The Rational Optimist_ How Prosperity Evolves - Matt Ridley [71]
This is just one example of how the organic movement’s insistence on freezing agricultural technology at a midtwentieth-century moment means it misses out on environmental benefits brought by later inventions. ‘I’m so tired of people who wouldn’t visit a doctor who used a stethoscope instead of an MRI demanding that farmers like me use 1930s technology to raise food,’ writes the Missouri farmer Blake Hurst. Organic farmers are happy to spray copper sulphate or nicotine sulphate, but forbid themselves the use of synthetic pyrethroids, which swiftly kill insects but have very low toxicity for mammals and do not persist in the environment causing collateral damage to non-pests. They forbid themselves herbicides, which means they have to weed by hand, using poorly paid labour, or by tilling and flame-throwing, which can devastate soil fauna, accelerate soil erosion and release greenhouse gases. They forbid themselves fertiliser made from air, but allow themselves fertiliser made from trawled fish.
In her classic book Silent Spring, Rachel Carson called upon scientists to turn their backs on chemical pesticides and seek ‘biological solutions’ to pest control instead. They have done so, and the organic movement has rejected them.
The many ways of modifying genes
Of course, almost by definition, all crop plants are ‘genetically modified’. They are monstrous mutants capable of yielding unnaturally large, free-threshing seeds or heavy, sweet fruit and dependent on human intervention to survive. Carrots are orange thanks only to the selection of a mutant first discovered perhaps as late as the sixteenth century in Holland. Bananas are sterile and incapable of setting seed. Wheat has three whole diploid (double) genomes in each of its cells, descended from three different wild grasses, and simply cannot survive as a wild plant – you never encounter wheat weeds. Rice, maize and wheat all share genetic mutations that alter the development of the plant to enlarge seeds, prevent shattering, and allow free threshing from chaff. These mutations were selected, albeit inadvertently, by the first farmers sowing and reaping them.
But modern genetic modification, using single genes, was a technology that came worryingly close to being stifled at birth by irrational fears fanned by pressure groups. First they said the food might be unsafe. A trillion GM meals later, with not a single case of human illness caused by GM food, that argument has gone. Then they argued that it was unnatural for genes to cross the species barrier. Yet wheat, the biggest crop of all, is an unnatural ‘polyploid’ merger of three wild plant species and horizontal gene transfer is showing up in lots of plants, such as Amborella, a primitive flowering plant, which proves to have DNA sequences borrowed from mosses and algae. (DNA has even been caught jumping naturally from snakes to gerbils with the help of a virus.) Then they said GM crops were produced and sold for profit, not to help farmers. So are tractors. Then they tried the bizarre argument that herbicide-resistant crops might cross-breed with wild plants and result in a ‘super’ weed that was impossible to kill – with that herbicide. This from people who were against herbicides anyway, so what could be more attractive