In the eighties, lots of young ideologues were worried about a Malthusian future; there would be more people in the world than we could feed. They decided that genetic engineering was going to save the world by adding micro-nutrients to rice, by making essential food crops drought resistant and higher yielding, et cetera. So they studied genetic engineering in University and joined Monsanto, which was obviously the company that was most likely to make this happen.
Thirty years later, they are vilified by very similar ideologues.
The differences in yield between fully modern farming techniques and modern organic farming is not that massive. It's substantial, I'll grant you - something like 13-25% difference. And that's with the fully bevy of certified organic practices - non-fossil-fuel soils, natural pesticides, etc. How much incremental improvement in yield do you actually think comes from the GMO side of things? The primary difference seems to be in manpower - Organic practices require far more manpower... but the world isn't short of manpower.
There is more than enough food in the world. Starvation happens because of infrastructure and economics, not insufficient yields. Norman Borlaug's green revolution would have happened with or without GMOs.
My main criticism of GMOs isn't the genetic alterations themselves, but the way they enable excessive pesticide use, IP law abuses, and monoculture.
> There is more than enough food in the world. Starvation happens because of infrastructure and economics, not insufficient yields. Norman Borlaug's green revolution would have happened with or without GMOs.
Norman Borlaug's green revolution did happen without GMOs - it was all about breeding (e.g for shorter stems) and intensification of nutrient inputs.
While food distribution is a major problem, it's simply not true that food supply is not also a problem. It is entirely unfeasible for all the food in the world to be efficiently distributed to everyone who needs food from the places it is currently grown in the time we have available before peak population. Food supply is a limiting factor. Enabling people to grow more food close to where they live will save lives. This is why we (plant geneticists) continue trying to raise yields.
Try telling a starving family in (Indonesia|Tanzania|Bangladesh) that the problem isn't their pathetic rice crop yield, it's that Americans are throwing away cheeseburgers. We can feed a lot of those people with better agricultural technology.
> My main criticism of GMOs isn't the genetic alterations themselves, but the way they enable excessive pesticide use, IP law abuses, and monoculture.
GMOs don't enable any of those things. Monoculture is a route to efficient food production - it was around long before GMOs. We have it because it was the path of least resistance to massive scale food production.
Total amount of pesticides might be increased in some cases with GMOs (though in many it is reduced), but the important thing is that current GMOs enable us to use much, much less harmful pesticides. Glyphosate is probably the safest herbicide the world has ever seen. Some of the alternatives are just terrifyingly harmful.
IP law is certainly used by some seed companies, but I'd argue it's generally not abused to anywhere near the level it is by tech companies. If you read the court documents from Monsanto cases they are almost always reasonable and subsequently misrepresented by activists.
Where do you get those numbers from? Anecdotally in my experience, organic crop yields are well under half of those from conventional crops. Often organic crops are left in the field to rot because there's so little there that it'd cost more to harvest the field than could be gained selling the crop.
In our area, organic cropland is typically left fallow 1 year in 3 to control weeds, so there's an automatic 33% yield loss before any other factors.
> My main criticism of GMOs isn't the genetic alterations themselves, but the way they enable excessive pesticide use, IP law abuses, and monoculture.
You clearly know nothing at all about GMOs, because if you did you'd be cheering on the fact that GMOs use less pesticide and herbicide than organic crops do, and the ones used are less toxic than the organic equivalents.
Actually, in Norman Borlaugh's time, also his plant breeding methods (crossbreeding etc.) and the resulting crop cultivars were considered "unnatural" by some [1].
Also, when the potato was brought to Europe centuries ago, people were first very suspicious: "Even peasants refused to eat from a plant that produced ugly, misshapen tubers and that had come from a heathen civilization. Some felt that the potato plant's resemblance to plants in the nightshade family hinted that it was the creation of witches or devils." [2]
> I love the science. It's the non-competitive market I don't like. "Get your seeds from us under any terms we dictate" isn't a healthy state, or in the public interest.
But that is not an accurate reflection of reality. Any farmer is free to buy any seed from any company at any time. They can even visit the seed banks and grow ancient varieties if there would be someone to sell the resultant food to. The whole "you must buy our seed" thing is just the another mimetic anti-GMO trope.
> And thanks to a number of factors beginning with patent arsenals and ending with good luck with that, your chances of leaving Monsanto to start a viable competitor are somewhere a few orders of magnitude below "disrupt Facebook.
And yet Monsanto are not the biggest seed company by a long way. That accolade goes to Dow.
The point is that its food - something everyone who eats it has an active interest in - but it's privately owned and therefore no one has the transparency or say they'd like in how it is produced.
