Bad News.
You might want to sit down.
Boris Johnson has won the Conservative Leadership Contest.
Boris Johnson is now, effectively, the new Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (whether he cares at all about the latter or not).
I want to call him all sorts of names at this points: names like Idiot in Chief; Prime Muppet; Brainless Johnson; and That Brexit Twat, but it's worse than any of that.
Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson is not stupid.
I'm not saying that an idiot in power is a good thing; you only have to look at post-2016 America to see how destructive the Dunning-Kruger effect can be when combined with actual power and influence.
Comparing America and Britain has never been quite so salient a point, either; both the brash idiot in the White-House and the callous toff poised to enter number 10 are demagogues - and in a way, the differences between these two moral vacuums are the clearest reflection of the underlying cultural differences between these two countries that my lifetime has yet offered; I think Hillary's ill-advised but spot-on turn of phrase "basket of deplorables" applies well to a large portion of both of their most ardent supporters, but while their supporters may fall broadly into the same demographic in both countries (below-average income and education, english-speaking, white, rural) they still look for different things when deciding who is the boss.
Trump and Johnson both won their positions in a manner that doesn't really belong in a democracy (Trump through the much-more-easily-repaired-than-you-think weirdness of the electoral college, and Johnson through the oh-so-British tradition of the elected leader of the people not actually being elected by the people), and both essentially won on platforms of... I want to say "fear of the other" but there's a perfectly good word for that and the word is racism.
Trump's was entirely open, and his position (for all that he might claim that he did not like the anti-Ihlan Omar chant of "Send Her Back") has never been open to any real interpretation. He doesn't like brown people. He just stops short of actually specifying that, but he's clearly quite happy for both his opponents and his supporters to fully understand that that is what he wants. He is also American in a way that very few Americans are; he is brash, unapologetic and utterly convinced of American Exceptionalism; there is no explanation of why America can fund terrorism and America can topple democratically elected governments and America can have nucleur weapons when any other nation is not allowed to do those things; the only explanation necessary is that America says so. We're not even given the explanation of "because communism" so popular with American politicians, because America says so is all that we need to know.
Johnson is... a little bit different.
For a start, he is very open to interpretation. His many - many many many many - public gaffes may make him seem like another politically incorrect buffoon stumbling from one scandal to the next, but they are always presented very much as a "whoopsie" - unlike Trump, Johnson is happy to say "Golly gosh, look how I messed up, I am so terribly sorry", which placates his detractors ("well, at least he doesn't think that that's acceptable behaviour") without convincing the racist core of his supporters that he didn't actually mean it. But even to them, this "Whoospydaisy!" approach to offensiveness is likely important: despite the rush of racist and xenophobic attacks in the wake of the Brexit referendum, the idea of Britishness still creates some notion that there must be at least a veneer of respectability (which, if you look at history, is really all that there ever was to it); it's important for Boris to know that it's not alright to say those things, but so deliciously humanising for him to "accidentally" say them anyway.
And while Trump is, in his own words, a "very stable genius" and will fight anyone who says differently, Boris seems to go to lengths to convince everyone around him that he is a bit of an idiot, really, and then laugh with those who see through it about how effective it is.
He is a bullying buffoon, and a charming academic, whichever the moment requires. He could be the most objectionable weirdo, compellingly tragic backstory included, on Big Brother and then a witty academic on Have I Got News For You the next day (I'm not going to look up if he's ever been on Big Brother. I don't want to know).
Really, Boris Johnson's position is very straightforward: publicity pays, and it should pay him the most, please.
This is very like Trump - and, incidentally, very like Jacob Rees-Mogg.
Like Trump, and like Rees-Mogg, Johnson has lived a live of rare privilege, pretty much from birth.
Unlike them, he is not a completely coddled moron with no concept of how the world beyond their adult-size diapers and gold-plated playroom actually operates.
Perhaps he was a little less coddled, or perhaps a little more intelligent, that he can quite readily understand most people and their plight.
This is what makes him worse than either of them - he just doesn't care.
This is where I digress quite briefly on the nature of good and bad.
I don't normally like the idea of "bad people" and "good people".
I don't even like the idea that people exist on a spectrum between "good" and "bad", with or without an arbitrary cutoff where people can be fundamentally lumped as more one than the other.
