Mark Lynas’s speech has had over a quarter of a million downloads
Last week, environmentalist Mark Lynas presented an articulate and painfully honest apology for his significant role in starting the anti-GMO movement in the 1990s. He said that it was the most successful campaign in which he has ever been involved, but after finally looking into the science, he now deeply regrets what he and others accomplished. While it is gratifying to have a figure like Lynas make such a turn-about, it does nothing to mitigate the damage of which this anti-science movement has perpetrated on humanity and the environment. Ideally, such a dramatic reversal will induce others in the movement to rethink their positions. but this sort of openness to letting the science speak into bias is likely to be rare.
Lynas is right that anti-GMO campaigners have been extremely successful at blocking, delaying, or destroying potential crop improvements via biotechnology. Lynas had a lot of ground to cover in his speech, so he only gave four examples of the ways that his previous movement has achieved its ends:
- In Europe, politicians influenced by the anti-GMO movement ignored the input from their own scientists to adopt hyper-precautionary and obstructive regulatory barriers to the technology. They have thus limited the ability of their own farmers to satisfy more of the substantial demand that the region puts on global food supplies.
- The European stance has greatly influenced the policies of many developing nations in Africa and Asia. Such “rich world thinking” denies poor farmers the advances that could significantly improve their food security. See Robert Paarlberg’s excellent summary of this phenomenon in his book “Starved for Science.”
- Phobia-driven (or publicity-seeking) vandalism by anti-GMO extremists has delayed or halted several crop innovations by destroying experimental field plots (e.g. Greenpeace “actions” against biotech wheat, or the destruction of a French field trial of grape rootstocks).
- The anti-GMO movement has intensified the regulatory environment so that the cost of biotech crop development now requires the resources of a large company. This reduces the potential contributions from smaller start-ups, academics or government sponsored programs.
Beyond what Lynas described, there are other mechanisms by which the anti-GMO movement has frustrated biotech crop progress. The threat of controversy generated by anti-GMO campaigners leads to various forms of brand protectionism which can become a non-regulatory barrier to technology adoption:
- The threat of protests has been most effective when applied to companies with major consumer brands and enough market leverage to dictate what happens for a given crop. The classic case of this phenomenon was how MacDonalds, in three phone calls to major frozen French fry producers, put an end to biotech potatoes in the US and Canada. Potatoes are an extraordinarily difficult crop to improve through breeding because of their complex genetics and vegetative propagation. Biotechnology was a promising way to deliver traits for important pest issues as well as quality and health benefits, and the major potato buyers knew it. However; the risk from brand-damaging protests drove the decision.
The specter of consumer backlash (fanned by anti-science propaganda) concerned major wheat importers/millers in Europe and Japan. Their response was to threaten to boycott all North American wheat if a single acre of commercial GMO wheat was planted. US and Canadian growers, faced with such a significant drop in export sales, reluctantly asked Syngenta and Monsanto to halt their biotech wheat programs. For the future the US, Canadian and Australian wheat industries have all decided to block any future blackmail threats by doing a simultaneous launch of biotech wheat when and if it becomes available. In the mean time there has been a multi-decade delay for positive technologies for one of the most important of global food crops.
- Anti-GMO campaigning has made the entire topic of “GMOs” sufficiently toxic that the growers/marketers of many crops wish simply to avoid any impact on their crop’s “brand” in the consumer market place. This is what we are seeing today in the US/Canadian apple industry where a small, grower-based company has developed an innovative, consumer oriented trait. The nervous industry has reacted quite negatively because of concerns about the apple “brand” even though those biotech apples would only reach the market advertised specifically as biotech-improved. This sort of thinking has also effectively blocked the use of biotechnology to solve problems in grapes as well as in most other fruit and vegetable crops.
Opportunities Lost
There is a long and growing list of agricultural, environmental, and health improvement that “could have been” if the anti-GMO movement had not been so effective. Some of these are only “nice to haves” like a fine wine. Some of them are significant advances such as potatoes that ward off their major insect and virus pests. Some of them are things like wheat which is less likely to have mycotoxin contamination. Some of them are things that could enable poor farmers to produce more local food with less need for inputs or more resistance to environmental stresses.
