Bio Fuels and Genetic Engineering

I have spent a good portion of this semester looking at different Bio Fuels and the affects and processes of Genetic Engineering for my Biology class.  My professor, Dr. Sairam Rudrabhatla is one of the foremost Bio Engineers in the world.  His research at the moment is focused on Jatropha and Golden Rice.  

Jatropha is a plant whose seeds are comprised primarily of oil.  This oil, when yielded from the seeds, can be placed directly into your gas tank and will fuel your car.  As I sit here looking at this small brown seed I wonder how we are not growing these as a major crop in places where nothing would otherwise be grown.  Jatropha is capable of being grown almost anywhere.  In places where there is barren wasteland and desert, Jatropha can be grown.  From a single hectare of Jatropha crop, nearly 1900 liters of oil can be yielded for roughly 8 cents per gallon.  

There are many fears that because of the weed like nature of Jatropha, if not properly cared for, the plants could pose a threat to food staples.  This is where the work of Bio Engineers and Genetic Engineers comes into play.  The practice of genetic engineering is nothing more than plant breeding done in a more precise way with better, faster results.  There is so much debate on this topic and it baffles me.  With the help of genetic engineering, we are able to create foods that last longer, can be grown in conditions they would otherwise be incapable of growing in, can contain all of the necessary vitamins of a healthy diet in a single grain of rice.  Why would we shy away from this.  The only unnatural aspect of this practice is the speeding up of natural processes.  If there was less hype around this subject, we could be working on feeding the starving people of this world, but instead after 10 years of research and development, we have a super rice which could help effectively feed the starving nations of the world, in which 20 million dollars have already been invested and this rice sits and waits to be given to the people who are in such dire need of it all because Europe does not believe in genetic engineering.  

These genetic engineers have made it so that Jatropha can be safely grown anywhere without risk of the endangerment of other crops, and yet here we sit, being raped on a daily basis by the oil giants of the world because of our alphabet soup of regulatory commissions here in the U.S. and in Europe.  

We are to blame for our own stagnation and despair, and it is our responsibility to change these wrongs we have done ourselves.