GM-free Scotland

May '08 | Finding the question to every answer

In the 1990s, scientists were bubbling over with excitement at their new-found ability to insert foreign, functional, genes into plants. Back then, it seemed their own imagination was the only limit to the novel plants they could create. The biotech industry was even more excited: anywhere in the world that had soil was a potential GM money factory. With all these plant-shaped answers at their disposal, all that was needed was the questions.

Early practical obstacles to the commercialisation of GM crops, such as people stealing your ideas, or the economic reality of having to charge a premium for GM seed, or the demand for expensive and time-consuming safety tests, were easily solved by an obliging administration which invented novel patents on life, and allowed the question of safety to remain unasked by leaving safety assessment to the industry itself.

The question of how to prevent farmers killing sales by 'stealing' seeds from last year's GM crop was answered by popping in a gene or two: hybrid crops from GM parents (male sterile plants crossed with fertility-restorer plants) which don't breed true, and terminator GM crops which don't breed at all.

However, after all these legal questions had been dealt with, the questions somehow came to lack the promised imagination and near-limitless variety.

Commercial GM development has never progressed beyond two traits and four high-input, commodity crops. We have GM crops able to neutralise branded weedkillers and GM crops which flood themselves with an insecticide, and a few which do both. In other words, GM got stuck in the conventional groove of artificial pest control.

But, if you happen to be a company which makes both GM seeds and all the conventional chemicals needed to grow them this is a very lucrative groove to be in. After the short-term gains from sales of licensed seeds with their own inevitable chemical package, the long-term dividends will follow courtesy of Nature which can be relied on to adapt constantly to any new situation, providing a steady production-line of questions for GM to answer. It works like this:

Sales of expensive, patented, GM herbicide-tolerant seed—Increased sales of herbicides—Evolution of herbicide-tolerant weeds

and this:

Sales of expensive, patented, GM insect-resistant seed—Evolution of target and non-target pests—increased sales of pesticides

By the time the cycle begins to drown in the river of its own ever-increasing chemicals, a new GM answer with a tweaked version of the transgene or a couple of stacked genes, will be ready to revitalise it.

Farmers were easily sucked into this GM system: already comfortably familiar with chemical-based agriculture, all it took was a load of PR and some government subsidies to take care of any misgivings they might have had.

Although the benefits of all these wondrous GM crops were easy to spin to farmers, consumers weren't too impressed by the GM food laden with pesticides and other unknowable components. After trying to skirt the problem by avoiding labeling, the question finally had to be faced: how to make GM acceptable to the consumer? The obvious answer was to add in a gene to add value to the food to benefit the customer, but as this proved elusive, the biotech PR machine was rushed in to fill the gap. The question of non-acceptance was successfully drowned in a great big ethical question: how to feed a rising population on an ever dwindling agricultural land area in a era of climate change? The answer was global uptake of GM crops with hypothetical higher yields and hypothetical resistance to environmental stresses (but see GM SPIN AT ODDS WITH THE EVIDENCE – News, April 2008)

Non-food crops do not, of course, suffer from the acceptability problem. The question of how to create health for all was solved by GM plants which produce cheap drugs. Similarly, the question of how to give the huge paper industry cheap, plentiful, raw materials was solved by GM plants with altered carbohydrate metabolism to optimise their composition for processing. The vast toiletries industry was already well-supplied with raw materials from the existing GM commodity crops.

Now that oil supplies are, unquestionably, running out, what better questions for GM to answer than how to fuel our transport system and how to continue to make the oil-based plastics needed by the modern world? What better substitutes for oil than GM crops growing year after year in fields? These crops don't, of course, have to be GM, but farmers in the major agricultural belts were already hooked on the GM production line.

So, what can you expect in the GM future planned for you? Well, you will put on your GM-cotton jacket, drive to the supermarket in a car running on GM-corn, buy a GM-punnet of GM plums, milk in a GM bottle from a cow sired by a GM bull (living on another continent) both fed on GM grass and GM corn, a fish fed on GM soya, a GM-cardboard box of GM sugar-beet candies, a GM bottle of GM shampoo enriched with GM-moisturiser, and some GM-rice vitamin pills (all delivered fresh daily by a lorry running on GM oilseed rape), pay with a GM credit card, collect your GM receipt and pack your shopping into a couple of GM carrier bags ...

Wait a minute. Let's have a reality check.

This GM future is in a world with too many people, too little agricultural land, very little oil, water shortages and global warming.

Every stage in this GM food supply scenario seems to need land: land for growing fuel, land for growing plastics, land for growing medicines, land for growing clothing, land for growing paper, land for growing toiletries, and land for growing animal feed ... oh, and land for growing food. Along with all these GM crops growing on all this land comes the need for a mountain of inputs along with good growing conditions. In other words, the whole system depends on all the things we're running out of. The necessary increases in GM crop yields, which have not happened yet and may never happen due to the added strain imposed by foreign DNA on the plants and their environments, would have to be truly spectacular to compensate for the diversion of land-use on this scale.

So far, with a liberal sprinkling of political trade manipulation, only the GM fuel and GM feed components of the GM future have started happen, the GM textiles are getting established. The other GM industrial materials are still coming from oil. But already world food stocks are at an all-time low, staple food prices are soaring, and 100 million more people in the world are facing severe hunger. It doesn't take the brain of Einstein to calculate that GM doesn't add up to a viable future, nor to realise that the only winners here are the people who own the most basic raw materials needed for all these GM products, the owners of the seed and all the chemicals needed to exploit them.

Sure enough, while the developed world tightens its purse strings in response to rising prices, and the developing world prepares for another famine, the giant agribusinesses are enjoying plenty as never before: Monsanto has reported more than double its net income and profits up by 54%; Cargill's net earnings soared by 86%, ADM increased net earnings by 42% with a 16-fold profit from its grain and merchandising handling operation; one of the world's largest fertiliser companies saw its income rise 12-fold.

OUR COMMENT

Looking back over the questions raised by the GM answers, the useful, more practical, questions should be:

The underlying answer to all these questions is self-reliance: sustainable, small-scale, low-input, waste-free, local (non-GM) agriculture. To include: a diversity of locally-adapted strains developed by modern (non-GM) technology, and the re-education of farmers in non-chemical, non-GM, diversified, locally-tailored agriculture. All bound together by co-ordinated, regional farm networks providing fresh, local food. Add in local, sustainable materials for industry, and local sustainable energy supplies developed by modern (non-GM) technology, and you’ll find, to quote Michael Meacher, “GM is not the answer, whatever the question was”.

If you don't believe local, small-scale, low-input agriculture can replace all the sterile, standardised food being trundled across the world (and sometimes back again), here's what has been possible in places where people are trying it:

All the answers are there, but making sure the questions are achieved is a local issue requiring political will and effort, and is up to you.

SOURCES:

About Us | Contact Us | 2008 GM-free Scotland