Big MACC Attack

Tiny Cars, Fuzzy Thinking

In an Op-Ed column in today's Washington Post, Anne Applebaum raises the important relationships between technology, equity and quality of life in our developing world. (Tiny Car, Tough Questions, Page A13)  She focuses on the developing world, using the introduction of the Tata Nano as an example of the double edge that making a middle class live accessible to a much larger population on earth will have. Comments posted on the WaPo site indicate that a fair number of people sense her conflation of ability to pay some sort of righteousness - when they are actually unrelated to the logical question at hand.

This is primarily a food, farming and technology blog so I want to point out how her general misunderstanding of the sociology of technology bleeds over into our world here in the food and farming biz because has apparently bit the biotech booster message big time and isn't even aware of it. Here's how:

 

Bt, Beta Carotene and the Big MACCs

Commodification and the Destruction of Efficacy

     On the one hand American agriculture can be seen as a huge success: the number of Americans required to till our fields has dropped from more than 60% to less than 2%, and only six percent of the farmers produce 56% of the crops; corn yields increased 333% over sixty years, to a point where agricultural products make up 10% of all exports. Whole industries have arisen to supply materiel to the farmer: in 1992 for example, 1.1 billion pounds of pesticidal chemicals (worth a solid eight billion dollars to GNP) and over four billion pounds of fertilizer (and this is only the active ingredient weights).1
     But there have been costs, too: falling water tables on a continental scale; chemical contamination of drinking water; eutrophication of lakes and streams; damaging outflows of both topsoil and nutrients into coastal estuaries. And these are just the environmental costs; there are social and economic costs as well, related to the eventual cleanup of pollution, the high energy input of modern, conventional agriculture, and the urban and suburbanization that result from the migration of farm populations into other employment sectors.      All this has been created by viewing agriculture strictly through an economic lens, though it is essentially a natural process. According to the Union of Concerned Scientists,

Industrial agriculture views the farm as a factory with 'inputs' (such as pesticides, feed, fertilizer and fuel) and 'outputs' (corn, chickens and so forth). The goal is to increase yield (such as bushels per acre) and decrease costs of production, usually by exploiting economies of scale.2

     This view of agriculture as a system of inputs and outputs has led, according to critics like Richard Lewontin of Harvard, to a situation where farmers are receiving a steadily declining portion of the 18% of the United States economy that flows from their farms and fields.3 Other factors are mechanization and the resultant plant and animal monocultures. Monoculture, at its current level, means growing literally thousands of contiguous acres of the same plant, which is an incredible biological incentive to the explosion of pest and disease populations. Both of these incentivize an increase in farm size, and a decrease in the number of crop varieties grown within the monoculture itself.4

The Link Between GMOs and the Ethanol Fantasy

Ethanol production from corn will mean more GMOs, according to a Reuters article posted on Yahoo today. The whole ethanol craze is getting out hand. Mexican farmers -- whose ancient seed stocks have already been contaminated by GMO corn -- are suffering because of subsidized corn from the north, and now that their economic competitiveness has been damaged, lo and behold, prices will go back up due to demand for ethanol. But the corn grown to meet that demand will now be high tech, input sensitive varieties rather than the adapted land races they had been growing, without the need for expensive irrigation and fertilizers, and once again they will be caught behind the eight ball.

What is so distressing about all this is that none of it has anything to do with their livelihood or their needs; it is all driven by the global companies of the north, and the gas guzzling global consumers of the USA they created via media and marketing to provide themselves with a steady sink for an increasingly threatened basket of natural resources cum entropic wastes. Throughput....throuhgput...throughput...build GNP and to hell with the fate of the world.

Here is a link to the Reuters piece: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20070210/sc_nm/usa_corn_gmo_dc_1 . I can see that I am going to have to got out and get the rest of the ethanol articles and try to sort out where the weirdness is here, because it just doesn't smell right.

The Language of Biotechnology

Terminate or be Terminated

The debate over transgenic technology in food and farming has been remarkably unproductive, due largely to the constant battle over how to describe these techniques. Are they radical and dangerous new innovations, capable of shattering the stability of societies and ecosystems, or merely incremental steps within a long tradition?

