Due to war in Ukraine, which has thrown Europe into a panic, and debacles in places like Sri Lanka that banned science in favor of an organic growing process, the world has started to appreciate agricultural progress again.
Wheat is a glaring example of how crops can be left behind due to a lack of genetic engineering. Corn is affordable and so plentiful we can even ridiculously cater to environmental groups and make it a gasoline additive, while wheat is stuck in the past. And with Russia invading Ukraine, 25 percent of wheat exports are at risk.
The solution, writes Terry Wanzek in the Wall Street Journal, is to make it feasible to use the same engineering that made modern insulin, cheese, and cow feed affordable - which will mean bureaucracies like USDA no longer treating completely safe food processes like they are a brand new heart transplant device. It took nearly two decades to put one gene from a natural salmon into another salmon to help it grow faster, which would make salmon more affordable and reduce depletion of wild salmon.
Activists opposed it every step of the way, just like they oppose Golden Rice - basically, a vitamin-fortified food crop to reduce blindness in brown and black kids, none of whom donate to Natural Resources Defense Council and therefore don't seem to matter to the white people running environmental groups.
They shouldn't do the same with wheat. Salmon is something that wealthy elites pride themselves on buying "wild caught" - they like knowing laborers risked their lives. Wheat is a staple crop, it is just too important to let the anti-science community have their way, and let Russia keep Europe from taking any meaningful action to resist aggression in the east.
