Biotechnology Will Benefit the Middle East

As in many times past, America is beset by ruthless enemies. But this time, our enemy is not a nation, but a culture shaped by intense envy. In large part this envy is itself shaped by the desert landscape of the Middle East, where there is little water, only a few oases, only a few date palms. To get something in the desert, you must take it away from whoever has it.

Desert peoples do not expect rising economic growth trends. Arabs were among the first peoples to try irrigated farming—only to find that irrigation builds up salts in the soil and ultimately ruins the land. The famed Hanging Gardens of Babylon are now a salt-rimed wasteland in southern Iraq.

Ultimately, America cannot protect itself from the envious anger of the Middle East by profiling airline passengers or keeping Muslim visitors under surveillance. We must help diffuse the anger of Middle Eastern Muslims by helping them generate more of two things for which America is famous: freedom and abundance.

Too few of today’s Middle Eastern Muslims enjoy either. Too many Middle Eastern governments are effective dictatorships that have generated little hope for their citizens. America must try its utmost to support the few efforts being made in the Muslim world to let people vote.

It may be even more important for us to help these Muslims experience the power of technological abundance. Until better standards of living arrive in the dusty markets and the tiny farmhouses, too many of them will think they have nothing to lose by sending their kids on suicide attacks.

We’ve already made a start. While al Qaeda’s extremists were plotting to turn American airliners into guided bombs, American researchers were solving one of the biggest, most intractable problems of Muslim society: the ruinous buildup of salts in its mostly-irrigated croplands.

In 2001, the University of California at Berkeley announced a genetic engineering breakthrough: crop plants which actually remove salt from the soil! The researchers turned on an existing gene in tomato and canola plants that tells them to store in their leaves any salt that enters their systems. Thus the farmer can harvest his crop, and then go back and harvest the salty leaves for industrial use. One canola plant can take out 12 grams of salt per year—and one acre may have 20,000 plants.

Desalinating crops may well represent the biggest step toward sustainability and affluence for the everyday people of the Muslim world since the Hanging Gardens were abandoned more than 2,000 years ago.

Water will be critical too. Pakistan’s population growth has boosted its food needs by 50 percent in the past 20 years, but silting behind its dams has cut irrigation water by one-third. Low-till farming is part of the answer to water shortage. Invented by American farmers during the 1970s OPEC oil emergency, low-till uses herbicides to control weeds instead of erosion-inviting plows. The system radically cuts water runoff and soil losses.

Farmers in Pakistan have recently discovered that low-till works a small miracle in their rice-wheat crop rotations. Low-till farmers need only one day, instead of weeks, to prepare the rice land for wheat. Their wheat matures 3-4 weeks earlier, before the full heat of summer can shrivel the grain. It also takes 30 to 50 percent less water. South Asian farmers planted only 7,500 acres of low-till wheat in as recently as 1998—but may plant a million acres next year.

Cotton is Pakistan’s biggest crop and most important industrial raw material. Voracious bollworms, however, have become resistant to several major pesticides. Now biotech cotton, with its own bred-in natural pesticide, is yielding far more fiber at far less cost. Chinese farmers say they need only two pesticide sprays instead of 12 per season, so it doubles their incomes.

These high-tech farming interventions go directly to the hearts and minds of the working people in the Middle East.

America could sharply increase its support for the FutureHarvest network of Third World agricultural research centers—which already has major facilities in major Muslim countries, including Syria, Indonesia, and Nigeria. (The whole FutureHarvest budget is less than $400 million per year.)

Computers and electronics are another promising high-tech route to greater prosperity in the Middle East. The rise of the Irish computer industry has defused Ireland’s ancient land-based hatreds, and quelled the vicious atrocities of the Irish Republican Army. The Muslim world was once famed for its advances in mathematics, architecture, and science, and with rededicated schools, it could be again.

That seems the only path to real peace.

Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the Hudson Institute.

This article originally appeared in the Knight-Ridder Tribune on June 28, 2002, and is reprinted with permission.