The popular media abound with major GM “breakthrough” stories. These are always accompanied by a biotech-inspired crisis narrative, and the 'breakthroughs' are never actually about to drop onto your plate. If you believe everything you read, GM is going to solve all the world's main problems:
- all pests (viral, bacterial, fungal, insect and nematode worm) will be banished by GMcrops
- the droughts and floods caused by global warming will not kill GM crops
- our increasingly salty water tables and nitrogen-depleted soils will be able to support GM crops
- vegetables which rot before anyone can eat them will be a given a new, GM, lease of life
- best of all, micro-nutrient deficiency in the third world will be a thing of the past,due to GM crops.
The truth is that GM is easy to hype but, in the words of Monsanto's own spokesmen,crops such as GM drought-tolerant ones are “actually not so easy to develop” and are“years away from commercial production”.
While the biotech industry struggles with GM promises that no one else believes in, there are other new crops on the horizon which don't make the news but are much more interesting:
- cassava (a staple crop in parts of Africa) resistant to mosaic virus
- broccoli, cabbage and oilseed rape resistant to the economically devastating effects of the Turnip Mosaic virus
- vines resistant to the bacterial onslaught of Pierce's Disease rice resistant to the bacterial onslaught of leaf blight
- fungal-resistant tomatoes in Europe, fungal-resistant rice in India
- maize (a staple crop in parts of Africa) resistant to the grain borer in Kenya
- maize and soya resistant to nematode worms in America
- drought-tolerant maize in South Africa and the Philippines
- drought-tolerant oilseed rape in Australia
- flood-tolerant rice in India
- salt-tolerant wheat in Australia
- salt-tolerant rice in India
- long-life broccoli
- vitamin A rich maize
- iron rich maize ....
The reason these crops are interesting is that every one has a real likelihood of being fully developed and in the ground in the foreseeable future. Every one has been produced using modern science and technology. And not one of them is GM.
The techniques used to produce these crops have involved conventional breeding speeded up using 'Marker Assisted Selection', and a search of the thousands of samples contained in the world's seed banks for useful, natural, genes on which to base breeding. For example, the new grain-borer resistant maize in Kenya was bred using seeds originally from the Caribbean-seed bank of 25,000 native maize races.
Crop yields have also been boosted by the use of new agricultural practices. For example, Zambia whose leaders were accused by the US of “the highest crimes against humanity” when they rejected GM maize food aid in 2002, have experienced bumper harvests of their staple, maize, for the past three years. This was achieved by promoting mixed farming and conservation methods.
The fact that you have never heard of any of these crops may not be only because no one is hyping them. They may well have been reported as a 'GM' success story by unwitting journalists.
This emerged recently when the out-going UK Chief Government Scientist, a champion of gene technology, volunteered an example of GM corn which was being grown alongside a GM grass in Africa with increases in yield of 40-50 per cent. He suggested the technique was to snip a gene out of the corn so that it would not produce a chemical attractive to corn borers and insert that gene into a grass which would then attract the pests away from the crop. In fact, the research had identified strains of the crop unattractive to the pest, and placed strains of grass which the pests prefer around the field margin. The maize was actually grown alongside a legume to boost nitrogen levels in the soil, an age-old method of putting nutrient back in the soil without chemicals, or GM.
OUR COMMENT
There is a mindset evident here in which the only agri-news worth reporting is about GM, and any agri-news success story is assumed to be about GM.
Modern agriculture has a wealth of resources to draw on: seed banks, Marker Assisted Selection, soil management designed to combat nutrient decline, water loss and erosion, use of companion crops, plant diversification and crop rotations to avoid pests. Whenever you see another GM 'miracle' in the press, point out to the editor that there are cheaper, faster, more sustainable, surer and above all safer ways forward for food and farming.
SOURCES:
- Institute of Science in Society, Non-GM Breakthroughs Leave GM Behind, Press Release 27.02.08
- GM Watch, Non-GM Breakthroughs 2007
- Sean Poulter, Daily Mail, 18.12.07
- GM Freeze Press Release and letter to Sir David King calling for an apology, 17.12.07