Synthetic biologists, a brave new breed of science entrepreneurs who engineer life-forms from scratch, are holding their largest-ever global gathering in Hong Kong this week, known as "Synthetic Biology 4.0."
Although most people have never heard of synthetic biology, it's moving full speed ahead fueled by giant agribusiness, energy and chemical corporations with little debate about who will control the technology, how it will be regulated (or not) and despite grave concerns surrounding the safety and security risks of designer organisms. Corporate investors/partners include BP, Chevron, Shell, Virgin Fuels, DuPont, Microsoft, Cargill, and Archer Daniels Midland.
"Bankrolled by Fortune 500 corporations, synthetic biologists meeting in Hong Kong are promising a green, clean post-petroleum future where the production of economically important compounds depends not on fossil fuels -- but on biological manufacturing platforms fueled by plant sugars," explains Jim Thomas of ETC Group.
"It may sound sweet and clean, but this so-called sugar economy will catalyze an unprecedented corporate grab on all plant matter as well as destruction of biodiversity on a massive scale," warns Thomas. ETC Group and other civil society activists will speak on a panel during SynBio 4.0.
A new 12-page report from ETC Group, "Commodifying Nature's Last Straw? Extreme Genetic Engineering and the Post-Petroleum Sugar Economy," warns that corporate biorefineries fueled by plant sugars will create a massive demand for agricultural feedstocks, which threatens to devastate marginalized farming communities, deplete soil and water, and destroy biodiversity.
The future bio-economy will rely on "extreme genetic engineering." This suite of technologies is still in early stages of development. It includes cheap and fast gene sequencing, made-to-order biological parts, genome engineering and design, and nano-scale materials fabrication and operating systems.
The common denominator is that all these technologies -- biotech, nanotech, synthetic biology -- involve engineering of living organisms at the nano-scale. This technological convergence is also driving a convergence of corporate power.
Synthetic biology enthusiasts envision a sugar economy" where industrial production will be based on biological feedstocks (agricultural crops, grasses, forest residues, plant oils, algae, etc.) whose sugars are extracted, fermented and converted into high-value chemicals, polymers or other molecular building blocks.
The quest for the sugar economy is fueling high-dollar deals in the university-industrial complex, most notably the $500 million alliance between BP and University of California Berkeley. Corporate alliances also involve synthetic biology start-ups and some of the world's largest corporations - including Big Oil, Big Pharma, chemical firms, agribusiness giants, automobile manufacturers, forest product companies, and more. For example:
• Amyris Biotechnology is attempting to modify the genetic pathways of yeast so that it ferments sugars to produce longer chain molecules of gasoline, diesel and jet fuel. It recently signed a deal with Brazil's largest sugar producer Crystalsev to turn sugar into commercially available diesel fuel within two years.
• Solazyme, Inc., which partners with Chevron, recently announced that it has successfully produced the world's first microbial-derived jet fuel by synthetically engineering algae to produce oil in fermentation tanks.
• DuPont, in partnership with Genentech and sugar giant Tate & Lyle, engineered the cellular machinery of an E. coli bacterium so that it ferments corn sugar to produce Sorona fiber - a product that Dupont says will eventually replace nylon. It takes six million bushels of corn to produce 100 million pounds of the key ingredient in Sorona fiber - the annual output of DuPont's Tennessee-based (USA) bio-refinery.
According to biotech industry estimates, it takes a minimum of 500,000 acres of cropland (that is, the crop residues or "wastes" from that area) to sustain a moderately-sized, commercial-scale biorefinery. Advocates insist that the "food vs. fuel" debate will be irrelevant because feedstocks will eventually come from cheap and plentiful "cellulosic biomass"- plant matter composed of cellulose fibers (including crop residues such as rice straw, corn stalks, wheat straw; wood chips; and dedicated "energy crops" such as switchgrass, fast-growing trees, algae, etc.).
