I have discussed in the past my disdain for radical diets and the marketing of food-like products as real food. On this same note, I have written criticisms of people who purport to have improved upon real food, and cited others who resoundingly state that this is impossible.
Much of my thinking and blogging on this has been inspired, or at least framed, by Michael Pollan's injunction to "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants," which I'm amazed that I've never discussed or linked to on my blog. I guess it has been so present in my thinking that I just assumed I'd already talked about it. A fish noticing the water and all.
Anyway, this revisiting of links about real food was inspired by a recent review of scientific literature that comes to the obvious conclusion that eating real food is better for you than any fad diet.
I am also re-linking to a great video spoofing how simple it really should be to eat healthy.
Economic development, current events, travel, sustainable living, and fatherhood, all from an agrarian perspective
Sunday, March 30, 2014
Saturday, March 29, 2014
Different views of development
This is an article by an Indian author, comparing the small-scale, unglamorous, yet amazingly effective model of development pursued in the state of Kerala on the one hand, to Karnataka on the other hand, which has embraced big projects, the private market and high technology, and the inequality, pollution, and repression that accompany this second approach.
It is a contrast I've long wondered about. In economic development, it often does seem that simple, proven approaches often lose out to approaches that are newer, flashier, yet less effective, especially when these less effective approaches have the potential to enrich a few interested parties.
It is a contrast I've long wondered about. In economic development, it often does seem that simple, proven approaches often lose out to approaches that are newer, flashier, yet less effective, especially when these less effective approaches have the potential to enrich a few interested parties.
Tuesday, March 25, 2014
Underground economy in Chicago
There's a new book out by the economic sociologist Sudhir Alladi Venkates, once again on the functionings of the economy in the Chicago ghetto. His basic thesis is that, in impoverished urban neighborhoods, residents are largely isolated from the nation's larger, formal economy, and so have forged an underground economy that dips in and out of crime. This rings true with my limited experience of life in Chicago's poor, marginalized neighborhoods. It also gives the lie to the idea that ending extreme poverty in the world (defined as making less than $1.25 a day) will end many of humanity's worst problems. I mean, if even homeless people or people living off the informal economy in Chicago's impoverished areas are making $10, $20, or $60 a day, and they still have to face hunger, violence, and early death from preventable health problems, then it is evident that simply moving someone's income beyond a defined threshold is not enough to address the problems of absolute, grinding poverty.
On another note, I am somewhat distressed that my hometown of Chicago is becoming increasingly identified in the public mind with desolation, decay, violence, and glaring inequality. We're like the poster child now for urban dysfunction in the 21st-century US.
On another note, I am somewhat distressed that my hometown of Chicago is becoming increasingly identified in the public mind with desolation, decay, violence, and glaring inequality. We're like the poster child now for urban dysfunction in the 21st-century US.
Monday, March 24, 2014
Congress's stand on land-grabbing in Ethiopia
Here are two news briefs from organizations concerned with the issue of land grabbing and forced displacement of people from land to make way for large-scale agricultural investments. Both celebrate language in the 2014 US government appropriation act that expressly prohibits US development aid from going to any project in Ethiopia that involves land grabbing and forced displacement. In addition to other recent news items like Coca-Cola's stand against land grabbing, I hope that this move by Congress is a sign that more and more people are aware of the serious problem of land grabbing and forced displacement, in Africa and elsewhere.
Friday, March 21, 2014
Conservation of landraces
This is a brief article about a scientist farmer, Debal Deb, who has dedicated himself to preserving, improving, and sharing traditional peasant landraces of rice in India. His approach of maintaining a diversity of germplasm, in living fields as opposed to cold storage seed vaults, is different from the reigning modern agricultural paradigm in at least two major ways.
First off is Deb's focus on diversity, as opposed to conventional farming's uniformity. Conventional modern agriculture opts for using a few high-yielding varieties of any given crop, as opposed to maintaining genetic diversity through a plethora of varieties (each itself genetically heterogeneous, too). This conventional approach, like most aspects of a modern industrial economy, could be said to be efficient but precarious. Efficient in that it squeezes out the maximum yield by using only the most productive germplasm. But precarious in that such uniformity makes it more vulnerable to any shock, like a disease outbreak or an extreme weather event. Conventional agriculture puts all its proverbial eggs in one basket. Everyone recognizes this, and so as a sort of safeguard, the modern agricultural paradigm maintains ex situ seedbanks, great vaults in which seeds or other planting material is maintained long-term in dry, cool, controlled conditions. When a new problem that threatens the agroindustrial monoculture presents itself, plant breeders can look for useful genetic traits in the stored germplasm that they can breed into the prevalent high-yielding varieties and thus theoretically overcome the threat.
