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Will Frankenfood Save the Planet?
« on: 2003-09-18 05:00:22 » |
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http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/2003/10/rauch.htm
Over the next half century genetic engineering could feed humanity and solve a raft of environmental ills—if only environmentalists would let it
by Jonathan Rauch
T hat genetic engineering may be the most environmentally beneficial technology to have emerged in decades, or possibly centuries, is not immediately obvious. Certainly, at least, it is not obvious to the many U.S. and foreign environmental groups that regard biotechnology as a bête noire. Nor is it necessarily obvious to people who grew up in cities, and who have only an inkling of what happens on a modern farm. Being agriculturally illiterate myself, I set out to look at what may be, if the planet is fortunate, the farming of the future.
It was baking hot that April day. I traveled with two Virginia state soil-and-water-conservation officers and an agricultural-extension agent to an area not far from Richmond. The farmers there are national (and therefore world) leaders in the application of what is known as continuous no-till farming. In plain English, they don't plough. For thousands of years, since the dawn of the agricultural revolution, farmers have ploughed, often several times a year; and with ploughing has come runoff that pollutes rivers and blights aquatic habitat, erosion that wears away the land, and the release into the atmosphere of greenhouse gases stored in the soil. Today, at last, farmers are working out methods that have begun to make ploughing obsolete.
At about one-thirty we arrived at a 200-acre patch of farmland known as the Good Luck Tract. No one seemed to know the provenance of the name, but the best guess was that somebody had said something like "You intend to farm this? Good luck!" The land was rolling, rather than flat, and its slopes came together to form natural troughs for rainwater. Ordinarily this highly erodible land would be suitable for cows, not crops. Yet it was dense with wheat—wheat yielding almost twice what could normally be expected, and in soil that had grown richer in organic matter, and thus more nourishing to crops, even as the land was farmed. Perhaps most striking was the almost complete absence of any chemical or soil runoff. Even the beating administered in 1999 by Hurricane Floyd, which lashed the ground with nineteen inches of rain in less than twenty-four hours, produced no significant runoff or erosion. The land simply absorbed the sheets of water before they could course downhill.
At another site, a few miles away, I saw why. On land planted in corn whose shoots had only just broken the surface, Paul Davis, the extension agent, wedged a shovel into the ground and dislodged about eight inches of topsoil. Then he reached down and picked up a clump. Ploughed soil, having been stirred up and turned over again and again, becomes lifeless and homogeneous, but the clump that Davis held out was alive. I immediately noticed three squirming earthworms, one grub, and quantities of tiny white insects that looked very busy. As if in greeting, a worm defecated. "Plant-available food!" a delighted Davis exclaimed.
This soil, like that of the Good Luck Tract, had not been ploughed for years, allowing the underground ecosystem to return. Insects and roots and microorganisms had given the soil an elaborate architecture, which held the earth in place and made it a sponge for water. That was why erosion and runoff had been reduced to practically nil. Crops thrived because worms were doing the ploughing. Crop residue that was left on the ground, rather than ploughed under as usual, provided nourishment for the soil's biota and, as it decayed, enriched the soil. The farmer saved the fuel he would have used driving back and forth with a heavy plough. That saved money, and of course it also saved energy and reduced pollution. On top of all that, crop yields were better than with conventional methods.
The conservation people in Virginia were full of excitement over no-till farming. Their job was to clean up the James and York Rivers and the rest of the Chesapeake Bay watershed. Most of the sediment that clogs and clouds the rivers, and most of the fertilizer runoff that causes the algae blooms that kill fish, comes from farmland. By all but eliminating agricultural erosion and runoff—so Brian Noyes, the local conservation-district manager, told me—continuous no-till could "revolutionize" the area's water quality.
Even granting that Noyes is an enthusiast, from an environmental point of view no-till farming looks like a dramatic advance. The rub—if it is a rub—is that the widespread elimination of the plough depends on genetically modified crops.
I t is only a modest exaggeration to say that as goes agriculture, so goes the planet. Of all the human activities that shape the environment, agriculture is the single most important, and it is well ahead of whatever comes second. Today about 38 percent of the earth's land area is cropland or pasture—a total that has crept upward over the past few decades as global population has grown. The increase has been gradual, only about 0.3 percent a year; but that still translates into an additional Greece or Nicaragua cultivated or grazed every year.
Farming does not go easy on the earth, and never has. To farm is to make war upon millions of plants (weeds, so-called) and animals (pests, so-called) that in the ordinary course of things would crowd out or eat or infest whatever it is a farmer is growing. Crop monocultures, as whole fields of only wheat or corn or any other single plant are called, make poor habitat and are vulnerable to disease and disaster. Although fertilizer runs off and pollutes water, farming without fertilizer will deplete and eventually exhaust the soil. Pesticides can harm the health of human beings and kill desirable or harmless bugs along with pests. Irrigation leaves behind trace elements that can accumulate and poison the soil. And on and on.
The trade-offs are fundamental. Organic farming, for example, uses no artificial fertilizer, but it does use a lot of manure, which can pollute water and contaminate food. Traditional farmers may use less herbicide, but they also do more ploughing, with all the ensuing environmental complications. Low-input agriculture uses fewer chemicals but more land. The point is not that farming is an environmental crime—it is not—but that there is no escaping the pressure it puts on the planet.
In the next half century the pressure will intensify. The United Nations, in its midrange projections, estimates that the earth's human population will grow by more than 40 percent, from 6.3 billion people today to 8.9 billion in 2050. Feeding all those people, and feeding their billion or so hungry pets (a dog or a cat is one of the first things people want once they move beyond a subsistence lifestyle), and providing the increasingly protein-rich diets that an increasingly wealthy world will expect—doing all of that will require food output to at least double, and possibly triple.
But then the story will change. According to the UN's midrange projections (which may, if anything, err somewhat on the high side), around 2050 the world's population will more or less level off. Even if the growth does not stop, it will slow. The crunch will be over. In fact, if in 2050 crop yields are still increasing, if most of the world is economically developed, and if population pressures are declining or even reversing—all of which seems reasonably likely—then the human species may at long last be able to feed itself, year in and year out, without putting any additional net stress on the environment. We might even be able to grow everything we need while reducing our agricultural footprint: returning cropland to wilderness, repairing damaged soils, restoring ecosystems, and so on. In other words, human agriculture might be placed on a sustainable footing forever: a breathtaking prospect.
The great problem, then, is to get through the next four or five decades with as little environmental damage as possible. That is where biotechnology comes in.
One day recently I drove down to southern Virginia to visit Dennis Avery and his son, Alex. The older Avery, a man in late middle age with a chinstrap beard, droopy eyes, and an intent, scholarly manner, lives on ninety-seven acres that he shares with horses, chickens, fish, cats, dogs, bluebirds, ducks, transient geese, and assorted other creatures. He is the director of global food issues at the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank; Alex works with him, and is trained as a plant physiologist. We sat in a sunroom at the back of the house, our afternoon conversation punctuated every so often by dog snores and rooster crows. We talked for a little while about the Green Revolution, a dramatic advance in farm productivity that fed the world's burgeoning population over the past four decades, and then I asked if the challenge of the next four decades could be met.
"Well," Dennis replied, "we have tripled the world's farm output since 1960. And we're feeding twice as many people from the same land. That was a heroic achievement. But we have to do what some think is an even more difficult thing in this next forty years, because the Green Revolution had more land per person and more water per person—"
"—and more potential for increases," Alex added, "because the base that we were starting from was so much lower."
"By and large," Dennis went on, "the world's civilizations have been built around its best farmland. And we have used most of the world's good farmland. Most of the good land is already heavily fertilized. Most of the good land is already being planted with high-yield seeds. [Africa is the important exception.] Most of the good irrigation sites are used. We can't triple yields again with the technologies we're already using. And we might be lucky to get a fifty percent yield increase if we froze our technology short of biotech."
"Biotech" can refer to a number of things, but the relevant application here is genetic modification: the selective transfer of genes from one organism to another. Ordinary breeding can cross related varieties, but it cannot take a gene from a bacterium, for instance, and transfer it to a wheat plant. The organisms resulting from gene transfers are called "transgenic" by scientists—and "Frankenfood" by many greens.
