Award winning science writer Colin
Tudge explains what's wrong not just with GMOs and Golden Rice but with
the approach to agriculture that is driving them.
The Founding Fables of Industrialised Agriculture
Colin Tudge
Independent Science News, October 30 2013
http://www.independentsciencenews.org/un-sustainable-farming/the-founding-fables-of-industrialised-agriculture/
Governments
these days are not content with agriculture that merely provides good
food. In line with the dogma of neoliberalism they want it to contribute
as much wealth as any other industry towards the grand goal of
“economic growth”. High tech offers to reconcile the two ambitions –
producing allegedly fabulous yields, which seems to be what’s needed,
and becoming highly profitable. The high-tech flavour of the decade is
genetic engineering, supplying custom-built crops and livestock as GMOs
(Genetically Modified Organisms).
So it was that the UK Secretary
of State for the Environment and Rural Affairs, Owen Paterson, told The
Independent recently that the world absolutely needs
genetically-engineered “Golden Rice”, as created by one of the world’s
two biotech giants, Syngenta. Indeed, those who oppose Golden Rice are
“wicked”: a comment so outrageous that Paterson’s own civil servants
have distanced themselves from it.
Specifically, Golden Rice has
been fitted with genes that produce carotene, which is the precursor of
vitamin A. Worldwide, approximately 5 million pre-school aged children
and 10 million pregnant women suffer significant Vitamin A deficiency
sufficiently severe to cause night blindness according to the WHO. By
such statistics a vitamin A-rich rice seems eminently justified.
Yet
the case for Golden Rice is pure hype. For Golden Rice is not
particularly rich in carotene and in any case, rice is not, and never
will be, the best way to deliver it. Carotene is one of the commonest
organic molecules in nature. It is the yellow pigment that accompanies
chlorophyll in all dark green leaves (the many different kinds known as
“spinach” are a great source) and is clearly on show in yellow roots
such as carrots and some varieties of cassava, and in fruits like papaya
and mangoes that in the tropics can grow like weeds.
So the best
way by far to supply carotene (and thus vitamin A) is by horticulture –
which traditionally was at the core of all agriculture. Vitamin A
deficiency is now a huge and horrible issue primarily because
horticulture has been squeezed out by monocultural big-scale agriculture
— the kind that produces nothing but rice or wheat or maize as far as
the eye can see; and by insouciant urbanization that leaves no room for
gardens. Well-planned cities could always be self-sufficient in fruit
and veg. Golden Rice is not the answer to the world’s vitamin A problem.
As a scion of monocultural agriculture, it is part of the cause.
Syngenta’s promotion of it is yet one more exercise in top-down control
and commercial PR. Paterson’s blatant promotion of it is at best naïve.
For
Golden Rice serves primarily as a flagship for GMOs and GMOs are very
big business – duly supported at huge public expense by successive
governments. It is now the lynch-pin of agricultural research almost
everywhere. The UK’s Agriculture and Food Research Council of the 1990s
even had the words ‘Agriculture’ and ‘Food’ air-brushed out to become
the Biotechnology and Biological Research Council (BBSRC). We have been
told that GMOs increase yields with lower inputs and have been proven
beyond reasonable doubt to be safe. Indeed, journalist Mark Lynas has
been telling us from some remarkably high platforms that the debate on
GMOs is “dead”; that there is now “a consensus” among scientists
worldwide that they are necessary and safe.
In reality, GMOs do
not consistently or even usually yield well under field conditions; they
do not necessarily lead to reduction in chemical inputs, and have often
led to increases; and contra Mark Lynas, there is no worldwide
consensus of scientists vouching for their safety. Indeed, the European
Network of Scientists for Social and Environmental Responsibility
(ENSSER) has drawn up a petition that specifically denies any such
consensus and points out that “a list of several hundred studies does
not show GM food safety”. Hundreds of scientists are expected to sign.
Overall, after 30 years of concerted endeavour, ultimately at our
expense and with the neglect of matters far more pressing, no GMO food
crop has ever solved a problem that really needs solving that could not
have been solved by conventional means in the same time and at less
cost.