This brings us to the second salient difference in Deb's approach. By maintaining plant varieties in situ, which is to say by re-planting them every year and harvesting the seeds, Deb differs in another key way from the dominant agroindustrial paradigm. As compared to ex situ storage in refrigerated conditions, in situ preservation maintains seed viability, and also maintains gene flow in varieties. Ex situ gene banks figuratively (and literally, too!) freeze a variety. It is conserved as in a museum, separated from daily use and the outside world. This is cheaper than planting a variety in the field and harvesting it every year, and it also has the potential to get rid of nasty things like viruses and fungal infections that can creep into seed over time. But, as with the efficient yet precarious practice of high-yield monocultures, the ex situ gene bank model has its problems. Seeds kept in an ex situ bank are stuck in time--they don't evolve. In contrast, varieties maintained in situ continue to adapt and change according to farmer preferences and prevailing conditions. Another very real problem with ex situ seedbanks, and one that Deb explicitly (and perhaps a bit exaggeratedly) calls out in the article, is that they are not as safe and sound as proponents would make them out to be. A fairly large proportion of ex situ-kept seed becomes inviable (read dead) over time, and if a given variety is stored long enough without planting in the field, it is lost from the seedbank, and possibly from the face of the earth, forever. Furthermore, keeping a bunch of germplasm in one location means that it is vulnerable to the vagaries of politics, disasters, and funding. Time and again entire seed banks have been lost as funding ran out, or responsibility for them became unclear.
It's probably clear from this post that I sympathize a lot with people like Debal Deb and his quest to maintain traditional landraces. I also recognize the criticisms that one could make of his approach. For one, preserving local landraces for productive use in real farmer fields means that those fields will often not be producing as much yield as they could if they were planted to an improved modern variety in monoculture. As with most traditional practices, if all farmers in the world planted only landraces, we probably wouldn't be able to feed everyone. This is basically due to the fact that the production levels of pre-modern agricultural practices were adequate for pre-modern conditions, which is to say when the world had a fifth or a tenth of its current and future population. They no longer suffice as an exclusive approach today.
But here is where I see the real value in the efforts of Deb and many others like him throughout the world. They are not calling for a monopoly of method, for everyone's converting to their way of preserving traditional knowledge or germplasm. Even if they were calling for such a monopoly, it's obvious that there is little risk of their forcing their way on the rest of the world. No, the preservation of traditional farming wisdom, techniques, and seeds is precisely a call against monopoly, against uniformity, in favor of diversity and pluralism. Beyond my own sentimental or intellectual preference for diversity of thought, it is becoming increasingly clear (if it was ever unclear) that the status quo cannot ensure the future of our world. Indeed, the current way of doing agriculture (and production and consumption in general) will ensure precisely our destruction as a planet and as a species. We need a multiplicity of ideas and approaches and resources to steer us away from our destructive practices, while maintaining the burgeoning production necessary to sustain billions of human beings, not to mention all the rest of the earth's species. Preserving traditional crop varieties must be part of that multiplicity, a dyke against the flow of destruction and irrecuperable loss.
First off is Deb's focus on diversity, as opposed to conventional farming's uniformity. Conventional modern agriculture opts for using a few high-yielding varieties of any given crop, as opposed to maintaining genetic diversity through a plethora of varieties (each itself genetically heterogeneous, too). This conventional approach, like most aspects of a modern industrial economy, could be said to be efficient but precarious. Efficient in that it squeezes out the maximum yield by using only the most productive germplasm. But precarious in that such uniformity makes it more vulnerable to any shock, like a disease outbreak or an extreme weather event. Conventional agriculture puts all its proverbial eggs in one basket. Everyone recognizes this, and so as a sort of safeguard, the modern agricultural paradigm maintains ex situ seedbanks, great vaults in which seeds or other planting material is maintained long-term in dry, cool, controlled conditions. When a new problem that threatens the agroindustrial monoculture presents itself, plant breeders can look for useful genetic traits in the stored germplasm that they can breed into the prevalent high-yielding varieties and thus theoretically overcome the threat.
This brings us to the second salient difference in Deb's approach. By maintaining plant varieties in situ, which is to say by re-planting them every year and harvesting the seeds, Deb differs in another key way from the dominant agroindustrial paradigm. As compared to ex situ storage in refrigerated conditions, in situ preservation maintains seed viability, and also maintains gene flow in varieties. Ex situ gene banks figuratively (and literally, too!) freeze a variety. It is conserved as in a museum, separated from daily use and the outside world. This is cheaper than planting a variety in the field and harvesting it every year, and it also has the potential to get rid of nasty things like viruses and fungal infections that can creep into seed over time. But, as with the efficient yet precarious practice of high-yield monocultures, the ex situ gene bank model has its problems. Seeds kept in an ex situ bank are stuck in time--they don't evolve. In contrast, varieties maintained in situ continue to adapt and change according to farmer preferences and prevailing conditions. Another very real problem with ex situ seedbanks, and one that Deb explicitly (and perhaps a bit exaggeratedly) calls out in the article, is that they are not as safe and sound as proponents would make them out to be. A fairly large proportion of ex situ-kept seed becomes inviable (read dead) over time, and if a given variety is stored long enough without planting in the field, it is lost from the seedbank, and possibly from the face of the earth, forever. Furthermore, keeping a bunch of germplasm in one location means that it is vulnerable to the vagaries of politics, disasters, and funding. Time and again entire seed banks have been lost as funding ran out, or responsibility for them became unclear.
It's probably clear from this post that I sympathize a lot with people like Debal Deb and his quest to maintain traditional landraces. I also recognize the criticisms that one could make of his approach. For one, preserving local landraces for productive use in real farmer fields means that those fields will often not be producing as much yield as they could if they were planted to an improved modern variety in monoculture. As with most traditional practices, if all farmers in the world planted only landraces, we probably wouldn't be able to feed everyone. This is basically due to the fact that the production levels of pre-modern agricultural practices were adequate for pre-modern conditions, which is to say when the world had a fifth or a tenth of its current and future population. They no longer suffice as an exclusive approach today.