Gene transfer poses risks, unquestionably. So, for that matter, does traditional crossbreeding. But many people worry that transgenic organisms might prove more unpredictable. One possibility is that transgenic crops would spread from fields into forests or other wild lands and there become environmental nuisances, or worse. A further risk is that transgenic plants might cross-pollinate with neighboring wild plants, producing "superweeds" or other invasive or destructive varieties in the wild. Those risks are real enough that even most biotech enthusiasts—including Dennis Avery, for example—favor some government regulation of transgenic crops.
What is much less widely appreciated is biotech's potential to do the environment good. Take as an example continuous no-till farming, which really works best with the help of transgenic crops. Human beings have been ploughing for so long that we tend to forget why we started doing it in the first place. The short answer: weed control. Turning over the soil between plantings smothers weeds and their seeds. If you don't plough, your land becomes a weed garden—unless you use herbicides to kill the weeds. Herbicides, however, are expensive, and can be complicated to apply. And they tend to kill the good with the bad.
In the mid-1990s the agricultural-products company Monsanto introduced a transgenic soybean variety called Roundup Ready. As the name implies, these soybeans tolerate Roundup, an herbicide (also made by Monsanto) that kills many kinds of weeds and then quickly breaks down into harmless ingredients. Equipped with Roundup Ready crops, farmers found that they could retire their ploughs and control weeds with just a few applications of a single, relatively benign herbicide—instead of many applications of a complex and expensive menu of chemicals. More than a third of all U.S. soybeans are now grown without ploughing, mostly owing to the introduction of Roundup Ready varieties. Ploughless cotton farming has likewise received a big boost from the advent of bioengineered varieties. No-till farming without biotech is possible, but it's more difficult and expensive, which is why no-till and biotech are advancing in tandem.
In 2001 a group of scientists announced that they had engineered a transgenic tomato plant able to thrive on salty water—water, in fact, almost half as salty as seawater, and fifty times as salty as tomatoes can ordinarily abide. One of the researchers was quoted as saying, "I've already transformed tomato, tobacco, and canola. I believe I can transform any crop with this gene"—just the sort of Frankenstein hubris that makes environmentalists shudder. But consider the environmental implications. Irrigation has for millennia been a cornerstone of agriculture, but it comes at a price. As irrigation water evaporates, it leaves behind traces of salt, which accumulate in the soil and gradually render it infertile. (As any Roman legion knows, to destroy a nation's agricultural base you salt the soil.) Every year the world loses about 25 million acres—an area equivalent to a fifth of California—to salinity; 40 percent of the world's irrigated land, and 25 percent of America's, has been hurt to some degree. For decades traditional plant breeders tried to create salt-tolerant crop plants, and for decades they failed.
Salt-tolerant crops might bring millions of acres of wounded or crippled land back into production. "And it gets better," Alex Avery told me. The transgenic tomato plants take up and sequester in their leaves as much as six or seven percent of their weight in sodium. "Theoretically," Alex said, "you could reclaim a salt-contaminated field by growing enough of these crops to remove the salts from the soil."
His father chimed in: "We've worried about being able to keep these salt-contaminated fields going even for decades. We can now think about centuries."
One of the first biotech crops to reach the market, in the mid-1990s, was a cotton plant that makes its own pesticide. Scientists incorporated into the plant a toxin-producing gene from a soil bacterium known as Bacillus thuringiensis. With Bt cotton, as it is called, farmers can spray much less, and the poison contained in the plant is delivered only to bugs that actually eat the crop. As any environmentalist can tell you, insecticide is not very nice stuff—especially if you breathe it, which many Third World farmers do as they walk through their fields with backpack sprayers.
Transgenic cotton reduced pesticide use by more than two million pounds in the United States from 1996 to 2000, and it has reduced pesticide sprayings in parts of China by more than half. Earlier this year the Environmental Protection Agency approved a genetically modified corn that resists a beetle larva known as rootworm. Because rootworm is American corn's most voracious enemy, this new variety has the potential to reduce annual pesticide use in America by more than 14 million pounds. It could reduce or eliminate the spraying of pesticide on 23 million acres of U.S. land.
All of that is the beginning, not the end. Bioengineers are also working, for instance, on crops that tolerate aluminum, another major contaminant of soil, especially in the tropics. Return an acre of farmland to productivity, or double yields on an already productive acre, and, other things being equal, you reduce by an acre the amount of virgin forest or savannah that will be stripped and cultivated. That may be the most important benefit of all.
O f the many people I have interviewed in my twenty years as a journalist, Norman Borlaug must be the one who has saved the most lives. Today he is an unprepossessing eighty-nine-year-old man of middling height, with crystal-bright blue eyes and thinning white hair. He still loves to talk about plant breeding, the discipline that won him the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize: Borlaug led efforts to breed the staples of the Green Revolution. (See "Forgotten Benefactor of Humanity," by Gregg Easterbrook, an article on Borlaug in the January 1997 Atlantic.) Yet the renowned plant breeder is quick to mention that he began his career, in the 1930s, in forestry, and that forest conservation has never been far from his thoughts. In the 1960s, while he was working to improve crop yields in India and Pakistan, he made a mental connection. He would create tables detailing acres under cultivation and average yields—and then, in another column, he would estimate how much land had been saved by higher farm productivity. Later, in the 1980s and 1990s, he and others began paying increased attention to what some agricultural economists now call the Borlaug hypothesis: that the Green Revolution has saved not only many human lives but, by improving the productivity of existing farmland, also millions of acres of tropical forest and other habitat—and so has saved countless animal lives.
From the 1960s through the 1980s, for example, Green Revolution advances saved more than 100 million acres of wild lands in India. More recently, higher yields in rice, coffee, vegetables, and other crops have reduced or in some cases stopped forest-clearing in Honduras, the Philippines, and elsewhere. Dennis Avery estimates that if farming techniques and yields had not improved since 1950, the world would have lost an additional 20 million or so square miles of wildlife habitat, most of it forest. About 16 million square miles of forest exists today. "What I'm saying," Avery said, in response to my puzzled expression, "is that we have saved every square mile of forest on the planet."
Habitat destruction remains a serious environmental problem; in some respects it is the most serious. The savannahs and tropical forests of Central and South America, Asia, and Africa by and large make poor farmland, but they are the earth's storehouses of biodiversity, and the forests are the earth's lungs. Since 1972 about 200,000 square miles of Amazon rain forest have been cleared for crops and pasture; from 1966 to 1994 all but three of the Central American countries cleared more forest than they left standing. Mexico is losing more than 4,000 square miles of forest a year to peasant farms; sub-Saharan Africa is losing more than 19,000.
That is why the great challenge of the next four or five decades is not to feed an additional three billion people (and their pets) but to do so without converting much of the world's prime habitat into second- or third-rate farmland. Now, most agronomists agree that some substantial yield improvements are still to be had from advances in conventional breeding, fertilizers, herbicides, and other Green Revolution standbys. But it seems pretty clear that biotechnology holds more promise—probably much more. Recall that world food output will need to at least double and possibly triple over the next several decades. Even if production could be increased that much using conventional technology, which is doubtful, the required amounts of pesticide and fertilizer and other polluting chemicals would be immense. If properly developed, disseminated, and used, genetically modified crops might well be the best hope the planet has got.
I f properly developed, disseminated, and used. That tripartite qualification turns out to be important, and it brings the environmental community squarely, and at the moment rather jarringly, into the picture.
Not long ago I went to see David Sandalow in his office at the World Wildlife Fund, in Washington, D.C. Sandalow, the organization's executive vice-president in charge of conservation programs, is a tall, affable, polished, and slightly reticent man in his forties who holds degrees from Yale and the University of Michigan Law School.
