The Real Scoop by Doug Gurian-Sherman
| "The Real Scoop", by Doug Gurian-Sherman, offers a science-based perspective on industrial-style agriculture approaches, including CAFOs (confined animal feeding operations), genetic engineering, and other methods with enormous impacts on human health, the environment, and society. Doug is a UCS scientist with a background in plant pathology and author of recent groundbreaking reports on CAFOs and genetic engineering. Check out "The Real Scoop" often for reliable analysis by Doug, joined occasionally by UCS colleagues, on breaking news from the world of science and agriculture. |
August 4, 2009
What Seed Companies Don’t Want Us to Know—the Performance of Genetically Engineered Crops
Since the release earlier this year of our report Failure to Yield—which showed that genetic engineering (GE) has had only a modest impact on yields of corn and soybeans in the United States—there has been renewed debate about why so many U.S. farmers nevertheless choose to buy and grow GE seed. A recent article covering our report in the leading biotechnology journal Nature Biotechnology (subscribers only), quoted one scientist as suggesting that farmers must be achieving increased yield or other benefits by growing GE varieties, or they wouldn’t keep doing it. This is a common argument in support of the value of genetically engineered crops, so it merits some thought.
I agree that farmers are generally savvy, and can judge the overall performance of their crops. But for the most part they can't readily determine whether particular crop properties—good or bad—are the result of GE technology. This is especially true for complex properties like yield or drought tolerance.
The problem for farmers is the difficulty in distinguishing between "natural" crop genes and engineered genes. Crop varieties that contain an engineered gene have also been improved through conventional breeding, which works with the genes already occurring in the crop. The GE companies (and public breeders) often use conventional breeding to improve corn, soy and cotton seed, and then stick an engineered gene, such as for glyphosate herbicide tolerance, into those conventionally improved varieties. This is one reason that Failure to Yield relied on controlled field trials—carefully designed and run by academic scientists—to tease out the contribution of the engineered gene to yield.
Farmers are also limited by the particular conditions on their own farm that affect crop performance, and these often vary from year to year. So their observations about crop varieties will often not be widely applicable.
So if farmers have limited ability to distinguish between natural and engineered genes, and their observations are specific to their own farms, where can they go to get the information they need about GE crop genes and varieties? For many decades prior to genetic engineering, farmers relied on university agriculture extension scientists to perform tests comparing new and standard crop varieties. But it is increasingly difficult for university scientists to conduct these important tests on GE varieties, because they are prohibited from doing research on GE crops without company permission. And when scientists do receive permission to do research, it is usually with strings attached that restrict the usefulness of the studies for comparing crop varieties. This was reported in the New York Times back in February, when 26 entomologists complained that they could not get seeds from GE companies to do adequate research on Bt crops. The problem is pervasive. Even as far back as 1999, weed scientists were also noting restrictions on their research about herbicide tolerant GE crops.
That leaves the GE companies in control of much of the information about seeds and crop varieties that gets to the farmers (and the public)—and what do you suppose they are saying about it? More and more, important information about our crops and the food they produce is coming from companies that are interested in showing only the positive side of their products.
July 17, 2009
Withering of Public Capacity to Breed Better Crops
Have you heard about the new lettuces that are resistant to corky-root disease? I didn’t think so—but is it important? Absolutely! Without the pest and stress fighting traits that breeders have incorporated into our crops over the decades, farm productivity would be a fraction of its current levels.
Traditional plant breeders have improved crops immensely over the years, and continue to deliver new varieties with valuable traits. New disease-resistant and insect-resistant lettuce varieties developed by USDA plant breeders over the last year are just the latest success stories of traditional breeding—a powerful technology that is all but invisible to most of the public.
Traditional crop breeding has contributed hundreds, maybe thousands, of useful traits over the years to virtually all types of crops, ranging from increased yield to disease and insect resistance to food quality and stress tolerance. The majority of these traits have been developed by public sector breeders. And unlike the limited achievements of genetic engineering, which so far has produced only a few insect and virus resistance genes and herbicide tolerance for a few crops, public breeding successes are rarely accompanied by splashy ad campaigns.
But while public plant and animal breeders are working in relative obscurity, their programs are also losing critical support and funding. These cuts are coming at a time when we will need breeding programs more than ever to help us deal with climate change and feed a growing population.
Of course, even public breeding programs need to be aimed at the broader societal good. Much too often, taxpayers’ public breeding dollars have been used to subsidize big agribusinesses, with breeders perfecting nutrient-poor commodity corn for processed foods, tasteless tomatoes for mass machine harvest and long-distance shipping, and chickens that can only survive in CAFOs.