But, like all privately developed technology, buyers have the choice not to purchase it. Monsanto isn't saying that they own corn any more than Microsoft says they own OS's, or google claiming they own search. At the end of the day, you put up money to purchase something (or make a choice to use something) -- be it a product made of corn, the OS you use, or search engine - do you look at price, profitability and compatibility with your workflow, or "GMO free", "FOSS" and "Privacy Protecting"? You may answer the latter in all cases - and I can respect that, but there's a large number of people to whom added productivity/profitability is worth a commercial or financial commitment that may come with legal restrictions.
This is one of those classical myths we tell ourselves - that buyers have an encyclopedic knowledge of the commodities they buy. In such a world oversight and protection wouldn't be needed. Unfortunately, we don't live in that world.
> While the debate about the impact of GM crops on the environment continues, the question of their effect on human health looks increasingly settled. The National Academy of Sciences, the American Medical Association, the World Health Organization, Britain’s Royal Society, the European Commission, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, among others, have all surveyed the substantial research literature and found no evidence that the GM foods on the market today are unsafe to eat. One of the few dissenting research papers, a 2012 study in the journal Food and Chemical Toxicology that found tumors in rats fed modified maize, was retracted by the journal last fall after questions were raised about the researchers’ methodology.
There is still a huge sentiment against GMOs, everyone think they are harmful to health here in France. I don't know how long it will take for the mentality to change.
> There is still a huge sentiment against GMOs, everyone think they are harmful to health here in France. I don't know how long it will take for the mentality to change.
About as long as it takes for people to stop believing in homeopathy and other snake oil.
Worse yet, even if there were some as-yet unknown health risk, it would have to be a plague-level threat to counterbalance the benefits to food production. That added food production can save millions of lives.
Plague-level is actually the degree of risk we are dealing with in regards to GMOs (not necessarily in likelihood, but in impact). In regards to the famine argument, consider the following:
"Invoking the risk of "famine" as an alternative to GMOs is a deceitful strategy, no different from urging people to play Russian roulette in order to get out of poverty. While hunger is a serious threat to human welfare, as long as the threat remains localized, it falls under risk management and not the PP [precautionary principle]." [1]
Where did this idea of GMO being harmful come from? Some of the environmental concerns seem to be legitimate, but I've never seen or heard a credible source claim they were harmful to human health.
As a side note, I've always been a bit of a technophile, so eating genetically modified food seems really cool, and I can't wait until they perfect lab-grown meat.
The Daily Mail constantly referring to them as "frankenstein-foods" did a good job in Britain. Even credible newspapers like the Independent had a "GM Watch" section pointing to as many negative studies as possible.
> "I've never seen or heard a credible source claim they were harmful to human health."
> Which says a lot about the media you read.
Apparently he only reads scientifically valid media, and not tinfoilhat publications.
(But unfortunately it is true, at least here in Europe, that even respectable media easily echoes totally unscientific falce claims about GMOs occasionally.)
Here in the US a vocal group of decidedly non-scientific celebrities decided that vaccines were the cause of autism ... we're now seeing a recurrence of diseases we'd previously eradicated.
If we had scientists with as big an audience as these celebrities, I think we'd stand a chance of having a logical discussion but instead these ideas spread like wild-fire without any critical thought involved. Very sad :(
There's is an old article by Michael Specter in the New Yorker about Robert Shapiro, the CEO who in the 1990s turned Monsanto from a chemical company into a biotechnology company. Shapiro is a fascinating CEO-- an anti-war activist from New York and former folk musician who was on a mission to save the world through biology. Two of his daughters founded the alt-rock band "Veruca Salt" who had a hit song "Seether" in the 1990s. Here's a PDF of the New Yorker article:
http://www.michaelspecter.com/wp-content/uploads/pharmageddo...
One of the big complaints I hear about Monsanto is that using their seeds forces farmers to throw away their seeds each year (cannot use the seeds that their crops produce). I spoke with a farmer about this once, and he said they almost always throw away their seeds, regardless of supplier. Using those seeds would result in variable growing since you have no clue what cross pollination happened in the previous season.
Any experience farmers or biogeneticists care to comment?
Plant geneticist here. For the vast majority of Monsanto-licensed crops grown, the seed itself is the crop (e.g. maize). The farmers aren't throwing it away, they sell it as food. For most of the remainder, although the seed isn't the crop, the fruit, which contains the seeds, is the crop (e.g. aubergine, cotton). So farmers throwing away seed is unlikely.
Additionally, the previous most productive system of farming (and still very popular) was to use first-generation hybrids (the offspring of breeding two different strains together). Due to a phenomenon known as hybrid vigour, first-generation hybrids often have more desirable growth characteristics (like higher yield, bigger seeds, etc.). However, the effect only lasts one generation. Try to plant the second generation seeds and you'll get relatively pathetic plants. But the hybrid breeding process is incredibly complex and hard to do at scale, so it's worth paying a seed company to do it, even if that means buying the seed every year.