The real point behind GMOs is to achieve corporate/ big
government control of all agriculture, the biggest by far of all human
endeavours. And this agriculture will be geared not to general wellbeing
but to the maximization of wealth. The last hundred years, in which
agriculture has been industrialised, have laid the foundations. GMOs,
for the agro-industrialists, can finish the job. The technology itself
is esoteric so that only the specialist and well-endowed can embark on
it – the bigger the better. All of the technology can be, and is,
readily protected by patents. Crops that are not protected by patents
are being made illegal. Only parts of the EU have so far been pro-GM but
even so the list of crops that it allows farmers to grow – or any of
us! – becomes more and more restricted. Those who dare to sell the seed
of traditional varieties that have not been officially approved can go
to prison. Your heritage allotment could soon land you in deep trouble.
As
GMOs spread – and governments like Britain’s would love to follow the
US lead in this – they could soon become the only options; the only kids
on the block. Then all of agriculture, the key to human survival, will
become the exclusive property of the few huge companies that hold the
patents. By every sane judgment this is a horrible prospect. Among many
other things, the obvious loss of biodiversity will make the whole world
even more precarious than it is right now, especially if climate
changes the growing conditions year by year. Yet our government’s
support for GM technology and for the thinking behind it is unswerving. Government wants agriculture to be seen as big business. Lip service is
still paid to democracy (young men and women are sent to their deaths to
defend the idea of it) but in truth we have rule by oligarchy: a
virtual coalition of corporates and government, with establishment
scientists in attendance. This monolith, and the crude thinking on which
it is founded, is a far bigger threat to humanity than North Korea or
“terrorism”, or the collapse of banks or dwindling oil.
Yet we
have been assured, time and again, that there is no alternative; that
without high tech, industrialized agriculture, we will all starve. This
is the greatest untruth of all; though it has been repeated so often by
so many people in such high places that it has become embedded in the
zeitgeist. Whether the officially sanctioned untruths spring from
misconception or from downright lies I will leave others to judge. But
in either case, their repetition by people who have influence in public
affairs, is deeply reprehensible.
Specifically we have been told
that the world will need 50% more food by 2050. The Chief Scientific
Adviser to the Government, Sir John Beddington, said this in his
“Foresight” report of 2012 on The Future of Food and Farming [1] His
argument was, and is, that a billion out of the present seven billion
are now undernourished; that numbers are due to rise to 9.5 billion by
2050; that people “demand” more and more meat as they grow richer; and
that meat requires enormous resources to produce (already the world’s
livestock gobble up about 50% of the world’s cereal and well over 90% of
the soya). So of course we need 50% more – and some have raised the
ante to 100%. Thus the message comes from on high, we must focus on
production, come what may.
But others, including some far closer
to the facts, tell a quite different story. Professor Hans Herren,
President of the Millennium Institute in Washington, points out that the
world already produces enough staple food to support 14 billion – twice
the present number. A billion starve because the wrong food is produced
in the wrong places by the wrong means by the wrong people – and once
the food is produced, as the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN
(FAO) has pointed out, half of it is wasted. The UN demographers tell
us that although human numbers are rising the percentage rise is going
down and should reach zero by 2050 – so the numbers should level out.
Nine and a half billion is as many as we will ever have to feed – and we
already produce 50% more than will ever be needed. The task, then, is
not to increase output, but to produce what we do produce (or even less)
by means that are kinder to people, livestock, and wildlife; more
sustainable; and more resilient.
The truth is that for commercial
purposes – for the maximization of wealth – it is too easy to provide
good food for everyone. A few years ago, after all, when the economy was
tweaked a little differently, farmers in Europe and the US were
embarrassed by gluts of wheat and maize; and as farmers have always
known, gluts are second only to total crop failure as the route to
financial disaster. The obvious and sensible solution would be to reduce
production: to tailor output to need and to genuine desire. “Set-aside”
was a crude stab at this. But the far more lucrative course is the one
we have taken- to overproduce – and if it turns out that people really
don’t need more food, then those who seek primarily to maximize wealth
must pretend that they do. So the word is put around, backed by
well-chosen and uncritical statistics, that we will need 50% more in the
next few decades.
The resulting surpluses are then fed to
livestock. Livestock that could, incidentally, be fed in more than
adequate numbers if we made better use of the world’s grasslands, which
account for about two-thirds of all agricultural land; or – which is a
straightforward scam, though again it can be made to look respectable –
the surplus wheat and maize can simply be burnt if labelled “biofuel”.
“Demand” (in this scenario) is judged not by what people actually say
they want (who ever said they wanted wheat-based biofuel, or cereal-fed
beef rather than grass-fed beef?) but by what can be sold by aggressive
PR and successfully lobbied through complaisant government.