Synthetic biology's grand vision of a post-petroleum economy depends on biomass - whether derived from "energy crops," trees (including GE trees), agricultural "wastes," crop residues or algae. If the vision of a sugar economy advances, all plant matter become a potential feedstock. Who decides what qualifies as agricultural waste or residue? Whose land will grow the feedstocks? An article in the February 2008 issue of Nature suggests that synthetic biology approaches "might be tailored to marginal lands where the soil wouldn't support food crops." (emphasis added)
The implications, especially for marginalized farming communities and poor people in the South, are profound. At a May 2006 meeting of synthetic biologists, Nobel laureate Dr. Steven Chu pointed out that there is "quite a bit" of arable land suitable for rain-fed energy crops, and that Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa are areas best suited for biomass generation. Failing to learn from the first-generation agrofuel train wreck, The Economist naively suggests that "there's plenty of biomass to go around" and that "the world's hitherto impoverished tropics may find themselves in the middle of an unexpected and welcome industrial revolution."
"Haven't we learned anything from the disaster of first generation agrofuels?" asks Camila Moreno of Terra de Direitos in Brazil. "Industrial agrofuels are driving the world's poorest farmers and indigenous peoples off their lands. Agrofuels are the single greatest factor contributing to soaring food prices, pushing millions from subsistence to hunger. With synthetic biology's sugar economy, the demand for plant biomass will increase exponentially -- not just for transportation fuels, but for plastics and chemicals as well. We're about to repeat the debacle of first-generation agrofuels on a more massive scale," said Moreno, who will be speaking at SynBio4.0.
Advocates of synthetic biology and the bio-based sugar economy assume that unlimited supplies of cellulosic biomass will be available. But can massive quantities of biomass be harvested sustainably without eroding/degrading soils, destroying biodiversity, increasing food insecurity and displacing marginalized peoples? Can synthetic microbes work predictably? Can they be safely contained and controlled? How will they be regulated?
No one knows the answers to these questions, but corporate enthusiasm for a sugar-coated, bio-engineered future is plowing forward.
"Once again, land, labor and biological resources in the global South are in danger of being exploited to satisfy the North's voracious consumption and reckless waste," observes Neth Dano of Third World Network, who will also be speaking at the conference. "We're seeing a new convergence of corporate power that is poised to appropriate and further commodify biological resources in every part of the globe," said Dano.
ETC Group will be blogging from Hong Kong during SynBio 4.0. Watch for updates.
Climate Citizen: Michael Pollan on agriculture and health care
Tweet for the bees
Comments
View as Threaded
Jonas Posted 10:04 am
10 Oct 2008
Why not?
If smart people like Craig Venter succeed in developing techniques that can feed more people and dramatically cut fuel prices, then surely that's good for humanity? And if it means a decentralisation of energy production, based on perpetually renewable resources, managed by local communities, then surely this is a good thing?
I think synthetic biology can be what biotech did to some parts of the Global South. That is: end hunger and poverty.
The case of Malawi comes to mind. The BBC has a great series of essays on it, running now. You see there how biotech is saving this entire nation:
Seeking Africa's green revolution
From the begging bowl to the bread basket: in just two years, Malawi has gone from famine to food surplus - a minor agricultural miracle.
The BBC goes to the field.
The piece about hybrid seeds is interesting.
The result was six successive years of food shortage in Malawi - beginning in 2000.
"And there was no lack of rains, I can tell you," says Dr Jeffrey Luhanga, technical co-ordinator at the Ministry for Agriculture.
"I experienced the famine in 2005; there were lines of people queuing for food aid.
"The thing you have to remember is that these were the ones who were still strong enough to walk to the depots. The hungriest - the ones who really needed the food - they were stuck at home, starving.
"Now look around Malawi, you see only healthy faces. Yes, this is a green revolution. And it is being driven by science."
He reels off a list of programmes - irrigation, agronomy, planting patterns, science-based economic practices.
"These technologies have been in our research institutes for years, but they went nowhere. Now, for the first time, the technology is in the farmers' hands."
Seeds of hope?
It begins with the seeds. The hybrid maize varieties are high yielding - around 2,500kg/hectare or more.
"I grew 80 bags this year, in the land just around my house. Eighty bags!" says Mitengo Gamr, one of Admarc's regional managers.
"My family no longer queues to buy food."
But they come with a catch - they are addicted to costly nitrogen fertiliser.
"But it is worth the investment," explains Muhhuku, "because the extra maize you grow, you can sell to pay for the fertiliser, buy an animal for your farm and diversify. You can build security."
And what if the rains fail? "Then you have enough left over from your big harvest last year," he smiles.
[...]
But utter the words "technological dependency" to Muhhuku, and he simply shakes his head.
