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.
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