The license protection for GMOs serves a similar purpose: developing GM lines is really, really hard and expensive. If Monsanto and other producers couldn't sell the seeds each year the technology simply wouldn't happen - the licenses allow them to profit despite the massive R&D cost.
"Even before biotech seeds came on the market, corn farmers tended not to save seeds, since store-bought hybrids delivered higher yields, but the technology agreement farmers sign when buying Monsanto’s biotech seeds forbids them from doing it."
So if I read this correctly, the only difference from pre-GMO days and now is that the common practice of buying new seeds every year is in a contract rather than just "common behaviour".
I'm a died-in-the-wool leftish vegetarian, and honestly, I actually am annoyed by the GMO issue because I think it distracts from the far more important concern about other modern farming practices that have far more serious impact.
Excessive pesticides, monocultures, over-intensive factory farms, fossil-fuel-based fertilizers. Those things worry me far more than GMOs, and they're far lower on everyone's priority-list.
I just started a new job at Climate Corporation and it has been interesting seeing the other side of the "Monsanto is the devil" story. Also, David Friedberg is so smart and impressive.
What are you doing there? As an environmental scientist/economist who loves working with data-driven projects, that company always really intrigued me.
One of our products is advice tools for farmers. The free version gives information about historical and predicted weather over a very precise area - farmers can select their exact fields from a map and get information via web, apps, or email. You can sign up and choose whatever land you want to monitor: http://www.climate.com/products/climate-basic/
The paid product takes more inputs from the farmer (crops, planting information, etc) and gives recommendations based on crop, weather, soil, and hydrology models specific to those crops, land, and planting. More details here: http://www.climate.com/products/climate-pro/
"The latest version of our precautionary principle, with application to GMOs, refined thanks to more fallacies in arguments countering it. For discussion before we move to the final version."
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the man is even afraid to drink orange juice, because it's too modern and untested for him:
"Taleb's hatred for orange juice is an example of a wider disdain for the modern diet. He reveals his personal food rules, and very fascinating they are: no liquids that have not existed for at least one thousand years (i.e. wine, water and coffee only), no fruit not present in the ancient Mediterranean (no pineapples, pawpaws or other exotica)"
I think publishing a book also may have "unpredictable systemic effects" (there have been several books that have radically altered the course of history), so it should be approached with extreme caution, don't you think? However, Taleb has published several books, so I don't think he lives like he preaches.
> In other words, is it impossible to grow enough food without using GMOs?
Of course not. We waste drastic amounts of food every year thanks to spoilage. We feed food to other forms of food - how much food does it take to raise a cow to maturity? We turn food into fuel for cars at utterly dire efficiency.
Starvation happens because of economics, warfare, ongoing experiments with centrally-planned governments (freaking give it up, Kim Jong), things like that. Not small percentile increments in efficiency.
You've highlighted important problems (spoilage, everyone wanting to eat meat, economics, warfare). But unless you know of some solution to those things on the horizon, you've not made a useful point.
Genetic engineering is a toolkit to solve a vast array of problems we face, and it's available right now. With a 1% increase in yield, we can feed 1% more people. 1% of 7 billion is 70 million.
Starvation happens because we're not making enough small percentile increments in efficiency.
While distribution and many social factors are important, production is also crucial. Farmers in Africa and south-east Asia have production problems. In those places a 1% yield increase really does equate to 1% more people fed. Distribution is a huge complex issue (many people including governments are actively making it worse with farming subsidies and other harmful policies), while production is a problem we can do something about right now with technology.
I work in food security, my research is on crop productivity and we collaborate with many crop centres including the International Rice Research Institute. Those centres have huge communities of local farmers who are desperate for yield increases and other huge communities whose entire livelihoods were made possible by improvements in agricultural technology.
I can assure you the people whose families are able to eat today because of increases in crop yields in just the last few years are grateful that we're all still working on increasing yields and not just telling them it's a greed and distribution problem.
That's what I thought.
What really bothers me about GMOs in the end is more this feeling that the technology is being shoved no matter what, dismissing any alternatives.
Why would you even ask that? If we can make food that requires less pesticides, or less fertlizer, or is more nutritious, or just produces more per acre, why wouldn't we? How is the idea that genetically modified = intrinsically bad anything other than superstition?
It's not so much that it's intrinsically bad, but just like with new, man-made chemical compounds that has never existed before, there's a possibility that there are adverse effects that we can't anticipate and won't be apparent for many years to come. After all the experience we've had with persistent pollutants, I think we're right to be cautious.