"We hear this accusation from western development workers. We are told 'why make farmers buy seeds every year? Why let the companies trap you?' But this is based on a misunderstanding. Storing the hybrid seeds - it takes a lot of technical knowledge.
"The farmers can stick to their traditional ways. But the yields are not worth their sweat."
Tomorrow, I will meet the farmers and ask them myself.
And the journalist asked the farmers, and they all say: "ah, these pampered bourgeois critics from the West. They know nothing about the world. They write reports warning about what we do and that's it. They have never put their own hands in the dirt. They don't know what they're talking about. They can come and visit us to learn, but they prefer to stay at their well paid desks in their wealthy Euro-American headquarters."
Perhaps synthetic biology can do in a next round, what the Green(er) Revolution has and is doing during this round?
If a poor African peasant understands the benefits of technology, then why shouldn't a well-educated Euro-American civil society organisation?
Permalink
mwildfire Posted 12:41 am
12 Oct 2008
ETC has done excellent research into genetic technology and nanotech--too bad it doesn't get more widespread attention.
What struck me reading this piece is that there probably is the potantial for nanotechnology to solve some problems--IF it were used responsibly, with government assuring that only fully safe applications were allowed out of the lab into the field. IF approaches that cause excessive diversion of poor people's food into rich people's gas tanks, or that risk contamination of ecosystems in unknown ways, or deforestation, were strictly prevented no matter how much money they could make for the life sciences corporations. In other words, if pigs fly.
Permalink
Russ Posted 2:35 am
12 Oct 2008
They would certainly rather see everything and everyone destroyed than ever accept an organized program of material descent and technological devolution.
Disaster capitalism is truly the final and most violent phase of capitalism.
Here's another article on this ghoulish campaign by the same author.
Permalink
Whiskerfish Posted 12:59 am
13 Oct 2008
But to say there is not an even better way is ridiculous -- e.g. modern organic methods. Don't presume that the incredibly crude methods traditionally practised by many African farmers bear any resemblance to contemporary, sophisticated organic ways of doing things! It seems that many foreigners do...
Just a thought!
Whiskerfish (African, in Africa, for all my sins!)
Permalink
Whiskerfish Posted 1:14 am
13 Oct 2008
If it is, food prices must go up, and more natural areas must be destroyed to make fields. These are major negatives.
The idea that African peasants will become rich by growing biofuel feedstocks presumes that they are poor because they currently cannot grow anything saleable on their land, and that they will be able to retain control their land if they manage to grow something profitable on it.
The reasons that many African peasants are not growing valuable crops is not because they -- for climatic reasons or whatever -- will not grow there. There are a host of complex factors at play: Lack of access to knowledge and capital, weird systems of land tenure, traditional superstition etc. etc. It's hard to see how biofuels will change this.
If biofuel crops are successful and profitable, then you can bet that more powerful people (poiticians, foreign investors, and the like) will soon rush in and take the land into their possession. Rural Africans will become near-slaves on plantations built on the land that was once theirs. Why do I say this? because it's already happening. From Mozambique to the Congo, from Angola to Tanzania, millions of acres are already being stolen. I've seen it for myself.
Some of the main drivers of rural poverty in Africa are political powerlessness, societal fragmentation and endemic corruption -- changing the crops people grow will do nothing to solve this.
99% of contemporary biofuels are just plain trouble. 1st-, 2nd- or 3rd-generation -- whatever.
Cheers
Whiskerfish
Permalink
Delay And Deny Posted 2:10 am
13 Oct 2008
Mr Obama causes problems in three ways:
He ruins our health by pushing inedible products into the food supply.
He makes housing and rents ratchet sky high by using up millions of acres for growing unsustainable crops.
He forces Americas off land and into squalor:
http://you-read-it-here-first.com/viewtopic.php?t=3215&am ...
http://www.westernwatersheds.org/watmess/watmess_2002/200 ...
Despite all the hand wringing over sprawl and urbanization, only 66 million acres are considered developed lands.
This amounts to 3 percent of the land area in the U.S., yet this small land base is home to 75 percent of the population.
In general, urban lands are nearly useless for biodiversity preservation. Furthermore, urbanized lands, once converted, usually do not shift to another use.