Although it's my usual counterpoint, I don't even particularly agree with the sentiment that people do good things and people do bad things.
I do believe that under intense scrutiny, most actions can be considered to have a "good" or a "bad" net effect, but if we're going to moralize about them, the context is essential.
For example: British government sending money to alleviate suffering in disaster-stricken nations in the developing world.
Looks like a good thing, right?
But what if that money goes through expensive institutions staffed almost entirely through cronyism, and at the same time the government props up dictators and refuses to impose restrictions on business that would prevent the rampant profiteering that forces those developing nations to base their economy entirely on exploitation of labourers at wages that are nothing more than a bad joke, so that neither nations nor individuals can buffer their lives against the disasters exacerbated by environmental exploitation - also often for western profit, rendering the donations of British taxes nothing more than a hollow publicity stunt.
Sound like a bad thing?
But what if the people deciding to give have no way of knowing or even suspecting the corruption that their giving supports? Are they paving their own road to hell? Or are they doing a good thing?
It's all a bit messy, really.
I do not think good intentions alone are enough to redeem an action; a good intention turned into action without even considering the consequences does indeed seem like it would nicely fill the pothole on mile 42 of the road to hell: if you're intending to help someone but not interested enough to even contemplate how effective your help will be, you're not interested in them so much as making yourself feel better for one reason or another. Such thoughtless giving can - and does - often help the recipient, but don't pretend that you're not doing it for selfish reasons, such as feeling better about seeing homeless people or making those Oxfam Chugger-Muggers go away. We've all done it (well, not the chugger muggers... I considered giving to one, once, and we spent a long while going through the literature she had with her before we agreed - or at least, I felt we agreed - that it was not a financially effective way for me to make the world a better place), so I say this without judgement, but thoughtless giving is not your ticket to heaven but a rather selfish act.
I want to distinguish this from mindless giving - which is to say, thoughtless giving by those who do not have the wherewithal to actually put thought into their giving. This is where giving is not even a conscious response, but a reflex action - essentially the monetary version of a mother lactating at the sound of her baby's cry.
These people take me back to my assertion that there are no good and bad people, and now I narrowly avoid contradicting myself by saying that I do think that many people seem instinctively driven to do good or bad things.
I do not think that a fundamentally kind, generous act carried out without thought or intention qualifies as specifically good in the broader, moral-philosophy context; to take it to the extremes, it would be to say that trees producing oxygen as a by-product of their metabolism are morally upstanding, when - despite the obviously (to us) beneficial effects of this action, the complete lack of intention means that it is morally neutral.
At this point, mostly for fun, I'm going to bring consciousness (and thereafter the concept of the soul) into the discussion.
It seems to be getting popular to define consciousness as having a sense of self, which is itself a tricky enough thing to define: if you push two sponges through a sieve together, they will famously display their sense of self when all the little bits of sponge regroup into the original two sponges - or at least, into multiple sponges that do not combine components of the original two. Is the sponge conscious?
Higher consciousness - the whole "soul" thing - is even more ambiguous: some would say that a human zygote has a soul, but an adult chimpanzee does not, despite the latter clearly having much better cognitive abilities. One promising option would be to suggest a sort of external concept of self and other, and the relationship between those: if a chimpanzee sees another chimpanzee perform an action for a reward, and then copies that action to gain the same reward, the chimpanzee's basic internal process can be interpreted as this:
Chimpanzee B wants Thing.
Chimpanzee A did Action and gained Thing.
Chimpanzee B is alike to Chimpanzee A.
The outcome for any behaviour by Chimpanzee B is the same as the outcome of the same behaviour by Chimpanzee A.
Therefore, if Chimpanzee B also perfoms Action, Chimpanzee B will also gain Thing.
(One can interpret B as Johnson and A as Trump, if one wishes)
This is Social Learning, and it's a very useful tool for people, animals and psychologists, but is it the peak of consciousness? It indicates at least some level of empathy, but that empathy is still used in a fundamentally selfish manner - to gain stuff. So what about giving?
So let's move on to a different example, with a different cast of characters:
Cat has caught Mouse.
Cat likes Mouse. Mouse is both entertaining and tasty.
Human is like Cat.
Human probably likes the same things as Cat.
Cat gives Mouse to Human.