Some weeks earlier, over lunch, I had mentioned Dennis Avery's claim that genetic modification had great environmental potential. I was surprised when Sandalow told me he agreed. Later, in our interview in his office, I asked him to elaborate. "With biotechnology," he said, "there are no simple answers. Biotechnology has huge potential benefits and huge risks, and we need to address both as we move forward. The huge potential benefits include increased productivity of arable land, which could relieve pressure on forests. They include decreased pesticide usage. But the huge risks include severe ecological disruptions—from gene flow and from enhanced invasiveness, which is a very antiseptic word for some very scary stuff."
I asked if he thought that, absent biotechnology, the world could feed everybody over the next forty or fifty years without ploughing down the rain forests. Instead of answering directly he said, "Biotechnology could be part of our arsenal if we can overcome some of the barriers. It will never be a panacea or a magic bullet. But nor should we remove it from our tool kit."
Sandalow is unusual. Very few credentialed greens talk the way he does about biotechnology, at least publicly. They would readily agree with him about the huge risks, but they wouldn't be caught dead speaking of huge potential benefits—a point I will come back to. From an ecological point of view, a very great deal depends on other environmentalists' coming to think more the way Sandalow does.
Biotech companies are in business to make money. That is fitting and proper. But developing and testing new transgenic crops is expensive and commercially risky, to say nothing of politically controversial. When they decide how to invest their research-and-development money, biotech companies will naturally seek products for which farmers and consumers will pay top dollar. Roundup Ready products, for instance, are well suited to U.S. farming, with its high levels of capital spending on such things as herbicides and automated sprayers. Poor farmers in the developing world, of course, have much less buying power. Creating, say, salt-tolerant cassava suitable for growing on hardscrabble African farms might save habitat as well as lives —but commercial enterprises are not likely to fall over one another in a rush to do it.
If earth-friendly transgenics are developed, the next problem is disseminating them. As a number of the farmers and experts I talked to were quick to mention, switching to an unfamiliar new technology—something like no-till—is not easy. It requires capital investment in new seed and equipment, mastery of new skills and methods, a fragile transition period as farmer and ecology readjust, and an often considerable amount of trial and error to find out what works best on any given field. Such problems are only magnified in the Third World, where the learning curve is steeper and capital cushions are thin to nonexistent. Just handing a peasant farmer a bag of newfangled seed is not enough. In many cases peasant farmers will need one-on-one attention. Many will need help to pay for the seed, too.
Finally there is the matter of using biotech in a way that actually benefits the environment. Often the technological blade can cut either way, especially in the short run. A salt-tolerant or drought-resistant rice that allowed farmers to keep land in production might also induce them to plough up virgin land that previously was too salty or too dry to farm. If the effect of improved seed is to make farming more profitable, farmers may respond, at least temporarily, by bringing more land into production. If a farm becomes more productive, it may require fewer workers; and if local labor markets cannot provide jobs for them, displaced workers may move to a nearby patch of rain forest and burn it down to make way for subsistence farming. Such transition problems are solvable, but they need money and attention.
In short, realizing the great—probably unique—environmental potential of biotech will require stewardship. "It's a tool," Sara Scherr, an agricultural economist with the conservation group Forest Trends, told me, "but it's absolutely not going to happen automatically."
So now ask a question: Who is the natural constituency for earth-friendly biotechnology? Who cares enough to lobby governments to underwrite research—frequently unprofitable research—on transgenic crops that might restore soils or cut down on pesticides in poor countries? Who cares enough to teach Asian or African farmers, one by one, how to farm without ploughing? Who cares enough to help poor farmers afford high-tech, earth-friendly seed? Who cares enough to agitate for programs and reforms that might steer displaced peasants and profit-seeking farmers away from sensitive lands? Not politicians, for the most part. Not farmers. Not corporations. Not consumers.
At the World Resources Institute, an environmental think tank in Washington, the molecular biologist Don Doering envisions transgenic crops designed specifically to solve environmental problems: crops that might fertilize the soil, crops that could clean water, crops tailored to remedy the ecological problems of specific places. "Suddenly you might find yourself with a virtually chemical-free agriculture, where your cropland itself is filtering the water, it's protecting the watershed, it's providing habitat," Doering told me. "There is still so little investment in what I call design-for-environment." The natural constituency for such investment is, of course, environmentalists.
B ut environmentalists are not acting as such a constituency today. They are doing the opposite. For example, Greenpeace declares on its Web site: "The introduction of genetically engineered (GE) organisms into the complex ecosystems of our environment is a dangerous global experiment with nature and evolution ... GE organisms must not be released into the environment. They pose unacceptable risks to ecosystems, and have the potential to threaten biodiversity, wildlife and sustainable forms of agriculture."
Other groups argue for what they call the Precautionary Principle, under which no transgenic crop could be used until proven benign in virtually all respects. The Sierra Club says on its Web site,
In accordance with this Precautionary Principle, we call for a moratorium on the planting of all genetically engineered crops and the release of all GEOs [genetically engineered organisms] into the environment, including those now approved. Releases should be delayed until extensive, rigorous research is done which determines the long-term environmental and health impacts of each GEO and there is public debate to ascertain the need for the use of each GEO intended for release into the environment. [italics added] Under this policy the cleaner water and healthier soil that continuous no-till farming has already brought to the Chesapeake Bay watershed would be undone, and countless tons of polluted runoff and eroded topsoil would accumulate in Virginia rivers and streams while debaters debated and researchers researched. Recall David Sandalow: "Biotechnology has huge potential benefits and huge risks, and we need to address both as we move forward." A lot of environmentalists would say instead, "before we move forward." That is an important difference, particularly because the big population squeeze will happen not in the distant future but over the next several decades.
For reasons having more to do with politics than with logic, the modern environmental movement was to a large extent founded on suspicion of markets and artificial substances. Markets exploit the earth; chemicals poison it. Biotech touches both hot buttons. It is being pushed forward by greedy corporations, and it seems to be the very epitome of the unnatural.
Still, I hereby hazard a prediction. In ten years or less, most American environmentalists (European ones are more dogmatic) will regard genetic modification as one of their most powerful tools. In only the past ten years or so, after all, environmentalists have reversed field and embraced market mechanisms—tradable emissions permits and the like—as useful in the fight against pollution. The environmental logic of biotechnology is, if anything, even more compelling. The potential upside of genetic modification is simply too large to ignore—and therefore environmentalists will not ignore it. Biotechnology will transform agriculture, and in doing so will transform American environmentalism.
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Re:Will Frankenfood Save the Planet?
« Reply #1 on: 2003-09-19 20:00:57 » |
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A very interesting read kharin.
As I am preparing for the start of a 4 year biotechnology course next year I certainly hope that environmentalists don't have their way on that one, but I fear that they may hold all the cards for some time.
Ground breaking work in the field of crop alteration will be a very good introduction to genetic engineering on a massive scale, even though it will suffer from very slow progress I am certainly hopeful to see governments embrace this kind of research and help accelerate change.
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Re:Will Frankenfood Save the Planet?
« Reply #2 on: 2003-09-21 12:05:31 » |
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The Fight To Save Our Food
Foot-and-mouth ran wild, GM is used ineptly and we can’t trust meat. In an exclusive essay adapted from his new book, Colin Tudge reveals why farming is killing us … and our only hope
Source: Sunday Herald
Authors: Colin Tudge
Dated: 2003-09-21
MODERN food policies are screwing up the world. In all countries – but of course, particularly in poor ones – they are killing people, in a variety of ways. They are overriding traditional cooking with all its family and social customs. They are doing more than anything else to destroy wildlife and the landscapes it occupies.
They are destroying rural economies and the life that goes with them – not by accident (as is the case with wildlife) but by intent. For good measure, modern farming is gratuitously cruel to animals and despite occasional ad-hoc legislation, it is getting worse.
Yet we are supposed to accept and admire the scientists, tycoons, and politicians who are bringing about the changes because, they claim, the despoliation that we see all around us represents “progress”.
There’s already a lot of protest. But if humanity really cares about humanity we need to grasp the nettle – to acknowledge that the present generation of “experts” and leaders have got it all horribly wrong. We (meaning all of us) have got to re-think agriculture from first principles – ask what it is, and what we really want from it, and how to get the world back on course.
