The superstition that opposes GM crops is deadly for the world’s hungry
There are only 32 harvests left before the world’s population hits 10 billion in 2050. Between then and now, farmers around the world need to increase production by 70%.
We’ve been in a similar predicament before. In the 1960s there was great trepidation about the anticipated population boom. Paul Ehrlich prophesied death and destruction on a massive scale. Norman Borlaug saw it another way: “There are 6.6 billion people on the planet today, with organic farming we could only feed 4 billion of them. Which two billion would volunteer to die?” He developed a solution: a hybrid wheat crop in Mexico that he shipped to India in time to prevent a mass starvation. His intervention saved billions of lives and he won a Nobel Peace prize.
Since the 1960s farmers around the world have increased the amount of food they produce on significantly less land – by embracing new technologies. In fact, it is mind-boggling what has been accomplished. If farmers used 1960s methods today we would need to ind an additional landmass the size of Russia to generate the same amount of food.
New technologies include better and greener controls of weeds and insects. Improved fertilisation and tillage practices have improved soil quality. And improved plant breeding, including genetic engineering since the 1980s, has provided farmers with superior crop varieties. The growth of organic farming, so that it’s worth $60bn in the United States today and accounting for £2bn of sale of foods in the UK, has been one reaction to higher-tech agriculture. This vast developed world market for ‘organic’ is built on some considerable myths, however. For example, Whole Foods, along with other supermarkets, label products that contain GMOs (genetically modified organisms) so that customers can avoid food made of crops with “DNA or a genetic make up that does not occur in nature”. Rather than creating ‘informed’ customers, however, such labelling is misleading because few foods we eat today have DNA that occurred naturally.
Humans have been altering the genetic composition of foods for thousands of years. The orange carrot is not natural. Afghan farmers turned carrots yellow from white 1,100 years ago. 500 years ago Europeans bred them orange, popular among the Dutch wishing to venerate their royal family, the House of Orange. Brussels sprouts, cabbage, kale, broccoli, and cauliflower have been developed by humans since 1400 from a wild mustard plant. The history of maize, corn, sweetcorn, is one of 10,000 years’ un-natural selection, begun in present-day Mexico. North American Indians introduced sweetcorn to Europeans in the 18th Century, and the process to create super sweet sweetcorn and popcorn today are all the result of human interference in the natural process of breeding and in the growth cycle of the plant. But even if we accept that some human interference is necessary or acceptable or an historic reality, at least with organic food no-one has interfered with DNA unnaturally, in the lab, right?
Wrong. Ruby red grapefruits came onto the market in the 70s and 80s. They were produced by mutagenesis, the process of randomly scrambling genes by exposure to atomic radiation or soaking in chemicals. It’s an attempt to speed up the evolutionary process by creating accidental mutations on a quicker scale than can be achieved over 10,000 years of human intervention, as with sweetcorn. It is clearly not natural, but it is the process by which some 3,000 crop varieties have been created, including wheat that goes into pasta.
So while there is labelling for GMO foods for the sake of ‘transparency’, there aren’t labels on organic foods to say they are unnatural because Aztecs bred them, or fake because a lab in Texas nuked seeds with gamma rays to see what it would do.
The commercial opportunities from labelling GM foods are enticing. According to Pew research, 57% of Americans think that eating GMO is unsafe, a quarter of Americans check the label to avoid GMO, and 55% of Americans think that organic food is safer than GMO. That is a lot of potential customers to win through GMO labelling.
But numerous academic bodies and health organisations from around the world have conducted studies of every sort to conclude that there is no detectable harm caused by GM crops. Amongst others, the National Academy of Science in the United States has published two exhaustive reports surveying the effects of GM, first on farming and the natural environment, and second on human health and safety. The conclusion is that GM crops are no more dangerous than their alternatives.
Humanity has seen this sort of opposition to new technology before. People were horrified at the advent of the steam train, with myths peddled that the human body would disintegrate if carried at unnatural speeds. Some conjectured that a woman’s uterus would fly out at 50mph. With the advent of the horseless carriage (the car), legislation was rushed through in Britain and America to ensure someone would walk in front of the danger with a red lag.
Vested economic interests benefit from playing on people’s prejudices about new, competitive technologies as ‘unnatural’. The uninformed consumer, working off a hunch that GM is bad is the victim of targeted advertising and lobby group campaigns.
This might be fine if we were talking about the developed world’s consumer choices alone. Perhaps we can afford to be indulgent with our food preferences. But not when they have a damning effect on those who are hungry or under- nourished.
There are subsistence farmers all across the developing world who have no choice but to farm organic. As a result their yields are pitiful and they have no livelihoods. It is so intensive that they can’t send their children to school because they need to have them working. When we buy organic in the developed world we might feel nice about it. When you farm organic in the developing world you might end up dead.
Calestous Juma, Professor of the Practice of International Development at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, dreams of a 21st century Africa of growing agrarian economies whose farms will require and fund new infrastructure: roads, warehouses, refrigeration. In a continent that currently imports 83% of its food, he believes the agricultural success story of Brazil can be repeated, to turn a continent into the food basket of the world.
A significant hindrance to this vision are the strict controls that developed nations, such as EU member states, place on African countries that use new technologies, including GM.
GM is largely prohibited in the EU (which is a vast insanity given that most European livestock consume GM-feed, 80% of the cotton worn in the world is genetically modified and the insulin used by diabetics is GM cultivated). The hostility is part a protectionist trade measure by locking out US competition. It also reflects highly aggressive and far reaching campaigns of NGOs who spread misinformation and fear about the technology. Whatever the reason for the EU walking with a red lag in front of GM, Juma says the effect is for the EU to exert a colonial control over African agricultural development.
Solutions to disease, pests, and nutritional deficiencies are being developed by local scientists across the developing world. Uganda has developed a Vitamin-A enriched banana. Vitamin-A deficiency leads to blindness and kills 250,000 children worldwide a year. Kenya has developed a disease resistant cassava which could spare the 21st century equivalent of the Irish potato famine when this staple fails. Tanzania is running trials of drought resistant maize that could triple yields and go a long way to feeding malnourished children. Because of GM restrictions the crop is burnt.
It has taken a lot of courage but Uganda has just this month taken the brave step of passing a bio-tech bill that will embrace the next steps needed to feed its people.
By shopping at organic supermarkets we can so often feel that we are part of a cause, a lifestyle that is beneficial to us and our planet. We like brown-bagged groceries picked from displays in hessian sacks.
Yet when we allow ourselves to be herded by marketing and NGO campaigns, ill-informed by the available science, then we are a part of the problem.
GM is not the answer on its own but the mindset that embraces new safe, scientifically tested new technologies is. We should be pro-whatever will feed, clothe, and fuel a growing population in ways that are safe and protect the planet.
The clock is ticking. What do we want to reap in the harvest of 2050? The whirlwind of our ill-informed, superstitious consumer choices that could lead to Paul Ehrlich style mass starvation events? Or one benefiting from our Norman Borlaug choices that are pro-innovation and will feed 10 billion on planet earth?