This apparent act of altruism, however misguided, is probably better seen as a form of currency use, which although it's certainly most entertaining when monkeys use it to watch porn and develop a prostitution industry, is actually something that many invertebrates can grasp - flies presenting perfectly good prey to a potential mate rather than eating it themselves are really just trading food for sex.
Cat is (hopefully) not trying to get sex from Human, but rather trying to purchase the various and sundry other things that cats desire, from more food and a comfortable place to snooze, all the way through to being kicked less frequently.
Cat's misplaced empathy here - assuming that Human will want the same things that Cat wants - is almost a reverse anthropomorphism: just as you and I readily assign human-like motivations to animals, Cat is assigning cat-like motivations to Human.
This type of projected (if sometimes displaced) empathy is often common in animals with any sort of social structure, and some of the examples of behaviour based on projected desires in birds are truly stunning.
Of course, in animals, the motivation for doing "kind" things is difficult to pin down precisely: the cat may intend to please the human simply because it unselfishly wants the human to be happy, not because it sees itself gaining from the experience. Its decision between eating the mouse itself and giving it to the person may be based on some calculation that the human needs the meal of the mouse more than it does, but we simply can't know that.
So when it comes to moral consciousness, the easiest example to go with is humans:
Human A, let's call it Rupert, has a big red Button.
IF RUPERT PRESSES THE BUTTON, MILLIONS OF PEOPLE WILL BE REDUCED TO SUBHUMAN IN THE PUBLIC CONSCIOUSNESS, TENS OF THOUSANDS WILL BE SUBJECTED TO DEGRADING TREATMENT AND THOUSANDS WILL DIE.
As a result, Rupert will gain "Stuff" - including but not limited to Money and Influence, Rupert's favourite things.
Pressing the Button is Bad.
Rupert knows this.
RUPERT PRESSES THE BUTTON.
This is more complicated than the example implies - not only because Rupert's button is actually an entire media misinformation machine involving thousands of individuals, both consciously and unconsciously participating in the dehumanisation of entire ethnic groups for personal gain, but also because of what it assumes:
First, that Rupert has a concept of Good and Bad beyond his own wants: Freud's Superego. This is probably Learned rather than Instinctive - so it's more or less on the same level as a beagle wagging its tail to be called "good dog" and cringing when it heard the word "bad"; Rupert's concept, like the beagles, be based on conditioning associating "good" acts with rewards and "bad" with punishment, until the ideas themselves are the reward and punishment, respectively.
Second, though, Rupert is able to consciously decide to do Bad things, which might be a bit beyond the average beagle. Rupert may well expect punishment for his actions, even if he decides that those punishments - public condemnations or thinly veiled jabs on internet blogs - are less than his personal reward, his capacity to do wrong despite knowing its wrongness makes his capacity to choose to do good all the more valuable.
I'm not saying that Chimpanzee and Cat do not have a soul, but that it makes a soul so much more interesting if it can sin, and if Rupert's instinct is to press the button, then his ability to prevent himself from doing so becomes a far greater sign of virtue.
And now we're back to why Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson is worse than Trump.
Trump's behaviour is astonishingly childlike at times. He wants things, and he's never had any real check on his wants, so he takes them; he grabs life by the - sorry - pussy, because that's what life is to him: Want thing, take thing.
It's difficult to hate a child for such behaviour, no matter how destructive it might be, because they simply don't know better.
The average republican in the senate is rather worse: They want stuff, and they Gerrymander and Filibuster to ensure that they get it. Within their own, Ayn Rand-warped worldview, I'm not convinced that many of them would think of this behaviour as wrong - at most, they might admit that it was disingenuous, but if they've really internalized Atlas Shrugged, they may well see acting in their own self-interest as their moral responsibility. Not exactly charming, but then we have...
Boris.
Unless I am giving him far more credit than he is due, Boris knows that what he is doing is wrong. Unlike the bubble-bound Rees-Moggs and Trumps of the world, he can see what it does to other people, and yet he is knowingly and willingly pushing Ireland back towards civil war, throwing Britain's economy into a tar-pit and encouraging the public to conflate "other" with "lesser" and see the desperate flight of refugees from countries Britain profits from the plight of as subhuman.
