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The debate over biotech crops has become predictable.
In his 2012 annual letter from the Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, who has a near-religious faith in technology and innovation, argues that an "extremely important revolution" in plant science, i.e., genetically engineered crops, can help farmers in poor countries by giving them access to new varieties of crops that will better resist disease and adapt to climate change.
Days later, the Center for Food Safety, a Washington watchdog group and persistent critic of Big Ag, pushed back, saying that biotech crops had failed to deliver on their promise to alleviate hunger, and that Gates would do better to support low-cost "agroecological techniques" that don't depend on patented, genetically engineered seeds.
The conflicting claims and supporting data are hard to sift through. Will disease-resistant biotech cassava answer the prayers of Christina Mwinjipe, a farmer in Tanzania, whose crops are threatened by diseases, as Gates writes? Or will patented genetically engineered crops prove disastrous for the 1.4 billion farmers in the global south who now save seeds from one season to the next, as Andrew Kimbrell, executive director for the Center for Food Safety, argues?
The voices of farmers are rarely heard in these debates. (They're probably working too hard.) But data released this week indicates farmers, through their actions, are voting for biotech crops.
Last year, farmers planted an additional 12 million hectares of biotech crops, an increase of 8 percent over 2010, according to the annual biotech crop report of the ISAAA (International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications).
Most of that growth -- 8.2 million hectares -- came from the developing world, lead by Brazil and India, the report says. The growth rate for biotech crops in developing countries was 11 percent, twice as fast and twice as large as industrial countries at 5 percent or 3.8 million hectares.
"Unprecedented adoption rates are testimony to overwhelming trust and confidence in biotech crops by millions of farmers worldwide," said Clive James, the report's author, in a statement. It must be said that James is an unabashed supporter of biotech crops but as best I can tell, his numbers haven't been challenged.
Why do more farmers every year plant biotech crops? Critics of genetically modified crops will say they are tricked into it by marketing or lack of knowledge or short-termism, and it's certainly true that the popularity of a product is not a reliable indicator of its value. (ABBA sold more records than the Rolling Stones. People smoke cigarettes.) But if biotech crops didn't make farmers more productive, or save them time or money, would they spread around the world as consistently as they have?
You are "teaching the
You are "teaching the controversy" much like the climate deniers who argue that science is not settled.
You failed to mention many important things:
1.) The solid opposition of the E.U. to GMOs. Politically and scientifically, it matters.
2.) The continuing rise of resistant strains of bugs and disease which tend to render the current generation of "silver bullet" plants and chemicals obsolete. Such as Roundup-ready... now I hear talk about bringing back chemicals that were last used in Vietnam as defoliants. This is not progress for sustainability!
3.) The tandem need for increasing chemical inputs for many of these G.E. crops which translates to bigger profits for the seed/chemical sellers and status quo (no better deal) for the farmers.
4.) The problematic issue of genetic pollen drift which messes up other people's non-GMO crop fields and makes them look like criminals to our legal system (posessing patented genetic material in their saved seeds), when in fact they are victims of natural processes.
5.) The intrinsic ecological vulnerability of ever-increased monoculture from these GMO varieties which are not going to be able to resist natural changes as well as a genetically diverse natural crop. Many GMO seeds have "terminator genes" which make them useless-- the farmer is beholden to the corporate seed supplier forever-- which alters the world's food stability in a very disturbing way for the first time in history.
As I see it, the corporate big-ag GMO developers and sellers are still focused on short term returns, not what is good for the planet or human development in the long term over several generations or more.
I would far rather see investment in algal biodiesel development as a GMO R&D strategy, rather than pesticide/herbicide-resistant traits for food crops.
In addition we have the ecosystem impacts of insect dieoffs (honeybees, others) chopping ladder rungs out of the food chain when a wider application of GMO practices is pursued.
The Precautionary Principle was not mentioned at all, and is clearly being ignored during this "market first, find out the impacts later" strategy which is not just coincident with an event known as the sixth great extinction in geologic time.