And the ethical concerns can be complex. The availability of pesticides and fertilizers improves yield, makes it possible to farm land that could never be farmed before, and has helped us avoid large scale famines in parts of the world. It keeps food cheap. As more acres are turned over to organic farming, less will be available for industrial farming, putting pressure on that supply.
But what food, and for whom? As you note, these issues are complex.
Modern industrial agriculture certainly makes it cheaper for, say, middle-class Americans to eat beef frequently. But does it make it cheaper for, say, former subsistence farmers in Africa to obtain all the various forms of produce in their traditional diets that they used to grow for themselves before switching to the cash crops that industrial agriculture demands?
Food is an important item not only in a society’s culture but in its public health. It’s not only about being able to afford enough calories in some form or another to keep from starving. Yes, not starving is very important, but it’s not the only important health issue in one’s diet.
Consequently, just noting that industrial agriculture reduces the average cost per calorie of the total amount of global agricultural produce isn’t enough to tell us whether everybody’s actually benefiting from that.
Yep, complex. Though I think the OVERALL effect of modern industrial farming has been to feed more people for less money worldwide. But not everyone. Nor have we always made wise decision on what we should increase yield on (the ubiquitous corn in the American diet).
That’s not true. The so-called (wrongly) green revolution, where modern industrial practises were introduced into farming in the 1st world in the 1950s did result in higher yield, and for the first world, going organic means roughly half the yield in terms of kilos of product.*
However, a recent study from an university showed that in the third world, the last 50 years of buying expensive artifical fertilizer, growing cash crops only, and buying new seeds (because of hybrid-sterility) every new year has left farmers poorer (because of the debt to the chemical giants), and depleted the soil. Often, the seeds are not adapted for the drougth conditions, because they were manufactured for first world climate. Often, the indiscriminate use of long-forbidden pesticides by badly-educated farmers result in serious health problems.
The study found that the path taken by Brot für die Welt (Bread for the world, the charity from the German Protestant Church), organic aids and others to teach farmers to grow organic by using their own local seeds, integrating plants to protect each other, grow veggies for their own use instead of cash crops, use manure treated to fertilisier from the chickens or goats - education, mostly - raises yield up to 70%. So organic is the solution for the third world.
Besides, as the guy commissioned from the UN Food programme said in the movie “We feed the world”, we already produce food enough for 12 milliards people, with 6 milliards people on earth. So even if all food yield would be halved by going organic, we could still feed people. That food is grown where none was before is mostly education and science, not chemisty.
- Though that is problematic in itself: a tomato pushed with artifical fertilizer that is two palms big but mostly water weighs more but is less nutrioutus than an organic tomato that is only one palm big, but less water.
There are countless studies (mentioned in German, so I can’t link right now) that organic veggies have lots more nutrients - vitamins, secondary phytho-stuff - and less pesticides than conventionally grown stuff.
Just because the mechanics of genetic modification can be boiled down to sound simple to a 11th-level biology class doesn’t mean it’s that simple in real life. We already have a method of traditionally adapting plants to different soil and climates by breeding specific strains.
But the problem with the new genetic modification is precisly that the scientists in favour of it are making it sound simple and easy like copy-pasting your word program, when it really is anything but. One of the biggest promises made in the past by the GM guys was that there was no way ever, cross-my-heart-and-die, that any of the manipulated genes could get away from the trial fields, either by wind insects or other, certainly not beyond the safe distance of 50m, so we put up a safe distance of 200 m, it’s all safe… until Greenpeace and other scientists did indeed find pollen of the GM plants in beehives, and in plants on fields outside the trial zone. So - the promise hadn’t been kept.
Basically, we have no reliable idea to know what the GM foods will do to our body, or what happens when a cow who has eaten GM food is milked. Any body who tells you he knows it’s safe because he understands the principle is a liar.
Why do we not know? Because it was never tested, and certainly not for 10 or 20 years we need for long-term effects. The scientists went ahead and said “The principle is easy, we can do it”, the industry said “Hey, we can make big bucks” and the thing just got rolling.
