Sustainability

Biotechnologies to feed the world

In order to solve the problem of having enough agricultural production to feed the world population, man is now exploring the way of “biotechnologies” applied to plants. This way seems to be very promising, but not everybody agrees with it and someone thinks it is unsafe for men and the environment.
With the word “biotechnologies” we mean any productive process that implies the use of biological agents, cells and their products to modify the original gene of a plant or an animal and to obtain a new species with different characteristics. The development of biotechnologies has particularly intensified in the last ten years, thanks to protein chemistry, the fusion of animal and vegetal cells and genetic engineering. Biotechnologies allow to manipulate genetic material and transfer it from one organism to another. In this way it is possible to generate vegetal or animal organisms that are genetically modified and that will allow to increase productivity, reduce costs or extend farming to new climatic areas.