What we really need is breeding targeted at improving agricultural sustainability that will enhance agro-ecological methods like organic and low-external-input systems, as well as satisfying consumers’ needs. With proper direction, public breeding can help develop tastier and more productive fruits and vegetables and grains and hardy livestock suited to pasture systems. It can play a major role in reducing the pollution caused by agriculture, and help farmers to confront climate change. It is past time to boost funding for public breeding programs and refocus them to support sustainable farming.
June 12, 2009
Organic Agriculture is the Future
As our changing global climate threatens to make agriculture more challenging than ever, farmers and policy makers are seeking new ways to grow more food with less environmental impact. But they don’t need to look as hard as many think. Though not yet widely adopted, modern organic and other low-external-input farming systems are already proving quite capable of producing large crop yields while also conserving energy and minimizing pollution.
Organic and similar methods rely on a sophisticated scientific understanding of how a farm operates within an ecosystem—indeed, how the farm itself is an ecosystem of interconnected plants, insects, and other animals. Organic farming systems incorporate techniques like long crop rotations to control pests and leguminous cover crops or manure to add nutrients and build soil. A recent summary of studies on farming systems around the world found that such systems are often nearly as productive as current industrial agriculture in developed countries, but importantly, much more so in developing countries. The study demonstrates that the green and animal manures employed in organic agriculture can produce enough fixed nitrogen to support high crop yields. Where additional synthetic inputs are needed, other low-external-input methods are producing high yields with much reduced environmental impact. These highly productive methods are needed to produce enough food without converting uncultivated land—such as forests that are important for biodiversity and slowing climate change—into crop fields. They build deep, rich soils that hold water, sequester carbon, and resist erosion. And they don’t poison the air, drinking water, and fisheries with excess fertilizers and toxic pesticides.
Some have dismissed the promise of these methods. Among these are State Department Science Advisor Nina Federoff, who in recent interviews characterized organic agriculture as some kind of retreat to a quaint past. She and others characterize organic farming and similar systems as inherently unproductive, sometimes suggesting that such methods are capable of supporting only about half the current world’s population.
Federoff’s view is at odds with the latest science, and represents a status quo kind of thinking. Today’s dominant industrial U.S. agriculture relies on huge monocultures of a few major crops like corn and soybeans, and requires large inputs of fossil-fuel based synthetic chemicals to control pests and fertilize the crops. Such an agriculture churns out a lot of commodity crops (most of which are turned into meat and processed foods) while also contributing greatly to air and water pollution. Industrial agriculture is a major contributor of heat-trapping emissions and a major cause of so-called dead zones such as that in the Gulf of Mexico. And industrial agriculture is ultimately its own worst enemy, as it causes massive degradation of the very soil that is vital to farming itself. This kind of agriculture is unsustainable. We will need to move away from it towards the biologically-informed approaches that can both keep yields high while reducing environmental harm.
Although many critics see genetic engineering as a major factor in this debate, it is in fact only a minor appendage onto the industrial agriculture system—one that has done little to either increase its productivity or mitigate its environmental harm. Leaders who rely on industrial agriculture systems—with or without genetic engineering—are the ones truly stuck in the past. The challenges of the 21st century demand a fundamental rethink of agriculture that takes environmental harm into account. Promising methods and technologies like organic are in the vanguard of that effort. We cannot afford to move toward the future without such technologies.
May 11, 2009
Responses to Failure to Yield Critics, Part III
This is the final (for now) in my series of responses to critics of the groundbreaking report released by UCS last month, Failure to Yield, which countered biotech industry claims that genetic engineering increases crop yields. Today's post continues our response to concerns voiced by Wayne Parrott, Ronald Bailey and others that Failure to Yield did not discuss the full range of genetically engineered (GE) crops' potential benefits.
Although a broad discussion of benefits was beyond the narrow focus of the report (or this post), it is worth pointing out the much of the evidence in Parrott’s paper linking benefits to GE crops is not convincing.
One such supposed benefit, often touted, is the contribution of herbicide-tolerant (HT) crops to reduced or conservation tillage, which can prevent soil erosion, save fuel, and reduce pesticide and fertilizer runoff. Unfortunately, the data presented by Parrott do not support the conclusion that increases in conservation tillage are a result of the adoption of herbicide tolerant crops. As his chart on “Corn Soil Loss per Acre and Yield Per Acre” (page 3) reveals, almost all of the improvements in reducing soil loss occurred before GE corn was introduced in 1996. A similar trend, by the way, occurs in soybeans–-a comprehensive USDA report from 2002 finds that HT is not a significant cause of increases in reduced tillage.