What Mark Lynas realized is that it is just as detrimental to the future of humanity to ignore the scientific consensus on crop biotechnology as it is to ignore the scientific consensus on climate change. The fact that there are groups successfully blocking rational action on both these fronts presents a synergistically dire threat to efforts to feed humanity.
You are welcome to comment here and/or to email me at savage.sd@gmail.com.
GMO protest image from University of Washington
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Steve Savage is an agricultural scientist (plant pathology) with >30 years of experience in agricultural technology. He has worked for Colorado State University, DuPont (fungicide development), Mycogen (biocontrol development), and for the past 13 years as an independent. He also has a little vineyard in his back yard near San Diego. His website is <a href="http://appliedmythology.blogspot.com You can follow him on Twitter @grapedoc 
This is very one sided. I wanted to keep an open mind about the subject but just calling something “anti-science” and complaining about the potential downside of an action doesn’t explain to me WHY we need to change apples, WHY changing wheat’s characteristics won’t lose important nutrients or WHY food may become intolerable for some or more fattening, etc. It doesn’t tell the story of farmers being sued/ ruined when GMO seeds blow onto their land or abut the ruination of their crops, it doesn’t give any reason at all why anyone might want to go slow with changing the basic traits of something everyone depends on for survival and with no assurances except from some profit-driven corporations and their defenders. This is much like the fracking industry keeping secret which chemicals they are blasting into our groundwater, people objecting to this secrecy and then being called anti-science. Where is the science proving GMO foods are safe? Maybe I can find another article called Counting The Cost Of Experimenting On GE foods We’ve Evolved To Eat Over Millennia elsewhere on this site? Saving the starving sounds like a worthy plan, making corps rich at humanity’s expense, not so much.
There is a difference between a mind that is open to new ideas, and a mind so open that everything sensible falls out.
Do you apply the same question to breeders? Do you enjoy different varieties of apples, of different fruits etc – if so then your why is there.
Because the characteristics of wheat are of vital importance to its sale value, changes to wheat may well alter these characteristics, but if they do what you have is a moderately interesting piece of academic work, not a commercial product.
Why would it? Can we simply invent whys willy nilly and expect answers? WHY may GM food turn black to white and white to black, and if it does should we all avoid zebra crossings?
It also doesn’t tell the story of a chicken who mistakes an acorn falling for the end of a world, probably as both are equally fictitious.
well, predominantly one would assume because going too slow with such things is utterly counterproductive and silly.
Which is an interesting point of view, particularly as one assumes as soon as assurances come you’ll lump the assurers in with the defenders of profit-driven corporations.
Well, in that it is an industry, but beyond that, not so much.
Genera on this site provides a whole bunch of it. More interestingly though is where is the science showing GMO foods cause harm? (as this is a question which can actually be addressed, with a null hypothesis of no harm – one cannot go in with a null hypothesis of harm and then prove non-harm, one can however prove harm and disprove safety – this hasn’t been done)
Good then that part the first is a possibility (albeit one vastly underutilized to date due to anti-GMO sentiments) and that part the second holds absolutely no basis in reality.
Laura,
I’ll address a couple of your points. Consider wheat. There is a new strain of stem rust disease spreading around the world. Breeders have identified a resistance gene to counter it via conventional breeding, but now there is a need to introgress that gene into all the hundreds of wheat varieties adapted to specific regions around the world with their usually very specific quality standards. That challenge would be no different for a biotech trait – it is the sort of challenge that breeders have been dealing with for a very long time.
As for wanting to slow down, a lot of that depends on your perspective. I first started hearing about the idea of engineering crops in 1977 and that was two years after the first big scientific meeting to consider if and how to proceed with genetic engineering. I then remember year after year hearing an update at scientific meetings on how the regulatory framework was being designed for the EPA, USDA and FDA. In 1988 I attended another major scientific meeting on risk assessment for biotechnology where a wide range of scientific disciplines were represented. Then in the early 90s there were closely monitored field trials. It wasn’t until 1995/6 that any commercial plantings happened. That certainly didn’t feel rushed. How is it that now, 38 years after the first biotech safety meeting, we are still debating this for places like Africa where traits could be offered to small farmers for free. Here is a quote from that continent you should consider: “You people in the developed world are certainly free to debate the merits of genetically modified foods, but can we please eat first” Florence Wambugu, 2003
I have good news Laura: the Arctic Apples actually retain more nutrients than control apples. You can read more about that here: http://www.biofortified.org/2012/07/okanagan-specialty-fruits/
Yay science!
