The End of Doom (23 page)

Some environmentalist critics claim that genes from genetically modified crops will “contaminate” the natural environment and conventional crops. A 2003 report by the International Council for Science (ICSU) found that “there is no evidence of any deleterious environmental effects having occurred from the trait/species combinations currently available.”

Meanwhile, no matter what effects either conventional or GM crops have on biodiversity in crop fields, they pale in comparison to the impact that the introduction of modern herbicides and pesticides sixty years ago had on farmland biology. Thanks to GMOs, farmers' fields became dramatically more productive and comparatively weed- and pest-free.

Biotech Crops and Feeding a Hungry World

In 2009, the Union of Concerned Scientists issued a report,
Failure to Yield,
by chief scientist Doug Gurian-Sherman claiming that modern biotechnology had not increased “intrinsic” crop yields—that is, the highest yield possible under ideal conditions. This assertion is a red herring. Current varieties of biotech crops boost yields chiefly by preventing weeds from using up sunlight and nutrients and insects from destroying them. In other words, biotech crops increase operational yields, the yields actually obtainable in the field taking into account factors such as pests and environmental stresses.

Keep in mind that farmers are not stupid, especially not poor farmers in developing countries. The UCS report acknowledged that American farmers had widely adopted biotech crops in the previous thirteen years. Why? “The fact that the herbicide-tolerant soybeans have been so widely adopted suggests that factors such as lower energy costs and convenience of GE (genetically engineered) soybeans also influence farmer choices,” noted the report. Indeed. Surely a UCS advocacy scientist should view saving fossil fuels that emit greenhouse gases as an environmental good. And what does Gurian-Sherman mean by “convenience”? Later, he admits that biotech herbicide-resistant crops save costs and time for farmers. Herbicide resistance is also a key technology for expanding soil-saving no-till agriculture, which, according to a report in 2003, saves 1 billion tons of topsoil from eroding annually. In addition, no-till farming significantly reduces the runoff of fertilizers into streams and rivers.

The UCS report correctly observed, “It is also important to keep in mind where increased food production is most needed—in developing countries, especially in Africa, rather than in the developed world.” Which is exactly what is happening with biotech crops in poor countries. Currently, 18 million farmers around the world are planting biotech crops. Notably 90 percent of the world's biotech farmers—that is, 16.5 million—are small and resource-poor farmers in developing countries such as China, India, and South Africa. Gurian-Sherman is right that biotech contributions to yields in developed countries are comparatively modest.

Farmers in the United States and Canada already have access to and can afford to deploy the full armamentarium of modern agricultural technologies, so improvements are going to be at the margins. Nevertheless, it is instructive to compare the rate of increase in corn yields between the biotech-friendly United States and biotech-hostile France and Italy over the past ten years. University of Georgia crop scientist Wayne Parrott notes, “In marked contrast to yield increases in the U.S., yields in France and Italy have leveled off.”

Biotech Crops Are Pro-Poor

Yield increases are much greater in poor countries. In 2004, the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization declared that crop biotechnology can be a “pro-poor agricultural technology.” The FAO pointed out that crop biotechnology “can be used by small farmers as well as larger ones; it does not require large capital investments or costly external inputs and it is relatively simple to use. Biotechnologies that are embodied in a seed, such as transgenic insect resistance, are scale neutral and may be more affordable and easier to use than other crop technologies.”

A 2006 study found that biotech insect-resistant cotton varieties boosted the yields for India's cotton farmers by 44 to 63 percent. Exasperatingly, some anti-biotech activists counter that these are not really yield increases, merely the prevention of crop losses. Of course, another way to look at it is that these are increases in operational yields. Yield increase or crop loss prevention, this success led in 2013 to nearly 90 percent of India's cotton fields being planted with biotech varieties. Similarly, biotech insect-resistant corn varieties increased yields (or prevented losses) by 24 percent in the Philippines.

