Denialism (13 page)
No continent needs agricultural improvement more desperately than Africa; yet there is no place where fear and denialism are more pronounced. (Until recently South Africa was the only country that permitted the harvesting of genetically engineered crops for commercial uses; not long ago Kenya became the second.) Why the resistance? Some leaders simply reject Western products on principle, particularly those, like drugs and engineered crops, that are hyped as vehicles of salvation. Commerce, too, plays a role, and so does history. “The governments and citizens of Europe continue to exercise considerable postcolonial influence in Africa through a range of mechanisms,” Robert Paarlberg wrote in his 2008 book
Starved for Science: How Biotechnology Is Being Kept Out of Africa.
Paarlberg, who has long studied the impact of science and technology on farmers in the developing world, noted that European countries provide a great deal of technical assistance, financial aid, and nongovernmental advocacy to Africa. But nothing comes without strings attached, and African governments learned quickly that nobody in European countries had any intention of purchasing exports grown with modified seeds. “Through each of these channels today Europe is telling governments in Africa that it would be best to stay away from agricultural GMOs and African governments have responded accordingly,” Paarlberg wrote.
Total reliance on organic farming would force African countries to devote twice as much land per crop as we do in the United States. It would also put the profligate West in the position of telling the world’s poorest nations—as well as its fastest-growing economies—that they don’t deserve to reap benefits that we have for so long taken for granted (and abused). That is the central message agricultural denialists have for Africa, and not just for Africa. It may be possible to convince China and India that burning less coal in their factories will not only ease carbon emissions but also lower their considerable health care costs. Lecturing people who have just purchased their first car or apartment about how cheeseburgers are going to kill them or destroy the planet is a different task. Do as I say, not as I do doesn’t work with American teenagers; why should it work in Bangalore or Beijing? It should be no surprise that McDonald’s franchises are growing faster in India and in China than anywhere else in the world.
Growth and poverty have come together—often in the same countries—to threaten the future for us all. Nearly a billion people go to bed hungry every night. Lack of food is not the only reason, and some argue that it is not even the principal reason. Politics, war, greed, tribal hatred, and bad government also contribute significantly to the problem. Now, so does something else: the growing demand for agricultural feedstocks to use as biofuel. In 2008, that demand pushed food prices ever higher, despite the recession, and the number of starving people rose to 14 percent of the world’s population, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization. Three out of every four of those people live in rural areas and depend on agriculture to stay alive. As the world’s financial crisis deepens, the bleak international economy can only add to the suffering. (Even lower prices rarely help struggling farmers during a severe recession; they are simply left with fewer incentives to plant a new season’s crops. At the same time, poor people are finding it nearly impossible to obtain loans to buy seed and fertilizer.)
To cope, Africans will need better governments. The quality of farming doesn’t really matter to countries engaged in eternal civil war or riven by corruption. The continent will also have to acquire new technology and the skill to employ it aggressively. “We are going to need a lot of inventiveness about how we use water and how we grow crops,” Nina Fedoroff said. Fedoroff, a molecular biologist who has worked on plant genetics for many years, is the science adviser to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. She believes people have become so hobbled by their fear of genetically engineered food that it threatens not only progress but peace. “People clearly are afraid and that is very hard to watch,” she said. “We accept exactly the same technology in medicine and yet in food we want to go back to the nineteenth century. We would never think of going to our doctors and saying, ‘Gee, treat me the way doctors treated people in the nineteenth century. Don’t use anything you learned in the twentieth century.’ Yet that is what we are demanding in food production for the world, and at the same time we are seeing the number of people who don’t have enough to eat grow and grow.
“We need to change the way we live and we clearly need scientifically sound ways of managing the resources that we have,” she continued. “We have treated our planet as an infinitely exploitable resource. That has to come to an end.”
