Do the benefits of GE justify the risks?
Even some pro-GE scientists, if you ask them politely and off the record,
will tell you that GE foods carry unpredictable and serious risks. They
justify the risk by pointing out the great benefits that GE foods and crops
are supposed to bring. They dismiss a precautionary approach as
unscientific and unwarranted.
This strategy is in line with the advice of PR company Burson Marsteller,
whose job it has been to persuade the public to accept GE foods. BM told
the biotech industry to stay off the "killing fields" of public health and
environmental risk, as these were arguments the industry could not win.
Instead, industry should focus on the "benefits" of GE. This involved using
"symbols -- not logic: Symbols are central to politics, because they
connect to emotions, not logic Bioindustries need to respond with symbols
eliciting hope, satisfaction, caring and self-esteem."34
The biotech industry has taken this message to heart, stressing the
articles of faith of GE:
* GE crops reduce pesticide use.
* They encourage wildlife.35
* They increase yield and can "feed the world."
The facts are less attractive. Just two genetically engineered traits
accounted for the nearly 40 million hectares of GE crops planted in 1999
36. The majority (71 percent) were engineered to be tolerant to the
companies' own patented broad-spectrum herbicides, while most of the rest
were engineered with Bt-toxin to kill insect pests. A university-based
survey of 8,200 field trials of the most widely grown GE crops,
herbicide-tolerant soybeans, revealed that they yielded 6.7 percent less
and required two to five times more herbicides than non-GE varieties37.
This has been confirmed by a more recent study in the University of
Nebraska38. Yet other emerging problems have been identified: erratic
performance, disease susceptibility, Bt-toxin resistant pests, unexpected
deaths of beneficial insects feeding on GE crops, herbicide-resistant
superweeds arising from stray GE genes and poor economic returns to
farmers.39
But, says the biotech industry, farmers wouldn't buy the seeds if they
weren't great performers. Unfortunately, the idea of a future in which
farmers are free to choose the best seeds is illusion. Increasingly in the
United States and Canada, farmers who visit their grain seed store find
that they only have a choice between GE seeds and more GE seeds. Farmers
who are steering clear of GE seeds because they farm organically or want to
cater to the European market for non-GE crops report that they have been
forced to stop growing soy or maize for lack of non-GE seeds. The global
seed industry is now controlled by a handful of companies dedicated to
selling seeds that they can patent and own. Many of these seeds are
chemical junkies, dependent on the companies' patented herbicides.
Feeding the world?
The biotech industry, in an effort to force us to embrace untested GE
foods, is playing the "guilt" card. We are told that GE foods can feed the
starving millions in the Third World.
This cynical move has been roundly condemned by charities working with
farmers in developing countries, including Christian Aid40, Action Aid41
and Oxfam42. They point out that people go hungry in developing countries
not because there is a shortage of food, but because they are too poor to
buy the food that is available and because they no longer own land to grow
food for their families. At the height of the 1984 famine in Ethiopia,
crops were grown there on prime agricultural land for export to the United
Kingdom as livestock feed. And while millions go hungry in India, the
Indian government is holding massive grain surpluses in store43.
Governments of poor countries have formed an unholy alliance with Western
agrochemical companies to push farmers into growing cash crops for export
rather than to grow food to feed their communities. Why? The governments
want to pay off debts to the rich countries, and the companies want to sell
patented seeds and chemicals. The cash crops are monocultures (where just a
single crop grows), which encourage pests and disease, which in turn force
farmers to use high chemical inputs, which in turn kill "weeds." In
traditional farming systems, the "weeds" growing among the staple crops
were the green vegetables (such as mustard greens in India), which provided
diversity in the diet and prevented vitamin deficiency.
Expensive, chemical input-hungry GE crops are not the answer to world
hunger. That's not to say farming has to stay put in the dark ages. Dr.
Jules Pretty has gathered research from hundreds of projects across the
developing world showing that yields have been doubled and trebled using
largely organic methods44. These methods also encourage a diversity of food
crops, prevent vitamin deficiency and guard against pests that can wipe out
monocultures. They do not bring with them the tragic legacy of
pesticide-poisoned populations, depleted soils, polluted water and First
World dependency that have marked out many of the developing nations'
experiments with chemical farming methods. In other words, modern organic
farming methods are sustainable. GE crops are merely an extension of the
chemical farming systems now discredited in both affluent and developing
countries.
Golden rice: Gift or Trojan horse?
In a desperate move to win back their lost credibility, the biotech
companies have promised to give away GE "golden rice," engineered to
contain higher levels of vitamin A, to Third World countries to prevent
blindness caused by vitamin A deficiency.
