Denialism (12 page)

The revolution began as a single experiment by one man, Norman Borlaug, an American plant scientist, who while working in Mexico had spent years crossing the local wheat with Japanese dwarf varieties to produce plants that could respond better to irrigation and benefit more consistently from fertilizer. That approach was quickly applied to corn, beans, and rice, and the results could soon be seen planted across hundreds of millions of acres throughout Latin America and Asia. The impact is still hard to believe: despite a 300 percent increase in the population of the earth since the end of the Second World War, by far the fastest such growth spurt in human history, available calories per capita have risen by nearly 25 percent. India not only survived the 1960s (with help from the United States) but has since seen its population double, its wheat production triple, and its economy grow ninefold. India has also become one of the world’s biggest rice exporters. The lives of billions of people have been transformed.

All technological advances have costs. Many are painful and most are unanticipated. The Green Revolution was no exception. With little thought devoted to land management and driven by an almost limitless reliance on water, the environmental impact has been staggering. For decades, India and China have been digging wells and damming rivers from one end of Asia to the other. The dams have displaced millions. Wells have liberated a generation of farmers from their dependence on rain, but clean water doesn’t flow forever. As the population grows, particularly in the world’s two most populous countries, the freshwater dwindles, and that leaves people with just one choice: dig. Drill too deep, though, and saltwater and arsenic can begin to seep into the ground, and when that happens nothing will grow on that land again.

For the first time since 1960, we are in a race to see whether the planet can provide enough food to feed its inhabitants. There are really only two ways to increase the amount of food a country can produce. Either you coax greater yield out of land already devoted to farming, or you find extra space to grow more. Historically, agriculture has alternated between the two strategies; for the past century, however, there has been a lot of both. Today, crops are grown on nearly 40 percent of the earth’s land, and it takes 70 percent of our water to do it. Farming is, by its nature, an assault on the earth. Tilling, plowing, reaping, and sowing are not environmentally benign activities and they never were. Moreover, it has been estimated that pests, viruses, and fungi reduce agricultural productivity throughout the world by more than a third. You can’t turn a crop into edible food without killing pests. And you can’t kill them without poison—whether man-made or natural.

There is only so much war you can wage on your environment, however, and we have just about reached our limit. Physical expansion is no longer a meaningful option because we have run out of arable land. Three-fourths of the farmland in sub-Saharan Africa, where a third of the population suffers from chronic hunger, has become nutritionally useless, and more than 40 percent of the African continent suffers from desertification. “Globally, we’re losing soil at a rate twenty times faster than it is formed,” writes David R. Montgomery, a professor of geomorphology at the University of Washington and author of the 2007 book
Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations.
Montgomery estimates that farming is responsible for eroding as much as 1 percent of the earth’s topsoil every year. If that doesn’t change we could literally run out of soil within a century.

By 2050, if not sooner, the earth will have half again as many people as it does today, more than nine billion. Long before that, though, possibly within the next twenty years, world food demand will have doubled. The Green Revolution largely bypassed Africa, and people in many countries there are actually getting poorer; but something surprising has happened throughout much of the rest of the developing world. Success itself has placed unbearable new burdens on the food supply. Agrarian societies have traditionally consumed little meat. But in China and other East Asian nations where income has been growing rapidly, that is no longer true. In India, 65 percent of the population still works on farms. Nonetheless, the country now has more than 280 million urban residents, and the shift to city life, which began more than a hundred years ago as rural residents fled famine and drought, continues.

Every day one hundred thousand Indians join the middle class; the trend in China is similar. As people get wealthier, and as they move away from the farm, their eating habits change. The biggest of those changes is that they start to eat meat. The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) expects that global meat production will double by 2050 (which is more than twice the rate of human population growth). The supply of meat has already tripled since 1980: farm animals take up the vast majority of agricultural land and eat one-third of the world’s grain. In the rich nations we consume three times the meat and four times the milk per capita of people in poorer countries. But that is changing rapidly, and as it does we will have to find ways to grow more grain to feed those animals—and to do it all on less land, and with less available water, than we have today. It is
this
demographic reality, more than population growth alone, that most seriously threatens the global food system.

