Sorry, Monsanto: The Science Is on Our Side, Not Yours

[FarrenH]

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Last edited Sun Mar 29, 2015, 10:29 AM - Edit history (9)

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/science-sushi/2011/07/18/mythbusting-101-organic-farming-conventional-agriculture/

"Industrial monoculture" and "organic" are not mutually exclusive categories and a lot of "organic" farming is still industrial monoculture. Even where polyculture is adoped, industrial farming methods are still commonly used.

The demand for so-called organic foods more or less ensures that a lot of food labeled "organic" comes from industrial farming efforts, especially in the USA. And that more or less requires a lot of pesticide and herbicide use for consistent yields.

The United Nations has recently for the first time acknowledged that monoculture is unsustainable and constitutes a risk to the world's long-term food security. A recent report suggests that to ensure long-term sustainability we need to turn to permaculture/agroecology-based farming methods, with smaller farms and more labour-intensive production. And I'm a 100% behind this. A problem in developed countries like the USA is that out of the tens of millions that get a warm fuzzy eating so-called "organic" foods, very few want to move out of the suburbs and cities and make this a reality. They're still trapped in the urban consumer pattern, so industrial farming methods and monoculture dominates.

And even once this is acknowledged, there are other rational connections and distinctions those with the loudest opinions fail to make. If anything, precise genetic engineering of food plants will improve permaculture efforts massively.

(1) Permaculture *doesn't* imply non-engineered plants. Precisely engineered plants can massively advance the cause of small-scale permaculture and even reduce environmental impact

(2) Bad IP regimes can obstruct such efforts (as stated earlier I oppose patenting of life forms) but that is a separate issue from whether GMOs qua GMOs are bad. There is absolutely zero scientific sense behind the latter kind of thinking. We entered the anthropocene several centuries ago. There is nothing distinctively "natural" about any of our food crops today, or most land ecosystems across the planet.

As stated in my preceding post, a huge number of popular "organic" cultivars were created through mutation breeding in the early- to mid- 20th century. This involves bathing plants in massive quantities of radiation or mutagenic chemicals to trigger mutation, then just selecting the varieties that arise that have desirable properties. This method introduced countless cultivars with vastly less well-understood and little-studied genetic changes than modern, more precise engineering methods, yet across the globe we see these cultivars sold as "organic" while poorly informed consumers freak out about so-called "GMOs" that are obviously better understood and represent less genetic change.

And appealing to the possibility of non-mutation-bred plants only being grown doesn't strengthen specious claims about "natural" foodstuffs either. We never bothered assessing the ecological impact of all the South American breeds that became staples across the globe when we introduced them to alien ecosystems in the colonial era, or the tolerances of human populations who had not co-evolved with them. Even claiming they're in some sense "natural" and not artificial in their original environments is specious, as examination of the difference between wild teosinte, the plant corn was selectively bred from and corn, will make obvious. Current evidence suggests the genetic changes that brought about these changes were not gradual, but involved one or two significant mutations that were rapidly propagated through artificial selection during the last two millennia: