(Non)organic crops
Planning to harvest 80 million tons of grain in five years, Ukraine should decide on the way this will be achieved
Ukraine plans to boost the annual harvest of grain up to 80 million tons by 2015. This goal is set in the new program “Grain of Ukraine,” Mykola Bezuhly, President of the National Academy of Agrarian Sciences of Ukraine says. The academician has assessed this year’s crop as over 51 million tons. In his view, this may break a record of the year 2008, when the agrarians harvested 50.2 million tons of grain. Yet the Ministry of Agrarian Policies and Food of Ukraine is less optimistic and forecasts about 47 million tons.
It is an ambitious goal to boost the harvest of grain by almost 30 million tons within five years. In Bezuhly’s opinion, this can be achieved by full use of the genetic potential of the Ukrainian varieties of grain crops. In his words, this potential has been fulfilled today by an average 30-35 percent, while it is possible to raise this index to 75 percent thanks to state of the art technologies. To increase harvests, we should use more fertilizers and anti-pest chemicals as well as change the zonal structure of grain cultivation areas, he says. All this requires 224 billion hryvnias, Bezuhly emphasizes.
Experts say that increased harvests will, in turn, revitalize livestock farming and essentially boost grain exports – to as many as 45 million tons a year. There are a lot of those who buy Ukrainian wheat, barley, rye, and other grain crops today: Egypt, Turkey, Israel, Bangladesh, Libya, Kenya, Korea, Georgia, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Syria, and Spain.
But, as academics and the abovementioned ministry anticipate bumper crops, they should answer the following question: what kind of product do we want to get as a result? Or, in other words, should we develop organic or traditional agrarian production?
On the one hand, the world is showing a trend towards the development of organic production. And Ukraine can, like nobody else, meet the demand for this kind of products: due to lack of funds, many agrarians use much fewer chemicals per hectare than the norm requires, and some do not use them at all.
But Maria Kolesnyk, chief of the AAA consulting agency’s analytical department, says it would be unwise to exclusively focus on this direction. “Elsewhere, one stakes on ‘organics’ if he can pay for it. And far from all can pay. The point is that organic crop farming and any organically-grown produce costs three times as much as those grown traditionally,” she says. For this reason, the expert continues, it is impossible to keep even one country well-fed by means of organic crop farming only. So there must be a parity of the organic and traditional ways of crop farming.
Besides, Kolesnyk says, Ukraine should not have put any obstacle to importing new foreign varieties of wheat, since national varieties were developed many years ago, and climatic conditions have changed over this period of time. So one should grow what suits the weather, she adds.
In his comment to The Day, Volodymyr Hirko, deputy director for research of the National Research Center at the Institute of Crop Farming, noted that Ukrainian scientists have today over 100 varieties of wheat with a yield of 80 quintals per hectare at their disposal. Moreover, the Mexico-based International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center and its branches throughout the world always ranked Ukrainian varieties very high on the list of world grain crops, the academic says.
Asked by The Day if these varieties contained GMOs [genetically modified organisms. – Ed.], the scientist said “no.” Yet, Hirko admits that, in spite of a GMO ban, the Ukrainian market can offer today genetically modified soy, rapes, potatoes, and maize. But there are no GMOs in wheat and barley, he adds. Yet active research is underway in Ukraine and the world to breed GM-wheat varieties. The current level of plant breeding has almost exhausted its potential, he says. For this reason, attempts are being made to use GMOs to breed an absolutely new generation of varieties that could help feed the entire world.
When The Day’s journalist noted that GMOs pose a threat to human health, the academic said this fact had not yet been officially confirmed, while GMO upsides are obvious. For example, he says, some countries carry out experiments on grafting the gene of chitin, which breaks the vertebrae of pests, to the genes of plants. This makes it unnecessary to use chemicals for pest control, Hirko explains. So the agricultural produce will be more pollution-free. And this gene is not hazardous to humans for our organism does not have it, the academic said in conclusion.
