GM Crops and the Principle of Population
Posted on November 12, 2009 by
Over the next forty years, we are going to have to make room on our planet for another two billion or so people. By most reasonable estimates, the world population in 2050 will exceed nine billion. This is a source of all sorts of personal stress for a misanthrope like myself but, from a humanitarian point of view, one of the biggest issues is how to feed all these people.
While there has been a remarkable growth in agricultural production in the last half century – the so called ‘green revolution‘ – we got a glimpse last year at one possible future scenario with the food riots that broke out in Haiti, Bangladesh, Mexico and elsewhere. A short term shortage and subsequent spike in world food prices resulted in a major pinch in much of the developing world. Things have settled down, but the problem has not gone away. We may be reaching the point that Thomas Malthus warned about at which world population is beginning to exceed world food production capacity.
The Royal Society, Britain’s national academy of science, recently issued a report addressing this looming food security crisis. I won’t go through all of their findings – basically things are pretty grim and urgently so – but they offer a list of suggestions to help alleviate the coming food crunch. Included are calls for more funding for agronomy research, crop breeding and genetics research with the hopes of increasing agricultural production in an environmentally sustainable fashion. But the recommendation that got the most attention from the press was a call for the expansion of genetically modified crop programs.
Genetic modification of crops, in the form of artificial selection and selective breeding, has been going on since the dawn of agriculture nearly 12,000 years ago. Much of the impetus of the recent Green Revolution was directed plant breeding programs at universities and seed companies around the world. And plant breeding is great, it is largely responsible for a 138% increase in world food production in the last half century, but it is slow. It can take up to a decade to introduce a single novel trait into a crop plant. There are also many crop plants – such as bananas and potato – that are extremely difficult to improve using standard breeding techniques.
In the last couple of decades, plant biologists have come up with a more efficient way to improve crop plants – transgenic technologies. Making a transgenic crop involves the introduction of a novel gene or genes into the genome of a crop plant. These genes can come from the same species or from another organism. This transgenic manipulation allows scientists to skip the several generations or more of crossing required for standard plant breeding. Transgenic manipulation has resulted in crop plants that are resistant to herbicides and diseases, plants that make their own insecticide, plants that have enhanced nutritional profiles and much more. There is active research into transgenic crops that will be resistant to drought or increased ambient temperature and thus may be more tolerant to global climate change. There is research into transgenic crops that will have improved photosynthetic efficiency and reduced nitrogen requirements and thus require less chemical fertilizer.
Genetically modified (GM) transgenic crops are currently grown widely in the USA, Argentina, Brazil, India, and Canada but are still tightly regulated or banned in most of Europe, Africa and some Australian states. Many environmental groups have consistently opposed any expansion of genetically modified crops. There are three main objections that have been raised by environmental groups and others to GM crops. First, that herbicide and/or insect resistant plants result in a reduction in biodiversity in agricultural areas. Second, that transgenes may escape from GMO crops and be introduced into wild or weedy relatives. Third, GM crops are potentially dangerous for human consumption.
Let’s look at these one by one.
Agriculture of any kind is detrimental to biodiversity. When woodland or prairie is cleared to make room for crops, that ecosystem is inextricably changed. There is no evidence that GM crops are any worse than non-transgenic crops in terms of biodiversity. In fact, GM crops may provide a higher yield, thus reducing the amount of land required to produce the same amount of food, and require lower inputs of herbicides, pesticides and potentially chemical fertilizers. Lower input crops mean less pollution and ecological damage.
The second concern about GM crops is that transgenes may escape into wild relatives or pressure pathogens to develop resistance to herbicides or pesticides. Darwin knew that closely related species could interbreed and that is certainly the case. So, gene flow is a risk. However it is also a risk with plants that are bred to be resistant to disease or other traits, GM crops are no more likely to spread their transgenes than normal crops are to spread their endogenous genes. However, this risk can and is being minimized in the field today.
The third concern that opponents have about GM crops is potential health hazards if the crops are eaten. A 2004 report by the British Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and their Food Standards Agency found no evidence of harm from GM crops and according to the Royal Society Report there has been no significant new evidence since then that GM crops could induce allergic or toxic reactions. That is not to say that GM crops should be unregulated, personally I think their should be an FDA style regulatory agency to insure testing of new GM crops before they are used for human food consumption.
We face a serious choice – either expand the area of agricultural land or increase yields on existing land. The former would result in a further reduction of biodiversity, increased demand for fossil fuels and increased agricultural pollution. The latter involves using every tool that we have available and that is what the Royal Society is proposing – bulk up breeding programs around the world, work on ways to improve crop and soil management and exploit transgenic technology to enhance crop yield without expanding acreage. From a green point of view, it should be a no-brainer.
not buying it… nope…
You’ve left out one concern, and it’s the biggest one for me. Monsanto owns the patent for the genetically modified corn and soy grown in the U.S., and they won’t allow farmers to save seeds. So year after year farmers have to buy new seed from Monsanto (and the round-up that comes with it). Thus, farmers are more and more beholden to one giant company to keep their farms going, and subsequently, consumers are also dependent on that one giant company. Also because the plants spread and interbreed as you say, farmers can find themselves unintentionally growing GM plants, and then Monsanto can sue them for patent infringement.
