The UK’s GM Science Review Panel has published its first report. Like many people, I’ve found it difficult to make my mind up on this issue in the face of conflicting reports, biased commentary, lobbying by vested interests and so on. There’s good reason to believe that this panel has done (and is doing) a good job. They’ve rejected most of the crazier scare stories about GM technology and food, but they’ve identified one real area of worry: the effect on wildlife diversity of extensive use of herbicide tolerant GM crops. If all the weeds are gone, the animals which depend on them for food will have a hard time. Generally, this is a biotech-friendly report, but one which is sufficiently sceptical and critical to displease the real pro-GM enthusiasts. (For full disclosure, I should say that one of the panel members is known to me, and that fact has enhanced my confidence in the process.)
{ 32 comments }
John Owen 07.22.03 at 3:06 pm
The report doesn’t seem to mention the long-term effect on the environment of using ever more intensive herbicides on agricultural land. Where does the excess go to when it is washed off the fields by rain? Answer: into the rivers and water reservoirs we humans use to supply ourselves with drinking waters. It’s all arse-backward anyway. A GM product developed to be herbicide-resistant is long term only doing one thing: assuring lots of business for the greedy companies (like Monsanto), rather than improving the food product.
DM 07.22.03 at 6:00 pm
I agree with your post they seem to have done a decent enough job steering between the loons.
btw john owen are all companies “greedy”? Surely any company’s business is business..
Chris Bertram 07.22.03 at 6:06 pm
John, Your remarks don’t seem to be GM-specific. I don’t see that there’s reason to believe that GM will use more (or more dangerous) herbicides and pesticides than conventional non-organic agriculture. There may even be reason to think that GM would lead to lower levels of herbicide and pesticide use. Perhaps you just want to ban all such chemicals.
As for “assuring lots of business for the greedy companies”. Sure. In that respect this technology is just the same as others (which we don’t ban). Some of those labouring to produce it will be moved by high ideals, others by filthy lucre. Nothing GM-specific there either.
Will the food be better or worse? Like you, I’m not optimistic. Intensive agriculture often = crap food. But again, I don’t see any reason to think that GM is worse that conventional nonorganic agriculture in this respect.
back40 07.22.03 at 7:20 pm
Very sensible Chris, even surprisingly sensible given context and location.
Your identification of intensive agriculture as a technique which makes various technologies threatening is almost sound. It is industrial agriculture, rather than intensive agriculture, which is the problem. They may seem the same until you consider intensive techniques with long and admirable records (Bali, Japan) and see that the real problem is scale and the use of industrial methods of mass production.
Recent changes to the CAP, too little but perhaps a beginning, may in future help with this threat by rewarding industrial agriculture less. It would be quite useful to channel the energies that have been squandered on GM opposition to more helpful activities such as support of human scale agriculture.
Bob 07.22.03 at 8:49 pm
May I intervene here to draw attention to the EU’s adoption and application of the “Precautionary Principle”?
Apparently lacking a formal definition in the EU, this principle seems to mean on my interpretation that it is a prudent and legitimate political decision under EU law to ban or otherwise regulate activities, including the import and sale of products (eg GM crops or food productss), which carry downside risks to human health or to the environment. The emphasis here is on “downside risks” – it is unnecessary to prove that direct harm will inevitably result from the activity, only that harmful consequences could occur. By reports, many criticisms have already been directed at applications of the principle in EU policy, including: (1) its vagueness and consequential inconsistent application within the EU, (2) its application as a rationale for trade protection.
Seems to me the principle raises challenging issues across several of the social sciences, for decision theory and in philosophy. Perhaps the best and sanest introduction I’ve come across is at: http://www.biotech-info.net/science_and_PP.html
What seems to be an extended formal and official discussion is at:
http://europa.eu.int/comm/dgs/health_consumer/library/pub/pub07_en.pdf
jack 07.23.03 at 1:29 am
The report actually seems pretty respectable but I feel that although it looks to have taken a rigorously broad view of its brief, some of the practical issues are not addressed directly enough.
Most of the questions addressed are based on the mass or even mainstream of genetic engineering for agriculture. but the same people who are willing to develop ways of making beef protein undetectable so that it can be used to make the water added to chicken breasts less prone to oozing out more cheaply than even chicken protein.