For me the most cogent argument against genetically modified crops is IP rights associated with the seed. We already have situations where people are starving in the middle of fertile farm land because importation of subsidized grain makes it unprofitable to farm. GM seed stock threatens to increase this situation dramatically. If you talk to those who want labeling of genetically modified products this is a big part of the conversation. It isn’t that genetically modified foods are somehow poisonous it is that the move to genetically modified seed stock prevents access to agriculture for the world’s poor.
This would explain why GM cotton, for example, has been such a resounding success in such vastly rich agricultural nations as India, Mali and China. Because poor farmers don’t have access to the seed. Yes. That must be it. All the poor farmers using this stuff are actually lying about their income vastly. Pam Ronald’s flood tolerant rice which was scuppered utterly by regulatory requirements inflated due to anti-GM sentiment and fear was specifically for poor farmers (thankfully they managed to breed the trait in succesfully and still helped folk, albeit on a rather later timeline than had they been able to get the GM varieties out there).
Robert,
If there are importation issues, they don’t have any connection to GM crops. We are in a global grain market where demand is outstripping supply, but again, that has no connection to GM crops. GM actually offers a great deal for the world’s poor. The technology is being offered for poor farmers for free by many organizations and companies. The denial for the poor is mostly driven by the fear driven by rich regions like Europe who are themselves dependent on imports from the nations that use biotechnology to increase their productivity. The threat to the poor isn’t from technology, it is from anti-technology
Laura is astute and absolutely correct. Consumers overwhelmingly DO NOT WANT toxic chemicals, unnatural elements and poisons in their food supply or breeding anywhere in the natural environment.
Consumer sentiment ALONE is enough to block the toxic, profit-driven gmo movement, and governments must listen to and respect the wishes of their constituents–not the wishes of an oligarchy of scientists and bureaucrats who have sold out to monopolies and corporations.
There should be some respect for the sentiments of the religious community, as well. Pope Benedict placed promoting gmos high on the list of of new “sins” that will harm humanity.
The lack of the ability to make informed decisions on the part of the consumer, secrecy involved in the development of these poisons, lack of labeling and knowledge of long-term health consequences, widespread contamination of acreage and lack of democracy involved with GMOs is alarming.
Consumers don’t want buzz words with no meaning in their food? That is nice. (really, unnatural elements? What on Earth does that even mean.
Y’know, if it were toxic I’d be all for it being blocked, alas (for your whole spit flecked tirade at least) it isn’t, and thus you’re tilting at windmills.
I will, I think, pass on taking the word of a guy who spent vast swathes of his career sheltering pedophiles on what is, and is not, a sin.
The lack of education on these things is certainly alarming. Although I think we both mean completely different things when we say this.
Actually, the Catholic church has called for less regulation of GM and more availability to those in need..
http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/v29/n1/full/nbt0111-11.html
GMO’s declared sinful by the Catholic Church? Are you really advocating to take scientific advice from the people that took 300+ years to pardon Galileo ? I guess your home orrery has a complete set of crystal spheres.
I am not part of a particular group, I want to say that at the outset.
I also want to say that I have a background in science, having begun a pursuit of biology at Reed College years ago. I ended up not gong that direction as a career, but just to say I’m about as techie as they come. I love the study of nature. And am not “anti-science”.
Having said this, I want to say that I find the pro-GMO writings, including the one that started this blog, loaded with name-calling.
Personally, I am deeply suspicious of GM foods, and have eliminated them from my diet. The idea of having the pesticide IN the food, not just on the surface–and that the pesticide (the Cry proteins) destroys the intestinal tract of insects–frankly, I hate.
It cannot be denied that a Monsanto employee, Paul Taylor, was the head of FDA at the time GM was approved by the FDA. It cannot be denied that the 44,000 pages of documents from the FDA approval reveal that FDA scientists warned of higher risk for GMO organisms.