ONE AFTERNOON in the beginning of February 2009, Louise Fresco stood on a stage in Long Beach, California, and held up two loaves of bread. “One is a supermarket standard white bread, prepackaged, which I am told is called a Wonder Bread,” said the Dutch agronomist, who is an expert on sustainable development and agricultural societies. She was speaking to seventeen hundred people at the annual TED conference. TED stands for “Technology, Entertainment, Design,” and in the twenty-five years since its inception the meeting has attracted many of the most enlightened and progressive representatives in those fields and others. Organic food is a given at TED, and so increasingly is a focus on solving the health and hunger crises that have engulfed so much of the developing world.
“This one is more or less a wholemeal, handmade bread from a small bakery,” she continued, waving a brown, homey-looking loaf in front of her audience. “I want to see a show of hands—who prefers the wholemeal bread?” A forest of arms filled the air. “Okay, let me do this differently,” she said, laughing. “Does anybody prefer the Wonder Bread?”
Two people timidly raised their hands. “Okay. Now the question is really, Why is this so? Because, naturally, we feel this kind of bread”—she said, holding the rustic loaf aloft—“is about authenticity. It’s about a traditional way of living, a way that is perhaps more real, more honest.” At that point she showed a slide of a generically happy family sitting over a meal at a table in Tuscany. There, she said, people still feel that agriculture is about beauty. About home and hearth. “We have somehow in the last few decades started to cultivate an image of a mythical rural agricultural past,” she told the audience. “It is only two hundred years ago that we had the invention of industrial agriculture. What did that revolution do to us? It brought us power.” And freedom from a life spent kneeling in sodden rice paddies or struggling fourteen hours a day to collect cotton bolls or snap peas. Freedom, in short, from an existence governed by agony, injury, and pain—one that most farmers, and most humans, have always had to endure. (Agriculture is still among the most dangerous of American professions and is associated with one of the highest rates of early mortality.)
Fresco went on. “You may prefer this loaf of bread”—for reasons of taste alone it would be hard not to. “But actually, the relevant bread historically has been the Wonder loaf.” A knowing sigh spread across the room. “Don’t despise the white bread,” she said, “because it symbolizes the fact that bread and food have become plentiful and affordable to all. And that is a feat that we are not conscious of. But it has changed the world.”
Agricultural work has always been—and remains today—humanity’s principal occupation. In the United States we long ago ceased to know, or care, where most of our food comes from. We have managed to liberate ourselves so completely from that dangerous and demanding life that the Census Bureau no longer bothers to count in a separate category the number of people who live on farms. Never before has the responsibility to feed humanity been in the hands of so few, and never before have so many been oblivious of that fact.
Americans rarely think about wheat when they eat bread (let alone know how to bake it), and most have never seen a live pig or chicken, unless they have visited a zoo. Poultry and pork are not animals; they are standard parts of a meal—born and raised in a baggie. There has been an understandable reaction to this mechanized approach to our food. The organic movement—fueled by rural nostalgia and pastoral dreams—is one that shuns mass production, stresses tradition, and seeks to return to less complicated times when the land was tilled by simple farmers, not regulated by computers and planted under the care of the Global Positioning System. Call it the Old McDonald fantasy.
The desire may be genuine, but it is based on a dangerous fallacy: that the old days were better. We can think that as long as we don’t have to live it—because it is true nowhere. The old days were treacherous and painful. Nasty, brutish, and short was the rule, not the exception. Life expectancy two centuries ago in Europe and America was little more than half of what it is today. Science changed all that, helping to feed the poorest people on earth; it brought farmers throughout Asia and Latin America a new kind of prosperity.