It is perfectly obvious that you could make somehting very dangerous with genetic engineering. It is also true that there are some very unscrupulous people involved in the industry. How is it going to be regulated? Potential issues range from the GM foods first thalidomide to exactly what the diluted chicken purveyors would make of the new opportunities.
Bob 07.23.03 at 6:06 am
In an important sense, the Precautionary Principle (PP) is hardly novel. In Europe, the like of the Food and Drug Administration in the US, have been regulating the use of new pharmaceutical drugs for decades. Common observation (I’m not a medic) suggests that new drugs may be offically approved for prescription even with unwanted side effects if the benefits demonstrated in trials sufficiently outweigh identified downside risks, including suitably low fatality risks from extreme allergic reactions.
The novel feature of PP seems to be the increasing frequency with which this is invoked as an official rationale in policies for regulatory action, including banning, over a widening range of products and activities, perhaps with little elaboration as to application of the principle in the context. Arguably, the PP in different guise was at the root of the UK’s recent decision to postpone joining the Euro into an indefinite future.
dsquared 07.23.03 at 9:20 am
>>I don’t see that there’s reason to believe that GM will use more (or more dangerous) herbicides and pesticides than conventional non-organic agriculture.
This is presumably a reference to “Roundup Ready” maize, the Monsanto product which is at the heart of most of the trade discussions. It’s been modified so as to be resistant to Roundup herbicide, thus saving farmers the tiresome and troublesome business of calculating the correct dosage of Roundup that will kill weeds but not corn.
derrida derider 07.23.03 at 12:18 pm
dsquared, on the face of it that’s nonsense.
Farmers don’t use more herbicide than they have to for the very good reason that the stuff costs money. If you’re worried about overuse of Roundup one way to prevent it would be to extend the patent protection on it, allowing Monsanto to charge extortionate prices for it.
There may be ecological issues about herbicide resistant crops. But the way that professional scaremongers have exploited public ignorance of what GM foods are makes me inclined to think these are oveblown too.
dsquared 07.23.03 at 12:56 pm
>>dsquared, on the face of it that’s nonsense.
Maybe so, but I’m actually reading it off the Monsanto catalogue
http://www.monsanto.com/monsanto/content/media/pubs/rrcorn_ffsafety.pdf
“Like other popular Roundup Ready(R) seed products, Roundup Ready corn is genetically improved to be tolerant to over- the- top applications of Roundup (R) herbicide – thus providing growers with flexible and broad-spectrum
post-emergent weed control. The benefits of this technology are many, including outstanding yield potential, crop safety, broad-spectrum weed control, convenience and compatibility with minimum tillage techniques that protect against soil erosion.”
>>Farmers don’t use more herbicide than they have to for the very good reason that the stuff costs money.
Yes they do if it’s Roundup. Using an extra few gallons of cheap herbicide is much cheaper than losing crop yield to weeds, so if you can be sure that you won’t damage crops, you chuck another few gallons at it. Risk management.
>>If you’re worried about overuse of Roundup one way to prevent it would be to extend the patent protection on it, allowing Monsanto to charge extortionate prices for it.
Perhaps, but given their track record, the idea of delegating my environmental policy to Monsanto’s marketing department somehow doesn’t appeal.
>>There may be ecological issues about herbicide resistant crops. But the way that professional scaremongers have exploited public ignorance of what GM foods are makes me inclined to think these are oveblown too.
Given the above, perhaps you’d care to reconsider?
dsquared 07.23.03 at 1:00 pm
A little digging, by the way, reveals that the reason that farmers “use more herbicide than they have to” is that with Roundup Ready corn, you can dump a shedload of Roundup on your field shortly after sowing time and practically never have to spray again until harvest time. If you’re using corn which isn’t herbicide-resistant, you have to keep spraying as the lower doses wear off. So it allows farmers to replace labour with capital; should have realised that something of the sort would be happening.
back40 07.23.03 at 4:37 pm
hmmm, no, Roundup (glyphosphate – 2,4-D) is a systemic herbicide that moves from contact points on leaves to roots. Application timing is critical to effectiveness. Growers time application by watching for weed growth and try to act after weeds have enough growth to have sufficient leaf surface area for contact but not so much that they interfere with crops. But, glyphosphate doesn’t persist or affect seed in the soil so a good rain can cause a new bloom of weeds. Multiple applications usually give better weed control.
