countries are more dependant on the resources and goods being supplied by rural areas. It is very attractive to stay in the urban area as there is high level of resources, safety, other benefits. However, there are also dsadvantages which are overcrowding and higher competition for resources and food.

People need to have self-ustainability of the food and ecosystem and grow our own food. Some ways of solving the problem of food scarcity in the future is the applying the tools of biotechnology on food and create better food with higher yields and benefits. The food will be also resistance to pest and diseases and Drought resistance crops will ensure higher harvest even with lower water supply.

For Biobased materials, people will also create sustainable use of non-renewable resources such as using corn to make oil as well as to be consumed as food. Farmer of the future who will be very knowledgeable and skills to grow crops and rear animals with high harvest and food supply.

Some people may or may not like to eat genetically modified food, but GM will definitely become a solution to the shortage of food. Genetic Modification has already been applied to a lot of food especially tomato ketchup. Another way would be Organic plants to grow plants using chemical fertilizers or naturally.

For this week's presentation, the topics being discussed were green technology for sustainable development, test tube burgers, the next green revolution and monsanto company but i will only touch on the green technology and the monsanto company. 

For Green technology for sustainable development, the belief of technology to become more efficient or not once possible. However, with the improvement of technology, alot of things have been made possible and with the selection of technology such as system Independence, Image of modernity, Individual technology vs collective technology, cost, risk, evolutionary capacity and single and multi-purpose technology.

The situation analysis has Interesting Observation that there has been poverty reduction and gender divide in these countries. In Nepal, Biogas reduced air borne diseases and health and sanitation problems while in India, Biofuel reduced global warming, reduce fear of energy crisis and provide new market for farmers. The Key Takeaways are:

1.       More factors besides costs that affect the integration of GT

2.      Solutions can also create new problems

3.      Chain effect of GT aside from sustainable development

For the next green revolution, GMO Genetically modified organisms is one of the solution to consistent crop harvest and feeding a growing population. However, there are safety risks and environmental risks. Nonetheless, GMO is becoming a fact of life for the world as there is a need to sustain growing population. GMO’s Allure harder to resist as the plants grew from the seeds that monsanto supplied are resistant to pesticides and herbicides, new qualities such as drought resistance, beneficial to consumers with enhanced taste and better nutritional benefits. Although Monsanto force farmers to purchase seeds from them every year, feeding people should take precedence over profits for producing food and i think Monsanto should allow farmers to reuse the seeds every year to lower the cost of the farmers.

Overall, i would rate this week's session a 9/10 as it covered most aspects of the biobusiness in the agribiology but there weren't any presentations on the industrial biotechnology, hence it lacks some information for this week.