And when one of my co-workers, trying to understand why I was quite so distressed that Jeremy (H)unt had lost the conservative leadership election, asked me whether Mr. Johnson was a good person, I surprised myself by answering quite definitively.
No.
Even in the context of our discussion of characters such as Michael Sata, who did plenty of Bad things as a minister before becoming President and trying his best to do Good things (while not giving back his ill-gotten gains, admittedly), Boris Johnson stands out as a spectacularly Bad Person.
And I don't even believe in bad people.
General Rants
Genetically Modified Horror - OR - It's hateful, but not the way you think.
Nobody seems to be saying it, so I'm going to.
Genetically Modified Food is probably fine.
BUT GMO IS STILL A MASSIVE PROBLEM.
Let's be honest, can we? If someone uses a modified retrovirus carrying a gene from polar fish to make tomatoes frost resistant, the worst - and that's still unlikely - that'll happen to people who eat them is that they become a little less inclined to lose fingers and toes if they don't wrap up properly on their way up Everest.
I say this as someone who wholeheartedly feels that we need to label GMO foods. They are not bad for you to eat - and the fact that the entirety of the Western Media as I experience it seems to think that GMO's will turn us into the troglodytes from The Descent is really clouding the issue and making it far too easy for proponents of GM to paint any who oppose it as tinfoil-hat-wearing loonies.
I do not have a tinfoil hat.
From where I'm sitting* problems with GMO come down to two really, really Big ones. I'm going to start with the bigger of the two, so that when we move on to the second point, we've already got the scary stuff out of the way, and it will just be light and a bit frivolous. Sound good?
Don't worry if it doesn't; it won't be light.
Don't worry if it doesn't; it won't be light.
First Up: GMOs Will Not Solve World Hunger.
(at least not in the way that we all know GM)
Before I explain this, I've got to note that the root of this problem is not fundamental to GMOs, and recent improvements in the ways that we M our Os offers a potential route around this problem.
But unfortunately, that potential route is going to hit a great big wall in the form of Profit Margin.
Before we start, imagine that you are going shopping for a... thing. Ooh, I know, it's very much appropriate, a loaf of bread.
So let's say you are a wealthy, discerning shopper who lives and works in corporate... hmmm... let's give America a break... Corporate Germany (seems fair - it is the home nation of the real villain of this piece). You're going out to buy a loaf of bread. Maybe you and some friends have tired of 54 of the local restaurants and, well, it's a weekday, so zum claashäuschen isn't serving, but you want to have a get together and are picking up something that'll look good on the table - or maybe you're just getting something for die kleine Kinder to have in their lunchboxes.
Anyway, you're a responsible parent and you've read about the dangers posed by overly refined flours, and all the chemicals that are added to make those sliced loaves stay as bouncy as Sarah Michelle Gellar's hair even after weeks forgotten in the bread-bin/fighting vampires non-stop - and you like to support your local businesses, after all, so you're going to get yourself a nice artisanal sourdough loaf made with stone-ground ancient grains, and then let's see Angela from accounting turn her nose up at your... well, I can't really say smörgåsbord without sounding like I don't know that Germany is not a Scandinavian nation, but that's the set-up I'm imagining and so dammit, imaginary corporate German, you are putting on a smörgåsbord for your friends and colleagues.
Do you notice anything about the price of your locally made artisanal sourdough loaf with stone ground ancient grains? Is it perhaps... cheaper than the sliced, crust-less cotton wool you used to get in the Edeka when you were on a student?
Point of honesty here - I have no idea what the quality of bread is in the Edeka in Leverkusen. But the point I'm making here is that our corporate friend lives in Leverkusen. Because of a very relevant company whose name I won't do the honour of mentioning, but which happens to be headquartered in Leverkusen.
In case you're wondering, the answer you're looking for is no, the locally-made, stone-ground ancient grains sourdough loaf from a small Leverkusen baker is not cheaper than the mass-produced, trucked in by the hundred, sliced loaf of cotton wool.
Is it because your local bakery is run by a money-grabbing, penny-pinching capitalist monster? It might contribute, but no, that's probably not the main reason. In fact, if both your local baker and the international conglomerate manufacturing pre-sliced loaves of cotton wool for mass consumption were to sell you their product at price, your local producer would still be more expensive - and I'm not just talking about hypothetical countries where a series of right-wing, corporate-interest governments have made things prohibitively expensive for small businesses and individuals while giving tax breaks for a wide class of people and businesses ranging from the ultra-wealthy to the obscenely rich**.