     We should not be surprised at either the location or the virulence of the battle. In the post-deconstruction world, neither religion nor science, faith nor reason can provide solid foundation for a defense of ones ideas, and language – its vocabulary – becomes a hypothesis offered for the description of the world that we hope others will accept. This can be messy, asserts Richard Rorty in his 1989 book, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity:

Europe did not decide [emphasis in the original] to accept the idiom of Romantic poetry, or of Socialist politics, or of Galilean mechanics. That sort of shift was no more an act of will than it was a result of argument. Rather, Europe gradually lost the habit of using certain words and gradually acquired the habit of using others. […] after a hundred years of inconclusive muddle, the Europeans found themselves speaking in a way which took these interlocked theses for granted. Cultural change of this magnitude does not result from applying criteria….(Page 6)

Relatively Sound Junk Science

Or should that be relatively junky sound science? If you have follwed this klog for a while, you might have noticed what one friend, a retired extension agent, refers to as "an agenda." I think that overstates the situation, but I won't deny for a moment that I have some intuitions, borne most likely out of my training in art school, that certain kinds of solutions to practical, real world problems have a certain aesthetic elegance that others lack, and that I use that intuition to guide me in my choice of topics -- or approach to topics.
     My friend seems to think of this as a kind of prejudice (in the sense of pre-judgment) and I will readily admit that it is does represent a form of perceptual bias, in the technical sense of that term. (Again, those of you who have read enough of the posts here -- or whom I have known and conversed with over the years -- will know of my obsession with technical precision in language .) But the simple fact is that all perception is biased, inherently and individually, though some collectively agreed upon biases -- like evangelical Christianity and Science -- are more popular.
     Now I know I have opened a can of worms here, because the scientifically trained (read: biased) among you will say that reality is no mere popularity contest (as the Rortian post-modernists claim, you would say, if you had heard of Rorty and his ideas...and of course you would be wrong to pigeon hole him that way) but a demonstrable set of provable and replicable observations. True enough, but the problem is that, once stated, this propostion is too vigorously defended -- methinks the lady doth protesteth too much -- instead of allowed to stand on its own piece of ground in the same manner that its own, empirical subject does.
     That is, the scientific worldview is elevated by a class of thinkers (yes, I know you consider yourselves observers, analysts and experimentalists, not merely thinkers) to a kind of telological status, despite their stated anti-teleological beliefs (dare I say bias?) and it is this hiddent, ambient contradiction that is characteristic, to my mind, of what would be called, in a Buddhist sense, attachment and delusion. Or as Gandhi -- a lawyer, remember, that most analytical of types -- was said to have replied whent told that religion was weakened by its embrace of the mysterious and the unknowable: ah, yes but without the unknowable, it would be mere science.
But I wander...

Silver Bullets

Here is an item from the Food Safety Network that cites a report that sweet potatoes genetically modified to resist a virus in Kenya proved no less vulnerable than ordinary varieties (7 February p 7).
      This is noted as unsurpising by the authors, which shows that at least they are paying attention, even if they are not calling into question the assumptions that lead to such results. Plants and their pathogens co-evolve and the co-evolution creates multiple sets of relationships which, according to evolutionary theory will be replicated over time in their DNA. Cut and paste bits of the relevant sections of their genetic code and you may affect aspects of those relationships, but it is unlikely you will affect the overall context. Bottom line, there are at least two kinds of efficiency: a production efficiency whereby a "breeder" short circuits evolution, and if clever and lucky enough creates a new organism with spectacular (and unpredictable) advantages, and a natural efficiency, less stellar perhaps, but with broader gains. Nature wastes nothing and always provides a multiplicity of solutions. To see how this applies to human health, see my paper on Beta-Carotene, and in terms of plant breeding, check out any of the works of the Canadian plant breeder Raoul Robinson.

Bt Toxin In Humans?

