Tackling the Hidden Costs of Food Insecurity
Written by Nadia Radzman
Plant biotechnology has an important role to play in improving food security
Everyone needs food and yet not everyone is aware of the current, dire state of food security. The recent report on The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World, published at the end of 2023 by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), outlines serious concerns regarding global food security with more than 700 million people experiencing chronic hunger and 2.4 billion people experiencing acute food insecurity across the world. At this rate, we are not likely to achieve Zero Hunger by 2030 – one of the several ambitious UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Another recent report on The State of Food and Agriculture 2023 by the FAO outlines the different hidden costs of the current global food system, two of which are particularly concerning: environment and health. The hidden environmental cost is primarily due to greenhouse gases emission from conventional agriculture, excessive use of non-sustainable nitrogen fertilisers, and toxic chemicals that negatively impact the environment. For the hidden health cost, consumption of unhealthy food with low nutrition leads to undernourishment and poor diet, creating or exacerbating health conditions. These hidden costs can also interact. For example, the environmental costs may negatively impact health outcomes by contributing to excessive weather changes or generating pollution from toxic chemicals.
With an expected increase of 10 billion people in 2050 and additional unpredictable weather changes due to climate change, we need urgently to address how we grow our food. Extreme weather changes not only reduce crop productivity but exacerbate the spread of crop pests and diseases. Any new ways of growing our food crops should be environmentally friendly and sustainable, while maintaining high productivity that ensures the availability of healthy and nutritious food.
Plant biotechnology innovation can address our problems with conventional agriculture and tackle the hidden costs described above by not only delivering crops with the desired traits for high productivity and sustainability, but also fortifying crops with necessary nutrients that are essential for a healthy diet. This innovation includes new ways to address the use of toxic herbicides, pesticides, and non-sustainable fertilisers such as the gene-editing technology, CRISPR-Cas9 which been utilised to generate crops with improved traits that can withstand the adverse effects of climate change. These kinds of technologies should be consolidated and integrated in their application to improve crops and agricultural techniques for a resilient food system.
Innovative use of peptides in plant biotechnology can accelerate the progress for sustainable agriculture
Plant peptides can address both crop improvement for productivity and sustainability, and technological improvement for better health and environment. As a plant biologist with a chemistry background, I am fascinated by the versatility of peptides in regulating important processes in plants. Peptides are essentially very small proteins. Proteins are made of amino acid subunits and if each amino acid is like a bead, then a protein would be an extremely long string of beads that are folded into a manageable shape. Peptides on the other hand are like short strings that are no more than 100 beads long and often much shorter (a well-known example of an important peptide, albeit not in plants, is insulin).
Compared to other molecules that can also control plant development (the majority of them are plant hormones), peptides are bigger in size and they can be manipulated in different ways to control how plants grow and respond to the external environment. This makes them an attractive group of molecules to be used in plant biotechnology – especially for accelerating crop improvement.
Based on my research experience working with four different peptide families, I am developing a new peptide-based technology to make crop improvements faster, easier, and more efficient. Importantly, I use a range of peptides to open up two bottlenecks in plant biotechnology: molecule delivery into plant tissue and plant regeneration. There is little innovation to address these two bottlenecks and we still use decades-old techniques for delivering molecules and regenerating plants – techniques that are very inefficient.
The CRISPR-Cas9 I mentioned a moment ago is a revolutionary tool to edit and improve traits in plants. This tool, however, requires delivery of DNA and proteins into plant tissue and regeneration of the tissue into a whole new plant. Our conventional methods are not efficient in delivering the molecules and many plants are not able to undergo regeneration after the delivery process. Peptides, however, can control plant growth and response and so I am using a combination of peptides to improve the molecule delivery process and to force tissue regeneration, even in plants that are recalcitrant. This results in a faster and more efficient method for improving crop plants, thus facilitating emerging technologies. My approach also allows us to quickly test a variety of new plants with improved traits against harsh weather conditions and if further improvement is needed, we can reiterate the process within a short period of time to produce better climate-resilient plants.
Integrating legumes (or plants from the bean family) into the food system has several benefits
Another of my expertise is legume biology, and so I am a big proponent of (re)utilising legumes as climate-resilient plants into our food system.
Legumes, or plants from the bean family (Leguminosae or Fabaceae), are known for their nitrogen-fixing properties through symbiotic interaction with special soil bacteria. These plants are ideal for sustainable agriculture – providing a high protein source and replenishing the soil with available nitrogen without the use of nitrogen fertilisers. Most legumes, however, are extremely difficult to regenerate and improve using conventional biotechnology. As legumes are also known for their climate-resilient traits, lack of genetic improvement in these plants could hinder our progress towards better food security.
To address this, I am using the peptide-based technology to find novel ways to improve key legume crops and contribute to sustainable agriculture and healthy food development. In Fava beans, for example, I increase the L-DOPA levels, a precursor for the happy molecule to dopamine, to support mental health. By accelerating crop improvement with these kinds of traits, I hope that legumes can change the food system for the better – a win for the planet with more sustainable crops, a win for the farmers with better soil, and a win for the consumers with healthier food.
Innovative plant biotechnology is important to ensure better food security and a resilient food system. Current technology has at least two bottlenecks that need to be addressed. Using plant peptides as versatile molecules, we can release these bottlenecks and provide a better method to improve our crop plants. This exciting technology can accelerate genetic improvement in challenging crops such as legumes which can, in turn, serve as a sustainable protein source.
At the same time, this is only one example of plant biotechnology. More innovation is crucial to address our food security issues and to work towards the Zero Hunger goal by 2030.
Nadia Radzman
Nadia is a postdoctoral researcher in plant developmental biology at the Sainsbury Laboratory Cambridge University (SLCU) and a founder of an early-stage agritech company that aims to accelerate crop improvement in plants that are impossible to be improved through conventional technique. She received her PhD in plant biology from The Australian National University (ANU) where she focused on the characterisation of the first positive peptide regulator for legume root nodule development that improves biological nitrogen fixation. Nadia has previously been awarded the Talent Programme Fellowship from Wageningen University & Research, Netherlands and was recently one of the winners of the #21towatch 2024 for her entrepreneurial research. In Cambridge, she is an active steering committee member of Cambridge Global Food Security (GFS) and a research associate at the King’s E-Lab.