But here is where I see the real value in the efforts of Deb and many others like him throughout the world. They are not calling for a monopoly of method, for everyone's converting to their way of preserving traditional knowledge or germplasm. Even if they were calling for such a monopoly, it's obvious that there is little risk of their forcing their way on the rest of the world. No, the preservation of traditional farming wisdom, techniques, and seeds is precisely a call against monopoly, against uniformity, in favor of diversity and pluralism. Beyond my own sentimental or intellectual preference for diversity of thought, it is becoming increasingly clear (if it was ever unclear) that the status quo cannot ensure the future of our world. Indeed, the current way of doing agriculture (and production and consumption in general) will ensure precisely our destruction as a planet and as a species. We need a multiplicity of ideas and approaches and resources to steer us away from our destructive practices, while maintaining the burgeoning production necessary to sustain billions of human beings, not to mention all the rest of the earth's species. Preserving traditional crop varieties must be part of that multiplicity, a dyke against the flow of destruction and irrecuperable loss.
Wednesday, March 19, 2014
The inefficiency of patents
Here is an article discussing the economic inefficiency inherent to intellectual property protection. It also gives some ideas as to alternatives for the prevailing patent protection regime for medicines. I personally understand the social benefit of some form of intellectual property protection, but I believe that it's gone way too far for most things, chief among them medicines and agricultural technology. In particular, those who argue that a modern, productive agriculture necessitates a rigorous intellectual property regime would do well to remember that most of history's greatest agricultural achievements have occurred in a climate of little intellectual property protection for plant genetics. The explosion of US apple clones in the 19th and 20th centuries, the Green Revolution of high-yielding grain varieties first in the US and then internationally, and most importantly, the very development of agriculture and the profusión of traditional peasant landraces for all major crops over the last ten thousand years--all of these transpired in an essentially open-source intellectual property legal regime.
What most struck a chord with me is how monopoly capital and the patent regime in drug research steers research towards patentable, monopolizable, marketable technologies, as opposed to techniques or lifestyle changes that can be disseminated free of charge:
What most struck a chord with me is how monopoly capital and the patent regime in drug research steers research towards patentable, monopolizable, marketable technologies, as opposed to techniques or lifestyle changes that can be disseminated free of charge:
"Drug patents also distort the direction of
research by pushing it in the direction of patentable results. Research directed
at finding cures or treatments based on diet, exercise, or environmental
factors will not be pursued in a health care system that relies exclusively
on patent monopolies to finance research. This neglect can be offset by
government funding targeted specifically towards these areas, but the patent
system will direct resources elsewhere."
This bears much in common with the state of agricultural research, much of which is done directly by private companies, or influenced in such a way by them that public research aligns with private company concerns. The result is that the US today funds very little research into low-input, low-impact farming systems relying mainly on natural processes, because the products of such research would not be readily commercializable by or profitable to private companies.
Monday, March 17, 2014
The future of food, per BBC
This is a decent video from the BBC, giving an overview of the current issues facing the world in terms of food--petroleum dependency, ecological destruction, fisheries management, changes in diet, etc. I don't think there were any really new insights for me in the video, but again, it's a good overview, hitting all the important topics.
For some reason they don't let me embed the video in my blog, so you'll just have to follow my link to their page.
For some reason they don't let me embed the video in my blog, so you'll just have to follow my link to their page.
Tuesday, March 11, 2014
Nuance on Crimea
This is a very insightful and nuanced article about the recent Russian incursion into Crimea, and the context of upheaval in Ukraine. I know very little about the region, and even less about the past month's events. But the article seemed well-written and well-informed to me.
Sunday, March 9, 2014
Diversity of thought
Here is a quote from an economist named McCloskey, taken from a website on diversity in economic thought. I really like her conception of true academic freedom, and the quality of intellectual debate and discourse:
“What distinguishes good from bad in learned discourse . . . is not the adoption of a particular methodology, but the earnest and intelligent attempt to contribute to a conversation . . . You can tell whether [an argument] is persuasive only by thinking about it and talking about it with other thoughtful people. Not all regression analyses are more persuasive than all moral arguments; not all controlled experiments are more persuasive than all introspections”
I like this call to tolerance for distinct epistemologies. Not just experimental science, not just anecdotes, not just statistics, not just contemplation, but all of the above, have something to expand our minds, to enlighten us.
“What distinguishes good from bad in learned discourse . . . is not the adoption of a particular methodology, but the earnest and intelligent attempt to contribute to a conversation . . . You can tell whether [an argument] is persuasive only by thinking about it and talking about it with other thoughtful people. Not all regression analyses are more persuasive than all moral arguments; not all controlled experiments are more persuasive than all introspections”
I like this call to tolerance for distinct epistemologies. Not just experimental science, not just anecdotes, not just statistics, not just contemplation, but all of the above, have something to expand our minds, to enlighten us.
Friday, March 7, 2014
The future of African agriculture
This is a brief bit entitled "African agriculture is growing, but is it transforming?" The title is somewhat misleading, because what it is really about is on the one hand, the impressive current performance and potential of African agriculture, and on the other hand, the vast gaps in knowledge that we have about the reality of farming in Africa and the changes it's undergoing. In any case, it is a much more nuanced, insightful piece than anything you normally read about farming or Africa.