Let's leave aside for a moment the warnings that several respected
scientists have issued about the toxicological dangers of isolating a
single nutrient and concentrating it in a staple food. Let's also disregard
the fact that everyone has differing needs and tolerances for different
nutrients and that engineering large amounts of one nutrient into a staple
food that everyone will eat regardless of individual need may be a
dangerous form of forced mass-medication.
Let's just ask the simple question: Is GE "vitamin-enhanced" rice the best
way to cure vitamin A deficiency? On the risks versus benefits scale, how
does it compare with enabling farmers to feed their own families and
communities with a traditional diversity of crops, including green
vegetables rich in vitamin A? And since organically grown food has been
found to contain higher levels of vitamins and nutrients than
conventionally grown food45 -- without environmental degradation, chemical
dependence and pesticide poisoning of workers -- might modern organics be
the way forward?
And if we are really fixated on getting a single nutrient into a staple
crop, how does GE golden rice compare with the many indigenous varieties of
red rice naturally rich in vitamin A?
This last question is one that the biotech companies don't want you to ask.
Since the massive groundswell of opinion away from GE food in Europe, plant
breeding centers have revealed that they can breed crops with the touted GE
"benefits" using traditional breeding methods. Broccoli with extra
cancer-preventing nutrients46, salt-tolerant cereal,47 tomatoes high in
immune-boosting lycopene48 and soy that grows in chilly climates49 all have
been developed without GE. A researcher for a major plant breeding center
confessed on condition of anonymity that the center had developed crop
plants by traditional cross-breeding methods for 40 years and could
continue to do so easily without any need for GE.
A minimal amount of research among Third World experts (the farmers!) and
aid agencies working with them reveals that nature provides a huge variety
of indigenous crops that grow in saline soils, survive drought and tolerate
acid soils. Such crops can form a valuable part -- but only a part -- of an
ongoing program of restoration of depleted soils.50 They are most
successful when used within a holistic approach to disease and pest
prevention, which offers more sustainability and self-sufficiency to
farmers than Western high-tech "magic bullet" approaches.
Such holistic methods include restoring the health and vigor of the soil by
incorporation of plenty of organic matter, and avoiding monocultures, which
deplete the soil of nutrients and offer a feast for pests. In one study,
Chinese scientists virtually eliminated a rice disease and increased yield
simply by planting several traditional varieties of rice in a paddy. The
control monoculture plot of a high-yield modern variety had more disease,
needed more poisons and yielded less.51 For an astonishing roster of plant
diseases resulting from monoculture, see Marc Lappe and Britt Bailey in
their book Against the Grain.52
The Chinese study is echoed by a vast collection of research by Pretty at
the University of Essex, which showed that Third World farmers were able to
double and treble yields using largely organic practices.53
In the Third World, many natural supercrops and sustainable farming methods
were swept aside in the "Green Revolution" of the 1960s and '70s, which
favored modern cash crop hybrids bought from Western seed companies. But
the lost supercrops and intelligent farm practices can be brought back --
if they are not forgotten once more in the GE hype.
There is no doubt that world hunger is a problem that must be solved. It
can be done -- with a large dose of political will, using solutions that
respect traditional knowledge, produce safe food and empower farmers. It
cannot be done with risky short-term techno-fixes that render poor farmers
serfs to Western corporations.
By the way, the fear that propels the GE bandwagon -- that we need GE to
feed the ever-increasing numbers of hungry mouths in the Third World -- may
be a construct of the fevered corporate imagination. The World Health
Organization says we currently have enough food to feed the world one and a
half times over -- it's political instability and poverty that prevent fair
distribution. And a recent report from the Food and Agriculture
Organization of the United Nations reveals that the world can feed itself
until at least 2030 without the use of GE.54 GE was not factored in because
of ongoing doubts about agricultural performance, safety and consumer
acceptance. The same report predicts that world population growth is
decelerating so fast that the per annum increase is expected to be just 0.3
percent in 2050.
GE is not about better crops, better health or feeding the world. It is
about patenting and private ownership of what used to be a common good: the
entire food chain. Monsanto executive Robert Fraley spelled it out for us
when he said about his company's buying up of small seed companies, "What
you are seeing is not just a consolidation of seed companies -- it is
really a consolidation of the entire food chain."55 In everyday English,
this means the company intends that there will not remain a single crop
seed on Earth that is not engineered, owned and patented by it.
Do we need GE? If we take a cool look at the "problems" that GE is supposed
to solve, time and again, we find that either the "problem" isn't a
problem, or that there is a better and safer solution.
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