More recently, a 2010 review article in
Nature Biotechnology
found that “of 168 results comparing yields of GM and conventional crops, 124 show positive results for adopters compared to non-adopters, 32 indicate no difference and 13 are negative.” With regard to feeding the world, yield increases are greater for poor farmers in developing countries than for farmers in rich countries. “The average yield increases for developing countries range from 16 percent for insect-resistant corn to 30 percent for insect-resistant cotton,” the
Nature Biotechnology
article notes, “with an 85 percent yield increase observed in a single study on herbicide-tolerant corn.”

In 2013 the Centre for Environmental Strategy at the University of Surrey published a working paper that looked at the agronomic, environmental, and socioeconomic impacts of biotech crops since they were commercialized in 1996. The researchers found, “Overall, the impact of GM crops has been positive in both the developed and developing worlds.” The adoption of biotech crops increased yields and used less energy. “Ecologically, non-target and beneficial organisms have benefitted from reduced pesticide use, surface and ground water contamination is less significant and fewer accidents occur to cause health issues in farm workers,” they noted.

The Centre for Environmental Strategy basically confirmed the earlier findings of a 2011 study by four agronomists at the University of Reading. Those researchers reported, “A considerable body of evidence has accrued since the first commercial growing of transgenic crops which suggests that they can contribute in all three traditional pillars of sustainability, i.e. economically, environmentally and socially.” With respect to social and economic aspects of sustainable agriculture, the researchers found that the adoption of biotech crops can increase farmers' incomes. “The increase in income to small-scale farmers in developing countries can have a direct impact on poverty alleviation and quality of life, a key component of sustainable development,” they noted.

In 2012, two British environmental scientists reviewed the past fifteen years of published literature on the agronomic and environmental effects of biotech crops and found that such crops increase yields and produce impacts that are largely “positive in both developed and developing world contexts.” They add, “The often claimed negative impacts of GM crops have yet to materialize on large scales in the field.”

Indeed they have not.

Anti-Biotech Activists Kill and Blind Poor Children

Many leading environmental groups are against Golden Rice, a crop that could prevent blindness in half a million to 3 million poor children a year and alleviate vitamin A deficiency in some 250 million people in the developing world. By inserting three genes, two from daffodils and one from a bacterium, scientists at the nonprofit Swiss Federal Institute of Technology created a variety of rice that produces the nutrient beta-carotene, the precursor to vitamin A.

Agronomists at the nonprofit International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines have been crossbreeding the variety, called Golden Rice because of the color produced by the beta-carotene, with well-adapted local varieties and want to distribute the resulting plants to farmers all over the developing world who eat it as a staple food. In 2013, some Filipino “farmers” rampaged through the fields where the IRRI was growing the Golden Rice variety. The “farmers” were later identified as anti-biotech activists who have worked with Greenpeace in the past to block other biotech crop varieties.

Frankly, the scientific community has been far too passive for way too long in confronting the disinformation campaigns of anti-biotech groups such as Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, and the Union of Concerned Scientists. But the Golden Rice atrocity finally aroused researchers. In August of 2013,
Science
magazine published a strong editorial, “Standing Up for GMOs,” condemning activists for their anti-scientific attacks on crop biotechnology.

From the editorial: “If ever there was a clear-cut cause for outrage, it is the concerted campaign by Greenpeace and other nongovernmental organizations, as well as by individuals, against Golden Rice.” The scientists pointed out that vitamin A deficiency causes blindness and compromises the body's immune system. The result is blindness for half a million children and 1.9 to 2.8 million preventable deaths annually, mostly of children under five years old and women. The statement notes that environmentalist campaigns are responsible for stalling the release of Golden Rice to farmers for more than a decade.

“Introduced into commercial production over 17 years ago, GM crops have had an exemplary safety record,” reads the statement. It adds, “And precisely because they benefit farmers, the environment, and consumers, GM crops have been adopted faster than any other agricultural advance in the history of humanity.”

Despite this clear record of safety, the statement continues, “The anti-GMO fever still burns brightly, fanned by electronic gossip and well-organized fear-mongering that profits some individuals and organizations.” Hooray! It's great that thousands of researchers have finally called out Greenpeace and other anti-biotech activist groups for peddling and profiting from their disinformation.