Climate change, environmental degradation, water scarcity, and agricultural productivity are all intertwined. It will not be possible to solve any of those problems unless we solve them all. Climate change is likely not only to bring warmer temperatures but also to alter patterns of rainfall, placing even more stress on agriculture. Livestock already consume 80 percent of the world’s soybeans and more than half the corn. Cattle require staggering amounts of fresh, potable water. It takes thirteen hundred gallons of water to produce a single hamburger; a steak requires double that amount.

Water scarcity may be the most visible problem caused by our addiction to meat, but it is not the only one: to make a pound of beef requires nearly a gallon of fuel. To put that into perspective, producing one kilogram of the grass-fed beef so revered by organic devotees and high-end restaurants causes the same amount of greenhouse gas emissions as driving a small car 70.4 miles. Even for beef raised less luxuriously (fed by grain on industrial farms) the figure is nearly forty-five miles. Eating meat is ecologically ruinous: according to a 2008 study by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, if we all skipped meat and dairy just one day each week it would do more to lower our collective carbon footprint than if the entire population of the United States ate locally produced food every day of the year.

Malthus may have badly underestimated human ingenuity, but he did get one formula right: combine intense population pressure with high levels of poverty, reduce the opportunity for technological advances, and the guaranteed result will be famine and death. In 2005, an average hectare of land could feed four and a half people; by 2050 that same plot will need to support at least six people (and possibly closer to eight). The only way that will happen is by producing more food per hectare—more crop, as agronomists like to say, per drop. That is not the direction in which the world has been moving. Grain production began to decline in the 1990s for the first time since World War II. Africa, the continent that needs the most help, is the place that is faltering most profoundly. Total production on farms there, according to the World Resources Institute, is nearly 20 percent less than it was in 1970. Without another agricultural revolution, that trend will surely accelerate.

IF WE GENUINELY care about sharing our fate, and making food more readily available to
everyone
, there is only one question worth asking: how can we foment that next revolution? Certainly we need a better way to grow crops, one that sustains the earth but also makes the most efficient possible use of it. Breeding is the art of choosing beneficial traits and cultivating them over time. Farmers have done that for thousands of years by crossing plants that were sexually compatible and then selecting among the offspring for what seemed like desirable characteristics—large seeds, for example, or sturdy roots. That had always been a laborious and time-consuming process: mixing vast numbers of genes—sometimes whole genomes—almost entirely at random meant transferring many genes agronomists didn’t want in order to get the ones they were looking for.

These extra genes often had negative effects, and it could take years of testing new strains to remove them. It was a crude system, akin to panning for tiny amounts of gold in a rushing river filled with stones, but given enough time it usually worked. By conserving seeds and careful mating, farmers learned how to make better plants, as well as entirely new varieties. All the plants we eat (corn, wheat, peanuts, rice) and many that we don’t (orchids, roses, Christmas trees) have been genetically modified through breeding in an effort to make them last longer, look better, taste sweeter, or grow more vigorously in arid soil. So have most varieties of grapefruit, watermelon, lettuce, and hundreds of other fruits, vegetables, and grains that are for sale in any supermarket.

Evolution, which works on a different time scale and has no interest in easing the life of any particular species, does essentially the same thing: selects for desired traits. Humans have no choice but to try and hasten the process. Modern agriculture—and modern medicine—really didn’t begin until 1953, when James Watson and Francis Crick discovered the structure of the DNA molecule, which carries the information that cells need to build proteins and to live. Genetics and molecular biology are simply tools to help scientists choose with greater precision which genes to mix (and how to mix them).

