In 2002, a most unlikely book came out: an oversized, lushly produced, coffee-table tome on the ills of mass-scale, chemical-intensive agriculture.
Grandly titled Fatal Harvest: The Tragedy of Industrial Agriculture, the book contained stark photos of highly mechanized, monocrop farming, along with pungent, probing essays by Wendell Berry, Wes Jackson, and other seminal thinkers of the agrarian school.
I got my hands on Fatal Harvest when I first started farming in 2004. It helped crystallize and shape my ideas around agriculture, providing me with a vocabulary and a tradition from which to begin writing.
Andrew Kimbrell, executive director of the Center for Food Safety, was the force and vision behind Fatal Harvest. A lawyer by training, he has been investigating the doings of agribusiness for 30 years. His main focus has been the stunning rise of the genetically modified seed industry. As Kimbrell has shown, the GMO seed giants (mainly Monsanto) have managed to foist their wares into our farm fields and onto our plates with at best minimal public oversight.
And guess what? The mapping of the human genome revealed that the GMO giants got the science wrong: the relationship between organisms and individual genes is much more complex and mysterious than researchers originally thought. And that, Kimbrell says in this interview, helps explain why after 25 years of R&D, the GMO industry has only managed to create a couple of viable traits. The main one, of course, is "herbicide tolerance," e.g., Monsanto's Round Up Ready corn and soy, engineered to withstand copious lashings of its flagship herbicide, Round Up.
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Comments
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Russ Posted 4:04 am
15 Sep 2008
There's another example of how rampant scientific ignorance is in America.
Among GMO supporters, even the allegedly well-educated often make an argument along the lines of, "They just take one gene out and/or insert a new gene, to achieve a well-calibrated precision effect, so what harms could it cause?"
I don't know how often this is true ignorance and how often it's intentional lying, but either way it suppresses the truth that most if not all traits are determined by a bundle of genes working in synergy, and most if not all genes contribute to many traits and have an effect on many other genes. So it defies believability that genetic modification is some sort of smart bomb achieving a precision effect. On the contrary it is carpet bombing a vast area to try to hit a small target, with effects which can only be guessed at.
It's a radical repudiation of the precautionary principle, which is why support for it is mutually exclusive with environmentalism.
[BTW Tom - you say you only started farming (and I assume writing about it) in 2004? I had assumed you'd been doing it for much longer. That gives me some hope that it may not be too late for me to become at least passably competent at it.]
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Wolverine Posted 7:34 am
15 Sep 2008
Gee, some of us have been saying this for decades, as in humans will never know enough to be messing with the basic building blocks of life without incurring serious, unforeseen consequences.
The science hawkers and their sheep, the science worshipers, are destroying life as we know it. Humans need to get rid of their self-worshiping hubris and get some humility, fast. All technology is ecologically and environmentally harmful, and the less of it we use and the more simple it is, the better.
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HWilkes Posted 7:42 am
15 Sep 2008
I suspect you may find this quite a shock, but there are plenty of ways of crushing the human spirit and the environment that don't involve much technology.
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Jonas Posted 1:06 pm
15 Sep 2008
Humans have been genetically modifying crops and animals for thousands of years. Nowadays, we have simply found a method to do it more precisely, rapidly, and with greater success.
None of the crops we consumed before the advent of GMOs were around 10,000 years ago.
The corn we ate in the 1970s has nothing to do with the corn the Mayas ate, which was something akin to a perennial with tiny grains (Zea diploperennis, teosinte), which then started selecting and breeding and genetically altering.
It took many famines before they got better crops.
We nowadays have the tools to modify crops without going hungry.
I would say that's quite an achievement. Keep it up, humanity!
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Russ Posted 4:55 pm
15 Sep 2008
must be smashed wherever we see it.
There is no comparison between the gradual art of plant and animal breeding, working with actual specimens over, as is said here "thousands of years", and the direct laboratory manipulation of the genetic code itself.
The former process attempts to meld natural gene complexes, while the latter really wants to eradicate genetic complexity in favor of targeted instrumentalism. (For an analogy, think of the difference between the natural nutrition complex in a fruit or vegetable, vs. a lump of sterile processed food "fortified" with some synthetic vitamin.) This is in fact impossible, but as a matter of ideology, not science, they dogmatize that it is, and that it's a lie doesn't matter because it serves to maximize profit and power concentration.
We advocates of the freedom and integrity of the genome are not "science-averse", on the contrary we oppose the abuse of science, tactical science and technology used in a predatory manner, and pseudo-scientific lies injected into the public discourse for the sake of power and profit.
BTW Jonas, since you say you believe there's nothing new about GMOs, I assume you don't believe they should receive patents.
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Jonas Posted 12:52 am
16 Sep 2008
It's highly romantic and pre-scientific to believe that there's an inherent difference between the cumbersome and slow process of cross-breeding in order to achieve a very precise target (e.g. drought tolerance), and speeding things up by cutting out the unnecessary labor and achieving the same desired target at once.
Traditional breeding techniques offered us an indirect view on the result of genetic changes. Modern genetic modifications offer us a direct view.
There's no fundamental difference.
About the patents. Obviously so, like many scientists I think the techniques to practise genetic modification of crops should be accessible to all, open source.
