Miracle or menace? : biotechnology and the third world / by Robert Walgate.

  • Walgate, Robert
Date:
[1990]
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Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)

Credit: Miracle or menace? : biotechnology and the third world / by Robert Walgate. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    Chapter 3: Plant tissue culture caused by genetic changes), but to be due to some disturbance in development. However, the programme may yet succeed. Unilever has planted out another 70-80 clones, with variations in the tissue culture techniques, in trial production in the nursery. First fruits of the test are expected in 1991-92. By 1996, Corley hopes, it will be possible to select reliable high-yielding clones for production. Unilever are taking a long-term view of this, said Corley, and are still at the beginning of what can be done. If the oil palm clone finally proves a success, a possible market of a million seedlings a year will open up in the late 1990s and a major impact on the vegetable oils market will follow. Some 100 million plants would be needed if all the world's plantations were to be substituted with the potentially high-productive, cloned varieties [24]. Palm oil is used as cooking oil; in margarine; as a cocoa-butter substitute; as a fat component in ice-cream; in bakery fat; as a chemical feedstock to produce fatty acids, esters and glycerol, soap, candles, lubricants; as a plasticiser for PVC; in tin plating; and in cosmetics. It is also a rich source of certain dietary chemicals that, it is claimed, may reduce cancer (beta-carotene, tocopherols and tocotrienols mop up free radicals, highly-reactive molecules which damage DNA and can cause cancer). Oil palm originated in West Africa, but is now widely grown in Asia and Latin America, with Malaysia the leading exporter of the two kinds of palm oil, one from the flesh of the fruit, and one (high in industrially useful lauric acids) from the kernel. World production of vegetable oils more than tripled between 1960 and 1984, from 13 to 44 million tonnes a year. Within this total, palm oil quadrupled from 1.5 to 6 million tonnes, 80% of it produced in South-East Asia (60% in Malaysia alone). The current 25-year life of a plantation is limited by the trees — which fruit at the very top — growing too tall to climb. So one aim of an accelerated breeding programme would be to produce shorter palms. Classical breeding has been slow (as with all trees) as the palms flower only after several years. French plant breeders took 30 years to increase oil palm yields by 35% — and to reduce stem height by 20%. However, according to L. H. Jones of the University of Cambridge, UK [25], there is at present almost total ignorance of the genetics of yield, quality, drought resistance, wind resistance or disease resistance of the oil palm, of the interaction between the plant and disease organisms, or of the mechanisms of pest resistance. Much basic biology is still to be done, he says.
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