Wednesday, March 5, 2014
Race in sports
This is what I think to be a very good analysis of the "Richard Sherman situation" and race in sports in general. Essentially the author argues that the white US public loves watching black athletes perform physically, but then places heavy censures on them if they act with insufficient deference or submissiveness off the field. I agree with this argument, and would take it further.
I have never been a huge fan of watching sports. When I was playing a lot of sports growing up, I could get really into watching NBA games or college basketball, or even football, but I always far preferred actively playing a sport to passively watching it. Over time, it's become almost physically impossible for me to sit through and pay attention during an entire sportscast. Aside from the barrage of overbearing publicity everywhere you look (around the court or field, on players' jerseys, in announcer plugs, and in the constant commercial breaks), it is particularly difficult for me to get excited about the racial dynamic of pro sports in the US, which I think is a huge part of our collective ritual obssession with watching them.
The institution of the post-game interview shows just how ritualized it all is. Reporters ask the same questions, players give the same typical answers (I'm happy we won, we won because we worked hard, the game was tough, it was a disappointing loss, etc.). No one would ever watch such drivel unless it fit into some larger ritual scheme, giving us solace in the repetition of the same old tropes. The post-game interview of course also gives the first chance to comment on naughty behavior during a game, or even to elicit some unexpected, "thuggish" comment that departs from the normal sequence of the ritual.
I came to the conclusion long ago that spectator sports, with the accompanying shows, commentary, ads, pop-culture references, etc., serves largely as a formalized, socially-acceptable forum for the general public to comment on what is and is not appropriate for black men to do with themselves. I'm not even talking about the use of the N-word or calling players thugs (though that's part of the pageantry too), but the constant, minute dissection of what players did or didn't do in a way acceptable to some prudish, hypocritical Puritan ideal of behavior. It's like a permanent rehash of dividing the black players into "house" and "field" categories. Dennis Rodman was a good, quiet, hard-working player until the 90s--lots of hustle, good on defense (if a bit dirty sometimes), not a big showoff. But then he dyed his hair and started saying crazy things, which gave everyone the occasion to comment on the utmost minutiae of his personal life. Cue same story for Allen Iverson, Latrell Sprewell, that mentally-unstable guy who was involved in the big Pacers fight, etc., etc., etc., up until Richard Sherman. Charles Barkley went from threatening bad-boy to fawning, smiling yes-stooge on one of those ESPN programs, and they've even squeezed Scottie Pippen into a suit and put him up on display, the "great tamed black thug giant".
In a very post-modern twist, the entire general public is involved, whites and blacks and everyone else, and the players too, such that everyone falls into and communicates in terms of these pre-established roles. Whites can play the aggressive racist role, with lots of derision and N-words, or the affable, colorblind oppressive avuncular type who just wishes for the old days, when players were polite, good sportsmen, and either white or submissive blacks. Blacks can be the ahistorical, hard-working good boy that is just looking to sweat and jump around and entertain and perhaps someday fully incorporate himself into the good graces of the white bourgeois social structure, or players can be a heel like Richard Sherman, with dreadlocks or tattoos or a generally untamed, bozal attitude that immediately makes white women alternately fear or fantasize about getting ravaged by them. But everyone is playing into these ritualized roles, whichever role they choose or are assigned to.
Given all this, I decided long ago that I just didn't want to participate in the whole deal. The only thing less interesting for me than sitting around and watching other people doing stuff, is sitting around and weighing in on whether or not I think so-and-so has shown sufficient deference to the mores of the decent white viewing public. Even if I were going to comment on the appropriateness of other people's behavior, I'd be more compelled to do so for the business barons and policymakers that promote unsportsmanlike, indecent behavior in our socioeconomic system, than for a guy who spends his life throwing and catching a ball.
Monday, March 3, 2014
Year of family farms
2014 has been declared by the FAO as the year of family farming. Here is a brief info sheet that really captures most of the important things to know about family farming, namely that family farms tend to produce more per unit of land but are do not generate high per person incomes, that family farms are both economic units and a way of life, and that there is not a clear division between farmwork and housework on a family farm. Such insight and accuracy is rare in mainstream treatments of family farming.
Saturday, March 1, 2014
Ethical, not scientific, objections to transgenics
Biocontrol is the use of one species to control the population of a another. It is most commonly employed in agriculture to control crop pests. For instance, if there is an insect that is causing major problems with crops in a certain region, scientists can research biocontrol alternatives. They will look for other insects that eat or parasitize the pest insect, or different bacterial or fungal diseases that can infect and thus destroy the pest. A commonly-cited successful example of biocontrol is the control of cottony cushion scale, a pest on citrus trees in California, using a special type of ladybug imported from Australia.