Did you know that the inventor of modern GMOs - prof Marc Van Montagu, who designed the process to modify crops which is still used today - is a staunch advocate of open source GM?
He runs the Institute of Plant Biotechnology for Developing Countries (IPBO).
The man is one of Europe's most respected socialists and internationalists, and the horror whenever he's invited to a debate in which problematic greenies try to talk about GMOs.
I've been priviledge to meet him on several occasions. He is not an evil monster, but a very wise, wel-grounded man, who has worked with and visited more African farmers than everyone who writes about GMOs in developing countries combined.
Sorry, your attempt at sketching this story in simplistic black and white terms doesn't work. You don't have the monopoly on deciding when science is "abused". Nor do you have the right to discredit potentially life-saving technologies, certainly not when you have neither more scientific, nor more social authority to speak about this than someone who has worked for decades with the world's poorest farmers, and who invented modern crop biotechnology.
By the way, one last point: you don't really need GMOs any longer to achieve great goals (drought tolerance, salt tolerance, cold tolerance, pest-tolerance, etc...).
Modern rapid genomic screening techniques allow you to breed plants the "traditional" way (your "melding of natural gene complexes") and achieve these goals.
You literally speed up what farmers have been doing all along. And you don't have to target and change a single gene. You just breed at a hyper-fast rate, in a virtual environment, and then you go real world. A non-GMO crop with specific qualities is the result.
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MPaul Posted 1:11 am
16 Sep 2008
There are no dachsunds or cows or corn in the wild, these have all been crafted by the hand of man in a very deliberate way.
If you think that there is a fundamental difference between the "natural" way of breeding and the transfer of single genes, how do you reconcile that with the fact that the primary instrument of plant genetic modification is a naturally occurring soil bacterium? Or that retroviruses have been writing directly into the genome for millenia with no help from man at all?
These issues are not black and white and there are very blurry lines between things like breeding, molecular breeding, and single gene transfer.
One can be cautious or concerned but deliberately obscuring the issues by claiming absolute moral superiority is taking it a bit too far.
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zegg Posted 1:58 am
16 Sep 2008
GMO were thoroughly tested for environmental side-effects before release
the introduced genes came from closely related species (that is the real difference between traditional breeding techniques and GM - GMO contain genes from completely different types of organisms)
the GMO was open-source, so that it was developed to benefit farmers or consumers (i.e. to have drough-tolerance, extra vitamins etc) rather than benefiting the round-up producers as at present
following from 3, the GMO seeds could be propagated from one generation to the next, so that the farmers would not be perpetually in debt to the seed-producers.
If GMO manufacturers had wanted to get the public on their side and improve the world, they would have done all of the above. But they just wanted to make money, hence I don't support current generation GMO.
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PermieWriter Posted 2:03 am
16 Sep 2008
Eat what you grow, grow what you eat
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Russ Posted 2:53 am
16 Sep 2008
It's highly romantic and pre-scientific to believe that there's an inherent difference between the cumbersome and slow process of cross-breeding in order to achieve a very precise target (e.g. drought tolerance), and speeding things up by cutting out the unnecessary labor and achieving the same desired target at once.
Just to add to what zegg and permiewriter said, traditional breeding, as I already said, must involve crossing actual creatures who are naturally crossable.
But in a laboratory any manner of monstrosity can be attempted. Didn't they synthesize glow-in-the-dark rabbits or something?
If you don't understand how something like that is qualitatively different, is, yes, unnatural, then that's obviously an irreducible philosophical chasm.
BTW, not long ago, in another thread, weren't you crowing about a breakthrough in drought tolerance which you said had nothing to do with GMOs?
And you say it again here:
By the way, one last point: you don't really need GMOs any longer to achieve great goals (drought tolerance, salt tolerance, cold tolerance, pest-tolerance, etc...).
Modern rapid genomic screening techniques allow you to breed plants the "traditional" way (your "melding of natural gene complexes") and achieve these goals.
You literally speed up what farmers have been doing all along. And you don't have to target and change a single gene. You just breed at a hyper-fast rate, in a virtual environment, and then you go real world. A non-GMO crop with specific qualities is the result.
If this is true, then that completely strips away any rationale, however tenuous, for the very existence of GMOs. Therefore that they still do exist is all the more monstrous a crime.
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bharshaw Posted 3:58 am
16 Sep 2008
The WI trio examined seed corn pricing in Illinois in 2004 to illustrate how stacked traits were actually priced:
Conventional seed corn averaged $88.33 per bag.
The Bt corn borer trait added $20.49
The Bt rootworm trait was alone worth $27.28.
One herbicide tolerant trait was priced at $14.51, another at $6.83.
Double stacking of corn borer and rootworm traits added $35.51.
Triple stacking of corn borer, rootworm, and herbicide tolerance added $37.30.
Quadruple stacking added $39.45 for corn borer, rootworm and both herbicide tolerant traits.
The market power of the seed company added over 8% to the price.
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rmainer Posted 1:59 am
23 Sep 2008
In a world where a great many of the people don't have enough to eat to reduce crop yields and increase prices through so called "organic" farming is immoral. "Organic" farming is a rich man's fancy. If organic farming worked as well as modern farming everyone would use it.
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