I am following up on one statement by Dr Fenning (9 June, Message 20) who said "Technology is about doing more with less". I suggest that it would be more appropriate to state that applying forest biotechology should be about "putting in more to achieve much more". Making increased inputs in order to achieve higher returns applies very generally to the process of domestication, and the successful application of new biotechnology will amount to bringing domestication to a higher level than is attainable with classical breeding.
As I have said earlier in this Conference, and in other fora, the application of new biotechnology will need to stand as an enhancement of classical breeding, rather than as a substitute for it. Thus the payoffs from such technology will often depend greatly on the application being superimposed upon a classical breeding infrastructure. True, there will be some things that cannot be achieved without the biotechnology, but being able to use the biotechnology may set the classical breeder free to achieve gains on other fronts. In the short to medium term, the development of biotechnology is likely to make much increased demands of the breeding infrastructure, e.g. in the progeny sizes needed for QTL detection and quantification, and in the field testing to verify the safety of using transgenics.
There will eventually be ways in which use of new biotechnology will contribute to reducing the need for certain inputs. Enhanced productivity, for instance, should allow the concentration of commercial forestry onto smaller land areas, through reducing a number of costs and increasing returns. Also, biotechnology promises more efficient ways to combat various diseases, pests and weeds. But both reducing the effective costs of growing trees and enhancing the returns will generally depend heavily on increasing a range of key inputs, notably in the area of genetic improvement.
Rowland Burdon, New Zealand
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