Often biocontrol entails bringing organisms from one part of the world to another, which brings up many biosafety concerns. It is difficult to predict the negative effects that these new organisms may have on the local ecosystem, beyond the positive impact of controlling the crop pest you're targeting. Whenever you introduce a foreign organism into an ecosystem, it is possible that it will reproduce and spread uncontrollably, because you've taken it away from whatever factors keep its population at a reasonable level in its nattive range. If this happens, the introduced species may displace other, native species, or become a pest in its own right. Something like this has happened with the Asian multicolored ladybeetle which, while it admittedly controls aphids as it was originally supposed to, has become a nuisance to homeowners in much of the US, and is displacing some native ladybug species. With careful planning, as is normally done when a biocontrol agent is released to fight against a crop pest, the new species is analyzed and tested extensively beforehand to make sure that the new effect it has on the environment will be mainly limited to controlling the target pest (which itself usually happens to be a species that was inadvertently introduced before).
Biocontrol efforts are not the only cause of invasive species propagation. Species like the nutria in New Orleans, or kudzu in the US South, or the Asian carp in the Mississippi river, were originally brought to the US for commercial reasons (for hides, erosion control, and pond cleaning, respectively), and they have since multiplied wildly. Probably the most common source of invasive introductions is unintentional--foreign species hitch a ride on clothes, bilge water, pallet wood, or any number of other ways, and become established somewhere they shouldn't be. Again, many of the major crop pests are invasive species, which is why it is often necessary to seek biocontrol agents abroad, where the pest is originally from.
Genetic engineering has a few things in common with biocontrol. Perhaps most notably, it is one technological approach among many that may have a positive impact on agriculture. People get excited when they first hear about biocontrol, because when it works, it is one of the best, least toxic, most durable, least expensive ways of dealing with crop pests. Nevertheless, biocontrol's applications have been quite limited up until now, so these days it is not a major focus of agronomy funding or research. It turns out that it is just not that simple to find a single species that can effectively control a crop pest.
Likewise, genetic engineering has until now not found many practical applications. Granted, the insertion of glyphosate resistance and natural insecticides into corn, soybeans, cotton, and canola have been very lucrative technologies that caught on across the US and other parts of the world. But these are basically just two marketable discoveries in the last 20+ years, that have since been revisited, riffed on, and tweaked. Scientific fashion is still smitten with the idea of transgenics, because they sound really cool, but when you weigh the overwhelming dominance of transgenic research in the overall agricultural research portfolio over these decades, just two marketable ideas is not a great return to the R&D buck. I believe that, as the ag research community gets over the initial wow-factor of transgenic approaches, we will gradually come to see them as one rather limited tool at our disposal (as we view biocontrol), as opposed to the principal avenue we should be investigating. This is a good thing, because pouring so many resources into just one area of research inherently means that you are depriving other, perhaps equally worthy avenues of inquiry.
Another commonality between biocontrol and genetic engineering is the question of biosafety. Scientists and the general public clearly see the undesireability of losing a native species displaced by an introduced biocontrol agent, even if there is no clear economic impact from this loss. For instance, if Ilinois's native ladybeetles are disappearing and their ecological niche is taken up by the Asian ladybeetles, no one will likely lose any money, and frankly, the ecosystem will probably not suffer any major damage, since one ladybeetle species can perform the same ecological functions as another. But nevertheless, few would argue that the loss is unimportant--that is one species, one bit of diversity and wonder and uniqueness, that has disappeared from the Earth, never to come back. I would argue the same for the infiltration of a foreign gene into a general crop population. If a Bt transgene gets into a traditional sweetcorn variety that has been passed down to you by your grandparents, you probably won't notice the differencce. Your corn will keep growing fine and tasting the same as it always has, because it is still 99.99% the same as before. But even if the economic or the ecological performance of the corn remains the same, it is clear that something has been changed; something will be lost. Call it purity, or integrity, or whatever else you want--there will have been a fundamental change imposed on you and your corn, through no desire of your own. Inserting a novel gene into a living organism is not to be taken lightly, because once this gene has entered the general population, you can never totally remove it. It is like a more insidious form of introducing a novel species to an ecosystem; there have been successful (albeit costly and difficult) eradication campaigns of invasive species after they've been introduced, but it would be almost impossible to eradicate a specific allele from a plant population once it has spread. If we believe we should be careful, and especially wary of our own complacence and hubris, in the case of a new species introduction that can be reversed, we should be all the more cautious with a gene transfer that cannot be undone.
So here we have one ethical, not scientific or economic, reason to avoid or at least minimize the planting of transgenic crops: inserting a novel, foreign gene into a genome is akin to introducing a foreign species into a native ecosystem. It creates an irreparable change in the essence of the system, and this is something that should not be done blithely. There is some recognition of this principle even in mainstream promotion of transgenics. There seems to be a relatively strong consensus that transgenic crops should be kept out of the zones of origin and diversity for a given crop, such as corn in Mexico or wheat in the Fertile Crescent. I believe the thinking here is that, even if the transgene shows no clear negative effects on people or the environment, common sense precautions should preclude us from doing anything that might spread something so fundamentally novel throughout the natural stocks of genetic diversity for a given species.
I think that this instinct to avoid introducing transgenes into biodiversity hotspots is a sound one. The problem is that these diversity hotspots are not limited to the seven small geographical regions traditionally considered as crop centers of origin. Every traditional field or garden is a biodiversity hotspot. I see this very clearly in Colombia, where a farmer may grow ten different traditional varieties of potato on the margins of his commercial potato monoculture, and even within any one of these varieties there exists much phenotypic diversity. But you don't have to go that far afield--if your neighbor participates in Seed Savers Exchange in the US, or your grandmother has three different types of collard greens whose seeds she got from her grandmother, or the country roads outside your town have lots of abandoned, semi-wild apple trees from old farmsteads, all of you are witnessing areas of important crop genetic diversity. If this is the case, then that aversion to introducing transgenes into a center of origin for a given crop would extend over most of the planet.
