• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 809 0

in principle. I shared this view for a long time, once helping co-found an organization called Corporate Watch. But being against GE per se because it has been promoted by big companies is a bit like being against word processing because much of the most useful software is produced by Microsoft—irrational and self-defeating. In both the Brazilian and Indian cases Monsanto actually lost out, because entrepreneurial farmers without spare capital wanted its product but not to respect its patent. Farm-level benefits of GE crops, that is profits accruing not to the corporations but to the farmers, have been estimated at $5 billion for 2005 alone, and $27 billion over the past ten years.51

Moreover, it is not only big agro-chemical companies that are exploiting the technology. All over Africa and Asia there are publicly funded efforts aiming to create transgenic varieties of subsistence crops that will be of benefit to poorer farmers and will be made available without licensing restrictions. A quick survey of some recent initiatives includes salt-tolerant rice for use in degraded land where salinization is reducing yields;52 a pest-resistant eggplant developed by a university in the Philippines; Vitamin A-fortified mustard in India that could avoid 46,000 unnecessary deaths per year;53 disease-resistant rice in Uganda; so-called “iron beans” in Rwanda to reduce anemia in preschool children and women; and an African banana that is resistant to devastating wilt disease courtesy of a gene transferred from the green pepper.54 I am often told that genetic engineering means monoculture by definition and will therefore eliminate crop diversity—but there is no logical reason why this must happen either. The International Institute of Tropical Agriculture, for instance, which is behind the disease-resistant transgenic banana, also works to support the biodiversity of traditional crops: In September 2010 it helped launch a “yam bank” in Nigeria to collect, store, and preserve some 3,000 varieties of this important subsistence crop. The two strategies can go together.

No wonder plant biologists often appear so baffled by the controversy surrounding GE crops. “It is hard to find good scientific reasons why this technology has not been universally embraced,” complain biologists Maurice Moloney and Jim Peacock in the academic journal Current Opinion in Plant Biology.55 As they point out, “All of the widely publicized objections…have been soundly rebutted and relegated to the status of ‘urban myths.’” The reality is that “this technology has fundamentally changed agricultural production for the better. Yields are uniformly higher, and there is a dramatic decrease in the use of less-desirable pesticides,” among many other environmental benefits. As a major report by the U.S. National Science Academy concluded in 2010: “GE crops have had fewer adverse effects on the environment than non-GE crops produced conventionally.”56 There may also be serious opportunity costs to the anti-GE furor preventing the uptake of nutritionally improved crop varieties: The transgenic “golden rice,” which has a higher Vitamin A content to help prevent blindness in developing-country children, is still stuck in the laboratory ten years after it was made ready for widespread deployment in Asia.57 The barriers to deployment are not technical but regulatory—largely the product of many years of bitter campaigning by environmentalists. It is time for a change of tack by the Green movement, for the benefit of farmers, consumers, and the environment.

Most important for the subject of this chapter, rejecting plant biotechnology means forgoing the opportunity to make what may be the single greatest agricultural breakthrough that might allow us to both feed the world and meet the nitrogen planetary boundary at the same time. This holy grail of genetic research is—just as the anonymous commenter under my 2008 anti-GE Guardian article proposed—to find a way to engineer our most important food plants to do what legumes manage to achieve naturally: fix their fertilizer directly