>
> >Farmers growing brinjal, a staple vegetable crop in Bangladesh, typically
> must spray their fields every one to two days — or 80-100 times during the
> growing season. But by using eggplant that is genetically engineered to
> resist the fruit and shoot borer pest, farmers like Aminul have been able
> to greatly reduce or eliminate their use of pesticides. They’ve also been
> able to achieve a higher yield, and attract more customers.


Thanks for this post Pete--exactly the sort of example that I've been
talking about.  In India, it is often children making those 100
applications of neurotoxic insecticides (Christina can tell us about the
effects upon their brains).  And think about the effect upon pollinators of
100 applications of insecticide.

Here's a case of a precision-bred cultivar being a win for the farmer, his
children, the consumer, pollinators, and the rest of the environment.

Before anyone responds, I'm aware that the Bt trait is not a final answer.
Life evolves, and so long as we grow monocultures, insects, fungi, and
viruses will become "pests."  Unfortunately, without monocultures, we could
not feed most of humanity.  Thus, crop cultivars will need to continually
evolve.

The pests evolve more quickly than traditional breeding methods can keep up
with.  Precision breeding reduces the amount of time, and has the potential
to help prevent large-scale human starvation, and the clearing of more
virgin habitat for agriculture.

It's not a perfect world, and we humans make it less perfect every single
day by the addition of another 200,000 mouths to feed.  We need to use all
the environmentally-friendly tools at our disposal.  Precision breeding is
an important one of those tools.

-- 
Randy Oliver
Grass Valley, CA
www.ScientificBeekeeping.com

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