06 Feb 2012: Report In Fast-Track Technology, Hope For a Second
Green Revolution With advances in a technique known as fast-
track breeding, researchers are developing crops that can
produce more and healthier food and can adapt and thrive as the
climate shifts. In Zambia during the current planting season, a
corn crop will go into the fields that begins the process of
rapidly boosting vitamin A content by as much ten-fold — helping
to address a nutritional deficiency that causes 250,000-500,000
children to go blind annually, most of them in Africa and Asia.
In China, Kenya, and Madagascar, also this planting season,
farmers will put out a crop of Artemisia annua that yields 20 to
30 percent more of the chemical compound artemisinin, the basis
for what is now the world’s standard treatment for malaria. Both
improvements are happening because of fast-track breeding
technology that promises to produce a 21st-century green
revolution. It is already putting more food on tables — though
it’s unclear whether it can