Do I exaggerate? Not at all. The bedrock point is that it’s technically straightforward to feed all the people in the world well, with food that’s abundant, nutritious, safe and – a key point – able to support all the great cuisines of all the world.
But that’s not how things are turning out. Famines are still common (almost routine in Africa) while 800 million people worldwide are currently undernourished. Yet in more and more countries, from the Americas to the Far East, hunger now persists side by side with gross obesity. A common sight in modern Beijing is two trim parents brought up in harsher days with an unfortunate, ponderous globe of a child. With obesity goes diabetes and in a few decades, according to the World Health Organisation, the number of diabetics worldwide will exceed the present population of the United States. In Mexico, diabetes is already the chief cause of death. These are the fruits of the modern food industry we are all supposed to believe is working selflessly on our behalf.
Food kills us too, by infection. The dangers come mainly from meat. While it’s true that legislation grows more extensive by the day, and the government recently established the Food Standards Agency, such bureaucracy is cheap. Livestock production needs re-thinking and re-designing from top to bottom – and that, it seems, would cost too much.
The government would like us to believe that BSE and the epidemic of foot-and-mouth disease were acts of God or were caused by careless farmers breaking the rules. In truth, both epidemics (and a lot of food poisoning too, which also kills people but seems almost minor by comparison) resulted directly from cut-price husbandry. But the only coherent government policy this past 30 years has been that food production of all kinds should be as cut-price as possible.
BSE came about because farmers fed bits of cow and sheep to dairy cows as a cheap source of protein. The secret of good farming is to break chains of infection but here the farmers created a chain that does not exist in nature. Science did not predict the resulting disease. However science is not and cannot be omniscient, and the blind trust we are encouraged to place in it is misguided. Millions of cattle have been slaughtered and people have died .
The foot-and-mouth epidemic of 2001 – the worst on record: in Dumfries and Galloway alone almost 180 farms were affected – happened partly because the government did not spend enough on its own policy. It intended to keep the virus out of the country altogether, as the same strategy had successfully excluded rabies. But whereas successive governments took rabies seriously, the foot-and-mouth policy was run on a wing and a prayer. A few years ago it was all too easy to bring diseased meat into Britain. Once in the UK the virus was carried all over the country in double-quick time because most of the local abattoirs had been closed in a cost-cutting exercise. This means animals sometimes have to travel hundreds of miles to slaughter.
The meat trade is horrifying. In France meat is labelled so that consumers can ascribe particular joints to particular farms. In the UK, however, the supply chain “from field to fork” is so long and convoluted that it offers endless scope for scams. Last year in Yorkshire tons of condemned chicken – green with decay – were first doctored and passed off as pet food, then doctored again and re-labelled and finally slipped into the human food chain. And only last Friday four men were jailed for 10 years for selling condemned poultry. Operating from rat-infested and sewage strewn premises in Derbyshire the food fraud gang butchered one million unfit chickens and turkeys and sold them to hospitals, schools and leading supermarkets.
Arable farming is no less problematic. Crops of all kinds are now transformed by genetic engineering and so become “GMOs”, genetically modified organisms. Advocates in science, industry, and government claim that without GMOs the world cannot be fed. Some of those advocates surely know that this is not true and are simply lying. Others believe what they say, but are mistaken. Either way this belief, echoing from the highest echelons, is wrong.
In truth, GMOs could have a great deal to offer the world. It is surely wrong to write them off altogether. In the Sahel, the huge area of semi-desert south of the Sahara, local farmers commonly lose half of their sorghum crop from mildew alone. Genetic engineers are now striving to produce mildew-resistant strains , and good luck to them. In Brazil just a few weeks ago, I spoke to government scientists who aim to develop pest-resistant papaya. Papaya is very important locally for cash and for vitamin A and again I wish them well.
But all technologies bring risks, which must be balanced against possible advantage. For the Sahelian sorghum farmers the possible advantages are obvious, and the risks seem small by comparison. But in most of the world – including Britain; several farms in north-east Scotland are participating in GM oilseed rape crop trials – there are no obvious advantages. The risks are not worth taking.
It matters, too, who is developing the technologies and why. Sir Kenneth Baxter, a former director of the Rowett Research Institute at Aberdeen, said in the late 1970s that science should be for the good of all humanity not just for making profits for the few. Brazil’s GM papaya is being developed by the people and for the people. GM technology could be easy and small-scale, and every country including the poorest, from Angola to Bangladesh, could in principle have their own programmes for their own purposes.
But today’s GMOs are mostly developed by Western corporations. They are not designed to tackle the real problems of local farmers but to make profits for their creators. Zambia was recently criticised for refusing to accept American GM maize. But that maize was designed for US farmers and in any case, much of Zambia is sorghum country. After decades of “aid” and dumping of foreign surpluses, Africans know the thin edge of the wedge when they see it.
The reality of farming at the moment is that common sense has been sacrificed for profit.
There are three ingredients of profit, as any businessperson knows. The first is to maximise production. So modern farming is as productive as possible – even when the country is producing vast surpluses, as is the case in Europe and the US.
The second is to minimise the cost of production, which means cutting labour. Britain and the US now employ little more than 1% of their workforce on the land – in the US there are more people in prison than there are full-time farmers. People are replaced by big machines and by industrial chemistry. Husbandry is simplified and, as foot-and-mouth disease so horribly demonstrated, it becomes riskier and riskier. In Third World countries 60% of people work on the land. Britain and the US had well-established urban industries long before they ran down their agrarian workforce but the poor countries are being encouraged to adopt Western practices and lose farm labour before they have alternatives. The real growth industries in Africa are mugging and prostitution.
The third ingredient is to “add value”. British governments, in particular, like to claim that cheap production leads to cheap food, but this is another con. Profit is maximal when production is lowest and sale price is highest. A survey by the Real Meat Company in the west of England recently showed that their own sausages cost only half as much as the cheapest brands in the supermarket. The Real Meat sausages look much dearer – £3.50 per pound against £1.75. But they contain four times as much lean meat. Supermarket shoppers pay for filler.
Globalisation is making the whole caboodle worse. Applied indiscriminately to all crops, it is disastrous. Every farmer in the world is now engaged in a global dogfight with every other farmer. First-world farmers cut costs by cutting labour and mechanising (and using GMOs). Some third-world farmers throw their lot in with Western corporations (farming is the modern imperialism) or else work for slave wages.
Many countries have all but stopped growing food for their own people to focus on cash crops. Costa Rica has all but given up on the traditional maize and beans, and buys in staples from the US. Its farmers are encouraged to grow coffee for cash – but everyone’s cultivating coffee now, even the Chinese and Vietnamese, and the price has fallen by 70% in the past five years. In fact coffee is currently being sold for less than the cost of production.
Countries that go for all-cash agriculture are giving up on independence. They are, as Harold Macmillan said in a slightly different context, selling the family silver. Meanwhile Western supermarkets make a virtue of buying at the lowest possible price – which means from the world’s most desperate farmers.
It’s a gloomy picture. But it’s one that we can fix. For it is possible to feed people well, and to look after wildlife and the environment, and to support agrarian economies, and to be kind to livestock – but only if we design an agriculture expressly for that purpose. What we need is an “enlightened” agriculture, rooted in sound biology – the biology of human beings, of plants and animals, and of the world as a whole. Just as farmers work out how much food to give a chicken or pig, so we must think about how much food human beings need. Then we need to see how the world itself can physically provide what’s needed.
That’s the theory. In practice, enlightened agriculture reflects nature. The most suitable land should be used for the most important crops, the staples like cereals, pulses and potatoes. The richest land is for fruit and vegetables.
Yet this isn’t a vegetarian formula. There is plenty of room for livestock. But we must play to the strengths of the different kinds of animals. Cattle and sheep are ruminants – great at eating grass, which grows on hills and wet meadows where cereals cannot be grown. Traditionally, pigs and poultry were kept to eat leftovers and this should remain their role.
In other words, the ratio of plants to animals in enlightened agriculture is high – just as it is in nature. But present day farming is organised quite differently. In the cause of profit, it aims to produces as much meat as possible. Half the world’s wheat, three quarters of the maize and 90% of the soya is grown for livestock. Animals raised on such a scale become our competitors.
