0/0/2012
A third resource needed for a global industrial growth: bio-technologies.
by C. Vitali
Rural productions have always been the very first step needed to ensure and to consolidate the survival of any stable local community where further cultural and economical processes could gradually take place.
The basic resources to root to fit the local context sustainable types of rural activities has always been the basic technical know how and the availability of water; a fundamental necessity to cultivate and to feed the human beings devoted to production. Besides the availability of that primary resource, the continuity and growth of rural development have been largely limited by the ability to overcome the difficulties opposed to production by the local environment that rarely is fit to the requirements of different productions.
The gradual growth of technical know how in theme of rural productions has rendered available to anyone subsidiary techniques and technologies able to compensate the hostile factors opposed by the specific local environmental parameters.
Alternating cultures, alternating productions, crossbreeding species cultivated in ways adequate to strengthen productivity of the specific environments, fertilize the soil, uproot noxious species, spread adequate chemicals fighting hostile biological agents, all have successive steps characterizing the growing industrial ability tailoring cultivations to the local environmental specificity. The seasonal cycles of rural productions have allowed the local communities to gather savings that during the rest of the year could be invested in other industry sectors. Those savings have fostered the initial growth of handcraft industries (able to produce technical products apt to improve productivity of the rural activities - irrigation, milling, wagons, silos, distilleries, conserves, preserves, chemicals) and the first types ofservices (insurance against environmental risk, industrial accidents, draught, hail, floods, blazing, disabilities; weather-forecasts).
Water has always been a random, volatile resource except from a few of the many areas where humans have established their communities. The types of support offered by technology have always translated the water-problem into energy delivery to feed the equipment necessary to extract and depurate that scarce and primary resource for rural productions (water pumps, pressure pumps, polluted waters purifiers, desalination plants) or to save that primary commodity optimizing its use to the strict irrigation (calibrated irrigation, reduced sprinkling of liquid anti-parasites and fertilizers).
The energy revolution could grant a diffused and accessible energy availability aiding in reduce the cost of water supply, a second type of commodity (aimed to reduce the quantity used for production of harvests) could be solved thanks the new bio-technologies. They namely offer the opportunity to adopt the cultivation of more productive species less subject to hostile environmental factors with lower amounts of anti-parasites sprinkling requiring lesser water), besides demanding minor amounts of water for equal quantity of harvest. Besides these immediate benefits, bio-technologies offer today improved production in terms of nutritional capacity per unit of cultivated land at unprecedented levels.
OGMs joined to the mentioned primary energy revolution, compose one of the three fundamental resources supplied by science to inaugurate a true global revolution that would permit to liberate Man (even in the most peripheral and dispersed communities) from the necessity to abandon their homeland to search better opportunities to survive (as has always been the case in the past) and to liberate humanity anywhere it chose to live by the uncertainty of conserving their primary sources of wellness.
This is the first step to inaugurate a development model compliant with the cultural diversities and capable to eliminate the traditional dramatic mass migrations in the quest elsewhere of better living conditions. Migrations often harmful and socially painful that hypocrisy hides behind the label of multiculturalism. A concept valid in cases ofindividual voluntary emigrations while just a troubled consequence in the many types of historical Volkswanderungenthat have been a tragedy in the past though they have allowed the hegemonic worldwide diffusion of the cultural model of the western civilization replacing the pre-existent ones (denying the flaunted multiculturalism).
Today the Genetically Modified Organisms could really feed the whole humanity at low prices allowing a huge amount of financial savings and a faster growth of living standards everywhere. Living standards that are the best factor limiting the huge birth rate in the less developed countries where Nature tries to compensate the high rate of death due to starvation and epidemics with high rates of birth. Feeding the indigent populations and delocalizing there mature phases of manufacturing could generate virtuous trade processes appropriate to optimize the use of the global resources from the basic natural commodities, thru the food, waters, medicals, communications and financial capitals.
Man is using already GMOs to correct human genetic diseases by modifying DNA flaws but opposes the diffusion of GMOs techniques in the rural and breeding industry sectors; a strange political ethics indeed!