I suppose we'll know in a few days just what is happening in the Philippines, but I couldn't not post this bit that came in through the Meridian agbiotech listserv:

Manila Rejects GM Maize Health Findings (SRC:Reuters -- ATH:n/a)

The Philippine government has said that it doubts findings by a Norwegian scientist that some Filipino farm workers show signs of exposure to Bt toxin from Monsanto's Bt maize. The Norwegian scientist, Terje Traavik, disclosed his findings February 23 on the sidelines of COP/MOP-1. He said that blood samples from 39 people on the southern Philippine island of Mindanao carried increased levels of three target antibodies, evidence of an immune reaction to Bt toxin. Responding to Traavik's study, Artemio Salazar, director of the corn program of the Philippines' Department of Agriculture, told reporters: "It's absurd. No biology student will believe it." Salazar, who has a doctorate in plant breeding and cytogenetics, said, "The implication of the study is that the resistant gene got inserted into the human gene, which is impossible." He asked Traavik to provide a copy of his findings for analysis by the government and other scientists, but he said that the Philippines, which allowed commercial planting of Bt maize for the first time in 2003, would not stop farmers from growing the genetically modified (GM) crop. Monsanto Philippines Inc. issued the following statement: "There have been no documented cases of allergic reactions to Bt maize after seven years of broad commercial use on millions of hectares in the United States, Canada, Argentina, Spain and South Africa starting in 1996." According to the company, it is "extremely unlikely that the limited production in the Philippines in a single season would have produced the claimed results." The article can be viewed online at the link below.

http://www.agbios.com/news.php

Pedigreed Soybean Promises Healthier Soy Oil

Now this is the right way to go about it: a new soybean line has been sent to the US National Soybean Germplasm Collection in Urbana, IL that has higher mono-unsaturated fat concentrations than any previous accession. Myself, I am not so interested in soybean oil -- I'll stick with the olive oil it is meant to replace -- but the fact is that this new line was developed with traditional breeding methods, not by splicing some olive gene into the soybean genome to get a quick fix.
     The key difference between transgenic (TG) breeding (though I hesitate to dignify it with such a term) and traditional breeding is whether the "breeder" is moving complexes of genes, or to put it more precisely genes within contexts -- contextual genes -- or just fragments, bits and pieces of DNA, or even single genes, sometimes artificially bound to other, promoter genes, into the genome of a given species.
     For those of you who gloss over at such jargon, let me try to simplify: TG technology cuts and pastes bits and pieces of genetic code willy nilly between different organisms, while traditional breeding simply facilitates the natural transmission of DNA sequences between compatible organisms. That may not seem too different -- and there are plenty of highly paid spin-doctors (many with doctorates) out there wanting to say just that -- but anyone who has revised a letter or any other document on a computer knows that it is a whole lot safer to cut and paste sentences than it is clauses or phrases, and that to cut and paste words alone sometimes leads to utter nonsense. And that is in language, which is not as critical as the sequencing of the common genetic code that all life on Earth shares, on which the functioning of organs within the body and bodies within the ecosystem depend.
     The nuance for which nature (or creation if you prefer) is known is borne in context. Remove the context and you build, eventually, the Tower of Babel.

The Nuts and Bolts of Genetic Engineering

The techniques of genetic engineering arose from two sources that came together at the beginning of the twentieth century. The first was the ten-thousand-year history of humankind’s domestication of plants and animals. Dogs, cattle, swine, grains, fruits, and vegetables were taken from the wild and cared for. Over time, observant farmers and gardeners, by choosing the most productive and compliant plants and animals, altered their evolutionary path sufficiently that they became distinct from their wild ancestors. While the term “genetic engineering” is stretched by some of its supporters to include this process of long-term selection and improvement of species by humans, the fact that it was concerned with whole organisms rather than some smaller part, like cells or genes, makes it quite different.

Bt Corn and Herbcide Persistence

Laboratory soil tests by three Italian researchers reported in early 2004 indicate that high levels of Bt (Bacillus thuringiensis) toxin decrease the rate of breakdown of two herbicides widely applied to transgenic herbicide resistant crops, glyphosate (Roundup) and glufosinate (Liberty). This is significant both because levels of Bt toxin are relatively high in soils where transgenic pesticidal corn (i.e., Bt corn) has been grown, but also because quick breakdown of these herbicides has been one of their enviromental selling points by the companies that manufacture the. Combination of both the insecticidal and herbicide resistance traits in a single variety has a been a goal of the major biotech seed producers for some time. To my mind this is just the kind of negative syngery that is missed in the single substance approach to measure the environmental pollution health burden on humans.