Will Frankenfood Save the Planet?
Jonathan Rauch, Atlantic Monthly 2003
- Genetically engineered (=GE) food is necessary if we are to feed
people in the future
- UN's middle projection has population going up 40% from 6.3
billion today to 8.9 by 2050
- To feed them (and their pets, and with increased protein diets a
richer world expects) will require food production to double,
perhaps triple
- Why assume and cater to increased protein diets if not
good for people?
- "Green revolution technologies" will not be sufficient to increase
food the required amount (3 fold) and so we need GE
- Green revolution: Movement to increase yields by using new
crop cultivars, irrigation, fertilizers, pesticides, mechanization
- Tripled world farm output since 1960
- Yet far more starve today!
- Feeding twice as many people from same land (doubled
land agricultural productivity?)
- But Green revolution used more land and water per person
- Are these last two claims be consistent? (People eating
more food or food that requires more land, namely animal
protein?)
- But most of good land already used, is heavily fertilized, and is
planted with high yielding seeds
- With same technologies we've used in the recent past, we can't
expect to triple output again--perhaps we could get a 50%
increase
- Critique: Hunger is a social/political problem, not an agricultural one
- It is often claimed that although 800 million people are hungry in
the world today--10-20 million people starve a year, 27,000
people starve a day-mostly children!--we have enough food to
feed all
- They starve because they can't buy the food
- So problem of hunger is mainly a social/political not agricultural
one
- Click here for detials on this argument
- GE can really help with environmental problems, but
unfortunately environmentalists stand in its way (due to misleading
ideas about biotech )
- GE can be used in env. friendly and env. harmful ways and
environmentalists should get behind GE and make sure it is used in
env. friendly ways.
- GE may be most environmentally beneficial tech in decades
- If properly developed, disseminated and used, GM (=genetically
modified) crops might be best hope planet has
- "Earth friendly transgenics": Crops that might fertilize the soil,
clean water, provide chemical free agriculture, crops that provide
habitat
- Lots of ifs: Question is (according to Lyons) not how
biotechnology could/might be used, but how it is likely to be used
- Environmentalists need to come around to this pont of view if
they want to save the planet
- They are the ones who can insure that biotech agriculture
will be used in env. friendly ways
- They care enough to lobby for this use and teach farmers
around the world to use it responsibly
- Ag is the single most important human activity shaping the planet
- About 2/5 of earth's land surface is devoted to crop land or
pasture
- This has been going up at .3% a year (additional land mass
of Greece per year 131,000 square kilometers)
- Despite agriculture tech revolution
- Agriculture harms nature in these ways:
- Agriculture involves making war on plants (weeds) and animals
(pests) -in short, a war on nature
- Destroying wildlife habitat
- Monoculture crop fields are poor habitat (as well as being
vulnerable to disease and disaster)
- Fertilizer runs off and pollutes water
- Farming w/o fertilizer will deplete and eventually exhaust soil
- Pesticides can harm humans and harm beneficial non-target bugs
- Irrigation leaves trace elements (e.g., salt) that accumulates and
poisons soil (i.e., salinization)
- Even traditional and organic farming harms nature:
- Tradeoffs fundamental
- Organic farming uses no artificial fertilizer, but does use manure
and it can pollute water and contaminate food
- That it can, doesn't mean it does this nearly as much as
does chemical based agriculture.
- Traditional farmers uses less herbicide, but do more ploughing
(with all its problems) to get rid of weeds
- BIOTECH AGRICULTURE CAN HELP WITH ALL OF THESE
PROBLEMS
- ONE: GE CAN HELP REDUCE PLOUGHING
- No-till farming (farming w/o ploughing) has huge
environmental benefits
- Plowing (tilling) has these negative env. consequences
- Runoff (soil) that pollutes rivers
- Erosion wears away land (top soil loss a serious problem)
- Release of greenhouse gases stored in soil
- Plowed soil, stirred up and turned over becomes lifeless and
homogeneous
- Example of no-till farming in Virginia: Good Luck Tract
- Dense wheat yielding twice what expected and yet on rolling,
gullied, highly erodible land
- Crop yields better than conventional methods
- Soil has grown richer in organic matter, more nourishing to
crops, even as the land is farmed
- No till farming builds up soil?
- Almost no chemical or soil runoff: land absorbs water before it
runs off
- Unlike ploughed soil, this soil was alive with insects and worms
- Not ploughed for years and underground ecosystem
returned
- Gives it elaborate architecture which keeps earth in place
and makes it a water sponge
- Worms doing the ploughing
- Crop residue left on the ground and rather than ploughed
underground, it decays and enriches the soil providing
nourishment for soil's biota
- Farmer saves fuel and money and reduced pollution compared to
ploughing
- Local conservationists excited as trying to clean up Chesapeake Bay
watershed and most of sediment that clouds rivers and the fertilizer
runoff that causes algae blooms and fish kills comes from farmland
- No till farming by eliminating agricultural erosion and runoff
would "revolutionize" area's water quality
- Widespread elimination of ploughing depends on gm crops
- Continuous no-till farming works best with help of gm crops
- No-till farming is poss w/o biotech but its more difficult and
expensive
- Thus no-till and biotech are "advancing in tandem"
- Why?