So there are science-educated people there, even scientists themselves, who want to exercise caution about GM foods. That doesn’t make them backwards ignorants.
Oh, and the last findings about the famous, much-touted Monsanto plant with the roundup-connection? Turns out the weeds did adapt quicker. It only ends up costing the farmers more.
I’ll be damned, I was wrong. I think I need to go back and re-read that book. I must have misunderstood either what it was saying or forgot what it said, because what I wrote was certainly not correct.
Ooops!
I think the problem people have with GM crops is that they think there is some fundamental difference between GM crops and ‘natural’ crops. In reality, we live in a metagenomic world where DNA is constantly being swapped between different organisms. What scientists are attempting to do is simply a timid version of what happens in a far grander scale in nature.
In terms of creating sustainable agriculture, opposition to crops that will resist pests and drought is not helpful. They even fight things like Golden Rice that would help alleviate the scourge of Vitamin A deficiency in the 3rd world.
I suggest reading the National Research Council report “The New Science of Metagenomics: Revealing the Secrets of Our Microbial Planet”. It can be downloaded for free from here.
http://dels.nas.edu/metagenomics/
This is not a correct representation of what GM are. In nature, DNA swapping has been observed occasionally between viruses and bacteria (and doctors are worried that this will create entirely new pandemics, untreatable with the current drugs). Occasionally, in nature, mistakes happen during the preparation for sexual reproduction (meiosis, mitosis), where parts of genes get stuck at the wrong part and stick together, or are swapped. But nowhere in nature is one specific part of a gene cut out and spliced into a completly different organism (sometimes even going from animal to plant, or vice versa).
To give you two historical examples: People understood the theory behind large production of one chemical compound for medication. Yet no major biologist or chemist knew in advance about how important not only the chemical composition of a molecule is, but also its 3D structure. So when the Contergan scandal happend, it took some time to figure out that the chemically identically, left-turning molecules were harmful to the human body, while the right-turning are harmless. AFAIK, scientists still have no explanation why this is the case, they only observed that 90% of all proteins etc. in nature are right-turning. But for the production company, it was a difficult challenge to only produce right-turning molecules, because there is no chemical difference at all - the only way to discover is to actually go and shine a light onto them, which sounds completly against normal chemistry theory.
Or: the theory behind the internal combustion engine in our cars is well understood, but it took some 100 years before scientists learned that the COx, SOx, NOx and other compounds produced by the reaction were harmful to the health of humans and the enviorment.
So to beta-test GM foods on humans without at least doing some lab rats first is highly dangerous, because it’s a huuuge leap from “We understand the theory” to “We can produce something that’s as a safe as rubber foam”.
Moreover, precisly because the promise about no-mingling has been broken, once the GMs are out in the wild, there’s no way to put them back in the bag if we discover 10 years down the road that they have long-term harmful consequences - they spread through the wild and get incorporated into wild plants. And wild plants are very important gene pools if the very few highly specialized strains used in modern agriculture start to fail in some way, then we need some other strains to start the normal breeding and selecting process again.
Wrong again. Greepeace and FIAN studies show (as they feared it would) that Golden Rice is far too expensive for the people already suffering from malnutrition. So having one kind of food that has been altered to include Vitamin A doesn’t help at all if the larger issue is lack of money to buy healthy food, and not lack of Vitamin A per se.
As for drought, I’ll repeat that the GM being currently developed are not drought resistant, because they are mainly developed for the first world, which has adequeate water supplies. Companies don’t want to spend a lot of money on research for a poor clientele.
Actually, drought-resistant plants are already there, and are being developed through traditional breeding, by charity and aid orgs. If you really want to help the poor farmers in third world coutnries, get the World Bank and private multinationals companies to stop ordering them to grow cash crops for export to pay off debts, and instead educate them to grow varied, localized food for self-sustanability. This has been proven in about 200 small projects to work. Again, the yield in this switch always increased, up to 70%.