Question: What are you doing at the moment to help Food Avallability?

Andrew Maynard answered on 14 Jun 2010:

Hi purplewolf9 and everyone else who asked this,

That’s a tough question to answer. A lot of my work involves new technologies that could help food availability, but only if they are developed responsibly.

To give you just two examples:

Much of my work involves how scientists can develop more effective technologies by working with stuff at an incredibly small scale – some people call it nanotechnology. Using this technology, people think that we might be able to apply pesticides more effectively to plants, package foods so that we can transport them more effectively to where they are needed and prevent them going off, and sense when food has been contaminated and so is dangerous to eat. If the technology is developed successfully – so that it is safe, and in a way that people are happy to use it, it could have a big impact on food availability.

The second example is research into changing the genetic code of plants to make them more nutritious, more able to grow in very dry or very wet areas, and more able to resist diseases and pests – all of which can have a big impact on food availability. This has been done in the past through selective breeding and genetic modification. Now though, a new technology is being developed – called synthetic biology – that will possibly allow scientists to design new or at least very different plants on the computer, then encode these new designs into the DNA in living plants. This could have an enormous impact on the availability of nutritious food. But it could also be risky – which is where my work comes in.

Of course, these are only two ways to help food availability out of lots of different options. The important thing is to select and develop the right technologies, and to use them as safely and responsibly as possible.