Harnessing a Demon for Humanity

‘We say it’s Frankenfood and we won’t eat it!” These are the shrieks of opposition to genetically modified foods now echoing throughout Europe and North America. An intense campaign against these foods is active worldwide, enlisting a large coalition of supporters that includes Greenpeace, Prince Charles, Dennis Kucinich, Jeremy Rifkind, and vast legions of the passionately ill-informed.Europeans – having had a long history of bitter opposition to all sorts of food including potatoes, tomatoes, and coffee (which the church once tried to ban using a smear campaign much like the one now directed against GM foods) – seem especially obtuse about these matters. “All across Britain and most of the rest of Europe,” the New York Times reported in February 2003, “shoppers would be hard pressed to find any genetically modified products on grocery store shelves, and that is precisely how most people want it.”Do we care about this in America? Surrounded as we are by mountains of beautiful groceries (including lots of “organic” produce) this issue would not seem so pressing to us now, if only the ominous shadow of Malthus would leave us in peace. So Nina Fedoroff and her colleague, Nancy Marie Brown, believe the time has come to put an end to this indulgent ignorance of the realities of food.Ignore the coy title of “Mendel in the Kitchen: A Scientist’s View of Genetically Modified Foods” (Joseph Henry Press, 370 pages, $24.95); the authors are deeply serious about the choices facing us. Think of it this way: Every human being on the planet (and that includes us) either gets enough to eat, or dies. It is that simple. The issue is survival. Period.With deliberate calm, the authors explain not only the biological science of growing plants for food but also what has been done in the past and what can be done in the future to produce more and better food on less land. They are trying to give us enough information for us to judge for ourselves the truth of the belief that genetically modified crops are somehow “against nature” and should be abandoned.Plants have been genetically modified for millennia; to change a wild plant into food requires changing its genes by selective breeding. In Walden, Thoreau says “making the yellow soil express its summer thought in bean leaves and blossoms rather than in wormwood … making the earth say beans instead of grass – this was my daily work.” This was in 1854, before Mendel explained the genetic mechanism in plants. But farmers have been deliberately modifying food plants like this since the end of the Stone Age.At that time, the world population was relatively stable at 8 to 10 million people. As farming took hold, the population began to explode. The number of people on earth reached 3 billion by 1950, then jumped to 6 billion in almost a single human generation. Farming kept pace with this explosion by advances in plant breeding by genetic manipulation and by the expanded use of nitrogen fertilizer; the Green Revolution transformed world agriculture. Unfortunately, these great gains have begun to level off.Ms. Fedoroff and Brown are blunt and to the point. The problem is that the yield limits of most food plants is fast approaching, which means that science will have to find other methods to double or even triple food production to provide for 8 or 9 billion people (the point at which the world population is expected to stabilize). How is this going to be possible?We have two choices, according to the authors. “We can cultivate more land, knowing that land put under the plow is land taken away from black bears and monarch butterflies, Bengal tigers and tropical birds. Or we can produce more food from the land that is already being farmed.” Under the circumstances, this continuing European neo-Luddite resistance to genetic science borders on the obscene.Consider the case of the rejected American wheat in Africa. In 2002 Zambia’s president rejected a shipment of donated corn from America, ostensibly because genetically modified food had not been proven safe to eat. According to the Los Angeles Times, “Many Zambians in rural areas have resorted to eating leaves, twigs, and even poisonous berries and nuts to cope with the worst food crisis in a decade.” But the Zambian president rejected the shipment of American corn, saying, “We would rather starve than get something toxic.”Why did he do this? The corn was safe; his logic was economic. If the Zambian government were to lose its “GM-free” status for its food exports, it would jeopardize its European market, which insists that food be GM free. Ideas, even lunatic ideas, have consequences. Thus, the private and personal choices of European shoppers, who are totally ignorant of the relevant science, set the public policy of African nations. As the authors point out, “African and other less developed nations are caught in a terrible bind. With almost 3 million people at risk of starvation, they are faced with a choice between immediate suffering and closing the door on future economic prosperity.”What the world needs now is not to “demonize” biotechnology but to continue to harness it for the benefit of all humanity. Just as we have done for the last 10,000 years.Mr. Pettus last wrote for these pages on scientific fraud.

Harnessing a Demon for Humanity

Harnessing a Demon for Humanity

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