Since glyphosphate is a broad-spectrum, nonselective herbicide that works by contact it is applied by directed spray or wiping to the target plants. It will damage most all crop plants if it gets on their leaves so it must be used before they germinate or very carefully after they emerge. Crop plants resistant to glyphosphate are easier to treat since less directed application techniques such as aerial spray can work.
dsquared 07.23.03 at 5:17 pm
I certainly wouldn’t portray myself as an expert here; I was going by the catalogue’s pitch that “fewer herbicide applications will be needed”.
Back-40, are you saying that “over-the-top applications” of Roundup in this context refers to “over the top of the plants” rather than “what would normally be considered an excessive amount”?
dsquared 07.23.03 at 5:30 pm
For what it’s worth, these guys, who I haven’t been able to audit for crankhood but who have certainly put a lot of work into not appearing like cranks, think that Roundup Ready corn planting has been associated with substantial (of the order 30%, if I read the tables right) increases in herbicide usage on the acres planted (although small increases as a percentage of total herbicide use in the USA)
Jeremy Leader 07.23.03 at 6:10 pm
“glyphosphate doesn’t persist or affect seed in the soil”… so where does it go? I’m not a chemist, and I honestly don’t know; does it break down quickly into something relatively harmless, or does it wash away to act against “weeds” elsewhere in the ecosystem, or some combination of the two?
Personally, I like science and technology, and I think they have a lot to contribute to agriculture. The trouble is, with genetic engineering, we’re opening up a whole new commons (the collective genomes of everything on Earth), and I don’t see how just closing our eyes and chanting “markets are good, markets are good” will make the benefits outweigh the problems. Which doesn’t mean the doom-sayers are right, but it suggests that completely disregarding them is also a bad idea.
back40 07.23.03 at 6:34 pm
“… are you saying that ‘over-the-top applications’ of Roundup in this context refers to ‘over the top of the plants’ …”
Yes, a common application technique when the weeds are taller than the crop plants is to use rope or sponge applicators that only make contact with the weed. Timing and judgment are critical and runoff is a disaster. Using excessive amounts is counterproductive in that crop plants can be harmed. Besides, it’s wasteful and expensive.
Herbicide use is increasing along with the shift to no-till methods.
In the past fields were plowed, disked, sliced and diced to death to eliminate weeds and prepare a seed bed. During the growing season they were disked and cultivated between rows to kill new blooms of weeds.
This damages soil. Soil is like the flesh of a tree, it is alive, and plowing or other mechanical methods that disturb the surface can be seen as being similar to stripping the bark off a tree. Exposure to air allows chemical reactions that mineralize the soil, reduce all kinds of organic matter and causes out gassing of various volatile hydrocarbons. It kills the soil, pollutes the air, and loses nutrients, but perhaps most importantly is causes wind and water erosion.
What to do? If weeds can be controlled without tilling then seed can be drilled into undisturbed soil. Methods to do this include mulching with organic matter or sheet plastic and this works well on smaller plots though it is expensive and creates a disposal problem in some cases. Herbicides can control weeds without mulch or tilling. Over time herbicides have become increasingly benign, as have pesticides, but still they are a concern. Glyphosphate is very benign but still we worry.
When we look closely at agriculture it doesn’t seem very nice. Killing the land in order to grow monocultures of food crops is an inherently destructive act. It damages the soil and every form of life except the target crop. It changes watersheds, causes flooding as well as drought, lowers water tables, reduces diversity and resilience, allows the soil to blow away on the wind and flow away in rivers to the detriment of both the fields and whatever is down wind or down stream.
We seek to reduce damage. Herbicide use in support of no till methods is one of the ways to reduce damage but it is a trade off. The certainty of damage using mechanical cultivation methods is matched against the risk of chemical consequences. One day we will stop farming and grow our food in vats or synthesize it directly. Until we master these technologies we seek to minimize damage. To live is to harm other living things and the world as a whole. Living mindfully, seeking to reduce harm, is the best we can do at present.
back40 07.23.03 at 6:44 pm
“… does it break down quickly into something relatively harmless…”
Yes. Contact with soil starts a very rapid biodegradation. Residues must contact leaves to harm plants.