> "new, man-made chemical compounds that has never existed before"
GMO cultivars usually do not contain new, man-made chemical compounds.
For example, Golden Rice contain beta carotene (occurs naturally in e.g. carrots).
The virus resistant Hawaiian Rainbow Papaya contains a protein from the virus' capsid, effective "vaccinating" the plants, resulting in virus resistance.
Bt Cotton contains a chemical from Bacillus thuringiensis, a common bacterium in soils, that is harmful to pest insects.
If you had taken the time to also read the words preceding your quote, "but just like with new,", you would have realized that I was making a comparison instead of believing I was making the claim that GMOs include new, man-made chemicals.
New, man-made chemicals aren't intrinsically bad. But based on past experience, we are right to be cautious because we can't always anticipate their effects, the effects can take a long time to become apparent and they can be impossible to eliminate (like with PCBs).
It's not about the GMOs themselves but if you can grow the same/a sufficient amount of food without using pesticides at all, then why even bother with GMOs?
> It's not about the GMOs themselves but if you can grow the same/a sufficient amount of food without using pesticides at all, then why even bother with GMOs?
But you can't. For example, organic farming uses much more pesticide and herbicide than the same GMO crops do. There is a persistent myth that organic doesn't use herbicides and pesticides but it is not in any way true and never has been. But +1 to the marketing department for implanting that persistent idea in the mind of the general public.
Well, we don't need it in the sense that we could all pay more for food that is grown in less efficient ways, just as we don't really need cars to get to work when we can all ride bikes. We don't really need cheap food because we can all afford the more expensive stuff that comes from less efficient farming methods. So you're right - it's not really needed. But it has great utility.
Moving our focus away from rich westerners for a moment, there is a clearer case of 'need' when you consider areas prone to drought or poor people who can't afford the higher quantities of fertiliser, herbicide and pesticides that are needed to grow non-GMO crops. Or at least that would be true if GMO crops were more widespread and western activists had not done such a good job of telling the poor of Africa and India that they are toxic horrors to be avoided at all costs.
I'm not personally afraid of GMOs, but I do not fault people for being skeptical of them.
Completely synthetic foods and food processing have a mediocre track record, and in many cases have caused actual harm (e.g. trans fats) for a long time before that harm was uncovered. Even in cases where there is no active harm, heavily processed foods very often have lower nutritional content than their less processed "whole" cousins. Take wheat for instance. We bleach it, denuding it of its nutritional value, and then try to add back the missing nutrients. Why?
Obviously that's apples and oranges -- GMO foods don't do the same thing that food processing, oil hydrogenation, etc. do... they're totally different technologies. But for the average person who doesn't deeply understand these issues, it's easy to look at the poor track record of "better living through chemistry" and be skeptical.
The general perception is that anything that "messes with" food is either reducing its nutritional content or adding something harmful.
Another reason for skepticism about GMOs stems from the poor track record of medical studies on the relative benefit or harm of various nutrients and foods. Take saturated fats for example, which were demonized for decades. Instead people were encouraged to eat trans fats like margarine, which turned out to be worse for you. Now apparently saturated fats are not too bad in moderation, or something. I don't know. That will probably be reversed next month, then reversed again, then reversed again, and each time the media will trumpet the news. Each big new finding about nutrition seems to contradict previous findings, leading to a general view among many people that nutritional science has no idea what it's talking about.
We can't even figure out after decades of study whether or not fat is bad for you and you're telling me we're absolutely 100% sure GMOs are safe...? Get the picture?
Finally, I think there's a problem of institutional trust. I've asked some organic hippie type friends before if they'd be more open to GMOs if they were made by non-profits working toward the public interest, if they were open source, and if all results of all studies were completely public. I've mostly gotten nods to that. People don't trust closed for-profit companies not to hide negative results, engage in research study "payola," push things to market that have known problems, etc.
The trust issue is huge. Any time this comes up around here I tend to post and bring it up, and for the most part nobody gets it.
People are afraid of GMO foods and parents are not vaccinating their children because the Bush administration lied about Iraq (to give one example). For some reason that is just flatly obvious to me. Why does nobody else see this?
> We can't even figure out after decades of study whether or not fat is bad for you and you're telling me we're absolutely 100% sure GMOs are safe...? Get the picture?
There are some cases, like Golden Rice, where it's relatively easy to be 100% sure of the safety. In Golden Rice, the rice is engineered to produce beta carotene, and because there is lots of beta carotene e.g. in carrots, we can be sure that beta carotene is safe to eat.
Can you expand on why you view Roundup as harmful? Without it, what methods would farmers be using instead, and would these be more environmentally friendly?
Thirty years later, they are vilified by very similar ideologues.