In addition to keeping fewer livestock, all farms should be as mixed as possible. Moreover for reasons both biological and social, farms should be small, with plenty of people to work them. But this isn’t simply a reversion to the 1950s. The traditional structures, with good husbandry, should of course be abetted by good science – to work out what really needs doing and to provide the technologies that will aid us. The tragedy is that science at present is employed to override good husbandry – primarily putting farming in the hands of the big corporations.
In physical terms, at least, enlightened agriculture is easy, little more than common sense. But as governments and commerce have abandoned common sense, in the meantime, we will have to take matters into our own hands.
What are the ways of doing this? Well, a surprising number of farmers are still trying to practise good husbandry. Consumers should try to seek them out. Organic farmers can be a bit too anti-technology than seems sensible but they too are carrying the flag of good husbandry, and deserve support.
In the short term we might pay more for good food that’s well raised. But in the longer term the prices will come down if there is a demand and producers supply more. Also, governments and “experts” might discover the error of their present ways and come back into line. The game’s not over yet – but if sanity doesn’t prevail it soon will be.
So Shall We Reap is published by Penguin on September 25 at £20.
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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Re:Will Frankenfood Save the Planet?
« Reply #3 on: 2003-09-24 14:38:25 » |
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Hmmm. Though this makes some well founded observations, I think that on the whole I find little to agree with here. In particular, the recommendation for farming to reduce production and to be based on small farms (already the condition in Britain, which is why the UK agricultural sector has never been particularly profitable) with increased numbers of farm workers would have the effect of driving up food costs dramatically, to the point where consumers (and by extension supermarkets) would turn to foreign producers still using intensive techniques.
Quote:| "Famines are still common (almost routine in Africa) while 800 million people worldwide are currently undernourished." |
Hmm. What about the counter-example of India? To quote from the Norman Borlaug interview mentioned above:
Quote:"In the late 1960s, most experts were speaking of imminent global famines in which billions would perish. "The battle to feed all of humanity is over," biologist Paul Ehrlich famously wrote in his 1968 bestseller The Population Bomb. "In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now." Ehrlich also said, "I have yet to meet anyone familiar with the situation who thinks India will be self-sufficient in food by 1971." He insisted that "India couldn't possibly feed two hundred million more people by 1980."
But Borlaug and his team were already engaged in the kind of crash program that Ehrlich declared wouldn't work. Their dwarf wheat varieties resisted a wide spectrum of plant pests and diseases and produced two to three times more grain than the traditional varieties. In 1965, they had begun a massive campaign to ship the miracle wheat to Pakistan and India and teach local farmers how to cultivate it properly. By 1968, when Ehrlich's book appeared, the U.S. Agency for International Development had already hailed Borlaug's achievement as a "Green Revolution."
In Pakistan, wheat yields rose from 4.6 million tons in 1965 to 8.4 million in 1970. In India, they rose from 12.3 million tons to 20 million. And the yields continue to increase. Last year, India harvested a record 73.5 million tons of wheat, up 11.5 percent from 1998. Since Ehrlich's dire predictions in 1968, India's population has more than doubled, its wheat production has more than tripled, and its economy has grown nine-fold. Soon after Borlaug's success with wheat, his colleagues at the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research developed high-yield rice varieties that quickly spread the Green Revolution through most of Asia." |
http://reason.com/0004/fe.rb.billions.shtml
Of course, alternatives have been suggested with regard to India. For example, Amartya Sen suggested India's status as a democracy was critical to dealing with famine. I merely wonder whether a failure to invest in improved agricultural techniques combined with an absence of good governance would not be a more likely explanation of Africa's woes.
Quote:| "Brazil’s GM papaya is being developed by the people and for the people. GM technology could be easy and small-scale... But today’s GMOs are mostly developed by Western corporations. They are not designed to tackle the real problems of local farmers but to make profits for their creators." |
Brazil is a reasonably developed country and has a certain amount of resources to use to address such problems. For most of the countries in question this is unlikely to be the case and I doubt that many of the advances we might hope to see from GM are likely without the resources and investments that is only likely to come from corporations (I certainly think we can conclude that Angola and Bangladesh have far better things to spend their money on). I'm also somewhat puzzled as to where the divorce between the problems of local farmers and profits comes from; if the two were not tolerably well aligned then it would hardly be possible to sell them.
Incidentally, it seems to me that the example of Zambia's refusal of GM maize inclines towards my earlier comment regarding standards of African governance. The author neglects to mention that the maize in question was supplied as aid (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/2412603.stm) and that the Zambian government apparently preferred to starve its populace. Incidentally, the result of the Zambian government's actions was mobs breaking into warehouses and looting the GM maize. Source as follows:
Quote:| "The European Union several years ago declared a moratorium on the import of GM foods. In part, European leaders feared that biotechnology was dangerous, but, more important, GM agriculture presents an economic threat to European farmers. Africans, especially, can use GM methods to grow food on small plots, and their exports could efficiently compete in Europe. " |
http://www.techcentralstation.com/021003M.html
I'm not sure that seems much better than Zimbabwean government. Here's another example:
Quote:| "1998 was a terrible year for Indian cotton farmers as the bollworm destroyed their crop. A genetically engineered strain of cotton offered hope... until the Indian government banned its use. " |
http://www.aworldconnected.org/article.php/305.html
Quote:"Last year, Gujarat was one of first Indian states to grow Monsanto's novel cotton crop. The plant contains genetic material taken from a bacterium. The modification makes the cotton plant's tissues lethal to insect pests, including the economically damaging bollworm.
But farmers here claim to have been using their own illegal versions of this so-called BT Bollgard for several years. And it is thought that a half of all the GM seed now sold in the state is pirated. " |
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/2998150.stm
Quote:| "The first is to maximise production. So modern farming is as productive as possible – even when the country is producing vast surpluses, as is the case in Europe and the US." |
Again, this is largely a governmental issue in Europe, where agriculture has been subsidised to supply, irrespective of demand (as I recall, much the same applies in the United States).
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romanov
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Re:Will Frankenfood Save the Planet?
« Reply #4 on: 2003-09-24 23:04:47 » |
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Thought you might find this article, taken from 'New Scientist', topical. It's broadly representative of the attitudes in Europe in general:
UK public strongly rejects GM foods
11:00 24 September 03
The UK public resoundingly rejected the case for growing and eating genetically modified food on Wednesday.
The emphatic snub comes in a report announcing results of the UK government's "GM Nation" public debate on the future for GM foods.
It sums up feedback from 1200 letters and more than 600 public meetings attended by at least 8000 British people since June 2003.
The news comes at a time when British and other European governments are coming under increasing international pressure - particularly from the US - to lift a five-year moratorium on the growing and approval of GM crops.
The document, along with major scientific and economic evaluations of GM crops published earlier in summer 2003 and forthcoming results of field trials, will help inform the UK government's decision on whether to end moratorium on the commercial growing of GM crops later in 2003
Hijacked meetings
Key messages from the report included:
-British people are generally uneasy about GM
-Finding out more simply deepened people's concerns
-Few people support early commercialization, with more than half attending the debates saying they never wanted GM crops grown in the UK
-Widespread mistrust of government and multinational companies
-People want to know more, and crave a "corpus of agreed 'facts' accepted by all organisations and interests"
-Developing countries have special interests, but fairer trade rules would do more to eliminate hunger than GM crops
The only solace in the report for supporters of GM crops was some evidence that opponents "hijacked" public meetings and sent most of the letters - so skewing the outcome. Observers at meetings counted five opponents for every supporter or neutral person who attended.
The report acknowledges this phenomenon. Websites run by groups opposed to GM crops, such as the National Federation of Women's Institutes, had urged members to attend meetings in force, for example. And the report identifies middle-aged mothers as displaying the most "implacable" opposition.
Hardened views
But views were trenchant even among 77 "impartial" participants chosen for a special "survey-within-a-survey". This survey aimed to tease out differences between committed, self-selecting individuals who attend meetings and the "silent majority", says the report.