Advocates of organic farming, almost always speaking from—if not for—the world’s richest countries, say the “natural” approach to breeding plants could solve food shortages and address issues of environmental sustainability at the same time. More importantly, they argue that genetic engineering has promised more than it can, or at least has, delivered (which is true, in part because opposition and bureaucratic meddling have made it true). The most vocal criticism of genetically engineered crops, and the easiest to dismiss, is based on willful ignorance, the driving force of denialism. The best-known representative of this group is Prince Charles, who summed his argument up nicely many years ago: “I happen to believe that this kind of genetic modification takes mankind into realms that belong to God, and to God alone.” Putting aside the fact that not all farmers believe in God, the prince’s assessment betrays his complete ignorance of the continuum of evolution and the unmistakable connection between “conventional” plant breeding and genetic engineering.

All the foods we eat have been modified, if not by genetic engineering then by plant breeders or by nature itself. After all, corn, in its present form, wouldn’t exist if humans had not cultivated the crop. The plant doesn’t grow in the wild and would never survive if we suddenly stopped eating it. Does God object to corn? The prince skipped over another, equally essential truth: genetic mutation occurs naturally in all living things. Genes are constantly jumping around and swapping positions without any laboratory assistance; in fact, evolution depends on it.

There are more legitimate reasons to worry about genetically engineered foods. The speed with which this technology has spread across the globe transformed agriculture before many people ever realized it. “So confident are the technicians of the safety of their products that each one is seen as no more than an arbitrary mix of independent lengths of DNA,” the popular British geneticist Steve Jones has written. “Their view takes no account of the notion of species as interacting groups of genes, the properties of one . . . depending upon the others with which it is placed.” Virus-resistant crops, for example, contain viral genes in all their cells. But viruses can introduce genetic material to their host cells, which means that these crops could, in theory, be able to create new diseases rather than defend against them.

The most vivid example of this kind of unintended consequence occurred in 1995, when scientists working at the seed company Pioneer Hi-Bred placed genes from a Brazil nut into a soybean, to help increase levels of two amino acids, methionine and cysteine, in order to make beans used as animal feed more nutritious. Technically, the experiment was a success, but the newly engineered bean also demonstrated how changing just a few molecules of DNA might affect the entire food chain. Many people are allergic to Brazil nuts, and they pay particular attention to labels. Yet labels cannot list every amino acid used to cultivate every crop that is then eaten by every animal, and which might ultimately find its way into a product. If somebody were unwittingly to eat a cake made with soy that contained the Brazil nut protein, the results could be deadly. (In this case, the Brazil nut soybean was never eaten. Pioneer took blood from nine people in a laboratory, and stopped the experiments when the serum tested positive. Still, with such research occurring in countries that lack strong regulatory systems, similar mistakes could have frightening consequences.)

There is an even darker and more abiding fear: that genetically engineered pollen will escape into the wild, altering plant ecosystems forever. That is both more likely and less dangerous that it seems. Pollen doesn’t simply plop onto any plant, have sex, and create new seeds; it would first have to blow across a field and land on a compatible mate. If not, there would be no new seeds and little environmental danger. Genetically engineered crops have been planted on more than one billion acres, yet there have been no examples of domesticated crops damaged by genetic promiscuity. That doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen—but it’s not surprising that it hasn’t. Most major crops have few relatives close enough to mate with, and wild species don’t mix easily with those that are domesticated.

Biotechnology is not without risks for people or the environment, nor is its potential unlimited. Nonetheless, that potential can never be expanded or explored as long as irrational fear and zealous denial prevent nearly every meaningful attempt to introduce genetically engineered crops in places like Africa. Agricultural investment and research there has withered even as the population continues to climb. European and American critics frequently state that the risks of genetically engineered crops outweigh their benefits. They have unrealistic expectations—as denialists so often do. If people in Geneva or Berkeley want to pretend that genetically engineered products pose a danger that scientists have been unable to discover, they should go right ahead. The risk and reward equation looks entirely different in sub-Saharan Africa, however, where starvation is common and arable land almost impossible to find.