Listen to Those with Their Hands in The Dirt
If we are to base our arguments regarding conventional versus alternative farming (I dislike those terms as it roots the former in tradition and stigmatizes the latter as unstable and fringy when in fact it is a far older practice) on books and lecturers alone*, we need to know from whence our information comes, whether it is legitimate, and who is funding it.
The genetically modified (GM) foods lobby is as much a political and money driven campaign as it is science.
Framing the argument as science versus emotion discredits the years of study by concerned scientists who have made legitimate discoveries that put GM seeds and conventional farming practices into question. I was disconcerted by Dr. Paarlberg's scene setting of, as Mr. Squalli put it so aptly, "two opposing camps" consisting of "a group of objective scientists or pro-science defending conventional farming and a group of activists (perhaps depicted as emotional and anti-science) calling for alternative farming." (Let’s not forget that Dr. Paarlberg is on the council to the CEO of Monsanto (Sourcewatch)). At the end of Mike Gibney's chapter Modified Food: Genetic or Atomic (Gibney, 2012) found in our reading this week, he writes that, "emotion is what drives the anti-GM lobby,” delegitimizing honest scientific research.
This is exactly what the “merchants of doubt” or “high-level scientists with extensive political connections” (Conway, Oreskes 2011) want to do: “run effective campaigns to mislead the public and deny well-established scientific knowledge.”
We need long-term investigation and research to understand the effects of newly developed seeds and products before implementation. This is not emotional. It is common sense.
Gibney, who writes off the anti-GM lobby as emotional, describes a safety measure for farmers who buy and plant Bt corn (genetically modified to contain the pesticidal toxin-producing Bacillus thuringiensis gene). “Farmers who buy GM seeds,” Gibney writes, “must sign a contract that they will create small insect refuges at strategic locations around the GM crop.” He argues that the progeny of any resistant “weevil” will have very few resistant weevil mates as so many weevils had the luck to dine on non-GM corn in the refuges. The very, very few resistant weevil progeny who do survive and procreate, he writes, will not survive after dining on the GM corn; thus no resistant strain of weevil.
His argument may not be emotional. But it's naïve. Really naïve. Any good journalist would have done a little more digging. First, let's clear this up: Bt corn was created mostly to combat the root worm, not a weevil. Brandon Keim (Keim, 2014) writes about the Bt corn resistant root worm discovered in 2009, years before Gibney’s book which he could have reported, due to a few glitches in the creation of insect refuges.
It all started with the undermining of insect refuges.” An advisory panel convened in 2002 by the EPA suggested that a full 50 percent of each corn farmer’s fields be devoted to…non-Bt refuges,” (Keim, 2014). Yet, seed companies resisted and eventually the EPA did too. The EPA set voluntary refuge guidelines between 5 and 20 percent of farmer’s fields. “Many farmers didn’t even follow those recommendations,” Keim writes. By 2011, Aaron Gassmann, an Iowa State University entomologist and co-author of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and other field scientists and farmers reported widespread extensive root worm damage to Bt corn fields in Illinois, Minnesota, Nebraska and South Dakota.
Ironically, Bt resistant root-worms could now force farmers to use and pay for pesticides undermining the economic rationale for creating Bt corn.
Economical? I don’t think so, especially when developing a GM seed can cost well over $100 million (Union of Concerned Scientists).
Shouldn’t we be questioning what drives the pro-GM lobby?
*On this matter, thanks to Jay Squalli and other organic farmers as well as field scientists, observation or hard labor on the ground may provide us with observed truth more than the abstractions from those who keep their hands soil free.
Gibney, M. Something to Chew On: Challenging Controversies in Food and Health. University College Dublin Press 2012.
Conway, E., Oreskes, N. Merchants of Doubt. Bloomsbury Publishing 2011. http://www.merchantsofdoubt.org
Keim, B. Voracious Worm Evolves to Eat Biotech Corn Engineered to Kill It. http://www.wired.com/2014/03/rootworm-resistance-bt-corn/ Wired 2014.
Union of Concerned Scientists. Marginalizing Alternatives: 8 Ways Monsanto Fails at Sustainable Agriculture, http://www.ucsusa.org/food_and_agriculture/our-failing-food-system/genetic-engineering/marginalizing-alternatives.html#.VgtQaHhlDOR