In our book, Tomorrow’s Table: Organic Farming, Genetics and the Future of Food, Raoul and I discuss whether or not GE varieties can help forge a future sustainable agriculture.
Both conventional and organic farmers rely on genetically diverse and improved plant varieties to increase their yields, and I see no reason why GE seed should be viewed differently. I like to think Rachel Carson would also agree. After all, in 1962 she said:
“A truly extraordinary variety of alternatives to the chemical control of insects is available. Some are already in use and have achieved brilliant success. Others are in the stage of laboratory testing. Still others are little more than ideas in the minds of imaginative scientists, waiting for the opportunity to put them to the test. All have this in common: they are biological solutions, based on understanding of the living organisms they seek to control, and of the whole fabric of life to which these organisms belong. Specialists representing various areas of the vast field of biology are contributing—entomologists, pathologists, geneticists, physiologists, biochemists, ecologists—all pouring their knowledge and their creative inspirations into the formation of a new science of biotic controls.”
Isn’t GE as exactly the kind of biological approach that Rachel Carson was hoping for?
I have a theory that the opposition to GM could largely have been avoided if the people at Monsanto who decided what the first GM varieties should be had discussed the issue with their PR people much earlier.
You can imagine the scene when they finally did discuss:
“So. We’re a large multinational company in an era when large multinationals are getting a bad reputation. Now, what’s this new variety you want to introduce?”
“It’s a variety of soy that is resistant to roundup.”
“Roundup? That’s a herbicide, isn’t it? Don’t we make it?”
“Yes”
“OK, I’m sure we can work out how to get round the implication that we are a large multinational who are only inserting this gene so that we can sell more chemicals. What’s our second product?”
“Well, we want to introduce a terminator gene into our varieties, so that the farmers will have to continue to buy our seed, and can’t keep their own for the next season. This will generate massive expansion into third world markets.”
At which point a whole PR division had a spontaneous nervous breakdown.
I think the very early work done by Monsanto (before it really got “into the field”) was determined by the systems in which the technique worked.
But this is a good point, and I believe one disappointment of the “green revolution” people (including people who became plant scientists after reading the works of Rachel Carson and others) was that the early GM crops were not those that would help feed the world. However, these days, with so much work on rice and other staples, I think that the value of GM is becoming more apparent. African countries value the technique because it makes a significant difference to harvests. People in the west (UK, certainly) make a virtue of “GM free” food in supermarkets, still, though. Is there a main supermarket chain which would dare to sell GM-derived products? Which is daft if you ask me – but, nonetheless, reality.
It’s true, Maxine, that the value is becoming more obvious. But it does seem that those with a knee-jerk reaction against GM like Greenpeace are prepared to knock even those crops with a social benefit. A genetically modified variant of rice that was designed to help counter Vitamin A deficiency, was dismissed by Greenpeace because the environmental organization said that to obtain the required amount of Vitamin A would require ‘seven kilograms a day of cooked Golden Rice.’ The actual amount is 200 grams or less.
Of course Rachel Carson is an interesting case study in her own right. How many people have died from malaria etc. as a result of banning DDT, and how does this compare with the positive effects of the ban? I’m not saying she was wrong, but I don’t think the cost/benefit has been fully worked out.
I think you’re right about GE, although it is not clear to me that we still fully understand what the long term consequences GMO’s have on health, sustainability, and the environment. They are certainly much different than chemical treatments (such as DDT) but, as Brian mentions, the cost/benefit hasn’t necessarily been worked out yet. It will be interesting to see the role of these foods in the future.
On a side note, I think a similar type of catch 22 with Carlson and GE is brewing with nanotechnology. Visionaries decades ago that we now idolize (Feynman?) predicted a better world through this new technology, and now that ‘nano’ is here, the backlash is starting.
It’s funny, isn’t it — you are quite right of course, Nick, but look at issues such as cigarette-smoking, SUVs (a pet hate!), massive domestic electrical wastage (air con, huge fridges etc), all kinds of activities which we know are harmful. Yet the numbers argue that at least some of the people participating in the backlash against nanotech, GM etc, are also participating in known dangerous and wasteful actitivies.
Perhaps a better analogy for what I just wrote would be people who are anti GM foods eating plenty of pre-processed foods laden with salts, additives et al.
I agree we don’t know of long-term risks of an awful lot of consumables – and probably never have done. So does it all boil down to making choices bases on emotion or religion or similar?
Thanks for all your interesting comments.
Regarding long term consequences, I agree that such consequences are difficult to predict for most consumables. Yet on the scale of high risk vs low risk, most scientists agree that GE crops that are currently on the market are safe to eat and the process of GE itself possesses a very very low risk of long term consequences- similar to conventional breeding approaches.
Often what is lost in the debates is that GE crops, after more than 10 years of consumption and 1 billion acres planted, have not caused a single negative health or environmental impact and there is solid data that we have reduced the use of million of tons of pesticides.
I have not been paying attention to the backlash against nanotech. It is quite interesting to hear of the parallels. Thanks for the info.
Good question Maxine. It’s hard because if I admit that it boils down to making emotional decisions (which is likely the case), then it takes away from the way in which I’d prefer these types of questions should be answered: through science. Not all questions, but ones about deciding if the benefits of a t-shirt with nanosilver or tomatoes with pig genes outweigh the cost. But maybe science can’t answer these questions because of the human component. Are you going to tell a poor family that it’s better for them to starve than eat GMO’s?
And Pamela—the backlash against nano isn’t nearly to the level of GE, but it is brewing. Admittedly, I have been on both sides of the ‘nano’ fence and still am not sure which side to set up camp. I think this speaks to the perceived difficulty of these types of decisions. However, the data you present about GE is quite convincing.
One of the most spectacular “nanotech backlash” examples is the book Prey by Michael Crichton.
There has been a more balanced discussion ;-) over the past few years in Nature, Nature Nanotechnology and some of our other journals. But you won’t find it hard to find other information about nanotechnology risks: I think there has been a US National Acadamy of Sciences report on them. (Or maybe it was the Royal Society).
Academy, sorry.