If you yawned your way through science class back in school, you're not alone. American students have lagged in the science department for years, with fourth and eighth graders recently placing eleventh among international peers. While this is often framed in terms of an inability to compete in the global marketplace, it has another insidious effect: ignorance when it comes to scientific issues that have great social and environmental impacts, leaving us vulnerable to questionable science. What if, while we were sleeping through class, a well-meaning but ethically compromised teacher received funding to conduct dangerous experiments in our presence, feed us the results, and dump the toxic byproducts in the river next to the school?
That's kind of the state of industrial agriculture, according to a new paper, "The Genetic Engineering of Food and the Failure of Science" (full text available for download here) published in this month's issue of The International Journal of Sociology of Agriculture and Food, and our future food supply is on the line, not to mention our health. The sharp-witted Bonnie Powell of The Ethicurean blogged about the report yesterday.
Even Bonnie's post is a little dense for a lay person, but it doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand the three terrifying "red flags" of GMO foods identified by Lotter's paper, which she breaks into digestible bullets and that I'll chew up a little more for you:
And in April 2008, as Lotter writes, 400 agricultural scientists and experts in 57 nations signed a United Nations-sponsored document known as the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development. The IAASTD's final report criticized the "Green Revolution" style of capital-intensive, high-environmental impact, technology- and yield-centered approach of agriculture and recommended that developing nations base their future food production around local and regionally derived sustainable and agro-ecological strategies. Not GMOs.
As we followed here with interest, Monsanto and Syngenta -- the two biotechnology-industry representatives in the IAASTD discussions, who were initially enthusiastic about convening a food production strategy agreement for developing countries -- took their balls and went home in January 2008, when it was clear that nobody at the IASSTD was interested in playing their game anymore. The United States, Canada, and Australia did not sign the agreement.
And yet, Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack continues to push the biotech agenda abroad and in the U.S. Senate, with a proposed Global Food Security Bill that would mandate GMO research funds as part of foreign food aid. Such requirements could trap farmers in the Global South in a system of dependence on multinational corporations for seeds they might otherwise have saved, and force them to buy chemicals year after year that strip their soil of minerals and pollute their water.
The second half of Lotter's study, Academic Capitalism and the Loss of Scientific Integrity, chronicles the questionable circumstances under which GMO technology was given the green light. He details the effects of "the large-scale restructuring of university science programs in the past 25 years from a model based on non-proprietary science for the 'public good' to the 'academic capitalism' model." He goes on to describe how dependence on corporate dollars corrupted science to do its bidding with "deficient scientific protocols, bias, and possible fraud in industry-sponsored and industry-conducted research; increasing politically and commercially driven manipulation of science within federal regulatory bodies such as the FDA; and bias in the peer-review process, tolerance by the scientific community of biotechnology industry manipulation of the information environment, and of biased treatment and harassment of non-compliant scientists."
The fact that so many of our government agency employees have worked for the very corporations they are now supposed to regulate, in the areas they govern and that so many officials have received campaign donations from these same corporations could account for their tendency to rely on this dubious research, but perhaps the reason so many of them continue to ride this precarious bandwagon is that they're not so great at science, either. Genetic modification is hard to wrap your head around.
One would think, however, that the big-brained folks at the Gates Foundation would have no problem understanding the science behind biotech and the potential problems with it, but if the government and academics are on the bandwagon and Monsanto is behind the wheel, Gates is definitely pitching in for gas with grants to the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA). What gives? Lotter and Powell both allude, in terms of America's acceptance of this dubiously tested technology, to our belief, as a culture, in science and innovation, and who stands for innovation more than Gates?
But bearing in mind that we are talking about our ecology, our health and our global food supply -- not really the kind of stuff we want to leave to chance -- we would likely do well to follow the example of our European counterparts, who, as Powell points out, have "tended to operate according to the precautionary principle essentially expressed as 'better safe than sorry.'"
In the end, Lotter says that he's not exclusively anti-GMOs, and whether this stance is meant to temper the rocking of the academic boat (a doctor of agroecology, Lotter has taught for years within the system he's bucking, and is not on a tenure track) or a genuine desire to call back only the most grievously dangerous of these technologies, it makes sense not to throw out the baby with the proverbial bathwater. But I would encourage consumers (and Gates, and government agencies) to err on the side of caution as well, and to entertain the idea that real innovation in the food and agriculture world may not be the stuff of spliced genes, petrochemicals and intellectual property but rather a better understanding of the nature of soil and weather and time-tested methods of food production, like compost and worms.
Originally published on The Green Fork.
Follow Leslie Hatfield on Twitter: www.twitter.com/lesliehatfield
Timothy LaSalle: Organic Agriculture Beats Biotech at its Own Game
The organic community may eventually be open to biotech crops if long-term, independent studies show there are no ecological or human health impacts. Before then, why risk it?
Cities innovate faster as they grow bigger. They create enormous problems, but they also create solutions faster. Cities seem to know how to get out of their own way.
