"Dark roast coffee has more caffeine than light roast."

"Wear a scarf and you won't catch a cold."

"We need genetically modified crops to feed the world."

There are some assertions you hear so often that it's easy to believe they must be true.

I live in central Illinois, the buckle of America's corn belt, and I can't count how many times I've heard that last one in recent years. It's a variation on what I heard as I was growing up -- I represent the fourth generation of a farming family here -- that agricultural chemicals and factory farming were tools required to feed the world.

It's time to challenge the claim that we need genetically modified crops -- and to delve into the assumptions and motivations underlying that idea.

One assumption is that people go hungry only because not enough food is being produced. But when you divide the amount of food on Earth by the number of mouths to feed (as many scholars in various disciplines have done), you find that there is enough to feed every person and then some. Hunger does not stem from insufficient food production, but rather from issues of food waste and access (most often poverty, but also political corruption).

And what about the oft-repeated claim that there will be more than 9 billion mouths to feed by 2050? For a lesson in confusing trend with destiny, consider that in the late 1890s, it was predicted that by 1950 the streets of New York City would be 9 feet deep in horse manure. Of course, the manure problem was eliminated when the source (horses) was removed. Likewise, the problem of feeding a large population can be remedied if the source, population growth, is addressed.

Population control (or lack thereof) aside, the biggest assumption to challenge is that GM crops are needed to feed poor people around the world. While received wisdom and persuasive multimillion-dollar ad campaigns affirm this version of reality, scientific studies do not. And while the studies referenced below do not have millions of publicity dollars behind them, they do have convincing numbers.

• In the most comprehensive analysis of world agriculture to date, five U.N. agencies and the World Bank enlisted more than 400 scientists and development experts from 80 countries over four years to produce the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science, and Technology for Development (IAASTD). This report warns that expensive, short-term fixes -- including GM crops -- are not likely to reduce long-term hunger and poverty. Instead, the study recommends a suite of sustainable techniques based on a sophisticated understanding of biological systems, including cover cropping, mulching, intercropping, composting and crop rotation.
• The Environmental Food Crisis, a recent report by the U.N. Environment Program, confirms the IAASTD findings and predicts further food crises due to environmental collapse, much of it caused by high-chemical-input agriculture. It also endorses ecological practices.
• To analyze how such sustainable practices affect on-the-ground productivity in the developing world, researchers at the University of Essex in the United Kingdom analyzed 286 projects in 57 countries, following 12.6 million farmers who were transitioning toward sustainable agriculture. The results, published in a report titled, Agroecological Approaches to Agricultural Development, found an average yield increase of 79% across a broad spectrum of crops, in a wide variety of soil and climate conditions.
• Similarly, the University of Michigan compared data from almost 100 studies and concluded that a worldwide switch to organic practices would actually increase global food production by as much as 50% -- enough to feed a population of 9 billion people without putting any additional acreage into production.

While it is true that conventional yields have increased over the years, the Union of Concerned Scientists' report, Failure to Yield, finds that most of the increases were due to conventional breeding -- that is, crossing different varieties of one species together -- not by genetic modification. The report also points out that the biotech industry has been promising better yields since the mid-1990s without significant results.

While neither the Union of Concerned Scientists nor I (after all, my father is a geneticist) dismiss the possibility that genetic modification may someday improve crop yield or nutrition, such benefits are, to date, purely speculative.

It makes no sense to defend expensive and unproven genetic modification instead of inexpensive sustainable practices proven to substantially increase yields and feed people, especially in developing countries. Yet the "we need GMOs to feed the world" mantra continues unabated for a welter of interconnected reasons, most of which trace back to money.

A handful of extremely wealthy companies dominates the U.S. and international GM seed markets with two main products: Roundup Ready soybeans and corn, and Bt insect-resistant corn. Neither of these are feeding starving children or protecting the environment. Rather, what these products do is make money -– vast amounts of it -– for the corporations. This money has influenced legislators, researchers, farmers and public opinion through expensive and effective lobbying, granting, advertising and public relations.

Money is a powerful persuader, and it can fool a lot of people for a long time, especially when paired with half-truths that appeal to our sense of empathy and altruism. But here in the Land of Lincoln we remember what Honest Abe said: "You may fool all the people some of the time, you can even fool some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all the time."

The truth is that the companies proclaiming we will go hungry without genetically modified crops are fooling the world, not feeding it.

Oh, and by the way, light roast coffee has more caffeine than dark roast. And eating well and getting plenty of sleep prevents more colds than a scarf.