Beyond and concurrent to this idea of not introducing transgenes into crop biodiversity hotspots, we have to consider the question of sovereignty and free will. Everyone has the right to say they don't want a certain crop variety in their fields--no one in the US would propose going into people's gardens and forcing them to plant only yellow tomatoes, or honeydew melons but not cantaloupes. We in the US are particularly insistent on our right to control our own space and our own decisions, but I think this is a universal value. We see it clearly when it comes to other technologies. The larger US society allows the Amish or any other group or individual to decide which technologies they will adopt or not allow in their lives. Despite the immense, obvious benefits to hooking your house to the electric grid, no one would propose forcing the Amish to use electricity. Even in the case of vaccination, where non-adoption by one person has a negative effect on the collective and should thus perhaps not be a protected right, most people would never advocate forced vaccination.
As with vaccination, which involves living organisms that spread beyond just the person making a given decision, things get a bit complicated when we're talking about plants and semi-natural systems like a garden or a farm field. You can't exclude the pollen from neighbors' plants from coming onto your field, and normally you have no right to, since that's how nature works. An engineered gene, on the other hand, is not a product of natural creation but of human artifice, and I should be able to decide whether that goes in my crop or not (especially since I could be sued if it is, as is the case with our prevailing laws allowing patentable transgenes).
Hence even if everyone around me were to agree that a particular transgene were a great thing, and even if my paltry little garden were not located in a biodiversity hotspot of any major concern, I would argue that it is still my right to insist that that gene not be introduced into my crops unless I want it to be. That is part of the free will and sovereignty that should be my birthright
Now I'm not so naive or polemical as to think that free will is an absolute. We are constantly ceding little bits of our sovereignty to the collective, and it must be this way unless we wish for a violent, chaotic society, each living as an island unto him- or herself, oblivious to our common interests. In theory, almost every country in the world reserves the right to call on its citizens to give their lives, the very essence of their personal sovereignty, in defense of the collective. But any time we give up some degree of our freedom, or call on others to do so, it must be with very good cause. The public will not support an unjust war (at least not in the long run); your neighbors won't respect your right to have a live dog if the dog keeps messing up their stuff or attacking their kids; even your house and property can be taken from you if the government goes through established, fair processes of eminent domain and can reasonably convince everyone else that it's for a just cause.
I believe the same principles should apply to transgenics. We should weigh the potential benefits of any transgene with the inherent affront it represents to the integrity of the natural world, or the free will of humanity. I haven't ever heard of anyone who objects to the treatment of diabetes with synthetic insulin. This insulin is produced by either E. coli bacteria or yeast that have been genetically engineered to make human insulin. On the one hand, the risks of such synthesis seem low, since it is confined to laboratories and factories, and the payoff seems high, because it saves millions of human lives. The benefit and the cause seem to be so positive and just that they trump any concerns we have about playing with human genes, or the low possibility of escape of this modified yeast into breweries and bakeries. On the other hand, few serious scientists would consider putting glow-in-the-dark genes into a human embryo (or really doing any experimentation with human embryos, for that matter), because the fact that a glow in the dark person would look cool is no justification for the ethical breach represented by experimenting with human life.
The problem is that most transgenics have not given humanity at large any stellar advantages over conventionally-bred crop varieties. As far as I know, the European corn borer that Bt corn was first designed to manage, was not that serious of a pest in much of the Corn Belt. Your fields had to be really infested before treatment was justified. Conversely, the advent of Bt varieties to fight Western corn rootworm was indeed a major breakthrough in many ways. It drastically reduced the use of highly toxic pesticides to fight this pernicious pest, and this is a laudable achievement. That said, growers could have avoided these chemicals in the first place with sensible crop rotation cycles of 3 years or more, instead of planting corn year after year. The spread of no-till farming is definitely a good thing, and glyphosate-resistant crops happened to be the way it played out, though the use of herbicide to avoid midseason cultivation could have come about through other channels. I don't see why the idea of no-till couldn't have been pursued with the mix of selective herbicides that farmers were using before Roundup. Hell, Clearfield imazapyr-resistant corn was a conventional-bred competitor to glyphosate-resistance for a while, until the market dominance of the Roundup-Ready trait asserted itself. That is to say that VHS won out over Betamax, but that was just an idiosyncracy of the market, not an indication of one technology's being objectively better than the other. In short, transgenics have thus far shaved some costs and some thought off of the management of corn, beans, cotton, and canola, but they haven't changed the way we do farming. If anything, transgenics have further cemented a chemical-intensive, thought-scarce agriculture that has some pretty profound inherent problems. If I'm right, then the net benefit to society of the commercial application of transgenic crops has not been that impressive thus far, and certainly has not created a clear case to override any of the possible ethical objections to transgenics I've raised above.