Richard Chin: New Momentum on Malaria
Synthetic biology is a brand new area of biotechnology. The goal is to use genetic engineering technology to build brand new biological machines and processes de novo. It's an area that has tremendous potential.
Jeffrey Smith: Lyme/Autism Group Blasts Genetically Modified Foods as Dangerous
Stop eating dangerous genetically modified foods! That's the upshot of the Lyme Induced Autism (LIA) Foundation's position paper released today.
Loading comments… 
it seems to me that what we have been doing with our technology
One very interestin
"Advanced technology belongs in the alternativ
Why? Because you think that if you burn this stuff it never gets into the environmen
Who said anything about biofuels? Solar, wind, - yes. MAYBE algae, The point is it is OK to feed strange things to machines, but I would rather not conduct experiment
Tom
Roy Mankovitz, Director
www.Montec
I am wondering where the idea comes from that we are exceeding the "carrying capacity" of the planet. How do you define "carrying capacity"? How many planets did you study to arrive at empirical conclusion
What motivates you to say that we have no ways to avoid dumping toxic substances completely
The claim that feedlot animals can stand in as clinical trial subjects for humans is ridiculous
Please specify which pandemics we are looking at that supposedly will wipe out humanity. As of now we are growing strong and it's unlikely that we will stop growing until 2100, by which time there will be about 11-12 billion of us. It will take at least another century to shrink the number of humans significan
Regarding toxins, if you are not aware of the studies showing the huge worldwide buildup of human-made environmen
Regarding the health effects on animals and humans from GM foods, see Genetic Roulette by Jeffrey Smith and http://www
Regarding future pandemics, take the swine flu as a recent example, and mutate it a few times. Repeat as necessary to get the desired result.
If you think this planet is carrying the human race quite nicely, we clearly do not share the same view of reality.
Hi I'm Don Lotter, the author of the GMO food paper(s) under discussion
The paper is actually two papers: Geneticall
Part 1: The Developmen
Part 2: Academic Capitalism and the Loss of Scientific Integrity
If you want an easier overview, watch my Google Video talk at
http://vid
or do a search on Google Video for "lotter geneticall
I am posting more comments elsewhere on this page, re: comments that the paper is "speculati
We would be much better served by following true organic practices (not government approved, warped "organic" practises) wherein all the systems are inter-rela
Tom
You can, by the way, follow any practice you like as long as it does not violate food safety. Worst case you are not allowed to sell your produce. That does not mean you can't eat it yourself.
Advanced technology belongs in the alternativ
It just seems an unwise area to be mucking around in. Kind of like fouling your only planet with CO2 and methane. Oh, wait, we are doing that. Darn.
Tom
I support biotech (and work in the field), because I believe that science and technology are our best hope to make major inroads on serious global problems like hunger. Though scientific advances take time, and we need to be patient and not paint with such a broad brush. I'm all for worms and compost, but I'm just not sure we can fight this holocaust with that alone.
Hunger is not caused by the fact that there isn't enough food in the world. It stems from creating a market around food, meaning only those with money have access to this fundamenta
Besides all this, it lends itself to environmen
Why would pest-resis
I agree with you that we are eating too much meat, we make too much corn syrup and, yes, we would have enough food for everyone, we just don't share it. But none of that has to do with GMO crop. All of it existed decades before we even had control over genes.
We won't solve world hunger with the western diet that's killing us in droves and degrading our environmen
No, we won't. It's still better to die from having too much bacon than from not having any. That's an empirical fact. So much so that one has to ask if those who are doubting it had to go hungry even once in their life.
While I understand your fear of the new (and that's mostly what reflects in your choice of language which lacks science content but is full with rhetorical devices that are trying to intimidate
Also, this report by the UN Conference on Trade and Developmen
.
There are also many studies that debunk the myth that GMO technology creates greater yield. See the Union of Concerned Scientists
Also, Monsanto is a funder of Jeffrey Sach's nonprofit.
The way it's been done in the vast majority of the past required four farmers to keep a non-farmer alive. In good times. In bad times it took ten for one. Since we have left those historic times behind, agricultur
The abstract of the first article says nothing about the use of modern crop... or modern tilling methods. It says nothing about water... and it's not even clear to me that it says anything about GM crops. What is says is that we might be able to get away from the synthetic nitrogen fertilizer
Now about GMO and yield... the way I understand GMO, it's not even about yield. It's about using less water, less fertilizer
I understand where you are going, but there is just not enough substance there to actually get there.
I suggest folks read Robert Paarlberg'
My papers (it is actually two papers, see my recent posting) have over 100 references each, most of them from scientific journals, that document the enormous flaws in the transgenic foods process and products.
Which of those scientific works to you think is "speculati
Or how about Dr. Arpaud Pusztai's paper in the the Lancet, considered the top medical journal in the world, documentin
Which specific parts of the papers are "fallacies
I rewrote each of those papers over 20 times and I would challenge anyone to call them poorly written. Nearly all reviewers have said they are very well-writt