Talk:High-yielding variety

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

	Agropedia Portal This article is within the scope of the WikiProject Agriculture, which collaborates on articles related to agriculture. To participate, you can edit this article or visit the project page for more details.
???	This article has not yet received a rating on the quality scale.
???	This article has not yet received a rating on the importance scale.
Assessment comments This article has not been rated for quality and/or importance yet. Please rate the article and then leave comments here to explain the ratings and/or to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the article.

[edit] soapboxing removed

i have removed the following paragraphs from this article. The exact same text was added to genetic erosion and genetic pollution. Both articles were started by the same author that added this text here. This reads a lot like soapboxing and given it is being cut and p[asted throughout wikipedia it borders on activist SPAM too. Maybe we can salvage something from it here on the talk page? David D. (Talk) 23:09, 16 November 2007 (UTC)

---

Conventional hybridization for higher yield, genetic engineering and the resulting loss of biodiversity, a threat to food security

See also: Biodiversity and Food security

In agriculture and animal husbandry, green revolution popularized the use of conventional hybridization to increase yield many folds by creating "high-yielding varieties". Often the handful of breeds of plants and animals hybridized originated in developed countries and were further hybridized with local verities, in the rest of the developing world, to create high yield strains resistant to local climate and diseases. Local governments and industry since have been pushing hybridization with such zeal that several of the wild and indigenous breeds evolved locally over thousands of years having high resistance to local extremes in climate and immunity to diseases etc. have already become extinct or are in grave danger of becoming so in the near future. Due to complete disuse because of un-profitability and uncontrolled intentional, compounded with unintentional crosspollination and crossbreeding (genetic pollution) formerly huge gene pools of various wild and indigenous breeds have collapsed causing widespread genetic erosion and genetic pollution resulting in great loss in genetic diversity and biodiversity as a whole^[1].

A genetically modified organism (GMO) is an organism whose genetic material has been altered using the genetic engineering techniques generally known as recombinant DNA technology. Genetic Engineering today has become another serious and alarming cause of genetic pollution because artificially created and genetically engineered plants and animals in laboratories, which could never have evolved in nature even with conventional hybridization, can live and breed on their own and what is even more alarming interbreed with naturally evolved wild varieties. Genetically Modified (GM) crops today have become a common source for genetic pollution, not only of wild varieties but also of other domesticated varieties derived from relatively natural hybridization^{[2][3][4][5][6]}.

It is being said that genetic erosion coupled with genetic pollution is destroying that needed unique genetic base thereby creating an unforeseen hidden crisis which will result in a severe threat to our food security for the future when diverse genetic material will cease to exist to be able to further improve or hybridize weakening food crops and livestock against more resistant diseases and climatic changes^[7].

---