Permalink
turanga leela Posted 7:41 am
13 Oct 2008
It was also rather frustrating to find at least one misrepresentation in their report. Coskata is not using bioengineered microorganisms--their "proprietary microorganisms" are actually rare organisms that got to their current state the way most microorganisms have--through evolution. This was confirmed by a Coskata principal--quite emphatically--on an educational webinar I participated in about 4 months ago. One thing I do wonder about with any of these companies that are working with microorganisms is whether or not any type of "conventional breeding" of bacteria and yeasts (the ability to manipulate successive generations by selecting and isolating individuals with desirable characteristics not by bombarding them with other species' DNA as Monsanto does) is playing with fire, due to the fact that we know so little about them and because of the rapid process of evolution these organisms undergo. But here again, this question can only be answered by a scientist, which they'll be less likely to do if you open dialogue with an insult of academia. The reason I can't stand fearmongering of any kind, whether it be by the Bush Administration or by my fellow environmentalists, is that it has a chilling effect on dialogue and it turns complex human beings into caricatures and monsters. If that's what you're trying to do because you are a militant who can only understand things through the thought and language of warfare, then you should understand that by purposely making positions intractable and considering the people who view things differently than you do as being so alien and "other" than you are that the mere thought of dialoguing with and understanding them is utterly repugnant, you will never achieve your results until your "opponent" is completely destroyed. And you can't wage war on an ideology because the moment you destroy one opponent, another one pops up. Look at the War on Terror--how's that been going lately? The only way to successfully change an ideology is by convincing people of your viewpoint through respectful dialogue.
Permalink
amazingdrx Posted 4:37 pm
13 Oct 2008
If only a few invasive species escape the vat, it could be bio-suicide for the living planet.
Non dangerous algae and digestor bacteria feeding on the waste stream will do just fine. Without more mega industrial tampering with life on earth.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin
Permalink
turanga leela Posted 12:46 am
14 Oct 2008
Permalink
amazingdrx Posted 1:15 am
14 Oct 2008
That kind of exposes a possible loophole for GMO. The insertion of toxin concentrating genes, found in some plants (like jimson weed), into microorganisms. This would make it possible to have biodigestion/energy systems that extract toxic heavy metals, even tadioactive ones, from the waste stream.
Or even process contaminated soil and water, recycling it, rather than landfilling it, with those clay and plastic lined facilities that have to treat the waste water as contaminated run off.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin
Permalink
turanga leela Posted 2:01 am
14 Oct 2008
Using plants to remediate contaminated soils/neutralize toxins and then turning the plants into fuels or pellets for stoves--this is not a big potential cash cow but it's hard to see how it wouldn't be one of the few sources of fairly benign biofuels. No one's growing food on contaminated soils right now. And if they are, I wouldn't eat it.
Permalink
Biodiversivist Posted 2:20 am
14 Oct 2008
In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world
Permalink
amazingdrx Posted 2:30 am
14 Oct 2008
That mud with PCB in it that GE dumped in the Hudson River from it's transformer plant, it could be sucked up and biodigested using renewable energy, river current power.
As the biomass is broken down, it would tend to concentrate the toxins. Allowing special separation like the electromagnetic trash seperation of non-magnetic metals from trash, only on a micro scale.
A plusing DC current magnetizing the metal containing microorganisms, then magnets separating them from the rest of the sludge.
PCBs and other dangerous organic compounds can be broken down by the selection of the right microorganisms.
Could even radioactive metals, like the Plutonium and Uranium leaking into the Ohio, Colorado, and the Columbia Rivers (to name just a few), be extracted economically from ground water using renewably powered bioreactors? I think so.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin
Permalink
turanga leela Posted 7:59 am
14 Oct 2008
Maybe instead of yakking away anonymously on Grist, I should be writing my own book...uh, anonymously...
Permalink
amazingdrx Posted 1:21 pm
14 Oct 2008
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog
It's a blook.
This is how Maureen Dowd gets ger books, she compiles her columns. Then has it published.
Do it online. It's free, no editors.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin
Permalink
amazingdrx Posted 1:34 pm
14 Oct 2008
What I'm advocating is using the energy from the biogas that the biodigester breaks the biomass down into.
It's fairly easy to separate gas from toxins and heavy metal, thus no toxic smoke! In a solid oxide fuel cell/turbine cogeneration system, the gas will be turned into electricity at 70% efficiency.
The gas is an easy to store source of backup power for a renwable grid. And waste stream biogas offsets GHG from other sources. It's all good. So does the organic fertilizer.
http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog John Schneider, Northern Wisconsin
Permalink