Often biocontrol entails bringing organisms from one part of the world to another, which brings up many biosafety concerns. It is difficult to predict the negative effects that these new organisms may have on the local ecosystem, beyond the positive impact of controlling the crop pest you're targeting. Whenever you introduce a foreign organism into an ecosystem, it is possible that it will reproduce and spread uncontrollably, because you've taken it away from whatever factors keep its population at a reasonable level in its nattive range. If this happens, the introduced species may displace other, native species, or become a pest in its own right. Something like this has happened with the Asian multicolored ladybeetle which, while it admittedly controls aphids as it was originally supposed to, has become a nuisance to homeowners in much of the US, and is displacing some native ladybug species. With careful planning, as is normally done when a biocontrol agent is released to fight against a crop pest, the new species is analyzed and tested extensively beforehand to make sure that the new effect it has on the environment will be mainly limited to controlling the target pest (which itself usually happens to be a species that was inadvertently introduced before).
Biocontrol efforts are not the only cause of invasive species propagation. Species like the nutria in New Orleans, or kudzu in the US South, or the Asian carp in the Mississippi river, were originally brought to the US for commercial reasons (for hides, erosion control, and pond cleaning, respectively), and they have since multiplied wildly. Probably the most common source of invasive introductions is unintentional--foreign species hitch a ride on clothes, bilge water, pallet wood, or any number of other ways, and become established somewhere they shouldn't be. Again, many of the major crop pests are invasive species, which is why it is often necessary to seek biocontrol agents abroad, where the pest is originally from.
Genetic engineering has a few things in common with biocontrol. Perhaps most notably, it is one technological approach among many that may have a positive impact on agriculture. People get excited when they first hear about biocontrol, because when it works, it is one of the best, least toxic, most durable, least expensive ways of dealing with crop pests. Nevertheless, biocontrol's applications have been quite limited up until now, so these days it is not a major focus of agronomy funding or research. It turns out that it is just not that simple to find a single species that can effectively control a crop pest.
Likewise, genetic engineering has until now not found many practical applications. Granted, the insertion of glyphosate resistance and natural insecticides into corn, soybeans, cotton, and canola have been very lucrative technologies that caught on across the US and other parts of the world. But these are basically just two marketable discoveries in the last 20+ years, that have since been revisited, riffed on, and tweaked. Scientific fashion is still smitten with the idea of transgenics, because they sound really cool, but when you weigh the overwhelming dominance of transgenic research in the overall agricultural research portfolio over these decades, just two marketable ideas is not a great return to the R&D buck. I believe that, as the ag research community gets over the initial wow-factor of transgenic approaches, we will gradually come to see them as one rather limited tool at our disposal (as we view biocontrol), as opposed to the principal avenue we should be investigating. This is a good thing, because pouring so many resources into just one area of research inherently means that you are depriving other, perhaps equally worthy avenues of inquiry.
Another commonality between biocontrol and genetic engineering is the question of biosafety. Scientists and the general public clearly see the undesireability of losing a native species displaced by an introduced biocontrol agent, even if there is no clear economic impact from this loss. For instance, if Ilinois's native ladybeetles are disappearing and their ecological niche is taken up by the Asian ladybeetles, no one will likely lose any money, and frankly, the ecosystem will probably not suffer any major damage, since one ladybeetle species can perform the same ecological functions as another. But nevertheless, few would argue that the loss is unimportant--that is one species, one bit of diversity and wonder and uniqueness, that has disappeared from the Earth, never to come back. I would argue the same for the infiltration of a foreign gene into a general crop population. If a Bt transgene gets into a traditional sweetcorn variety that has been passed down to you by your grandparents, you probably won't notice the differencce. Your corn will keep growing fine and tasting the same as it always has, because it is still 99.99% the same as before. But even if the economic or the ecological performance of the corn remains the same, it is clear that something has been changed; something will be lost. Call it purity, or integrity, or whatever else you want--there will have been a fundamental change imposed on you and your corn, through no desire of your own. Inserting a novel gene into a living organism is not to be taken lightly, because once this gene has entered the general population, you can never totally remove it. It is like a more insidious form of introducing a novel species to an ecosystem; there have been successful (albeit costly and difficult) eradication campaigns of invasive species after they've been introduced, but it would be almost impossible to eradicate a specific allele from a plant population once it has spread. If we believe we should be careful, and especially wary of our own complacence and hubris, in the case of a new species introduction that can be reversed, we should be all the more cautious with a gene transfer that cannot be undone.
So here we have one ethical, not scientific or economic, reason to avoid or at least minimize the planting of transgenic crops: inserting a novel, foreign gene into a genome is akin to introducing a foreign species into a native ecosystem. It creates an irreparable change in the essence of the system, and this is something that should not be done blithely. There is some recognition of this principle even in mainstream promotion of transgenics. There seems to be a relatively strong consensus that transgenic crops should be kept out of the zones of origin and diversity for a given crop, such as corn in Mexico or wheat in the Fertile Crescent. I believe the thinking here is that, even if the transgene shows no clear negative effects on people or the environment, common sense precautions should preclude us from doing anything that might spread something so fundamentally novel throughout the natural stocks of genetic diversity for a given species.
