Titolo Provvisorio

Cultivating fields has become easier in the last century, thanks to synthetic fertilisers, extracted from hydrocarbons by the Haber Bosch process. Without the two German chemists, it is estimated that four billion people would go hungry today, or never have come into the world. More than a century later, however, the knot of synthetic fertilisers is coming to the boil: on the one hand they alone generate 2.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions (more than air transport) and on the other hand half of them are wasted, which instead of nourishing food plants end up polluting the waters, causing vast dead zones in the world's seas. In addition, they make farmers dependent on petro-states like Russia or the Emirates and expose them to frequent hydrocarbon crises, such as the one we are currently experiencing with the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Hence the need to look for new ways to make agriculture more sustainable and less dependent on fossil fuels.

The first attempt to make the main food plants self-fertilising has been underway for decades, but has not yet achieved its goal: it involves incorporating within the plant genome the mechanisms used by those microorganisms - known as diazotrophs - that use the molecular nitrogen present in the air (N2) to produce ammonia (NH3), much better than the Haber-Bosch process and without any need for hydrocarbons. The result would be a GMO capable of independently fixing atmospheric gaseous nitrogen in a more biologically useful form and thus dispensing with nitrogenous fertilisers. So far, the GMO world has achieved good results on other fronts, but has not freed agriculture from its dependencies. Most American maize is genetically modified and contains a gene for herbicide resistance, which means that fields can be sprayed with powerful herbicides without damaging food crops. This is an advantage for companies selling herbicides and herbicide-resistant seeds, but it has not made agriculture less dependent on hydrocarbons, if anything the opposite. Moreover, it has fuelled widespread scepticism towards the very concept of GMOs. Europe has never welcomed the idea and its regulatory standards have curbed the use of this technology even in developing countries wishing to sell on European markets.

But now we are faced with new genomic techniques, called 'assisted evolution techniques' (Tea), which should enable us not to repeat the same mistakes, and in fact the European Council and Parliament have already agreed on the Commission's proposal to deregulate them. Scientifically, genetic modification is indeed different. In a GM plant, an animal gene is inserted into the plant genome, as for example in some GM maize varieties in which the genes of a bacterium poisonous to certain pests have been inserted. Because the gene comes from another species, GM plants are known as 'transgenic'. The new genomic techniques, on the other hand, merely insert small mutations with the now well-known Crispr method - already used in medicine also in the human organism - equivalent to a lucky cross that could have occurred naturally, without using the DNA of other species.

Scientists around the world are working to introduce the natural nitrogen-fixing capacity of legumes, which do not need fertilisers, into important crops such as wheat, barley and maize. Researchers at the University of California, Davis, were among the first to use the Crispr technique to create a wheat variety capable of activating microorganisms in the soil to develop the enzyme nitrogenase, which converts nitrogen in the air into ammonia, meeting the nutritional needs of the crop even with a minimal input of chemical fertilisers. Researchers at the University of Aarhus, Denmark, have applied Crispr on barley for the same purpose. And the giants are also moving: Bayer has a project on maize with Pairwise, the first American start-up to market Crispr-modified vegetables, while the Gates Foundation has invested 26 million on rice.

In Italia, Tea research is already an operational reality, with the start of the first six field trials and the birth of the Tea4It programme, a Crea project financed by Masaf with nine million euros and coordinated by Concetta Licciardello. In the fruit and vegetable sector, Crea is engaged in the development of new fruit and vegetable varieties, such as orobanche-resistant tomatoes, aubergines with reduced browning or vines resistant to downy mildew and oidium. "In this positive climate, we are about to transplant, in a little over a month, for the third year in a row, a field of brusone-resistant Tea rice, more extensive than the previous ones, from which we expect to collect solid scientific data that can be used to decide whether our work can be safely shared with farmers when the regulations allow it," said biotechnologist Vittoria Brambilla, who teaches General Botany at the University of Milan, during the States General on Tea.