Maybe GM foods are part of the population solution, but definitely not in the manner that we’re seeing them now.
Are you serious? No way, no how. This is terrible advice and a terrible idea. No GMO’s are “good” at all. Of course, if we GM all our food, we might not have a population problem as the food wipes us out.
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I am just curious why the two posters above oppose GM crops – they don’t bother to say? (I agree with the second post about Monsanto, but there is (and could be more) research done by universities.) Also, it is easy to say no to GM crops (if ignoring that everything you already eat (save for a couple of wild/gathered products) have been heavily genetically modified). I think the point the writer was trying to make is that saying no to the new GM crops means 1) an incredible environmental catastrophe as millions of acres of land are plowed under for crops or 2) mass starvation across much of Africa, Asia and Latin America.
OK, obviously still some opposition from the environmental community. The Monsanto comment is fair enough and that’s why the Royal Society report made recommendations regarding work by the public sector. Most of the GM crops out there were originally generated by university or government researchers and then one of the agbiotech companies bought up the technology. It’s a valid concern.
But as Jamie wrote, what’s the problem that the other two commenters have? Why are GM crops ‘bad’? What’s the problem. If you’re opposed, that’s fine but why? It’s time to start being realistic. It’s time to start being pragmatic. The fact is that if you live in the U.S. and you’ve eaten any kind of processed food in the last year, you’ve eaten GM crops anyway. The only way we’re going to be able to continue to feed people without more agricultural land is to increase crop yield. Transgenic technology is the most effective way to increase yield quickly.
Hubby and I talk about things like this often. We are under the impression that the company who owns the patent for the GM food product can set their own price for the food product. Obviously we have a long way to go to produce enough food to accommodate the billions of humans in the future. Hopefully the planet will be able to sustain that growth and we humans will be intelligent enough to find the means to produce enough food.
GM crops are not the answer.
1) Monsanto and their “green” revolution in India did not work. Recently the New York Times did a piece about GM crops and featured Vandana Shiva, an activist, author AND farmer who has seen first-hand the despair Monsanto has brought to the poor farmers in India, including bankrupting them, leading to untold spikes in suicide rates. Monsanto, however, will tell you that it was a success. So, who are you going to believe? A greedy corporation who has a vested monetary interest in the expansion of GM crops, or an Indian farmer who can give a FIRST-HAND account of what actually happened to the poor and starving?
2) GM crops do not actually increase production yield. Another researcher, Doug Gurian-Sherman, published a study called “Failure to Yield,” which explores the FAILURE of genetically-modified crops. Here is an excerpt: “…the UCS report concluded that genetically engineering herbicide-tolerant soybeans and herbicide-tolerant corn has not increased yields. Insect-resistant corn, meanwhile, has improved yields only marginally. The increase in yields for both crops over the last 13 years, the report found, was largely due to traditional breeding or improvements in agricultural practices.”
3) The GM crops are dependent upon pesticides. And come on, people, this point should be a no-brainer. Look no further than the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico to see the destruction of the environment caused by pesticides (and by the way, we eat the fish that swim in the ocean), or google for “pesticides and cancer” to see the havoc it’s slowly wreaking on our bodies. Pesticides do not magically go away once fruits and vegetables arrive in the supermarket. In fact, they are sealed in by the waxed supermarkets apply in order to preserve produce.
And I haven’t even gotten to the specious studies that claim GM food is “safe”…(google for “The World According to Monsanto” and “Controlling Our Food” for that one).
So, I’m with David on this one. We won’t have to worry about an exploding population if GM crops become the norm. We will poison ourselves before too long.
Yeah, the Monsanto issue is surely valid, but it’s not the issue AFM is addressing here. The beef with Monsanto is a business/legal one that doesn’t in and of itself lessen the potential value of GM crops. Maybe Monsanto is evil, but that doesn’t mean their product necessarily is.
Also, whenever we talk about population pressures, people always throw around the projections for 2050 (nine billion hungry folks.) I bet we can feed ‘em, no biggie. We’ll do what it takes. But what about 50 or 100 years beyond that? 10 billion people? 15, 20 billion? Something’s gotta give.
if they can GM lettuce to taste like chocolate i’m all for it. Actually, I’m all for GM- everyone wants technological advances in everything they do, except food, which to me is just stupid. People put fake bit of plastic in their chests but wont eat GM corn, go figure. Either shut the hell up and eat GM or don’t bother having any children cos they are all going to die from lack of food. we’re so picky and choosy in the west and dont realise how fucking lucky we are.