Many "impartials" who started out undecided hardened their views against GM foods after they had had two weeks to "immerse themselves" in the subject - although their sources were not always impartial.
"Most people relied on secondary reports of research, often from interested parties, without checking back to see if the research had been reported accurately," says the report.
[end]
romanov
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Re:Will Frankenfood Save the Planet?
« Reply #5 on: 2003-09-25 05:17:17 » |
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Quote:| "Thought you might find this article, taken from 'New Scientist', topical. It's broadly representative of the attitudes in Europe in general" |
Doubtless. I would observe that the British public tend to be highly conservative and prone to distrust any change regardless of the benefits. Levels of risk aversion and uncertainty avoidance also tend to be quite high. As a sample, consider this from a report of one of these debates:
http://www.spiked-online.com/Articles/00000006DDDE.htm
Quote:| "Millicent was anti pretty much everything that modern science and engineering had conjured up (GM, 'Western' medicine, nuclear power and - yes - fluoridation). Millicent explained how you cannot tell what is in food nowadays, and that she had been feeling ill for ages because of it." |
Luddism is clearly alive and well.
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Re:Will Frankenfood Save the Planet?
« Reply #6 on: 2003-09-25 23:26:58 » |
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I'd bear in mind that following the BSE and Foot and Mouth crisis', public faith in the ability of government agencies to safely administer food to the public has plummeted. This is as true in many parts of Europe as it is in the UK.
It isn't just a case of Europeans being naturally more inclined to throw wooden clogs into machines.
Also, the way that the questions are typically framed has a distinct effect.
Try to bear in mind that part of the whole furore over genetic modification of foods is based in part on what philosophers know as the "Naturalistic Fallacy"- the idea that everything natural is good.
Its a glitch in the way the mind works, something that history's greatest thinkers have known about for centuries. It's seen in advertising, politics, religion- just about every sphere of human activity.
If you give people a bunch of info about splicing gene a into chromosome b while inhibiting rna strand c to produce organism d, people are going to look at you blankly and conjure up images of men in white coats and sterile surroundings making choices without their consent that they don't understand.
Bluntly, no matter how much information you produce about how safe something is, all you have to do is mention the word "unnatural" and thats it- you lose the argument. Add to that general levels of scientific ignorance and the pro-GM lobby is in trouble, given the human habit of ascribing bad motives to things they are ignorant of. The only reason that the decision was made in the USA was an orchestrated avoidance of the issue by the major corporations and their media allies, allowing them to slip in by the back door.
Personally, GM as such doesn't bother me. I know the science involved, and I also know that humans have been selectively breeding plants and animals for 10,000 years (next time the anti-GM lobby throw the insult 'interfering with nature', the pro's could accurately throw the word 'eugenics' back at them and see how they like emotive language).
My problem is the simple fact that unless something is done about the way global trade is structured, no amount of increased yield or pest-resistance is going to help the millions abroad on the verge of starvation.
We already produce more that enough food to meet the worlds needs, remember.
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Re:Will Frankenfood Save the Planet?
« Reply #7 on: 2003-09-26 05:23:11 » |
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You make some interesting points (though I would point out that Europe is a slightly different case to the UK in the sense that many EU countries have much powerful green parties. Germany is the foremost example).
I think you're entirely correct that a hierarchised dichotomy between natural and unnatural is a particularly well entrenched meme. The question for me is, given that, how were technological and scientific developments driven in the past? One possible answer is that we don't have any discourse of progress; when the term is mentioned, it is typically in a negative context, which was not always the case (Pre WW2 would be my assumption; Sartre did say that after WW2 any naive trust invested in science was misplaced). The result is that scientific developments occur but the default response is that many of these developments are treated as guilty until proven innocent. As I mentioned, conservatism (something practised by both the environmental left and the right to varying degrees), uncertainty avoidance and risk aversion (see: http://www.spiked-online.com/Sections/risk/index.htm) are all prominent responses at this point.
Quote:| "My problem is the simple fact that unless something is done about the way global trade is structured, no amount of increased yield or pest-resistance is going to help the millions abroad on the verge of starvation." |
Entirely correct in my view. I've found it fascinating how on this issue leftwing pressure groups and advocates of free trade have come very close to sharing the same position. My feeling is that Europe should largely scrap its subsidies and trade barriers, with the possible exception of subsidies for some organic farming (I'm largely indifferent to organic food but the framing practise does have some environmental benefits). That said, with the entry of Poland and Hungary into the EU, the previously isolated France now has allies for its position on the common agricultural policy.
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Kharin
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Re:Will Frankenfood Save the Planet?
« Reply #8 on: 2003-10-02 05:56:01 » |
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Interesting piece..
http://www.guardian.co.uk/gmdebate/Story/0,2763,1053917,00.html
GM crops fail key trials amid environment fear
Two out of three strains 'should not be grown'
Paul Brown, environment correspondent
Thursday October 2, 2003
The Guardian
Two of the three GM crops grown experimentally in Britain, oil seed rape and sugar beet, appear more harmful to the environment than conventional crops and should not be grown in the UK, scientists are expected to tell the government next week.
The Guardian has learned that the scientists will conclude that growing these crops is damaging to plant and insect life.
The judgment will be a serious setback to the GM lobby in the UK and Europe, reopening the acrimonious debate about GM food.
The third crop, GM maize, allows the survival of more weeds and insects and might be recommended for approval, though some scientists still have reservations.
The results of the three years of field scale trials - the largest scientific experiment of its type on GM crops undertaken anywhere in the world - will be published next Friday by the august Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. The results have been a closely guarded secret for months, and will be studied by scientists, farmers, food companies and governments across the world.
The study will include eight peer-reviewed papers about the effect of growing GM crops and accompanying herbicides on the plants and animals living in the fields around. The papers compare the GM fields with conventional crops grown in adjacent fields.
The overwhelming public hostility in the UK to GM crops has not been shared by scientists or the government but the results of the field scale trials are expected to be a jolt to the enthusiasts. The Royal Society refused to publish a ninth paper produced by the scientific group.
The Society's explanation was that the ninth paper was not a scientific document but a summary of findings and in effect a recommendation to the advisory committee on releases to the environment - the expert quango. The scientists involved will now themselves publish this summary at the same time as the other eight papers, concluding that two of the three crops should not be grown.
The trials were set up four years ago by the former environment minister, Michael Meacher, urged on by English Nature, the government's watchdog on the natural world, which feared that the UK's already declining farmland species might be further damaged by the introduction of GM crops.
A three-year moratorium on the commercial introduction of crops was negotiated with the GM companies Monsanto, Syngenta and Bayer Bioscience while the experimental field trials took place. Despite repeated attacks by anti-GM protesters that destroyed many of the fields, the scientists decided they had enough results to be scientifically valid. Experts not involved in the trials had not expected definitive results even though hundreds of fields were used.
The numbers of weed species and various types of spiders, ground beetles, butterflies, moths and bees in fields of GM crops and the adjacent conventional crop fields were counted to see if they showed marked differences. All were treated with herbicides to kill weeds but the GM crops were modified to survive special types made by Monsanto and Bayer.
The papers accepted for publication by the Royal Society show that in GM sugar beet and oil seed rape the weeds and insects were significantly less numerous. Spraying with the Monsanto herbicide glyphosate had taken a heavy toll in the beet fields and the Bayer product glufosinate ammonium had wiped out many species in the rape fields.
For maize the reverse appears to be the case. The reason seems to be that maize fields are normally sprayed with atrazine, which kills weeds as they germinate, and is an even more savage killer than the Bayer product. But the result may be controversial because maize is particularly sensitive to competition from weeds and yields may be down. Farmers in America found glufosinate ammonium was not enough to kill competitive weeds and used a second herbicide, further damaging biodiversity.
The political fall out from the trial results is potentially enormous. It would give the government every excuse to refuse permission outright for two of the three crops on environmental grounds. One of the two legally watertight reasons for such a refusal is the environment, the other is health. Almost all of northern Europe, with similar farming conditions, would be expected to follow any British ban.
