TWC Session 7

This week’ lesson is a continuation of last week’s lesson on BioBusiness Revolution. However, we focused on agribiology, environmental life science and industrial biotechnology. This week lesson is on how biotechnology plays a part in helping to feed the world’s population in the future. It is also on how the green revolution will help to increase the food supply. We started off the lesson with a quote by our professor. The quote says that “When we are able to grow the resources we need, we will finally be on the road to sustainability.” I totally agree with this sentence because if we were able to recycle all the things that we used, we won’t have to use more resources. This would result in us having sufficient resources in the long run and thus we will be sustainable.

We then moved on to talk about the biobusiness landscape in bioenterprise perspective. Today biobusiness is still in the valley opportunities stage, and one challenge that is faces is to come up with new idea or ways to be on the summit opportunities. Summit opportunities is where people, technologies and resources can be put together to capture the value proposition. Some issues that were discussed in class were growing food vs. growing energy resources and to GM or not to GM. I think we should focus or grow on our food need first and then used the remaining to grow energy resources. While discussing on whether to GM or not to GM, we talked about GM in color sense which I think that it is quite cool. Blue color is used to represent the marina and aquatic applications of technology. Green color represents biotechnology that is applied to agricultural processes. Red color represents those that are applied to medical processes. The last color which is white is known as industrial biotechnology; it is biotechnology applied to industrial processes.

Another quote that we discussed was “There’s enough on this planet for everyone’s need but not for everyone’s greed” by Mahatma Gandhi. This means that if we were to abuse or overuse the resources, problems will start to occur and one is not able to afford this king of problem. Although at time greed can be good, it is bad in this case. People will never be fulfilled and will want more. Greed is a problem to being sustainable since the resources will be depleted very quickly. This will prevent or will be get in the way of achieving food security; a condition where all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life.

This week’s presentation is mostly on genetically modified food and I find all of the quite interesting. One question that was mentioned in class is whether GM food should be labeled.  I think since that consumer can’t taste, see, or smell that the food has been genetically modified, the products should label. This is because consumers have the right to know about it and they should be provided the right to decide whether they want to buy or not if it is genetically modified. I think that the issue now it how much they should label and not whether they should label the food. Now, several countries require food manufacturers to label GM food products. And each country has certain tolerance level of GM before a food must be labeled as modified. For example, Australia allow up to 1% of any ingredient in the food to be genetically engineered before it must be packaged as genetically modified.