Week 7

Once again the lesson started with a question which had me thinking about our future. Dr. Shahi asked this question: Will we be more sustainable if we grow our own resources?

In my opinion, of course! If we grew our own resources, we would be less reliant on other factors, especially the non-renewable sources which are bound to run out one day. Furthermore, as Dr. Shahi mentioned, by growing our own resources, we would also be able to generate more income.

The main topic today was on biotechnology. Dr. Shahi said that biotechnology is nothing different from what humans have been doing all along. It is merely the pin-pointing and targeting of our entire approach.

Dr. Shahi played several videos during lesson time today, but the one that I gained the most insight from was “Sustainable Agriculture and the Environment”. The video focused on how as the world population continually gets larger, our ecosystem becomes at risk because the amount of resources we have available are decreasing. Farmers are being introduced to agri-biotechnology, which helps to increase the production of food. Furthermore, agri-biotechnology can also be used to cope with the increase in global energy use we are going to face due to the growing world population.

Lenard’s presentation also showed how such technology is going to drastically change the way crops are being grown and how positively we have progressed with the aid of these technologies.
He also showed us 2 videos on Vertical Farming which was really interesting! It seems like a pretty feasible idea, especially for Singapore, since we are not self-sustainable with respect to crops. With this system, we are able to produce 5 times more crops than a normal farm. This saves us space as well, which has proved to be a huge problem for us, since we are such a small island.

One last issue I would like to address is regarding the reading for this week. In the reading entitled “Ending World Hunger” by Norman Borlang, the issue of global hunger and scarcity of food in future are identified. While we need to increase the supply of food in order to effectively face this problem, it is a problem getting the new forms of technology to reach the farmers, especially those in the rural areas. Thus, it is my view that even as technology advances such that we are capable of producing enough food to meet the growing population, we need to ensure that these technologies are being put to good use by all farmers. Furthermore, by producing a greater supply, we are bringing greater revenues to the farmers.

I would rate this lesson 8/10 because the lesson was clear-cut, and I was able to clearly understand the points being made by the oral presenters as well as by Dr. Shahi. However, I agree with Dr. Shahi that all 5 presentations today touched on agriculture and technology; there was little on industrial biotechnology. I suppose it is because industrial biotechnology is still a rather new concept and hence people are not that confident about presenting on such a topic.