GM maize, grown in the UK as a fodder crop, may be given the green light under strict guidelines, as a concession to the GM companies and the US where a trade war looms. The US is threatening to take the EU to the World Trade Organisation if the moratorium on GM crops is continued.
The government has other minefields to negotiate before GM crops can be introduced. The agriculture and environment biotechnology commission is still wrestling with the vexed question of distances required between GM and conventional crops to avoid cross contamination and compensation schemes for injured farmers if all goes wrong.
If contamination above 0.9% occurs in conventional crops it will have to be declared and will be virtually unsaleable to food companies and all UK supermarkets. For organic farmers the threshold is even lower at 0.1%.
The majority of the commission members believe that the biotech industry should set up a fund with a levy on farmers growing GM crops to compensate any conventional farmers whose crops lose value because of cross-contamination. The biotech industry is wholly opposed to this.
The commission is also set to recommend a second statutory fund paid for by the government to compensate farmers who lose organic status for the same reason.
New legislation would be required to set up the schemes and enforce the separation distances between crops. The legally enforceable separation distances could be made larger or smaller in the future in the light of experience.
The commission meets again in December by which time a draft of proposals will be circulated.
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Re:Will Frankenfood Save the Planet?
« Reply #9 on: 2003-10-07 08:29:56 » |
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Genetically Modified Foods Are Nothing New
Our food has long been "unnatural," and it's a good thing. So why all the fuss about modern genetic practices?
AUTHORS: Channapatna S. Prakash and Gregory Conko
SOURCE: Betterhumans
DATE: Monday, October 06, 2003, 9:59:03 AM CT
 Channapatna S. Prakash and Gregory Conko Green evolution: All of today's crops are a product of genetic meddling, write Gregory Conko (left) and Channapatna S. Prakash, and modern genetic engineering is just an extension of previous agricultural techniques
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From the dawn of civilization, mankind has been modifying plants at the genetic level to suit its needs, and the fates of human society and agricultural crops have been inextricably linked and mutually interdependent ever since. Agriculture allowed humans to abandon hunter-gatherer behavior, in turn spawning broader economic and cultural development. And the suitability of certain plant species for food or fiber—which provided the proximate cause for their eventual domestication—let those organisms survive and thrive far beyond their original ranges.
Our ancestors chose a few once-wild plants and gradually modified them simply by selecting those with the largest, tastiest or most robust offspring for propagation. In that way, organisms have been altered so greatly over the millennia that traits present in existing populations of cultivated rice, wheat, corn, soy, potatoes, tomatoes and many others have very little in common with their ancestors. Wild tomatoes and potatoes contain very potent toxins, for example. But today's cultivated varieties have been modified to produce healthy and nutritious food.
Breeding safe and useful crops from wild plants was a remarkable feat, given how poorly those first plant breeders understood the dynamics of selection and heritability. It was not until the 19th century that plant genetic modification became anything other than a hit or miss affair. Gregor Mendel's discovery of the principles of inheritance in the 1860s gave rise to a revolution in crop hybridization, perhaps best characterized by the life of horticulturalist Luther Burbank. Burbank developed more than 800 new varieties of fruits, vegetables, flowers, and trees—some so unique that he was eventually awarded patents on 16 of his plants.
Yet, despite the predictive capacity that arose from Mendelian principles, actual understanding of the source of plant characteristics was still quite limited until the turn of the 20th century. Verification of Mendel's principles initiated a wave of new genetic discoveries clarifying how nucleic acids within plant cells controlled the generation of specific traits. From that point forward, hybridization could truly be considered more a science than an art.
Early experiments in corn hybridization by G.H. Shull in the 1900s established the modern genetics foundation for a revolution in food and fiber production. Shull's scientifically guided corn breeding helped lay the groundwork for the Green Revolution some half a century later, and initiated yield growth from fewer than 30 bushels per acre in the 1920s to more than 130 bushels per acre in the late 1990s. Such productivity gains helped North American and European farmers grow more food at a lower cost, without having to encroach upon forests and other wildlands to feed an ever-growing population. Crop improvement has thus been one of the most important environmental success stories in history.
Modern genetics has been so powerful an influence on food production that, in a recent survey, members of the North American Agricultural Journalists professional society ranked crop hybridization, recombinant DNA genetic modification, discovery of DNA's double helix structure and the Green Revolution as the four most important developments in agriculture during the past 50 years.
The productivity gains derived from scientifically bred, high yielding crop varieties allowed the world's farmers to double output during the last 50 years, on roughly the same amount of land, at a time when global population rose more than 80%. Without genetics and other scientific developments in agriculture, we would today be farming on every square inch of arable land to produce the same amount of food, destroying hundreds of millions of hectares of pristine wilderness in the process.
How natural are our crops?
All crops are unnatural. Not only are they vastly different from their wild ancestors, but most also had their origin and domestication far from where they are now grown. For instance, the US is the world's leading producer of corn and soy, yet these crops are native to Mexico and China, respectively. Wheat, grown throughout Western Europe, was domesticated in Mesopotamia. The world's largest traded commodity, coffee, had a humble origin in Ethiopia. But now, most coffee is produced in Latin America and Asia.
Florida oranges have their roots in India, while sugarcane arose in Papua New Guinea. Food crops that today are so integral to the culture or diet in the Old World, such as the potato in Europe, chili pepper in India, cassava in Africa and sweet potato in Japan, were introduced from South America. For that matter, every crop in North America other than the blueberry, Jerusalem artichoke, sunflower and squash is borrowed from somewhere else.
All our crops, domesticated long ago, have more recently been improved for human use. Rapeseed, grown in Asia for centuries, naturally contains two dangerous chemicals that make it more amenable for use as a lubricant than a cooking oil. But in the 1960s, Canadian scientists used conventional breeding techniques to eliminate the genes responsible for producing those toxic and smelly chemicals. They named their creation canola (short for Canadian oil), a popular but completely new crop now grown widely in North America and Europe.
In the most fundamental sense, all plant and animal breeding involves, and always has involved, this kind of intentional genetic modification—adding useful new genes and shedding old deleterious ones. And though critics of today's most advanced breeding method, recombinant DNA, believe it is somehow unique, there have always been Cassandras to claim that the latest technology was unnatural, different from its predecessors and inherently dangerous. As early as 1906, Luther Burbank noted that, "We have recently advanced our knowledge of genetics to the point where we can manipulate life in a way never intended by nature. We must proceed with the utmost caution in the application of this new found knowledge," a cautionary note one might just as easily hear today regarding recombinant DNA—modern genetic modification.
But just as Burbank was wrong to claim that there was some special danger in the knowledge that permitted broader sexual crosses, so are today's skeptics wrong to believe that modern genetic modification poses some inherently greater risk. It is not genetic modification per se that generates risk. Recombinant DNA modified, conventionally modified and unmodified plants could all prove to be invasive, harmful to biodiversity or harmful to eat. Rather, risk arises from the characteristics of individual organisms, as well as how and where they are used. Thus, an understanding of the historical context of genetic modification in agriculture may help us to better appreciate the potential role of recombinant DNA technology, and quell public anxieties about its use.
Even though it is guided by human hands, hybridization may seem perfectly natural when it simply assimilates desirable traits from several varieties of the same species into elite cultivars. But when desired characteristics are unavailable in cultivated plants, hybridization can be used to borrow liberally from wild and sometimes quite distant relatives. Domesticated tomato plants are commonly bred with wild tomatoes of a different species to introduce improved resistance to pathogens, nematodes and fungi. Successive generations then have to be carefully back-crossed into the commercial cultivars to eliminate any unwanted traits accidentally transferred from the wild varieties, such as glyco-alkaloid toxins common in the wild species.
When crop and wild varieties do not readily mate, various tricks can be employed to produce so-called "wide crosses" between two plants that are otherwise sexually incompatible. Still, the embryos created by wide crosses usually die prior to maturation, so they must be "rescued" and cultured in a laboratory. Even then, the rescued embryos typically produce sterile offspring. They can only be made fertile again by using mutagenic chemicals that cause the plants to produce a duplicate set of chromosomes. The plant triticale, an artificial hybrid of wheat and rye, is one such example of a wide-cross hybrid made possible solely by the existence of embryo rescue and chromosome doubling techniques. Triticale is now grown on more than three million acres worldwide, and dozens of other wide-cross hybrids are also common.
