Commodification and the Destruction of Efficacy
America’s food system has been industrialized from seed to table. This paper will examine the tendency of industrial agriculture to reduce and then commodify the variability of natural systems and thereby to fail to realize their inherent efficacy and efficiency.
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]
As Craig Holdrege, author of Genetics and the Manipulation of Life, the Forgotten Factor of Context, wrote in an article in the journal Biodynamics,
Industrial agriculture has led away from the concrete, local situation. Scientists in university, governmental and agribusiness stations breed only a few varieties, designed for global use. For a global variety to thrive in different parts of the world, it must become less dependent on local conditions. [5]
We could say this process began with the Moravian monk, Gregor Mendel, who did a series of experiments in the mid to late 1800’s in which he hand crossed pea plants from his garden, because with Mendel the application of the scientific method to plant breeding began.
Peas were an excellent choice because they are normally self pollinating, and so genetically stable unless you intervene. Mendel took plants that had white flowers and crossed them with plants that had violet flowers, then kept elaborate records of the flower color of the resulting offspring (called progeny in the world of plant breeding). He also kept track of the seed type, as he began with some that had smooth gray seeds and some with wrinkled green seeds. From his records, Mendel was able to develop a set of theoretical rules, or laws, that eventually (after a forty year hiatus in which his work was forgotten) became the basis of modern genetics.
But, by focusing on just a few traits of his peas, Mendel by definition ignored the holistic reality of the plants. They differed in more ways than just their flower color, or their seed shape and color; but in both plant breeding, and in “big-S” Science, if you look at too many things, then you can’t draw conclusions about anything. What is left out of that syllogism, in too many discussions, though, is the complementary conclusion: that if you leave out too many things (in any analysis) then your conclusions are limited; and they are limited exactly to the extent that you have excluded the natural diversity of that which you study.
That Mendel concentrated primarily on two sets of characteristics, and drew his conclusions based solely on them, does not affect the cogency of his theories, but – and here is the problem – it does mean that those theories, and the so-called laws built upon his insights (born of examination of those purposely limited sets of data) – the color and form of flowers and seeds – should not be taken to have meaning beyond the kind of data upon which they were based.
***
Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) is a naturally occurring soil bacterium that, when it gets into the gut of certain species of moth and butterfly larvae – including important farm and garden pests like corn root worm, corn borer, cabbage worm, and tomato horn worm – releases a precisely adapted and fatal toxin. It was discovered in Japan by Ishawata in 1901 and then in Germany by Ernst Berliner by 1911. A series of experiments were performed around 1930 to test its efficacy, but no serious attempt was made to use it as a biopesticide until problems began to appear with synthetic pesticides after World War II. [6]
Once new strains of Bt were discovered that controlled potato beetle and even mosquito larvae, it became an important pest control within both organic and conventional farm systems. By 1995, 67 different Bt preparations accounted for $97 million in sales worldwide[7], and about 80-90% of all biopesticide use.[8] In fact, a 1998 survey of organic farmers found that more than 50% of respondents used Bt, making it the number one pest control product used by organic farmers.[9]
In the past 10-15 years, researchers for multinational agricultural chemical companies (tagged “Big MACCs” by one tongue in cheek trade journalist) such as Monsanto, Agrevo and Novartis have found a way to insert a gene they isolated from the Bt bacterium (and then patented) into crops like corn, cotton and potatoes so that the plant tissues themselves will express a toxin apparently the same as that produced by the Bt organism.
This makes every bite a pest takes poisonous, but it also means that resistance to the Bt toxin, previously rare, is likely to develop quickly, for the genes implanted in the crop contain only about 65% of the material in the natural bacterial gene[10], enough to trigger resistance, but not enough to be effective as the natural form – very much like a vaccine, in a way we will consider shortly.
The Bt in transgenic crops differs from the Bt previously used by farmers in another way as well. While the Bt bacterium produces a precursor form of the toxin (what scientists call a “protoxin”) that is only activated by the digestive enzymes of the pest’s gut, the toxin engineered into transgenic crops is an “endotoxin” that has bypassed several stages in the creation of the toxin itself.[11] Numerous laboratory studies have found that the active toxin in corn pollen is toxic to both Monarch butterfly larvae,[12] and more important, to various pest predators – called “beneficial” insects – including green lacewings[13].
