Guest opinion: A juicy debate: Hybrids vs. heirlooms.

It is by George Ball, past president of The American Horticultural Society and chairman of the W. Atlee Burpee & Co.

I very much like:

“Increasingly, NGOs and activists are encouraging Third World farmers, in Haiti and elsewhere, to grow heirlooms in lieu of hybrids. By so doing, they are putting their sophisticated personal tastes and aesthetics before the life and death needs of the farmers and their communities – people for whom a poor harvest can be a death sentence. This is nouveau imperialism at its most pernicious: ‘Let them eat heirlooms’.”

The ‘crap detector’ comment was NOT directed towards you, Mr. von Mogel or this website. After all, the people here actually have a clue about what they’re writing about.

My comment is directed to the non-expert. Unless you’re an ideologue to whom the facts are completely malleable, then you should think about what you read and ask if it makes sense in terms of how the world normally works and the motivations of those involved. Secondly, even if your crap detector doesn’t go off, run a couple of neutral language searches and scan the results looking for the other side of the story.

Applying that here, let us assume that Monsanto is donating seed strictly for public relations purposes. They’re not likely to donate GMO seed and try to impose their usual rules. So you could just do a couple of searches.

A search route I did not use here, but often use is the site search. I want to read the official line from mansanto. I’ll assume that Monsanto’s main site is monsanto.com. If that doesn’t work, I’ll just search on monsanto and find the official site.

So site:monsanto.com gmo haiti donate

and there you have enough information to answer most questions. Of course, Monsanto could be lying, but the chances, if you think about it (bizarre for many people who participate on the internet) is extremely unlikely.

Why the long comment here? Well, I’m going to add it to my blog entry anyhow.

One more time, I’m impressed by this site and those who write for it and comment here.

I hope you’re not saying Biofortified’s authors make “claims are made that should set off any rational person’s crap detector”. We try pretty hard to keep our internal “crap detectors” on high alert whenever looking at contentious issues in agriculture.

Perhaps all the news stories are wrong, but I’ve seen requests and demands that the seeds be burnt all over the place. For example (from Common Dreams):

…farmers would have to buy the seeds before they could burn them in protest. Asked if he knew of any farmers who were burning Monsanto’s donated seeds, the MPP’s Jean-Baptiste said no, but he wishes they would.

I’m not a fan of sensationalism or strawmen either. However, I do think it’s important for people to know what people like Chavannes Jean-Baptiste are telling farmers and other in Haiti to do. Unless people are putting words in Jean-Baptiste’s mouth, this certainly sounds like a call for seed burning. It would be cool to have a conversation with someone who’s actually in Haiti, working to improve agriculture, but if Mark Hare works for the same organization as the person calling for burning, I don’t know how useful that would be. I might give it a shot though.

The history of ag intervention in Haiti holds a lot of misguided attempts to help. The creole pig example is very sad. Another example I know of is attempts to introduce sorghum (at least I think it was sorghum) with high yields to replace local low-yielding varieties. The problem was that the goats kept by most farmers could easily eat the seeds off the high yielding but short plants while the local varieties were tall enough to keep the goats from eating the seeds.

Every intervention, even with the best intentions, can have negative consequences. I understand that, and know at least a little about some failed interventions in the past. However, there have been some major philosophy shifts in the way ag intervention is done, including much more local farmer participation. Still, fear or uneasiness that any intervention might make the situation worse is warranted. I don’t think anyone’s dismissing the concerns of farmers – at least, I’m not. What I do have a problem with is activists who spread rumors and falsehoods in an effort to take choices away from farmers. Lying about sterile seed or poison coated seed is just wrong, even if their hearts are in the right place. If they have to lie to get their point across, it wasn’t a very strong point in the first place.

Here is what is bizarre. There is at least one NGO in Haiti developing hybrid seeds. That includes ‘normal’ hybrids and hybrids that are better nutritionally.

How did I learn about them? By asking myself questions, such as, “Is anybody else working with hybrids in Haiti?” and then turning them into simple search queries.

I’m not critical of experts, such as here, when they don’t think in this way, because that just isn’t the way experts tend to think.

