The Rational Optimist_ How Prosperity Evolves - Matt Ridley [72]
By 2008, less than twenty-five years after they were first invented, fully 10 per cent of all arable land, thirty million acres, was growing genetically modified crops: one of the most rapid and successful adoptions of a new technology in the history of farming. Only in parts of Europe and Africa were these crops denied to farmers and consumers by the pressure of militant environmentalists, with what Stewart Brand calls their ‘customary indifference to starvation’. African governments, after intense lobbying by Western campaigners, have been persuaded to tie genetically modified food in red tape, which prevents them being grown commercially in all but three countries (South Africa, Burkina Faso and Egypt). In one notorious case Zambia in 2002 even turned down food aid in the middle of a famine after being persuaded by a campaign by groups, including Greenpeace International and Friends of the Earth, that because it was genetically modified it could be dangerous. A pressure group even told a Zambian delegation that GM crops might cause retroviral infections. Robert Paarlberg writes that, ‘Europeans are imposing the richest of tastes on the poorest of people.’ Ingo Potrykus, developer of golden rice, thinks that ‘blanket opposition to all GM foods is a luxury that only pampered Westerners can afford.’ Or as the Kenyan scientist Florence Wambugu puts it, ‘You people in the developed world are certainly free to debate the merits of genetically modified foods, but can we eat first?’
Yet it is Africa that could stand to benefit the most from GM crops precisely because so many of its farmers are smallholders with little access to chemical pesticides. In Uganda, where a fungal disease called Black Sigatoka threatens the staple banana crop, and resistant strains with rice genes are still years from market because of regulations, the experimental GM plants have to be guarded by padlocked fences, not to protect them from tram pling titled protesters, but to protect them from eager users. Per capita food production in Africa has fallen 20 per cent in thirty-five years; some 15 per cent of the African maize crop is lost to stem-borer moth larvae and at least as much again is lost in storage to beetles: bt maize is resistant to both pests. Nor is corporate ownership a problem: Western companies and foundations are keen to give such crops royalty-free to African farmers, through organisations like the African Agricultural Technology Foundation. There are glimmers of hope. Field trials begin in Kenya in 2010 of drought-resistant and insect-resistant maize, though years of safety testing will follow.
Ironically, the main result globally of the campaign against GM crops was to delay the retreat of chemical pesticides and ensure that only commodity crops could afford to find their way through the regulatory thicket to market, which effectively meant that the crops were denied to small farmers and charities. Genetic engineering remained for longer than it would have done the preserve of large corporations able to afford the regulations imposed by the pressure of the environmentalists. Yet the environmental benefits of GM crops are already immense – pesticide use is falling fast wherever GM cotton is grown and no-till cultivation is enriching soil wherever herbicide-tolerant soybeans are grown. But the benefits will not stop there. Plants that are resistant to drought, salt and toxic aluminium are on the way. Lysine-enriched soybeans may soon be feeding salmon in fish farms, so that wild stocks of other fish do not have to be plundered to make feed. By the time you read this, plants may already be on the market that absorb nitrogen more efficiently, so that higher yields can be achieved with less than half as much fertiliser, saving aquatic habitats from eutrophic runoff, saving the atmosphere from a greenhouse gas (nitrous oxide) that is 300 times as potent as carbon dioxide and cutting the amount of fossil fuel used to make fertiliser – not to mention saving farmers’ costs. Some of this would