- Ploughing is done to control weeds (turn over soil between
planting to smother weeds and their seeds)
- If don't plough land becomes a seed garden
- Unless use herbicide to kill them
- But herbicides tend to kill the agricultural crops as well
- Farmers have significantly reduced ploughing by planting Round-up Ready Soybeans
- This allows them to use herbicides to kill weeds rather than
ploughing
- These soybeans plants are genetically-engineered to tolerate large
amounts of the herbicide round-up)
- So can spray it on fields, it kills weeds but not the soybeans, and
then "quickly breaks down into harmless ingredients"
- Allowed farmers to control weeds with "just a few applications
of a single, relatively benign herbicide, instead of many
applications of complex and expensive menu of chemicals"
- Is the total amount of pesticide reduced?
- Also allows farmers to "retire their ploughs" and use roundup to
control weeds
- Over 1/3 of all U.S. soybeans are now grown w/o ploughing
mostly due to Round-up Ready varieties
- TWO: GE PEST RESISTANT CROPS (E.G., BT COTTON)
REDUCES PESTICIDE USE
- Pesticide spraying, not pesticide use!
- Poison only goes to the bugs that eat the crop, instead of being
sprayed all around, which hurts humans and others
- GM cotton reduced pesticide use by 2 million pounds in U.S.
from 1996-2000
- Are we reducing pesticide use by putting it in every cell of the
plant?
- Any human health effects? Other pesticides you could wash off,
can't wash off these pesticides as in the body of the plants
- THREE: GE SALT TOLERANT CROPS COULD HELP SAVE
FURTHER ENCROACHMENT INTO WILDLAND BY BRINING
MILLIONS OF ACRES OF SALT-WOUNDED LAND BACK INTO
PRODUCTION
- GM tomato plant able to thrive on water ½ as salty as sea water
(50 times saltier than ordinary tomatoes can stand)
- Traditional plant breeders tried to do this for decades and
failed
- Irrigation leaves soil salty and makes it hard to crop plants
- Soil destroyed by salinization a huge problem worldwide
- 25 million acres (SC is 17 million acres) a year is lost to
salinity
- 40% world's irrigated land and 25% of U.S. irrigated land
hurt so some degree
- These crops could bring back millions of acres of wounded
land into production
- We had been worried about keeping these salt-contaminated fields going for decades, now can think about
doing so for centuries
- Rather than change the practice that degrades farmland (over
irrigation), we change the plant grown there so that it can
tolerate the degraded conditions
- A techno-fix solution, instead of addressing the cause of the
problem
- Rather than clean up rivers, should we GE fish so they can
live in polluted waters?
- FOUR: GM CROPS CAN HELP RESTORE LAND HEALTH
- These salt-tolerant crops take up 7% of their weight in sodium
and so theoretically one could grown them in a salt-contaminated field and restore the field to health
- Also developing crops that tolerate aluminum (and take up?), another soil
contaminant
- FIVE: GM crops (and Green revolution) could/has/will allow us to
increase wilderness/habitat preservation by letting us use less land
to grow out food
- Habitat loss perhaps most serious environmental problem
- From 1966-1994 all but three of central American countries
cleared more forest than left standing.
- Great challenge next 50 years not feed additional 3 billion people but
do so w/o converting much of world's remaining wildland into
farmland
- Borlaug hypothesis: By improving productivity of farmland, Green
Revolution not only saved many human lives, but also saved millions
of acres of tropical forest and other habitats and the animals that lived
there
- Claims that between 60s-80s green revolution advances saved more
than 100 million acres of wildland in India
- Avery: If farming techniques/yield not improved since 1950, world
would have lost additional 20 million square miles of habitat, and since
only 16 million square miles of forest exist today, "we have saved
every square mile of forest on the planet"
- But this is a mere projection of how much additional farmland
they would have had to use with old productivity level to get
same amount of food
- Not take into consideration political and social dimensions of
what would have happened without increased productivity
- Again the Lyons question seems appropriate: Not what GM crops
could do, but what are the likely results of widespread use of GM
crops? Will they really reduce use of wildlands given the practical
situation of their use? Perhaps...
- Rauch acknowledges that GM crops could be used against
environment
- Salt tolerant or drought resistant crop might induce farmers to
plough up virgin land previously too salty or dry to farm
- Thus it is environmentalists job to make sure GMOs used in
environmentally friendly way
- Gene transfer poses risks to be sure
- GM crops spreading into wildlands or cross pollinating
with weedy relatives producing superweeds or
invasive/destructive varieties
- Then says so does cross breeding
- He's ignoring relative risks or suggesting they are equally
risky, without explaining why that is supposed to be so
- Says need some government regulation
- He imagines a world in 2050 where population has stabilized and we
are able to feed all people while reducing our agricultural footprint and
putting agriculture on sustainable basis (e.g., returning cropland to
wilderness, restoring damaged soils/ecosystems)