Today the world, and particularly its poorest inhabitants, needs more science, not less. Much of the technology Africa requires has been available—to us—for decades. Without passable roads, products never make it to market. Modern irrigation systems are almost wholly absent from Africa, but they would permit farmers to grow larger crops with less water, as such systems have done nearly everywhere else in the world. More than anything, Africa needs soil that has an adequate supply of nitrogen. Without nitrogen fertilizers we would lose a third of our crops. Organic evangelists argue that the best way to get more nitrogen into Africa is to use more manure. Clearly, these are people who have never been to Tanzania or Tamil Nadu. Africans and Indians have plenty of manure. In fact, human and animal waste are often the only farming resources available to villagers. They have no other choices. In effect, that means organics have been imposed on them. Cuba is an interesting illustration; the country has often been portrayed as an organic utopia because it had no genetically engineered crops or synthetic fertilizers. Nobody could afford them. In 2009, however, the government announced that it was about to plant its first crop of engineered corn. With access to technology the ideological barriers vanished. The consequences of any other approach would be horrific. Feeding the world with organic food would require vast new tracts of farmland. Without ripping out the rain forests, there just isn’t enough of it left.
At the TED conference, Fresco was displaying pictures of African farmers, people for whom securing daily meals is no more certain than it was for our Paleolithic ancestors. “If we want small-scale farming we will relegate these farmers and their families to poverty,” she said. “What they need are implements to increase their production. Fertilize their soil. Something to protect their crops. Small-scale farming is a luxury.” She peered knowingly into the crowd. “A luxury for those of us who can afford it.”
I WAS ONCE invited to dinner by a friend who ate nothing but organic food. We picked up vegetables on the way to her house: broccoli, squash, and peppers. Then we bought swordfish. When we arrived at her house, my friend walked straight into the backyard, fired up her Weber grill, sliced the vegetables, and proceeded to cook them. “I just do it this way,” she said, “so they don’t lose their vitamins.”
Vitamins are good for you; but cancer isn’t. Charred food contains carcinogens; so does charcoal and the grease that often drips from a grill into the fire. The food we ate that night was far more likely to cause harm than any conventional product cooked another way. The genuine risks never occurred to her. Like many people, though, she buys organic food because it makes her feel safer. But there is no such thing as safer. There is only safer than something else. Skiing and driving cars are thousands of times more dangerous than walking or cycling. Yet we never refuse to enter a motor vehicle because it “may” cause death. In most parts of America, tap water is not at all dangerous, a fact that is well publicized. That hasn’t put a dent in the bottled water industry.
When people decide that science can’t solve their problems, they reject its principles. Denying the truth becomes a habit. First we say, oh, pesticide is causing illness, so I’ll eat only organic food. Or perhaps chemicals are the problem. The solution for that is simple: use only natural medicine. Lord Melchett, of the British Soil Association, put it this way: “It will be consumers,
not scientists
, who decide whether pesticide residues are safe to consume.” So much for the value of facts or the idea of objective standards. Why bother assessing the safety of foods or employing scientists at all? Nearly every day there seem to be new and contradictory directives about what to eat and how to eat it. For some people the most coherent response is to say, in one way or another, “Civilization causes cancer,” so they begin to turn their backs on civilization.
Many producers of organic food have seized on that fear and uncertainty, advertising their goods as natural and healthy alternatives to this intangible and remote system of corporate farms. Never mind that nearly all the organic crops in the United States are grown or sold by the same food conglomerates that grow and sell conventional produce. Giant corporations like Heinz, Cargill, Kellogg, and Kraft have gobbled up organic food companies throughout the nation. Why wouldn’t they? If customers are willing to pay twice as much for foods cultivated without synthetic pesticides or that lack genetically modified ingredients, Kellogg and General Mills will be only too happy to sell it to them.
Thoughtful proponents of precaution argue that at least with organic crops we know what is likely to happen. Genetically engineered products are so new that we can’t be sure. “No one person or group knows or understands enough about the complexity of living things or their intimate interactions or what affects them to declare that biotechnology and genetic engineering are risk-free,” Denise Caruso wrote in her book
Intervention: Confronting the Real Risks of Genetic Engineering and Life on a Biotech Planet.
“In fact, the only thing we all share—scientists, citizens, regulators—is the profound uncertainty of this moment in history.”