In 2014, researchers in Germany and California published another study that calculated that the delay in getting Golden Rice into the fields of poor farmers in India has resulted in the loss of 1.4 million life-years in India that would otherwise have been saved. As the study noted, Golden Rice is “a cost efficient solution that can substantially reduce health costs.” Continued environmentalist opposition to this technology is just plain evil.

Biotech Crops and Superpests

Always willing to push its campaign against biotech crops, the Union of Concerned Scientists darkly advises that “genetically engineered crops can potentially cause environmental problems that result directly from the engineered traits.” The UCS adds that “the most damaging impact of GE in agriculture so far is the phenomenon of pesticide resistance.” The UCS goes on to warn that some insect and plant pests are already becoming resistant to biotech crop protection technologies.

What the UCS and other environmental lobbying groups must know is that researchers have documented for decades the evolution of pests resistant to conventional and organic insecticides and herbicides. It's almost as though the environmentalists had never heard of DDT. This is basic natural selection at work.

Consider, for example, the 1984 article “History, Evolution, and Consequences of Insecticide Resistance,” in the journal
Pesticide Biochemistry and Physiology
. Note that the first commercial biotech corn was planted in 1996—that is, twelve years after this article appeared. From the abstract:

The first inkling of what the future held with respect to pesticide resistance of arthropods may be found in 1897 writings concerning the difficulties of controlling San Jose scale (
Quadraspidiotus perniciosus
(Comstock)) and codling moth (
Laspeyresia pomonella
(L.)). Eighty-three years later, the ever-growing list of resistant species involved 14 orders and 83 families, and numbered 428 different insects and acarines (e.g., ticks), of which 61 percent are of agricultural importance and the remainder of medical/veterinary concern.

So what to do to address the emerging pesticide resistance problem? Hit them twice or thrice. Researchers well before the advent of the biotech crop era had devised strategies for slowing down the evolution of pesticide resistance in insects. For example, a 1989 article entitled “The Evolution of Insecticide Resistance: Have the Insects Won?” in the journal
Trends in Ecology and Evolution
noted: “A mixture of insecticides … can delay the evolution of resistance by several orders of magnitude compared with a rotation. Mixtures work because insects that receive a lethal dose of one insecticide are simultaneously dosed with the other insecticide as well. Only extremely rare individual pests, which have resistance mechanisms against both chemicals, will survive.” Those few that do survive will have difficulty passing along their double resistance because they will typically breed with untreated nonresistant mates.

This multiple-treatment regimen is precisely the strategy that plant breeders use when they “stack” several traits as a way to thwart pest resistance. Stacking traits is how researchers at Monsanto have created the Genuity SmartStax crop varieties. The new Monsanto Genuity corn variety incorporates six different genes aimed at controlling insect pests plus two for herbicide resistance. In addition, the company is developing Genuity varieties that are drought resistant and use less fertilizer.

What about “superweeds”? Again, the evolution of resistance by weeds to herbicides is nothing new and is certainly not a problem specifically related to genetically enhanced crops. As of April 2014, the International Survey of Herbicide Resistant Weeds reports that there are currently 429 uniquely evolved cases of herbicide-resistant weeds globally involving 234 different species. Weeds have evolved resistance to 22 of the 25 known herbicide sites of action and to 154 different herbicides. Herbicide-resistant weeds have been reported in 81 crops in sixty-five countries.

A preliminary analysis by University of Wyoming weed scientist Andrew Kniss parses the data on herbicide resistance from 1986 to 2012. He finds no increase in the rate at which weeds become resistant to herbicides after biotech crops were introduced in 1996. Since Roundup (glyphosate) is the most popular herbicide used with biotech crops, have the number of weed species resistant to Roundup increased? Kniss finds that the development of Roundup-resistant weeds has occurred more frequently among non-biotech crops. “Glyphosate-resistant weeds evolved due to glyphosate use, not directly due to GM crops,” he points out. “Herbicide resistant weed development is not a GMO problem, it is a herbicide problem.”