Finally, not to go on too long:
828 scientists from around the world are calling for a complete moratorium on GMO’s. Their open letter is fully documented. Below is just an excerpt:
“A university-based survey of 8200 field trials of the most widely grown GM crops, herbicide-tolerant soya beans – revealed that they yield 6.7% less and required two to five times more herbicides than non-GM varieties(3). This has been confirmed by a more recent study in the University of Nebraska(4). Yet other problems have been identified: erratic performance, disease susceptibility(5), fruit abortion(6) and poor economic returns to farmers(7).” http://www.i-sis.org.uk/list.php
Now, maybe you disagree with their conclusions. But could we please stop the unfair rhetoric?
Regarding that list of 828 “scientists” – who are they? I’ve started browsing it and I’m finding a significant amount of people without academic titles as well as many with “only” BSc’s and MSc’s. Examples (I started from the bottom of the list):
754 Najeeba Naja Ph.D THE QURAN IS TRUE MANKIND ARE U DEAF DUMB BIND WERE U OR WERE U NOT A DROP OF SPERN ISNT THE ONE WHO GIV E LIFE able to GIVE LIFE TO THE dead THE HUMAN RACE I ISLAM IS TRUE USA
755 Elaine Needham illustrator researcher writer speaker none USA
758 Panatey Nice To See Your Site Is Being Updated Company inc USA [scientist?]
762 Trina Paulus food issues sculpture writing Hope For the Flowers USA
768 William Pizer Many years as an organic farmer Schoharie Certified Organic Hydroponic Greenhouses USA
772 Linda Prout M.Sc nutrition writer speaker consultant Lifehift USA
777 Claudia Riumallo Mother concerned about her children future health Mother USA [!!!!!]
778 John Robb permaculture USA
781 James Rose Ceptual Institute USA
788 Thomas J. Saunders Student Environmental Science Humboldt State Univ. Arcata USA
797 Colleen Sheppard Wholistic Energy Therapist USA
803 Kim Smith I consume only organic food and desire to see a ban put on GM as soon as possible USA
It kind of goes on like that.
Some familiar names:
211 Prof. Gilles-Eric Seralini Laboratoire de Biochimie& Moleculaire Univ. Caen France
292 Dr. Vandana Shiva Research Institute for Science and Ecology India
418 Prof. Terje Traavik Virologist University of Tromso Norway
576 Dr. Mae-Wan Ho Geneticist and Biophysicist Open University UK
813 Prof. John Vandermeer Biologist Univ. Michigan Ann Arbor USA
First you say you have “background in science,” then you say this:
“The idea of having the pesticide IN the food, not just on the surface–and that the pesticide (the Cry proteins) destroys the intestinal tract of insects–frankly, I hate.”
I do not have science “as a background,” and yet I know that all foods contain pesticides in one form or another, and that the pesticide you cite, the Cry proteins, are only activation by enzymes in specific insects’ guts.
Finally, at the end, you cite a quack organization as a source. Scroll here:
http://www.quackwatch.com/04ConsumerEducation/nonrecorg.html
Keep taking those biology courses.
Our plant-based foods naturally contain many pesticides that evolved to protect them from insects and other consumers. Some, like capsaicin, we specifically breed for greater concentration.
Here is a good starter article on natural pesticides in our food:
http://www.pnas.org/content/87/19/7777.full.pdf
Yes, the Bt protein works in the digestive tract of insects, but an alkaline pH (usually >8) is required to fold the protein to its active state. This is very different from the human gut pH of about 1.
Mr. Hunt, I agree wholeheartedly that it would be best to stop the unfair rhetoric . But how about you being the first to do that.
I mean, for example, you may suspect a possible conflict of interest because Michael Taylor of the FDA has previous connections to Monsanto, but considering that you got his name wrong and also incorrectly stated that he was the head of FDA at the time GM was approved, the words “it cannot be denied” seem to be rather exaggerated.
And what does it mean for herbicide tolerant soybeans to need two to five times more herbicides than soybeans that are killed by herbicides? Isn’t that like saying that cars need two to five times more gasoline than bicycles?