About GM farming - reply to post

Why is it important to be reductionist in the GM debate?  To understand this issue I think that it should be broken down into, at the very least, two main parts. The first one would be the technology, without any reference to big agro business like Monsanto and Co. And the second one would be how to regulate the implementation of the technology in a global market economy to minimise its negative impact in the environment at large and in the economies of developing countries. Why is it important to do so and move away from the “holistic” approach, whatever that means? Because failing that, we may abandon a perfectly fine tool to fight malnutrition, improve the environment and return more power to all farmers to control their crops.

For instance: GM “golden rice” produces Vitamin A and it may help to solve the problem of infant blindness in some countries. The last I heard about this, a few years ago, it was not patented so small farmers in Asia could use it. Obviously this rice is as safe for human consumption as the non-GM rice and has a similar impact in the environment.    

GM cotton produces a toxin that kills the one major pest. This toxin is produced by a bacterium so what scientists did was to introduce those genes in the cotton seeds. Incidentally, the toxin is widely used by organic farmers as it is approved by the Soil Association and other similar organizations. GM cotton avoids the need to spray the toxin with the subsequent savings in energy.

There are many more examples of GM crops that can have a positive impact our world. At the end of the day, it is just another piece of agricultural technology. Depending on how it is used, and who is using it, it can be friend or foe.

Addressing your points more directly:

·         I don’t remember any campaign by any serious organization stating that GM crops would eradicate hunger and improve food security. They may help to do so, along with all the other agricultural methods, conventional non-GM and organic, and a much fairer trade conditions for farmers, big and small. It is mainly a socioeconomic issue. No agricultural method is a silver bullet. Allowing free rein of GMOs will not solve this. Banning GMOs will not solve it either. But they might be crucial in some future scenarios. We cannot afford to ditch them or to stop research on them.

·         The suicide of farmers in India is caused by Monsanto’s horrific trading conditions and not by biotechnology.  Big multinationals are not charities. They are big and powerful and need intense regulation and scrutiny. In the age of the Internet, it should be possible to keep an eye on them and be quick to report and condemn such practices. If we got that many diplomatic cables from the USA thanks to Wikileaks, there could be some of them coming from whistleblowers inside big corporations. That would put pressure on official regulators . A wonderful book dealing with a similar issue is “Bad Pharma” from B. Goldacre. I’m halfway the book but I’ve read enough to realize how important it is overhaul the entire regulatory system when it comes to big multinationals. The same applies to Monsanto and the like. But neither the author wants a ban on neither medicines nor I want a ban on GMOs. Monsanto could have driven the farmers to suicide in other ways. The technology is not the culprit. Big corporation methods are the ones to blame.

·         I suppose that the Mexican farmers died for exposure to pesticides. Nothing to do with GMOs.  Like in the BT example, GM crops can do away with pesticides and so help to prevent those deaths. But it is clear to me that appalling working conditions killed them. Pesticides are used all over the world and they don’t kill workers every time.  Same for the loss of soil fertility. It has to do with the wrong approach to farming and nothing to do with GM crops. “No-till” corn varieties (GM) used in the USA prevent soil loss.

·         The impact on wildlife and bees is not greater than the one caused by non-GM agriculture. It could be even less as suggested above. Why GM crops are not necessarily worse than other crops and why scientists are fairly sure of that is a very interesting, and lengthy, discussion. One of the best books I’ve found about this is “Mendel in the kitchen” (N. Fedoroff).

·         People are not getting more ill in the last 20 years. Every single small increment in allergy frequencies is picked up by the media who make a really big meal of it. People are getting less ill when they are young; provided they have a proper diet, a reasonably clean air and that they are not worked to death. When they old, they get more ill than before because of old age, because they live longer. Cancer is a good example of that. Rates of cancer increase because we live longer, so more chances for more dreadful mutations, but they also decrease because finally we are quitting smoking, doing exercise and eating better (well, some people are).  I’d like to know the proper figures for this as my hunch is that, overall and correcting for age related cancers, cancer rates are decreasing. But I need to see the studies, rather than believe what the telly pulls out of you know what place to prey on their audience’s fears.

Finally, your last point is very important. It cannot be proven that GMOs have nothing to do with, say, an increase in cancer. It is impossible to prove a negative. How would you design a trial for that? To prove it you would have to test GMOs in every single person alive now and in all people that ever lived. Only then you could have a proof that every single genetic modification on crops, achieved only by means of modern biotechnology and bearing in mind that all those modifications are different, cause, or do not cause, cancer. It is impossible to do that. That impossibility cannot be a reason to ban GMOs because it could be argued for any type of technology and so we would not have any technology at all.  So what we do is stick to the evidence and the evidence says that modifying crops genetically by using modern biotechnology does not make them more dangerous than crops modified genetically by traditional ways. That goes together with what I mentioned before about Americans eating them and not suffering any health problems.