Then
we are told that the 50% increase we are said to need can be provided
only by industrial agriculture and that this industry, like all human
endeavour, works most efficiently when driven by the maximally
competitive global market. The pious slogan that is meant to justify all
this is “sustainable intensification”: more and more output per
hectare, achieved by high tech. The magic bullet of GMOs is just part of
the hype.
For if we really did need more food (and it would be
good to produce more in some places) then the industrial high tech route
is not the one to go down. As the IAASTD report [2] of 2009 pointed out
– this being one of the few official reports of recent years that is
truly worthwhile – the industrial farming that is supposed to be feeding
the world in practice provides only 30% of the world’s food. Another
20% comes from fishing, hunting, and people’s back gardens – and the
remaining 50% comes from the mostly small, mostly mixed traditional
farms that the industrialists and their political assistants tell us are
an anachronism; and small mixed farms can be the most productive of
all, per unit area [3]. Furthermore, to produce their 30%, the
industrial farms gobble up enormous quantities of oil for their
industrial chemistry with immense collateral damage, not least to the
climate. In contrast traditional farms are low input, and at least when
properly managed, need not be damaging at all.
More yet:
traditional farms worldwide typically produce only about a half or even a
third of what they could produce – not because the farmers are
incompetent, as Western observers like to claim, but because they lack
the most basic supports. For instance, if farm prices are left to the
global market, they go up and down– so that farmers who have no proper
financial support from banks or governments are subjected to dumping of
foreign surpluses. They then cannot afford to invest upfront in more
production. So they err on the side of caution, while western industrial
farmers, or at least the richest ones, have often thrown caution to the
winds. A little logistic help could increase the output of traditional
farms – 50% of the whole – by 100%. Heroic efforts would be needed to
increase the output of high-tech western crops and livestock even by
another 10%, because the 10-tonne per hectare wheat fields and the
10,000 litre-plus dairy cows are already hard up against physiological
limits (while the livestock is well beyond welfare limits). But all the
official effort, and our money, is poured into more industrialization.
Policy, agricultural and alas scientific, goes where the money leads.
Finally,
we are told that the high-tech, global market approach to food
production keeps prices down. Small, mixed, traditional-style farms are
said to be far too expensive because they are labour-intensive. But in
fact, about 80% of what people spend on food in supermarkets goes to the
middle-men and the banks (who lend the money to set up the system in
the first place). So the farmers get only 20%. If those farmers are up
to their ears in debt, as they are likely to be if they have gone down
the industrial high-tech route, then a fair slice of that 20% goes to
the banks. At most, the farm labour costs that we are supposed to try so
hard to keep down probably account for less than 10% of the total food
bill. It’s the 80% we need to get down. When farmers sell directly to
customers they get 100% of the retail price; through farmers’ markets
they typically get around 70%; and through local shops at least 30%.
With different marketing the small farmers can certainly make a good
living – and farming as a whole in Britain could easily soak up all the
million under-25s who are presently being invited to wile away their
days in the job centre. (But then, agricultural economists don’t tend to
take social costs into account).
In short, agriculture in Britain
and the world at large needs a sea-change – an “Agrarian Renaissance”:
different ways of farming and marketing and – emphatically — different
people in charge. The oligarchy of corporates, government, and compliant
academe has failed. Farming that can actually feed us is innately
democratic. Worldwide, the farmers know best – but the oligarchs rarely
talk to them. They are content merely to impose their scientific and
economic and scientific dogmas: high tech in a neoliberal market.
Mercifully,
worldwide, many people are helping to bring the Renaissance into being.
They range from setters-up of local farmers’ markets to organizations
like ENSSER to the worldwide peasants’ movement, La Via Campesina. As
many as can be fitted in congregate each year at the Oxford Real Farming
Conference: the next one is in January 2014. Do come, and join the
Renaissance. This is the cause of our age, for whatever else we may
aspire to do, agriculture is the thing we absolutely have to get right.
1: Foresight. The Future of Food and Farming, GO-Science, 2011
2: International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD), Island Press, 2009.
http://www.unep.org/dewa/Assessments/Ecosystems/IAASTD/tabid/105853/Default.aspx
3:
See for example Commentary IX (UNCTAD TER 2013): Comparative analysis
of organic and non-organic farming systems: a critical assessment of
on-farm profitability, Noemi Nemes, FAO