Is it because your local bakery is run by a money-grabbing, penny-pinching capitalist monster? It might contribute, but no, that's probably not the main reason. In fact, if both your local baker and the international conglomerate manufacturing pre-sliced loaves of cotton wool for mass consumption were to sell you their product at price, your local producer would still be more expensive - and I'm not just talking about hypothetical countries where a series of right-wing, corporate-interest governments have made things prohibitively expensive for small businesses and individuals while giving tax breaks for a wide class of people and businesses ranging from the ultra-wealthy to the obscenely rich**.
The reason is not actually particularly sinister. It's actually the same reason that it's often cheaper to buy that sliced cotton wool than to make your own bread: if you are making 10,000 of the same thing at once, you basically just make one giant batch and divide it. Even without automation (which you are definitely using), your labour-per-loaf is substantially lower, your larger oven, filled to capacity, uses far less fuel (per loaf, again), and you can bulk buy the same 97 ingredients in such astonishing quantities that your suppliers can afford to lower their margins while still profiting, which gives you more space to profit.
But what, you ask, does this have to do with my friendly neighbourhood GMOs?
So we have to talk about landraces.
Much of Africa - which, being brutally honest, is where most of these friendly, neighbourhood GM mega-corps claim to be solving world hunger - relies primarily on small-scale agriculture.
This is not a bad thing.
As you have hopefully found out by now, Africa is an incredibly diverse continent, and I do not just mean ethnically and culturally. The vast central plateaus of much of sub-Saharan Africa create incredible climatic variation in small spaces, and the long and tortured history of the formation of the soils of the continent has created massive differences over quite short distances - and add to that, different cultural practices - such as fire regimes, nomadic agriculture and livestock grazing - together create thousands of years worth of subtle differences in the soils which accumulate into a mosaic of different environments.
Now at some point after good old Chrissy Columbus decided to brutalize the people of a new world, send the value of gold into free-fall, and inadvertently create the opening that the trading cities of the nation that would eventually become Ghana needed to start selling live human beings as novelty home decor*** - isn't history nice? - well, at some point after that all started, something arrived in Africa.
Something that Linnaeus would call Zea mays.
Something that you or I might call maize.
This special something didn't take long to get really, really popular, and so now we can skip a few hundred years of people being, well, awful, really awful, to each other, and get to the present.
Maize is an annual plant. It has a generation time of one year.
Traditionally, a farmer growing maize one year would save some seed to plant again the next year. And from that year to the next, and so on and so on. This matters because sooner or later, that farmer has a bad year. To keep it simple, let's say this one is because of a drought.
If he plants anything at all the next year, the seeds are from the crops that fruited despite the drought.
This goes on. And on. The farmer experiences flood years, with crops washed away and nutrient shortages; years when the rain falls as a constant trickle in the little bowl of a valley where he lives and half his crop gets mildew, years where the clouds never seem to clear during the rainy season and his crop grows spindly and pale.
The second time his crop experiences a drought, he still has a bad year. But not as bad as the first drought. Without any intervention from the farmer, the crops are adapting to the local conditions: the chaotic mix of free reproduction within the crop creates endless genetic lines, and when those that can't stick it die, his maize's family tree is pruned, and pruned, and pruned, until it is ready for anything the environment can throw at it.
We're nearly at a point where the bread thing will make sense. Or I hope it will, anyway.
So what our farmer has unconsciously done here is to create a landrace - a crop that is adapted to the soil and climate conditions of his specific plot of land.
So now, in our story, we need a villain - and no, that is not an obscure pun on the archaic word villein, meaning peasant farmer.
Our cackling do-er of misdeeds is a seed company. It's not the most exciting baddie, I'll admit - evil through ignorance is too real to be fun. But a pretty effective monster, I'm sure you'll find.
So, our baddie sells seeds. And to give him his due, not bad seeds: he sells F1 hybrids between two true-breeding strains, which under ideal conditions grow bigger, faster and more productively than either of their parents. It's probably not malice aforethought that the F2 hybrid will have a much lower yield, thus making seed retention relatively unproductive - although if the farmer has to buy new seed every year, that does make for a pretty good business model.