Finally, when a desired trait cannot be found within the existing gene pool, breeders can create new variants by intentionally mutating plants with x-ray or gamma radiation, with mutagenic chemicals or simply by culturing clumps of cells in a petri dish. A relatively new mutant wheat variety has been produced with chemical mutation to be resistant to the BASF herbicide ClearField. Mutation breeding has been in common use since the 1950s, and more than 2,250 known mutant varieties have been bred in at least 50 countries, including France, Germany, Italy, the UK and the US.
It is important to note that these sophisticated and unnatural breeding techniques are considered "conventional," and go almost totally unregulated. Yet, despite the massive genetic changes and potential for harm, consumers and anti-technology activists are largely unaware of their existence and evince no concern.
Along comes recombinant DNA
As we have seen, all modern crops are a product of various genetic meddling. Recombinant DNA methods can therefore be seen as an extension of the continuum of techniques used to modify organisms over the millennia. The biggest difference is that modern genetically modified crops involve a precise transfer of one or two known genes into plant DNA—a surgical alteration of the crop's genome compared to the sledgehammer approaches of traditional hybridization or mutagenesis. Furthermore, unlike varieties developed from more conventional breeding, modern genetically modified crops are rigorously tested and subject to intense regulatory scrutiny prior to commercialization.
There has been widespread acceptance and support for recombinant DNA modification from the scientific community, plant breeders and farmers. Accumulated experience and knowledge of decades of crop improvement combined with expert judgment, science-based reasoning and empirical research has generated confidence that modern genetically modified crops will pose no new or heightened risks that can not be identified and mitigated, and that any unforeseen hazards are likely to be negligible and manageable.
Many growers have embraced modern genetically modified technology because it makes farming more efficient, protects or increases yields and reduces their reliance on chemicals that, other things being equal, they would prefer not to use. Crops enhanced with recombinant DNA technology are now grown on nearly 58 million hectares in 16 countries. More importantly, more than three-quarters of the 5.5 million growers who benefit from genetically modified crops are resource-poor farmers in the developing world.
High anxiety?
Ingredients produced from modern genetic modification are found in thousands of food products consumed worldwide. Yet, even though no legitimate evidence of harm to human health or the environment from these foods is known or expected, there is an intense debate questioning the value and safety of genetically modified organisms.
Although it may seem reasonable for consumers to express a concern that they "don't know what they're eating with genetically modified foods," it must be repeated that consumers never had that information with conventionally modified crops either. Indeed, while no assurance of perfect safety can be made, breeders know far more about the genetic makeup, product characteristics and safety of every modern genetically modified crop than those of any conventional variety ever marketed. Breeders know exactly what new genetic material has been introduced. They can identify where the transferred genes have been inserted into the new plant. They can test to ensure that transferred genes are working properly and that the nutritional elements of the food have been unchanged. None of these safety assurances can be made with conventional breeding techniques.
Consider, for example, how conventional plant breeders would develop a disease-resistant tomato. Sexual reproduction introduces chromosome fragments from a wild relative to transfer a gene for disease resistance into cultivated varieties. In the process, hundreds of unknown and unwanted genes are also introduced, with the risk that some of them could encode toxins or allergens. Yet regulators never routinely test conventionally bred plant varieties for food safety or environmental risk factors, and they are subject to practically no government oversight.
We have always lived with food risks. But modern genetic technology makes it increasingly easier to reduce those risks.
What about the environment?
All of us have to eat to live, and organized food production is the most ecologically demanding endeavor we have pursued. Agricultural expansion over the millennia has destroyed millions of acres of forestland around the world. Alien plant species have been introduced into nonnative environments to provide food, feed, fiber and timber, and as a result have disrupted local fauna and flora. Certain aspects of modern farming have had a negative impact on biodiversity and on air, soil and water quality. But do modern genetically modified crops really pose even greater environmental risks, as critics claim?
The risk of cross-pollination from crops to wild relatives has always existed, and such "gene flow" occurs whenever crops grow in close proximity to sexually compatible wild relatives. Yet breeders have continuously introduced genes for disease and pest resistance through conventional breeding into all of our crops. Traits, such as stress tolerance and herbicide resistance, have also been introduced in some crops with conventional techniques, and the growth habits of every crop have been altered. Thus, not only is gene modification a common phenomenon, but so are many of the specific kinds of changes made with recombinant DNA techniques.
Naturally, with both conventional and recombinant DNA-enhanced breeding, we must be vigilant to ensure that newly introduced plants do not become invasive and that weeds do not become noxious as a result of genetic modification. Although modern genetic modification expands the range of new traits that can be added to crop plants, it also ensures that more will be known about those traits and that the behavior of the modified plants will be, in many ways, easier to predict. That greater knowledge, combined with historical experience with conventional genetic modification, provides considerable assurance that such risks will be minimal and manageable.
It should also be comforting to recognize that no major weed or invasiveness problems have developed since the advent of modern plant breeding, because domesticated plants are typically poorly fit for survival in the wild. Indeed, concerns about genetically modified crops running amok, or errant genes flowing into wild species—sometimes characterized as "gene pollution"—pale in comparison to the genuine risk posed by introducing totally unmodified "exotic" plants into new ecosystems. Notable examples of the latter include water hyacinth in Lake Victoria, cord-grass in China, cattail in Nigeria and kudzu in North America.
This is, of course, not to say that no harm could ever come from the introduction of modern genetically modified or conventionally modified crop varieties. Some traits, if transferred from crops to wild relatives, could increase the reproductive fitness of weeds and cause them to become invasive or to erode the genetic diversity of native flora. But the magnitude of that risk has solely to do with the traits involved, the plants into which they are transferred and the environment into which they are introduced. Consequently, breeders, farmers and regulators are aware of the possibility that certain traits introduced into any new crop varieties, or new varieties introduced into different ecosystems, could pose genuine problems, and these practices are carefully scrutinized. Again, though, this risk occurs regardless of the breeding method used to introduce those traits into the crop.
Finally, one must also recognize the potential positive impact of recombinant DNA modified crops on the environment. Already, commercialized genetically modified crops have reduced agricultural expansion and promoted ecosystem preservation, improved air, soil and water quality as a consequence of reduced tillage, chemical spraying and fuel use and enhanced biodiversity because of lower insecticide use.
Studies have shown that the eight most common modern genetically modified crops grown in the US alone increased crop yields by nearly 2 billion kilograms, provided a net value of US$1.5 billion and reduced pesticide use by 20 million kilograms. A 2002 Council for Agricultural Science and Technology report also found that recombinant DNA modified crops promote the adoption of conservation tillage practices, resulting in many other important environmental benefits: 37 million tons of topsoil preserved, 85% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from farm machinery, 70% reduction in herbicide runoff, 90% decrease in soil erosion and from 15 to 26 liters of fuel saved per acre.
Conclusion: Societal anxiety over the new genetic modification is, in some ways, understandable. It is fueled by a variety of causes, including unfamiliarity, lack of reliable information about regulatory safeguards, a steady stream of negative opinion in the news media, opposition by activist groups, growing mistrust of industry and a general lack of awareness of how our food production system has evolved.
Humans and crops will always be mutually dependent upon one another's survival, and the guided evolution of crops will continue but increasingly will be more precise and safer. An appreciation of the history of agricultural development, however, may provide us with a useful roadmap for devising appropriate strategies for informing the public and making rational societal responses to crop improvement.
Channapatna S. Prakash is a professor of plant biotechnology at Tuskegee University in Alabama and the president of AgBioWorld Foundation based in Auburn, Alabama. Gregory Conko is director of food safety policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute in Washington and vice-president of AgBioWorld Foundation. This article first appeared in the retrospective 50 Years of DNA published in London by Business Weekly and the Wellcome Trust this spring.
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the bricoleur
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