MUMBAI - Professor Keerti Singh Rathore and his colleagues have given a
surprisingly tasty twist to the 7,000-year history of cotton. After serving a
mundane but essential multi-millennia function as a material for covering the
Earth's post-Garden of Eden inhabitants, the plant's seeds may now be used to
help feed folk, including malnourished millions in Asia and Africa.
Cotton Inc, a North Carolina-based industry body that touts a celebrated
American advertisement campaign "Fabric of Our Lives", could have hardly
expected cotton to emerge as food to save lives.
Further west, in Texas, India-born Rathore and genetic scientists are creating
the possibility of cotton seeds being an abundantly
available, protein-rich, cheaper and stronger nutrition source than cereals
such as rice, wheat, maize and millet.
Rathore, who studied at Rajasthan University and then Gujarat University before
earning his PhD at Imperial College, London, is now associate professor and
director of the Laboratory for Crop Transformation at Texas A&M University,
where he and his colleagues have cracked a scientific riddle of making cotton
seeds edible without harming the cotton plant.
They have reduced the presence of a toxic substance called gossypol, which
protects the cotton plant from insects but is poisonous to humans and animals
other than those, such as cows, with multi-chambered stomach digestion
capacity.
An earlier version of cotton seed without gossypol, called "glandless cotton",
was tried decades ago and as early as the 1930s cotton seed flour was used in
doughnuts, biscuits, crackers and bread in the US and Canada. But without
gossypol, the cotton crop died early from insect attacks, and the idea of
"glandless cotton" also perished, with no takers among farmers.
The breakthrough to a possible new chapter in the age-old cotton story involves
a process developed by Rathore and his involving RNA interference (RNAi), a
biotechnology that targets and suppresses a key gene in the embryonic cotton
seed. [1]
The RNAi process reduces gossypol levels in the seed to make cotton seeds safe
enough for human stomachs while keeping it high enough in the rest of the
cotton plant to protect the plant from predatory insects. It means the cotton
crop, widely grown in 80 countries, can now both clothe and nourish us.
The result, with the big breakthrough in 2006 having taken Rathore 12 years of
work, is the prospect of a healthy, inexpensive new food source in the near
future, with cotton seed breads, cookies, protein bars and cotton stew. The
cotton seed flour can boost nutritional value by being mixed with conventional
cooking flours.
"We have tested our engineered plants for five generations in the greenhouse to
make sure that the trait is stable," Rathore told Asia Times Online. "We
conducted our first field study this year and confirmed that the engineered
plants grew normally and were still maintaining the ultra-low gossypol
cottonseed (ULGC) trait." He says the new cotton seed has a "pleasant nutty
flavor". Others say it tastes better than soya bean.
Rathore's cotton seed meets with World Health Organization and US Food and Drug
Administration standards for food consumption, and is undergoing further tests
ahead of appearing on shop shelves and as cheaper and better animal feed.
The new biotechnology gives cotton a much-changed status. Its earlier history
as a "white gold' whose cultivation went hand-in-hand with slavery - more than
six million slaves are estimated to have suffered in cotton, coffee and sugar
plantations in southern USA, Cuba and Brazil as late as 1860.
Even if the ultra-low gossypol cotton seed delivers half its promise, the
possibility of it tackling global hunger on a massive scale makes the Rathore
team effort one of the more significant food-related scientific breakthroughs
in recent times.
Nearly 200 million children in poor countries suffer stunted growth due to
insufficient nutrition, according to a new United Nations report published on
December 2, as part of a three-day international summit in Rome to address
hunger across the world. Over 90% of those malnourished children live in Africa
and Asia.
The Rome-based UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) declared this year
that a record 1.02 billion people worldwide, or one in six humans, suffer from
hunger - with family finances ruined with high food prices, recession, drought
and war.
Nor has hunger spared the world's richest country. Ahead of Thanksgiving, the
US Department of Agriculture revealed that one in seven American families
suffer without regular and reliable access to food, and 17 million American
families and four million American children regularly go hungry.
"Technology similar to the one we have used in ultra-low gossypol cotton seed
certainly opens up some new sources for use as food," says Rathore. "As the
global climatic conditions worsen, as many are predicting, humanity may have to
turn to new sources to meet the food requirement."
Cotton seeds contain about 22% protein, say research scientists, as compared to
7% to 10% protein levels in rice, wheat and other cereals.
For every kilogram of cotton fibre, cotton plants also produce 1.65 kg of seed
a year. According to Rathore and team, "Forty-four million tonnes of cotton
seed [9.4 million tonnes of available protein] produced each year could provide
the total protein requirements of half a billion people for one year [at 50
grams per day] if the seed were safe for human consumption."
This nutrition source, they say, would significantly contribute to improving
health in developing countries, and cope with a predicted 50% increase in the
world population in the next 50 years. FAO says global food output has to
increase 70% by 2050 to feed a projected population of 9.1 billion.
"The ultra-low gossypol cotton seed will have to go through the regulatory
approval process of individual African or Asian country before it can be grown
by the farmers." Rathore informed Asia Times Online. "Several other types of
analyses are yet to be carried out on the ultra-low gossypol cotton seeds, and
all the results will be published next year."
The results would be keenly scanned by watchdogs of the genetically modified
food industry, though Rathore believes there could be less concern about eating
genetically altered cotton seeds than there is regarding other genetically
altered foodstuffs because his RNAi technique involves "shutting down a
chemical process within the seed, not adding something to it".
Even so, farmers in places such as India may prove cautious in adopting the new
seed. Early this decade, a new genetically modified seed, Bt, made by US-based
Monsanto, was introduced into India with the backing of local governments.
Monsanto, the the world's largest seed producer, said it was resistant to
cotton bollworm. This and the hope of higher yields helped to persuade farmers
to switch to the product despite it costing about four and a half times the
cost of normal seed.
Yet within two years, the modified cotton plants were afflicted by blight and
crops were ruined, leading indebted farmers to commit suicide; figures indicate
more than 100,000 farmers of cotton and other crops have taken their own lives
in the past decade.
Still, the nature of volition and motives influence the result of any endeavor.
Rathore and his team have no plans to cash in on their groundbreaking work at
the expense of poor farmers "We, of course, wish to make it [the ultra-low
gossypol cotton seed] available freely for humanitarian use," says Rathore.
Notes
1. "Engineering cottonseed for use in human nutrition by tissue-specific
reduction of toxic gossypol" by Ganesan Sunilkumar, LeAnne M Campbell, Lorraine
Puckhaber, Robert D Stipanovic, and Keerti S Rathore.
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