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not my title

In Defense of Genetically Engineered Foods was not my point, not my title. My point was that we bourgeois foodies for the most part don't have a clue about what sustainability is like for developing countries and we don't have a clue about genetics. I am neither passionate about the potential of GMOs nor am I particularly knowledgeable about them. I had to speak on hoppin' john at the Beans + Rice Forum in New Orleans last weekend, following four PhDs, and all of what I stated about cowpea engineering in Africa was from my own research in preparation for that speech. For decades rose gardeners on the East Coast have bemoaned the impossibility of successful, chemical-free and black-spot-free rose gardening. Finally, through genetic engineering, black-spot resistant "knock-out" roses are being grown naturally from Maine to Florida. Old roses in private gardens and famous botanical collections are being ripped up and replaced with the more environmentally friendly roses. I don't hear anyone complaining about them. And I also distrust any critic who hides behind the mask of anonymity.
"Hoppin'" John Martin Taylor
Washington DC

a guest , June 20, 2010

Speak to the issue

I don't think the issue is whether or not Monsanto or the individuals working in Africa are well meaning, or not. The topics in Ms. Brockman's piece are 1)estimates of population growth and the way to address it, 2) the effectiveness of GMOs in meeting need in the long term,3)the role of profit in choosing how we plan for the future of food. She suggests that we should look at how government policies affect population growth, an important cause of a future food crisis (coupled with climate change), rather than throw our main resources into a technology (GMOs)that is controversial and, according to the studies she cites, not so effective. It is much easier for everybody to sit around and wait for some tech-fix, but if we do not think deeply about our policies, the whole globe will end up as we are now in the Gulf. BP has developed amazing technologies to drill for oil, a present necessity; but it did not think through a means to deal with problems. Why not?, we are asking. Because here is where vast profits distort the science. Planning for contingencies slows you down, makes the enterprise less profitable. Mr. Taylor seems to be both knowledgeable and passionate about the potential of GMOs. It is important that he and other compassionate champions grapple with the potential for crisis, or at least failure to meet the need. To do so is common sense, not ideology.

a guest , June 17, 2010

in defense of genetically engineered foods

I find your article incredibly myopic and ideological.
Monsanto donated the technology to help the cowpea farmers of Africa who lose as much as 60% of their crops to maruca. (That's the gene construct, that is: Bt gene + the promoter + the marker gene, etc., not the seeds.) That's an important distinction since it's essential that farmers use local varieties. Monsanto does not own those.

Monsanto has been donating technologies (gene constructs, gene-based disease diagnostic kits, etc.) to poor countries for decades; surely your father knows that. So have other companies, though they don't have as much to donate since Monsanto is years ahead of all of them.

If you want to know more about the Bt cowpeas, go to the AATF website aatf-africa.org. They're people other than the big companies whom you seem to think only want to make money. Other people who are involved in developing the product and who probably have their own web pages are
TJ Higgins at CSIRO in Australia, who did the transformation (got the gene into cowpea cells and got the cells to regenerate into actual plants). For some reason, it's been really difficult to transform cowpea and its closest relatives. Soybean was easy (or maybe it's just that so many companies were trying to transform soybean it happened much more quickly than the others have). All of the beans are tougher than most crops to improve through breeding or GM since they have that cute little flower structure that enables them to self pollinate before the flower opens (It matters to improving crops with GM since getting the gene into one line is only the first step. The GM line has to be crossbred with preferred varieties again and again). That's also why any of the anti GM discussion of gene flow to non GM plants is ludicrous. Breeders would pray for such a thing to be possible.

Also you might follow the work of Larry Murdoch at Purdue.

There are also people in Nigeria working hard on the problem. Check out the IITA (International Institute for Tropical Agriculture) website. They are the go-to folks for all of the cowpea improvement work that goes on at all of the other international ag research centers. Christian Fatokun has been working on trying to breed Maruca resistance into cowpeas --- for most of his career.

There's also an international group of scientiest who banded together and formed something called NGICA (Network for the Genetic Improvement of Cowpeas) about 15 years ago. The only part I remember is GIC - Genetic Improvement of Cowpea. Higgins and Murdoch were part of that original group. Their website is www.entm.purdue.edu/NGICA/

As my grandmother used to say, don't throw out the baby with the bath water. I am neither a scientist nor a farmer, but I am a conscientious food writer. Both of my parents, by the way, were scientists. I am an avid gardener and I grow my plants naturally (I don't like the term "organically" any more than you like "genetically engineered"). I own no stock in Monsanto or in any other company that is in any way involved with agriculture. I do have a small company that distributes stone-ground, heirloom dent corn. But my bourgeois customers, willing to pay as much as $20 (with shipping) for a bag of my grits and cornmeal, know nothing of the cowpea and rice farmers of Africa.

The thing that bugs me about so many food writers is that they lash out against genetic engineering, but they would be hard-pressed to explain what a gene is. I believe in sustainable agriculture and I, too, distrust Big Business. But the millions of people who live on cowpeas and rice in Africa are barely sustaining themselves. They need our help, not our ideology.

John Martin Taylor
Washington DC

a guest , June 17, 2010