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both biodiversity and the climate. This is not to say that chemical-dependent farming using GE crops is an environmental boon, merely that it is better than the conventional non-GE alternative, as several recent studies have confirmed.45, 46 A global survey found that, between 1996 (when GE crops first began to take off) and 2005, 7 percent less pesticide was used globally as a result, translating into a reduction of 224 million kilograms fewer toxics sprayed onto fields.47 Given that toxic pollution is a proposed planetary boundary, this cannot be dismissed as a negligible benefit.

Another substantial benefit of herbicide-tolerant GE crops is that they allow the adoption of no-till agriculture. Instead of plowing up farmland after each harvest, farmers can spray glyphosate to kill the remaining weeds and plant directly into the undisturbed soil the following spring. No-till helps soils conserve carbon, reducing greenhouse emissions, and also stops winter rains exacerbating erosion in exposed, naked soils. The carbon savings may be substantial: A recent review suggested about 9 million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions are saved through soil conservation and fuel-use reduction, equivalent to removing four million cars from the road.48

Another application of genetic engineering technology has allowed farmers to cease spraying altogether, by incorporating pesticide toxics into the tissues of the crop plant itself: Examples include insect-resistant corn and cotton, now planted across the world from the U.S. to China. These have uniformly reduced the need for pesticide spraying, with benefits both to the local environment and to the human workers who would otherwise be regularly exposed to toxic sprays. In fact, the insect-resistant crops have been so successful that other pests have taken advantage of the fact that insecticide sprays are no longer being used.49 In the context of this book, this is evidence of genetic engineering being useful to both toxics and biodiversity planetary boundaries.

One fear that many campaigners shared was that commercial GE seeds, which tend to be patented and cannot legally be saved by farmers between crops, would bankrupt poor-country growers. At activist training camps we fondly imagined a bucolic idyll of Indian and African subsistence farmers, saving their own seed and valiantly resisting the faceless corporate onslaught forced on them by rich countries. In actual fact, farmers in developing countries were some of the first to adopt GE crops—for the practical reason that they increased yields and reduced costs. When Monsanto’s GE soy was banned in Brazil under pressure from environmentalists, farmers smuggled it in over the border from Argentina in enormous quantities. The Brazilian government eventually rescinded the law.

In India the tradition of developing non-patent generic drugs was applied stealthily to GE cotton brought to the country by Monsanto. In his book Hybrid: The History and Science of Plant Breeding, Noel Kingsbury writes that even while Western-inspired anti-GE activists were denouncing Monsanto’s Bt insect-resistant cotton as “seeds of suicide, seeds of slavery, seeds of despair,” farmers were desperate to get hold of them because of their ability to kill pests without the need for expensive pesticides. “By 2005, it was estimated that 2.5 million hectares were under ‘unofficial’ Bt cotton, twice the acreage as under the ones which had been sown from Monsanto’s packets,” Kingsbury relates. “The unofficial Bt cotton varieties had been bred, either by companies operating in an ambiguous legal position, or by farmers themselves.” By engaging in this “anarcho-capitalism,” Indian farmers were demonstrating that “they were not passive recipients of either technology or propaganda, but taking an active role in shaping their lives.”50

The idea that there is something inherent in genetic engineering technology that makes it beneficial only to big corporations is illogical but very persistent among environmental campaigners, many of whom are extremely suspicious of big business