Chris Bertram 07.23.03 at 7:58 pm
I don’t know why Daniel presumed that my reference was to a specific Monsanto product. There was no reason for such a presumption. Anyway, as the report to which I pointed makes clear, the “in principle” benefits to be gained from the fact that more biodegradable herbicides might me involved with GM can’t be taken for granted. We do have to look at how farmers actually use the stuff.
back40s “One day we will stop farming and grow our food in vats or synthesize it directly” may not have been Swiftian in intent, but he certainly triggered my yuk-reflex. Not that my yuk reflex is a reason for legislation – but I’m not planning to eat the stuff that comes out of vats if I can avoid it.
back40 07.23.03 at 8:12 pm
No cheese, no wine, no tofu? Bacteria are our friends.
Chris Bertram 07.23.03 at 8:41 pm
LOL! The end of tofu would be no great loss, but wine and cheese make up about 85% of my diet. But, yes, I’m afraid I want my potatoes out of the earth and my apples off a tree.
dsquared 07.23.03 at 10:03 pm
>>I don’t know why Daniel presumed that my reference was to a specific Monsanto product.
Sorry, unclear; I was attempting to elucidate the point of the bloke you were replying to.
Frankly, I don’t want to gainsay anybody, but I’m having a hard time convincing myself that *ploughing a field* is a horrifically environmentally destructive activity compared to the use of glyphosphates.
My position is that it’s silly to be agin a technology on quasi-moral grounds, but that no great harm will come from waiting a few years until there is someone on the pro-GM side with less of a track record of untrustworthiness than Monsanto. For the time being, the pro-GM case is “objectively” pro the planting of Roundup Ready corn and Flavr Savr tomatoes in Europe (as in, that would be the main immediate effect of a change in the EU law), and I’m not at all convinced about either of these products.
Too much of the debate is conducted in terms of “now or never” rather than “now or later”. And the habit of certain American GM advocates of dragging the Poor Old Africans into the matter puts me off a great deal.
clew 07.23.03 at 10:44 pm
>>I’m having a hard time convincing myself that ploughing a field is a horrifically environmentally destructive activity compared to the use of glyphosphates.
Depends on how deep & often you plow, and how much glyphosate you waste. And, of course, on the particular soil & weather. Ploughing damp clay with horses might be a net win (horseapples); ploughing dry loess to bring up subsoil water gets lossy. (One of the most annoying things about debating ag technologies at a national or international level is that productive & least-harm farming is very particular to place.)
What disappoints me about current “pro-tech” industrial ag is how unimaginative it usually is; just putting more and more effort into the practices of 1950. As an alternative to Roundup-ready crops, for instance, some people are working on developing perennial grain crops – after the first year or two they should outcompete the weeds almost on their own; makes it progressively less important what weed suppression is used for their establishment. Also, there’s some hope that they’ll be less dependent on getting water at the exact right times. That is likely to be increasingly important.
AFAIK, the most productive food crop known is still a mature chestnut tree; but it takes so long for them to mature!
back40 07.23.03 at 11:15 pm
[slipped clew’s excellent commentary]
“…I’m having a hard time convincing myself that ploughing a field is a horrifically environmentally destructive activity compared to the use of glyphosphates.”
This is a common result of lack of archeological, historical, biological and ecological knowledge. Plato reports Critias complaining about this eons ago, and even earlier evidence from archeologists show it to be an immediate and repeated consequence of farming except in the few places, such as the Nile delta, that are continually renewed. It is not new knowledge.
More recently the writings of Edward Faulkner such as _Plowman’s Folly_ in 1943 brought the problem to the attention of academics and practitioners. After the ‘dust bowl’ period in the American plains states farmer’s were much more attentive to such issues. The transition from moldboard plows which turned the soil over, to chisel plows which left it spatially undisturbed, to plowing with the contours of the land to minimize erosion, and increasingly the cessation of tilling followed.
More recently researchers have come to better understand soil life and soil structure which is destroyed by cultivation. Glomalin, an extremely valuable and durable organic carbon compound produced by Vesicular Arbuscular Mycorrhizal (VAM)fungi, was only discovered in 1996 because it is destroyed in farm fields by tillage and so was never present when farm soil was studied. In pastoral fields that are not plowed it contributes greatly to soil stability, water retention and tilth. VAM fungi play a key role in the transport of phosphorous, an otherwise immobile nutrient, in the soil.