Let's ignore the now wasted thousands upon thousands of hectares or land and hours of labour required to reliably produce these F1 hybrids for sale each year. Let's skim right over that and straight to the point:
Our seed-seller's crop is more productive in good years, so the farmer buys this much more profitable, aggressively advertised product which is not adapted to his local conditions.
At best, it has been assessed for having the highest average tolerance of the widest possible range of conditions. The really conscientious seed-seller might sell a handful of varieties adapted to the broader strokes of variation, but the thing is, if a thousand farmers have a thousand varieties that each do the very best for where they are grown, and this is replaced with five varieties which are, on average, the best across the whole area, what is going to happen to crop yields?
Well?
Oh, yeah, I was going to tell you that. It goes down.
Unfortunately, I can't read your mind, so I can't tell if you've worked out how this relates to the bread, yet.
It relates this way:
Modifying a genome does not have to be expensive, but it has costs.
It's cheaper to mass-produce fewer varieties of genetically modified crops, starting with lines that do best over the widest possible range of conditions, than to create genetically modified versions of the thousands upon thousands of landraces that each do best in their little pockets of the landscape (just like it's cheaper to produce loads and loads of identical loaves, rather than a wide range of varieties in smaller quantities. See?)
Creating a GM crop that outperforms these landraces under certain conditions simply creates a famine when it's not growing under its ideal conditions.
Oh, and even if our farmer does keep his landrace going, it's now constantly being weakened by genetics flowing in from the seeds that he or his neighbours have bought from a big Ag company. It's not doomed, but it is back to square one.
Unless of course the bought seed has patented genes, in which case if he replants his retained seed unwittingly infected with good ole patented DNA, he's a thief and a criminal and he's going to be sued for much, much more than he's worth and lose his land.
So even with technology like CRISPR bringing down the price of genetic modification, GMOs - and any other mass produced seed, for that matter - do not offer an improvement in food security.
So at this point, I would love to end this rant. I really would. I would love to say "start GMing local landraces for local consumption, and I'll be right on board!", but it's just not that simple.
It would be, if we were primarily modifying crops for improved nutrient uptake or drought resistance. There are a number of successful lines that are modified for improved insect resistance, which I do think are fantastic (although I do have minor theoretical concerns there, too).
I am not going to say that it would be A-OKay if they were being modified for increased yield, because even typical artificial selection for a bigger yield (or a fatter cow) sacrifices nutritional value for bulk, and a lot of the malnutrition in the world today does not go hand in hand with starvation, but rather with heavy consumption of nutrient deficient, yield-boosted crops.
But probably the most successful GM crop on the planet is not modified for improved nutrient uptake or drought resistance. It is NOT a modification for boosted yield or insect resistance.
It is modified for herbicide resistance.
It is modified to allow drenching of agricultural land with very broad spectrum herbicides without reducing yields.
It is... Roundup Ready (TM, C or R or whatever)
I know, I know, I've been explicitly avoiding naming names but this stuff is absolutely evil.
Not because Glyphosate may be very bad for the humans spraying it and consuming the food that has been sprayed with it.
Not because Glyphosate interferes with the soil chemistry and biology in a way that takes a very long time to repair.
Not because of the bees - Hang on.
It kind of is because of the bees.
And the wasps. And the spiders. And the earthworms. And the entire complex interconnected ecosystems that our agricultural systems depend on and that our experience with the Biosphere projects shows us that we are embarrassingly bad at recreating from what seem to be their component parts.
Once again, this has less to do with GM and more to do with what it enables.
And what it enables is a continuation of post-WWII agricultural practices.
What I mean by post-WWII agricultural practice is essentially monoculture farming.
But what, you ask, does this have to do with my friendly neighbourhood GMOs?
So we have to talk about landraces.
Much of Africa - which, being brutally honest, is where most of these friendly, neighbourhood GM mega-corps claim to be solving world hunger - relies primarily on small-scale agriculture.
This is not a bad thing.