I think that this instinct to avoid introducing transgenes into biodiversity hotspots is a sound one. The problem is that these diversity hotspots are not limited to the seven small geographical regions traditionally considered as crop centers of origin. Every traditional field or garden is a biodiversity hotspot. I see this very clearly in Colombia, where a farmer may grow ten different traditional varieties of potato on the margins of his commercial potato monoculture, and even within any one of these varieties there exists much phenotypic diversity. But you don't have to go that far afield--if your neighbor participates in Seed Savers Exchange in the US, or your grandmother has three different types of collard greens whose seeds she got from her grandmother, or the country roads outside your town have lots of abandoned, semi-wild apple trees from old farmsteads, all of you are witnessing areas of important crop genetic diversity. If this is the case, then that aversion to introducing transgenes into a center of origin for a given crop would extend over most of the planet.
Beyond and concurrent to this idea of not introducing transgenes into crop biodiversity hotspots, we have to consider the question of sovereignty and free will. Everyone has the right to say they don't want a certain crop variety in their fields--no one in the US would propose going into people's gardens and forcing them to plant only yellow tomatoes, or honeydew melons but not cantaloupes. We in the US are particularly insistent on our right to control our own space and our own decisions, but I think this is a universal value. We see it clearly when it comes to other technologies. The larger US society allows the Amish or any other group or individual to decide which technologies they will adopt or not allow in their lives. Despite the immense, obvious benefits to hooking your house to the electric grid, no one would propose forcing the Amish to use electricity. Even in the case of vaccination, where non-adoption by one person has a negative effect on the collective and should thus perhaps not be a protected right, most people would never advocate forced vaccination.
As with vaccination, which involves living organisms that spread beyond just the person making a given decision, things get a bit complicated when we're talking about plants and semi-natural systems like a garden or a farm field. You can't exclude the pollen from neighbors' plants from coming onto your field, and normally you have no right to, since that's how nature works. An engineered gene, on the other hand, is not a product of natural creation but of human artifice, and I should be able to decide whether that goes in my crop or not (especially since I could be sued if it is, as is the case with our prevailing laws allowing patentable transgenes).
Hence even if everyone around me were to agree that a particular transgene were a great thing, and even if my paltry little garden were not located in a biodiversity hotspot of any major concern, I would argue that it is still my right to insist that that gene not be introduced into my crops unless I want it to be. That is part of the free will and sovereignty that should be my birthright
Now I'm not so naive or polemical as to think that free will is an absolute. We are constantly ceding little bits of our sovereignty to the collective, and it must be this way unless we wish for a violent, chaotic society, each living as an island unto him- or herself, oblivious to our common interests. In theory, almost every country in the world reserves the right to call on its citizens to give their lives, the very essence of their personal sovereignty, in defense of the collective. But any time we give up some degree of our freedom, or call on others to do so, it must be with very good cause. The public will not support an unjust war (at least not in the long run); your neighbors won't respect your right to have a live dog if the dog keeps messing up their stuff or attacking their kids; even your house and property can be taken from you if the government goes through established, fair processes of eminent domain and can reasonably convince everyone else that it's for a just cause.
I believe the same principles should apply to transgenics. We should weigh the potential benefits of any transgene with the inherent affront it represents to the integrity of the natural world, or the free will of humanity. I haven't ever heard of anyone who objects to the treatment of diabetes with synthetic insulin. This insulin is produced by either E. coli bacteria or yeast that have been genetically engineered to make human insulin. On the one hand, the risks of such synthesis seem low, since it is confined to laboratories and factories, and the payoff seems high, because it saves millions of human lives. The benefit and the cause seem to be so positive and just that they trump any concerns we have about playing with human genes, or the low possibility of escape of this modified yeast into breweries and bakeries. On the other hand, few serious scientists would consider putting glow-in-the-dark genes into a human embryo (or really doing any experimentation with human embryos, for that matter), because the fact that a glow in the dark person would look cool is no justification for the ethical breach represented by experimenting with human life.
The problem is that most transgenics have not given humanity at large any stellar advantages over conventionally-bred crop varieties. As far as I know, the European corn borer that Bt corn was first designed to manage, was not that serious of a pest in much of the Corn Belt. Your fields had to be really infested before treatment was justified. Conversely, the advent of Bt varieties to fight Western corn rootworm was indeed a major breakthrough in many ways. It drastically reduced the use of highly toxic pesticides to fight this pernicious pest, and this is a laudable achievement. That said, growers could have avoided these chemicals in the first place with sensible crop rotation cycles of 3 years or more, instead of planting corn year after year. The spread of no-till farming is definitely a good thing, and glyphosate-resistant crops happened to be the way it played out, though the use of herbicide to avoid midseason cultivation could have come about through other channels. I don't see why the idea of no-till couldn't have been pursued with the mix of selective herbicides that farmers were using before Roundup. Hell, Clearfield imazapyr-resistant corn was a conventional-bred competitor to glyphosate-resistance for a while, until the market dominance of the Roundup-Ready trait asserted itself. That is to say that VHS won out over Betamax, but that was just an idiosyncracy of the market, not an indication of one technology's being objectively better than the other. In short, transgenics have thus far shaved some costs and some thought off of the management of corn, beans, cotton, and canola, but they haven't changed the way we do farming. If anything, transgenics have further cemented a chemical-intensive, thought-scarce agriculture that has some pretty profound inherent problems. If I'm right, then the net benefit to society of the commercial application of transgenic crops has not been that impressive thus far, and certainly has not created a clear case to override any of the possible ethical objections to transgenics I've raised above.