*Will GM technology feed the world - or destroy farming, and human
health, in the name of corporate profit? How can we tell, when the
science is up for sale?
Genetically modified crops might once have proved useful. In the early
days, in the 1980s, scientists I spoke to in India hoped to transfer
genes from groundnuts (which are very resistant to heat and drought)
into sorghum, the staple cereal of the Sahel, which is also
drought-resistant but succumbs in the worst years. In California, there
were advanced plans to produce barley that could thrive in brackish
water of the kind that is spreading worldwide in the wake of overzealous
irrigation. In Brazil, just a few years ago, I found GM being used to
make disease-resistant papaya - which grows everywhere in the tropics
and is an instant, free source of succulence, energy and Vitamin A. I
was all for it.
Of course, the scientists anticipated snags. The GM plants might develop
undesirable traits, possibly hazardous to consumer health, not
necessarily in the first generation but down the line. That things could
go wrong was evident from some of the early forays into GM livestock,
which produced sad monsters. Perhaps the GM plants would escape into
ecosystems and become pests - as many a crop has done in the past - but
the GM super-crops might prove to be super-pests. Perhaps the
insect-resistant types with built-in insecticide would kill non-target
insects, with disastrous knock-on effects.
Nevertheless, the mood I encountered then was optimistic, essentially
altruistic, and cautious. There was no need to hurry, because the
conventional techniques of the day, properly deployed, could do what
needed doing. Today, the world isn't like that: food production is now
private enterprise, controlled by corporations and banks. The main
purpose of farming is no longer to feed people but to maximise profits,
raise GDP and maintain economic growth.
Critically, farming geared to making money differs in all significant
ways from farming that is committed to providing good food today and for
the future. Farming that feeds people well and sustainably must in
general be mixed (many kinds of livestock and crops all interacting). It
is complex and labour-intensive. Chemical inputs should be minimised,
especially inputs of non-renewables; and, as far as possible, most food
should be produced locally. The overall target is to ensure resilience:
a steady supply of varied and high-quality crops, even in difficult
times.
Cheap food is an illusion
In contrast, farming that is designed to make money must be maximally
productive, but at minimum cost. So the systems must be simple: big
machines and industrial chemistry instead of husbandry, and the farms on
as large a scale as possible and monocultural, with just one crop or one
kind of animal. Balanced diets in any one place can therefore be ensured
only by mass imports. Labour - usually the most expensive input - must
be cut to the bone and then cut again, with the workers paid as little
as possible.
Finally, there must be maximal "value-adding" by processing, packaging
and contrived exoticism, but above all by turning cheap yet good staples
of the kind that have supported the great cuisines into meat for fast
food. So we feed half the world's wheat to animals, and 80 per cent of
the maize. But if something else should turn up that makes more money
than food - for instance, biofuels - we'll grow that instead.
It works, does it not? While the food technologists and retailers have
grown rich beyond all dreams of avarice, the masses have had, at least
until recently, cheap food: it takes up just 8 per cent of the average
Briton's income. Yet cheap food is an illusion. It is made to seem cheap
by creative accountancy that ignores the vast quantities of oil needed,
the collateral damage to soil, rivers, lakes, forests, wildlife, climate
and, indeed, to human life, as well as the most blatant injustice as
farmers across the globe are made bankrupt. According to the UN, one
billion people now live in urban slums worldwide; and most of the
shanty-dwellers are former farmers or their immediate descendants and
dependants. The multinationals assure us there are "alternative
industries". No, there aren't. When and if there are alternatives, it
may be sensible to encourage people to leave the land. Not until. And
it's a big "if".
As long as GM was part of an economy and a morality that had the
well-being of humanity at heart, it had the potential to become what
Ivan Illich in the 1970s called "a convivial technology", truly
improving the human lot. As things stand, it merely serves to
consolidate the status quo: to strengthen the arm of the corporations,
which alone will control the seed and the inputs that the new seed
requires; and to promote all the agro-industrial strategies that are so
obviously destructive.
To be sure, the biological risks of GM remain, and should not be
underestimated; but given time, and due caution, they could have been
minimised. Commerce, however, demands immediate results, such that
organic farmers already find it hard to buy feed for their animals that
is not made from GM maize or soya. Yet reports that all is safe in the
world of GM technology are greatly exaggerated. Nor is it true that it
simply replicates the "horizontal" transmission of genes that occurs in
the wild, and hence is "natural". Natural genes contain stretches of DNA
known as "introns" that modify and regulate their function. Genetic
engineers strip out the introns before they transfer them, to make life
simpler. The difference could be significant, but we just don't know. I
have yet to hear an advocate of GM technology even raise this issue.
Indeed, there has been so much hype and obfuscation in the promotion of
GM - Prince Charles's recent warning about the looming environmental
disaster aside - that it would be foolish to believe a word of it. Here
are three quick examples. We have heard much, of late, of the "golden
rice" made by Syngenta. It is fitted with a gene that produces carotene,
which is the precursor of Vitamin A - the lack of which is a prime
source of blindness among children worldwide. Therefore, Syngenta tells
us, golden rice is a good thing - a sentiment echoed subsequently in the
media and in the House of Lords by Dick Taverne. But carotene is the
yellowish pigment in green leaves (such as spinach) and in all
yellow-orange roots and fruits (carrots and papaya among them) and is
one of the commonest organic molecules in nature. Poor people do not
need handouts from Syngenta. All they need is horticulture - which,
before the days of corporate-owned monocultures of commodity crops, they
had.
We are told that GM crops yield more, and that the technology's
opponents are irresponsible. Yet yield is rarely what really matters:
very few famines in modern history have been caused by an inability to
grow enough food; it has always been secondary to wars and economic
breakdown, often caused by the west's destruction of subsistence
farming. And anyway, the idea that GM crops can be relied upon to yield
more than conventional crops is simply not true. Some GM crops do
sometimes yield more than most standard crops in some circumstances and
in some years; often they do not. In the long term, we have yet to see.
The published results which seem to show that GM crops consistently
outstrip their conventional counterparts are highly selective, with
unfavourable results not made public. More and more, we are urged to
rely on the "objectivity" and unimpeachable integrity of science. But
when science itself is up for sale, there is no court of appeal.
"Feeding People is Easy" by Colin Tudge is published by Pari Publishing
(GBP9.99)
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