Earth population 'exceeds limits'

By Steven Duke
Editor, One Planet, BBC World Service
LIVING ON A CROWDED EARTH
Current world population - 6.8bn
Net growth per day - 218,030
Forecast made for 2040 - 9bn Source: US Census Bureau
There are already too many people living on Planet Earth, according to one of most influential science advisors in the US government.

Nina Fedoroff told the BBC One Planet programme that humans had exceeded the Earth's "limits of sustainability".

Dr Fedoroff has been the science and technology advisor to the US secretary of state since 2007, initially working with Condoleezza Rice.

Under the new Obama administration, she now advises Hillary Clinton.

"We need to continue to decrease the growth rate of the global population; the planet can't support many more people," Dr Fedoroff said, stressing the need for humans to become much better at managing "wild lands", and in particular water supplies.

Pressed on whether she thought the world population was simply too high, Dr Fedoroff replied: "There are probably already too many people on the planet."

GM Foods 'needed'

A National Medal of Science laureate (America's highest science award), the professor of molecular biology believes part of that better land management must include the use of genetically modified foods.

"We have six-and-a-half-billion people on the planet, going rapidly towards seven.

"We're going to need a lot of inventiveness about how we use water and grow crops," she told the BBC.

THE MOST POPULOUS NATIONS
China - 1.33bn
India - 1.16bn
USA - 306m
Indonesia - 230m
Brazil - 191m
"We accept exactly the same technology (as GM food) in medicine, and yet in producing food we want to go back to the 19th Century."

Dr Fedoroff, who wrote a book about GM Foods in 2004, believes critics of genetically modified maize, corn and rice are living in bygone times.

"We wouldn't think of going to our doctor and saying 'Treat me the way doctors treated people in the 19th Century', and yet that's what we're demanding in food production."

In a wide ranging interview, Dr Fedoroff was asked if the US accepted its responsibility to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide, the gas thought to be driving human-induced climate change. "Yes, and going forward, we just have to be more realistic about our contribution and decrease it - and I think you'll see that happening."

And asked if America would sign up to legally binding targets on carbon emissions - something the world's biggest economy has been reluctant to do in the past - the professor was equally clear. "I think we'll have to do that eventually - and the sooner the better."

The full interview with Dr Nina Federoff can be heard on this week's edition of the new One Planet programme on the BBC World Service

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/science/nature/7974995.stm

Could Nanotechnology Make An Average Donut Into Health Food?

Could nanotechnology make donuts into health food? The promise of nanotechnology is that it could allow for re-engineering of ingredients to bring healthy nutrients more efficiently to the body while allowing less-desirable components to pass through, according to a Dutch scientist. (Credit: iStockphoto/Dean Turner)
ScienceDaily (Feb. 14, 2009) — European food companies already use nanotechnology in consumer products, but few volunteer the information to consumers, said Dutch food scientist Frans Kampers.

He is among the panelists gathered in Chicago for the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting symposium "From Donuts to Drugs: Nano-Biotechnology Evolution or Revolution."

Kampers from Wageningen University and Research Center in the Netherlands will take a look at food science issues in his presentation, "What Nanotechnology Can Do for Your Average Donut."

"All of us as scientists are being impacted by nano-bioscience and there are many issues. The interdisciplinary aspect is just one of them," said Rod Hill, a University of Idaho professor and symposium organizer.

The panel includes two graduate students, Jessica Koehne of the University of California, Davis, and Kristina Kriegel of the University of Massachusetts, are working on projects combining, nanotechnology with biology and chemistry.

"On the food side there is greater public resistance to nanomaterials and nanotechnology in food whereas on the biomedical side there is greater public acceptance or less recalcitrance," Hill added.

His focus on applications, products and processes, and on sensors useful for in food safety and food quality monitoring and in packaging, reflects the wide range of nanotechnology's use in the food industry, Kampers said.

"The problem I always face is that people do not understand what we are doing with nanotechnology and food," Kampers said. "Everyone has this vision of nanotechnology being nanoparticles and nanoparticles being risky, so they are very afraid that nanoparticles in food will have an adverse effect on health."

The promise of nanotechnology, the Dutch scientist said, is that it could allow re-engineering ingredients to bring healthy nutrients more efficiently to the body while allowing less-desirable components to pass on through.

European food scientists use nanotechnology to create structures in foods that can deliver nutrients to specific locations in the body for the most beneficial effects, Kampers said.

"We are basically creating nanostructures in food that are designed to fall apart in your body because of digestion so in the end there will not be nanoparticles," Kampers said.

He said there are some researchers studying applications of persistent nanoparticles in food and packaging that he believes could present risks. Use of metal, usually silver, nanoparticles in packaging to slow spoilage could move from the packaging material into the food itself.

"The persistent metal or metal oxide nanoparticles could move into the bloodstream, and research has shown they can migrate into cells or in some cases even into the nucleus of cells," Kampers said.

"These are the more controversial applications of nanotechnology," Kampers added. "More research is necessary to understand the kinetics and dynamics of these particles before large-scale applications in food are developed. At the moment, these types of nanoparticles are rarely used in food products."