Finally, Parrott claims that Failure to Yield is incorrect in claiming that a new non-GE variety of soybeans reportedly has significantly increased yield. He writes that the new non-GE soybean variety is really genetically engineered, and that this could have been easily understood by checking a USDA database that lists this soybean variety. But Parrott is apparently confusing the new non-GE soybeans by Pioneer Hybrid mentioned in the report with another soy variety called Roundup Ready 2 Yield (RR2Y) from Monsanto, mentioned elsewhere in the report. RR2Y soybeans exhibit increased yields and do contain transgenes, but contrary to Parrott, the yield increases in RR2Y are due to superior conventional genetics not the GE traits.
Jumping to the conclusion that any yield increases observed in GE crops are due to the GE traits is an all too common mistake. One of the major reasons I wrote Failure to Yield was to distinguish the contribution to yield of GE traits from contribution of conventional breeding, and to make sure the conventional breeding gets the credit it deserves.
May 8, 2009
Responses to Failure to Yield Critics, Part II
Today’s post provides additional responses to criticisms from Dr. Wayne Parrott and Ronald Bailey. In his piece, Dr. Parrott writes, “The premise of the report [Failure to Yield] is that GM crops are a bad means to achieve global agricultural sustainability simply because they have not affected intrinsic yield.”
In our view, increases in intrinsic yield are essential to producing enough food for growing populations. The failure of GE to produce any traits to increase intrinsic yield is an important deficiency in a technology touted as a response to the world food crisis. We understand that GE insect resistance traits crops have provided some increases in operational yield, and discuss those operational yield increases at length in the report. But as the report amply documents, even those benefits are modest.
GE crops are not so much a "bad means" to achieve sustainability as an overrated one.
So why didn't Failure to Yield cover all of the other purported benefits of GE?
Any report, paper, or research project sets limits, and Failure to Yield is no different. The report was narrowly focused on yield of GE food and feed crops in the U.S. and simply did not analyze any other benefits.
We agree that there are other benefits to GE crops. The pesticide reduction benefits associated with Bt cotton in the US, for example, have been well documented. Many of the other benefits cited by Parrott and Bailey, however, like lower nitrogen fertilizer use, increased pest resistance, and stress (e.g. drought) tolerance, are associated only with experimental crops—none have been successfully commercialized. Some of these crops may be successful in the future, but based on the record documented in Failure to Yield of thousands of experimental GE crops that were never brought to market, some degree of skepticism is appropriate.
April 30, 2009
More Response to Criticism of Failure to Yield
I wrote in my last post about why Failure To Yield didn’t include studies on the performance of genetically engineered crops in the developing world. Here are my responses to two other critiques.
Critique: You should have included GE cotton in your analysis
Failure to Yield was motivated in large part by the “global food crisis” of the past few years. So we wanted to examine the ability of GE to address the challenges for food production given a growing global population, changing consumption patterns, and climate change impacts. For this reason, we decided to look at major GE food or feed crops in the United States, and this means soybeans and corn. We didn’t include canola, an oilseed crop, because the acreage devoted to canola, about a million acres, is only 0.6 percent of the acreage devoted to corn and soybeans in 2008.
Cotton was excluded because it is primarily a fiber crop. Cotton seed meal may also be used as animal feed, and the plant itself as fodder in some places, but these uses are secondary to fiber production. In other words, we did not look at GE cotton because the report is intended to inform the solution of the global food crisis, not a global clothing crisis.
Continue reading "More Response to Criticism of Failure to Yield"
April 29, 2009
Failure to Yield Turns on Biotech Spin Machines
On April 14, the Union of Concerned Scientists released a new report, Failure to Yield, which analyses the contribution of genetically engineered traits to increased food and feed crop yields in the United States. The report was motivated by questions raised by the recent food crisis about the ability of the human population to produce enough food, and by ongoing claims that genetic engineering has increased yields and will be vitally important for doing so in coming years.
Since the launch of Failure to Yield, several comments complained that the report does not include studies from the developing world. In essence, they claim that the report misses important parts of the picture.
I think these comments are off the mark. By criticizing what is not in the report, they divert attention from its core finding that a solid body of research shows that despite decades of trying, genetically engineered (GE) traits in the United States contribute only marginally to increased yields, while at the same time, other means of agricultural innovation have shown great success at increasing crop yields.
Nevertheless the comments raise important issues that are worth additional discussion.
Critique #1: Failure to Yield does not include yield data from GE crops in developing countries
This is an important point, because although the report is about the impact of GE on the yield of food and feed crops in the United States, the context of the report is the coming global food crisis, and several recommendations concern agriculture policy toward developing counties.
There are several reasons why we focus on data from the United States, why these data have relevance for other parts of the world, and why data about GE crops in developing countries have some important limitations and therefore may not be as useful as would first appear.
Continue reading "Failure to Yield Turns on Biotech Spin Machines"