It’s interesting to contrast the attitudes of pre-agricultural peoples with those who have long accepted the practices. What they see as an abomination – gouging mother earth’s breasts with steel fingers, creating a desert of bare soil, denying plants their natural diverse communities and forcing them to live in monocultures – is now understood as sound ecological reasoning rather than animist spirituality. We can’t stop farming, it is the foundation of civilization, but it is useful to understand the consequences and seek ways to minimize them.
Most of the world’s farm land is in ‘fragile’ environments where the climate is harsh, soil is shallow and moisture is scarce. Unsophisticated agronomic practices have consequences in these places that may take centuries to notice in more benign places where soil is deep. Still, squandering the natural wealth of deep soil is silly even in those fortunate places. Other consequences, such as altering watersheds, are problems even there. The disastrous floods in Europe that some tried to blame on changes in rain fall patterns were more likely changes in runoff patterns that became obvious during a normal but cyclical high rain fall period. When soil loses its ability to retain water and allow slow percolation to the subsoil floods result.
Not surprisingly, the more we learn the less we know since some of what we thought we knew was false.
dsquared 07.24.03 at 6:59 am
>>Most of the world’s farm land is in ‘fragile’ environments where the climate is harsh, soil is shallow and moisture is scarce.
Agreed, but most of the UK’s farmland isn’t, and that’s what we’re talking about here.
back40 07.24.03 at 2:02 pm
hmmm, yes, I suppose there’s no need to be concerned about destructive agronomic practices that may take many decades to become a pressing problem. UK agriculture is in fine shape.
dsquared 07.24.03 at 2:19 pm
Not wishing to appear obtuse here, but I think this matters. The UK has been ploughing its fields for quite a while without visible adverse effect, and is a significant producer of agricultural surpluses. The risk/reward tradeoff seems particularly slanted against GM foods here. (though this obviously raises the issue of the separate questions of whether GM crops should be planted, and whether GM food products should be allowed to be sold).
back40 07.24.03 at 3:06 pm
Maybe you would enjoy some study. Try the UK Soil Environment Services which have done some work on farm erosion.
dsquared 07.24.03 at 3:31 pm
Do you mean these guys? What they have on the web seems to be mainly about recovered mining areas, which isn’t really typical of UK agriculture. Or am I looking in the wrong place?
back40 07.24.03 at 3:44 pm
Yes, but try their agriculture section for information relevant to agriculture. If the subject is of interest and you find other useful information then perhaps you can share the results of your investigations into UK problems with soil erosion on agricultural land. I suspect the hill farms will be an area of particular interest.
“The UK has been ploughing its fields for quite a while without visible adverse effect, and is a significant producer of agricultural surpluses.”
The House of Commons thinks that UK is a net food importer. This is a problem for politicians since the CAP causes food prices to be high and so a larger than desired drain on wealth, but also arguably a problem for all since the UK is not self sufficient in food.
dsquared 07.24.03 at 3:50 pm
My understanding is that the UK is a substantial exporter of the arable crops it produces, but is a net importer of food because of its taste for fruit and vegetables grown overseas.
back40 07.24.03 at 4:48 pm
That’s one of the issues that intrigue me. Is the UK actually deficient in food production or is it only deficient in the production of valuable food? If the UK was in some way completely cut off from the rest of the world would it produce sufficient calories with adequate nutrition to avoid starvation and nutritional deficiency health effects? The lack of tea, spices and such would be a cultural tragedy but would it be a health problem?
A related issue is fiber since it is a significant amount of agricultural production and competes with food for space. Wool, cotton, leather, fur, lumber and paper production needs to be considered as part of the larger issue. Wool and leather are special cases of dual use agriculture and to a lesser extent so is wood. Perhaps there is a paper in this for someone. Is the UK deficient in total agricultural production including both food and fiber? This seems relevant to policy.
dsquared 07.24.03 at 5:09 pm
We’re net grain exporters, but importers of most other foods.
Going by the wartime experience, we can feed the population a nutritious but pretty grim diet if forced onto virtual autarky in food, but paper and textiles become a real problem.
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