As you have hopefully found out by now, Africa is an incredibly diverse continent, and I do not just mean ethnically and culturally. The vast central plateaus of much of sub-Saharan Africa create incredible climatic variation in small spaces, and the long and tortured history of the formation of the soils of the continent has created massive differences over quite short distances - and add to that, different cultural practices - such as fire regimes, nomadic agriculture and livestock grazing - together create thousands of years worth of subtle differences in the soils which accumulate into a mosaic of different environments.
Now at some point after good old Chrissy Columbus decided to brutalize the people of a new world, send the value of gold into free-fall, and inadvertently create the opening that the trading cities of the nation that would eventually become Ghana needed to start selling live human beings as novelty home decor*** - isn't history nice? - well, at some point after that all started, something arrived in Africa.
Something that Linnaeus would call Zea mays.
Something that you or I might call maize.
This special something didn't take long to get really, really popular, and so now we can skip a few hundred years of people being, well, awful, really awful, to each other, and get to the present.
Maize is an annual plant. It has a generation time of one year.
Traditionally, a farmer growing maize one year would save some seed to plant again the next year. And from that year to the next, and so on and so on. This matters because sooner or later, that farmer has a bad year. To keep it simple, let's say this one is because of a drought.
If he plants anything at all the next year, the seeds are from the crops that fruited despite the drought.
This goes on. And on. The farmer experiences flood years, with crops washed away and nutrient shortages; years when the rain falls as a constant trickle in the little bowl of a valley where he lives and half his crop gets mildew, years where the clouds never seem to clear during the rainy season and his crop grows spindly and pale.
The second time his crop experiences a drought, he still has a bad year. But not as bad as the first drought. Without any intervention from the farmer, the crops are adapting to the local conditions: the chaotic mix of free reproduction within the crop creates endless genetic lines, and when those that can't stick it die, his maize's family tree is pruned, and pruned, and pruned, until it is ready for anything the environment can throw at it.
We're nearly at a point where the bread thing will make sense. Or I hope it will, anyway.
So what our farmer has unconsciously done here is to create a landrace - a crop that is adapted to the soil and climate conditions of his specific plot of land.
So now, in our story, we need a villain - and no, that is not an obscure pun on the archaic word villein, meaning peasant farmer.
Our cackling do-er of misdeeds is a seed company. It's not the most exciting baddie, I'll admit - evil through ignorance is too real to be fun. But a pretty effective monster, I'm sure you'll find.
So, our baddie sells seeds. And to give him his due, not bad seeds: he sells F1 hybrids between two true-breeding strains, which under ideal conditions grow bigger, faster and more productively than either of their parents. It's probably not malice aforethought that the F2 hybrid will have a much lower yield, thus making seed retention relatively unproductive - although if the farmer has to buy new seed every year, that does make for a pretty good business model.
Let's ignore the now wasted thousands upon thousands of hectares or land and hours of labour required to reliably produce these F1 hybrids for sale each year. Let's skim right over that and straight to the point:
Our seed-seller's crop is more productive in good years, so the farmer buys this much more profitable, aggressively advertised product which is not adapted to his local conditions.
At best, it has been assessed for having the highest average tolerance of the widest possible range of conditions. The really conscientious seed-seller might sell a handful of varieties adapted to the broader strokes of variation, but the thing is, if a thousand farmers have a thousand varieties that each do the very best for where they are grown, and this is replaced with five varieties which are, on average, the best across the whole area, what is going to happen to crop yields?
Well?
Oh, yeah, I was going to tell you that. It goes down.
Unfortunately, I can't read your mind, so I can't tell if you've worked out how this relates to the bread, yet.
It relates this way:
Modifying a genome does not have to be expensive, but it has costs.
It's cheaper to mass-produce fewer varieties of genetically modified crops, starting with lines that do best over the widest possible range of conditions, than to create genetically modified versions of the thousands upon thousands of landraces that each do best in their little pockets of the landscape (just like it's cheaper to produce loads and loads of identical loaves, rather than a wide range of varieties in smaller quantities. See?)
Creating a GM crop that outperforms these landraces under certain conditions simply creates a famine when it's not growing under its ideal conditions.
Oh, and even if our farmer does keep his landrace going, it's now constantly being weakened by genetics flowing in from the seeds that he or his neighbours have bought from a big Ag company. It's not doomed, but it is back to square one.
Unless of course the bought seed has patented genes, in which case if he replants his retained seed unwittingly infected with good ole patented DNA, he's a thief and a criminal and he's going to be sued for much, much more than he's worth and lose his land.