Nor am I particularly critical of others when they don’t think this way. I thought this way 15 years ago, with my first internet crusade. And it helps if you’ve had a long exposure to the Skeptic movement.

But I keep reading comment after comment and article after article where claims are made that should set off any rational person’s crap detector (plausibility detector).

Sure, I understand that the originator often lies or distorts the facts. No surprise. But it is those large number of less ideologically driven people who merely parrot what they’ve read that bothers me. Perhaps they don’t exist, but I think they do.

They’re not willing to spend a couple of minutes thinking about a simple search query and scanning the results. Perhaps they don’t understand that for most controversial claims, someone, somewhere has written up a thoughtful response.

Yes, I’m on a soapbox and maybe this isn’t the right place. But I do get a blog posting out of this at least. See http://vaccineswork.blogspot.com/2010/06/on-soapbox.html

My blog entry is Monsanto and Haiti. It, like many others of my entries starts with examining claims made at Huffington-Post, commenting there and adapting them for my blog.
http://vaccineswork.blogspot.com/2010/05/monsanto-and-haiti.html

Information on nutritional hybrids in haiti can be found at http://www.oreworld.org/qpm.htm ORE also grows open pollination seed and ‘normal’ hybrid seed.

In the meantime, please stop attacking the straw-man argument that anti-Monsanto people are urging farmers to burn the seeds. It was hyperbole, which I understand in your view was irresponsible. But at the protest in Hinche, they burned an inch-high pile of the seeds in symbolic protest. That’s it. As far as I know, nobody is actually urging Haitian farmers to burn tons of seeds. I’ve seen various bloggers, even on the Huffington Post, claim that the MPP already burned 400+ tons of donated seed in the protest. I wish people would fact-check.

I’d also recommend that you familiarize yourself with the history of American-led development schemes in rural Haiti before dismissing the protesters and their supporters out-of-hand – SHADA, the Creole pig, Miami rice, etc. I’m not saying the anti-Monsanto folks are right. But they have reason to be suspicious, and no one from Monsanto or its supporters is acknowledging that. If you’re interested in dialogue and progress, that might be a first step.

Contact/bio info for Mark Hare here. All it takes is a Google search. Having worked here in Haiti for several years now, I imagine there’s something to what he says. Would be cool to see an exchange between your blog’s authors and him posted here.

You conveniently omitted the first part of the Wikipedia item “hybrid seed”:

“In agriculture and gardening, hybrid seed is seed produced by artificially cross-pollinated plants. Hybrids are bred to improve the characteristics of the resulting plants, such as better yield, greater uniformity, improved color, disease resistance, and so forth. Today, hybrid seed is predominant in agriculture and home gardening, and is one of the main contributing factors to the dramatic rise in agricultural output during the last half of the 20th century. In the US, the commercial market was launched in the 1920s, with the first hybrid maize.”

The ideological opposition to the distribution of hybrid seed in Haiti is thus tantamount to denying Haitian farmers the benefit of a “ dramatic rise in agricultural output”.

Karl is right about the use of “cannot” in a Wikipedia article which is shamefully short and general, and also wrong (hybrid seed is not “predominant in agriculture: wheat, barley, oats, and rice varieties are still predominantly pure lines).

“Hybrid seed cannot be saved…”? They can. Actually, in circumstances like those prevailing in Haitian agriculture, seed saved from commercial hybrids is quite likely to perform better than “saved seed”, a significant proportion of which is grain sold on markets for consumption but used as seed.

But this is quite pedantic. The paradigm of the use of hybrid seed in agriculture is that the benefit that accrues to farmers in terms of higher and more regular yields, better quality, easier cultivation, etc. exceeds by far the cost of having to buy seed every year.

The assumptions underlying seed saving are also wrong in certain cases, particularly cross-pollinating crops such as maize (corn). But this would need to be explained in more detail than what a comment allows.

I am sorry to say here that the polemic over seed saving and hybrids assumes that farmers who go for hybrids are congenital idiots; in the case of developing countries, the polemic seeks to ensure that they and their agriculture remain “developing”, that is, in view of the increase of their population on the one side and the further development of others, remain on the slippery slope of poverty and dependence.

So sad. Maybe the activists are proposing that the farmers steal the seed and burn it?