Vitro meat for the poor: Pie in the sky?

August 9, 2013, 8:23 pm 

If the cattle knew about man’s latest scientific feat, they would burst in jubilation, mooing and hoofing it. He is now capable of eating beef without killing bovines! The day may not be far off when there is no need at all for rearing animals for slaughter thanks to the invention of ‘test tube meat’.

In what is being flaunted as a baby step towards meeting the shortfall in global meat production, scientists have ‘grown’ burger in a lab. It has come to be aptly dubbed the ‘Googleburger’ in that the research project which cost USD 330,000 was funded by Google co-founder Sergey Brin. A team of scientists from Maastricht University, led by Prof. Mark Post, made meat in vitro.

The test tube meat is being described as a solution to hunger in the developing world, especially Africa. The cost of vitro burger is bound to come down drastically with the passage of time, making industrial scale production thereof economically viable, but the question is whether there aren’t better ways of feeding the hungry. We are living in a world where more than one billion people hit the sack on empty stomachs; about 25,000 people including 10,000 children die of hunger every day. Who is going to make Googleburger for all of them?

Some are already toying with the idea of ‘growing’ meat in their kitchens with stem cells from farm animals, nutrients, growth promoting chemicals etc. Such optimism looks somewhat misplaced. Anyone could make bread at home but everybody is still at the mercy of those who batch-bake bread and achieve economies of scale. Mushroom is easy to grow at a very low cost at home. Only spawns, sawdust or hey, a little water and a dark place are necessary for producing that miracle food. But, how many of us take the trouble of producing our own mushrooms? Similarly, as is the way with the industrialised food chain, lab meat production on an industrial scale is likely to be controlled by powerful cartels with prices determined according to their whims and fancies.

The stem cell or ‘human master cell’ research should be promoted as it offers solutions to many problems in the medical field and the lab meat project may help save the cattle and other animals from the butcher’s knife. It will also go a long way towards minimising environmental damage the meat industry causes. BBC tells us, quoting the Environmental Science and Technology Journal, that ‘the lab-grown beef uses 45% less energy than the average global representative figure for farming cattle … produces 96% fewer greenhouse gas emissions and requires 99% less land’. But, global hunger is a seemingly intractable problem which requires a multi-pronged approach; the need for developing agriculture couldn’t be overemphasised in tackling it.

As President of International Fund for Agricultural Development (Ifad) Kanay Nwanze has told the Forum of Agricultural Research in Africa in Ghana, investment is really needed in small farms, not big science. The Guardian newspaper (UK) has recently quoted Nwanze as saying that for agriculture to yield the greatest returns, development efforts must focus on the smallholder farming sector. The world is fast moving towards an age of small things—micro credit, smallholder farming, nanotechnology etc. One is reminded of Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful.

Most African countries, the Ifad chief tells us, used to export food in the 1960s and 1970s as they allocated 20 percent of their national budgets to agriculture and their universities were top-notch research stations at that time. He has struck a responsive chord with the right thinking people across the globe by blaming the World’s Bank’s structural adjustment programmes for under investment in agriculture and the attendant drop in food production. Sri Lankan policymakers, too, should take serious note of the Ifad President’s observations and avoid the blunders that ruined Africa’s agricultural sector. Agricultural development and industrialisation should go hand in hand and care should be taken to avoid a grand pratfall between two stools. The government’s wisdom of slashing the fertiliser subsidy which helped achieve self-sufficiency in rice stands questioned.

The test tube meat, though it is said to differ, to some extent, from ‘the real McCoy’ in texture, flavour and colour, will help the meat industry overcome ethical, economic, environmental and health issues which trouble it at present. But, whether its much-touted potential to dull the hunger pangs of the global poor could be realised is in doubt.