Environmentalist Mark Lynas has created
big waves among foodies recently by making an about-face on genetically
modified foods (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obC2TwtJhuI).
He got to a point where he noted a
discrepancy between his activism on climate change, where he was
arguing that the broad scientific consensus ought not be ignored, and
his activism on GMO food, where he was part of a group that held the
broad scientific consensus on the safety of GMO's in deep suspicion.
He begin to see the same insularity and circularity in the anti-GMO
arguments that he saw among climate change sceptics.
I have not followed the GMO debates
closely, but would generally be suspicious of these “Frankenfoods,”
a phrase Lynas himself once helped to coin. But I found Lynas'
readiness to change his mind based on the evidence admirable. The
intellectual rigour that does not allow scientists to pick and choose
the results that suit their biases is something we should all aspire
to.
Being doctrinaire about GMO food may be
precluding some valuable advances. For example, I know that Wes
Jackson of the Land Institute has speculated whether GM methods could
help in the quest for perennial strains of grain crops. The heavy
reliance on annual crops which have to be tilled under every single
year has long been a detriment to agricultural soils. Nature keeps
the ground covered. Could GM help us do that, and still let us eat
grains?
But as little as I know about the GMO
science, I feel able to draw some distinctions between climate
science and GMO science. I think one can argue that they ask
different kinds of questions.
What is the question that climate
science has been trying to answer? The questions, as I have
understood them, are:
- Is the world's climate changing?
- Is there a link between human-caused emissions of so-called greenhouse gases and this change?
The evidence, as it has come in from
many independent studies across the globe, has been overwhelmingly
weighted to answer these two questions in the affirmative.
What is the question the GMO science
has been trying to answer? The question has been, are GMO's safe? It
strikes me right off the bat that this is a much broader question
than the two questions above. Do we mean by this, “Will humans get
noticably sick if they eat GMO food?” If so, I can imagine that
this question could be answered in the negative, and still leave out
many other questions of safety.
The pattern of agricultural research
and development has generally been to propose narrow solutions to
narrow problems (e.g. profitability, productivity, pest control) and to
review the results in a context that excludes broader factors of
health: e.g. Soil erosion, nutrient run-off, watershed pollution,
biodiversity depletion, rural depopulation, etc.) If the research on
GMO's was broad enough in scope to take all such vital factors into
consideration, it would be a first in “agri-tech.”
As arduous and massive as the research
efforts on climate science have been, it seems to me that the burden
of proof for establishing that a human activity is causing
harm in the natural world is orders of magnitude smaller than the
burden of proof for establishing that a human activity is not
causing harm in the natural world. We live in a world that is deeply
complex and interconnected. The fact that we lack the scientific
methodology to trace how the wingbeat of a butterfly can be the
beginning of a hurricane does not make this inherited wisdom saying
untrue.
A case in point: Colony collapse
disorder - the problem of honey bees disappearing by the millions and
never returning to their hives - remains a complex and so far
unsolved problem. If unmitigated, it threatens around 40% of the
world's food crops, which rely on bee pollination. This dire problem
is almost certainly multi-factorial. The broad application of
insecticides and the disruptive annual transportation of 3/4 of the
US honeybee population in and out of the monocultured almond groves
of California are among the suspected stressors, but GMO's have not
been ruled out. Studies point to sublethal effects on honeybees from
exposure to GMO pollen, affecting feeding and learning behaviours.
Not enough to kill a bee perhaps, but quite possibly enough to affect
colony viability. It begs the question, what is meant by “safe?”
In this multi-pronged attack from a
variety of known, suspected and unknown stressors, how large or
small of a factor is GMO in colony collapse disorder? This would be
difficult enough to say. To say with any confidence that GMO's are
not at all a factor in this problem seems very premature.
Science admits we do not fully understand the causes. How then can we
already rule out GMO as a suspect?
Then there are other questions, which
science does not ask. Questions like: Does GMO food overly
concentrate the control of the world's food system in the hands of a
few multi-nationals? How is it eroding local self-determination,
locally adapted foodways, local culture? Are these losses worth the
gains? Are we helping or hurting poor farmers by flooding markets
with another cheap food that requires high technology and very few
farmers? These are not scientific, but moral questions. No doubt
there are sciences that can furnish us with data that could make our
moral wrestling well-informed, but the wrestling remains to be done,
in the arenas of culture and conscience. The laboratories cannot tell
us everything we need to know.
To conclude with Mark Lynas that the
debate on GMO foods is “over” seems to me to reduce that debate to
the narrowest of questions. While there may be some sense in which
GMO's have been scientifically demonstrated to be “safe,” they
may yet prove to be harmful to much that is rightly held dear.
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