So even with technology like CRISPR bringing down the price of genetic modification, GMOs - and any other mass produced seed, for that matter - do not offer an improvement in food security.
So at this point, I would love to end this rant. I really would. I would love to say "start GMing local landraces for local consumption, and I'll be right on board!", but it's just not that simple.
It would be, if we were primarily modifying crops for improved nutrient uptake or drought resistance. There are a number of successful lines that are modified for improved insect resistance, which I do think are fantastic (although I do have minor theoretical concerns there, too).
I am not going to say that it would be A-OKay if they were being modified for increased yield, because even typical artificial selection for a bigger yield (or a fatter cow) sacrifices nutritional value for bulk, and a lot of the malnutrition in the world today does not go hand in hand with starvation, but rather with heavy consumption of nutrient deficient, yield-boosted crops.
But probably the most successful GM crop on the planet is not modified for improved nutrient uptake or drought resistance. It is NOT a modification for boosted yield or insect resistance.
It is modified for herbicide resistance.
It is modified to allow drenching of agricultural land with very broad spectrum herbicides without reducing yields.
It is... Roundup Ready (TM, C or R or whatever)
I know, I know, I've been explicitly avoiding naming names but this stuff is absolutely evil.
Not because Glyphosate may be very bad for the humans spraying it and consuming the food that has been sprayed with it.
Not because Glyphosate interferes with the soil chemistry and biology in a way that takes a very long time to repair.
Not because of the bees - Hang on.
It kind of is because of the bees.
And the wasps. And the spiders. And the earthworms. And the entire complex interconnected ecosystems that our agricultural systems depend on and that our experience with the Biosphere projects shows us that we are embarrassingly bad at recreating from what seem to be their component parts.
Once again, this has less to do with GM and more to do with what it enables.
And what it enables is a continuation of post-WWII agricultural practices.
Which are AWFUL.
What I mean by post-WWII agricultural practice is essentially monoculture farming.
As a broader species, we have known for a really long time that this is.... good for creating biblical plagues.
For those of us who don't like feeling like we're living through Exodus, monoculture farming is really, really, really bad.
This type of farming essentially strips soils of their nutrients, gradually exterminates their natural capacity to regenerate by wiping out the hosts of fungi, bacteria and other micro-organisms that make the difference between living, carbon-trapping "soil" and dead, useless for pretty much everything "dirt". Even without its modern reliance on chemical intervention, it destabilises ecosystems - leading to crashes of some insects and unnatural population explosions of others - and in inland areas, it changes weather patterns and behaviours of water-sheds, sometimes catastrophically.
If I was to name one thing that we could do as a species that would have the single biggest positive impact on the planet, it would be to end monoculture farming.
Its briefly boosted productivity exhausts farmlands, leading to falling yields in the longer term, and ever increasing incursion into natural areas, which in Africa's inland plateau regions, are often dangerously infertile and only capable of supporting nutrient-wise, productive forests or barren, dead deserts. It is a major reason for deforestation, it is pretty much fundamentally chemically dependent (and don't you dare feel smug, committed buyers of organic produce - unless you've actually looked into the incredible range of chemicals that are approved for use in "organic" systems. But that's another rant for another day) and it creates a dependency on interregional transport of foods that contributes massively to our global carbon output - and even beyond that, those billions of hectares under monoculture hold a fraction of the carbon that they could, under natural systems or more responsible, pre-WWII agriculture.
It ___________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ sucks, in short.
(These blank lines for insertion of any and all expletives you feel are necessary for emphasis, and then more to reach the emphasis I intended).
**If I was, this little analogy would be happening to a corporate individual living in the UK. I am especially bitter at the moment, as I can't believe that I had to learn through American television that the UK only just stopped paying reparations to the families of former slave-owners for the loss incurred by their slaves being freed. I can believe that the U.K. actually did that, though, which is not something I'm happy to have realised.
***The fallout from this is another rant that many, many, many other people have had, but I do feel that it is necessary to point out that the predecessor nations of Ghana might have made black African slaves into the must-have accessory for your wealthy European household, but that is not to say that Europeans and their American descendants should not receive the bulk of the blame for the horrors of what became the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)