Further, when plant remains are plowed under at the end of the season, the active toxin has the capability to accumulate in the upper layers of the soil, and it
…remains active in the soil, where it binds rapidly and tightly to clays and humic acids. The bound toxin retains its insecticidal properties and is protected against microbial degradation by being bound to soil particles, persisting in various soils for at least 234 days (the longest time studied), as determined by larvacidal assay.[14]
The scope of this problem is enormous when you consider the realities of soil ecology. A single gram of agricultural soil contains up to 1 million bacteria, 50 meters of fungal hyphae, 100,000 protozoae, several thousand micro-insects and 500 nematodes.[15] An acre of soil six inches deep contains up to half a ton of living creatures, and these organisms are the engines of soil fertility. The ecological balance among them is fundamentally important to the stability of plant, and therefore, agricultural processes.
An ordinary field of fodder corn contains about 20-30,000 plants per acre, and each plant contains about a billion cells.[16] Each cell contains the transgenic Bt toxin, and
…millions of acres of Bt GM [genetically modified (sic)] varieties have been allowed to be grown in the US with little, if any, research being carried out as to the long term effect on soil fertility of such potentially toxic plant residue material. […] That this fundamental question has been overlooked is symptomatic of modern systems of agriculture…[17]
In addition, it is important to note that when Bacillus thuringiensis itself was used to control pests, it was applied as a spray to the crop, and any bacteria not consumed by pests either died, or were washed back into the soil by irrigation or rain water. Pest larvae which did not actually encounter the bacteria – and this was a significant percentage in all but the most extreme instances – were never exposed to the toxin, and, as resistance to it is a recessive genetic trait, the overall pest population was not as likely to become resistant to Bt.[18]
But in order to earn back to enormous investment the Big MACCs have made in the technology to implant Bt gene into their crops and deliver it to farmers in yield competitive crops – estimates range anywhere from $100 million[19] to $10 billion[20] depending on who is doing the counting -- they need to cover the landscape with millions of acres of patented Bt enabled crops (up to 90% of planted acreage of corn, cotton and potatoes), and this enormous pressure on the pest species has been calculated by some researchers to virtually assure resistance within as few as 3-5 years.[21]
Company researchers insisted that if farmers planted a percentage of their land to non-Bt crops, resistance could be put off long enough for alternatives to be developed. Estimates ranged from 20% to 50%, though there are a few more extreme cases,[22] and in January 2000, the EPA issued regulations codifying this 20-50% figure.[23] But there is serious doubt whether cash strapped farmers will follow the recommendations, or in an ironic re-casting of the “tragedy of the commons”, simply count on their neighbors to do so. As Fred Kirschenmann, arguably the largest organic farmer in the USA, with over 3,000 acres under cultivation, and a member of the National Organic Standards Board, has noted,
“Most farmers operate under very intense financial constraints. Consequently, they make field management decisions based on immediate financial returns, not future problems. […] In the early 1980’s for example, farmers in North Dakota were warned by everyone from extension agents to seed sales people, that failing to rotate sunflowers would invite sunflower insect and disease disasters. But sunflowers were a good cash crop that produced much needed revenue, so most farmers raised sunflowers in the same fields at least every other year, and in some instances they continuous cropped them. Within a few years insect and disease problems became so severe that the cost of pest control forced many farmers to get out of sunflower production. It is not that farmers were stupid or unconvinced of the risks. Short term economics simply took precedence over long term economics. Management decisions for transgenic plants will be no different.”[24]
In its essence, conventional economics is a flat-earth paradigm. The only way that it can make sense of the phenomena it studies is by drawing a box around them – the mystical “transactions” between free agents, or rational maximizers, or whatever – and everything outside the box is basically ignored; it is an “externality.” Like the ignored elements of Mendel’s peas, these aspects of our messy, fecund reality get in the way of reductionist clarity.
That is why the price of a head of iceberg lettuce or a cardboard tomato from California at the supermarket is lower than its locally grown, organic version: conventional economics externalizes (read: ignores) the rail subsidies, the 1902 water bill, the interstate highway system, the desalinization and toxic waste cleanup costs – all the extra expenses that are hidden in our taxes instead of included in the price on that card at the supermarket –that ought, from a more balanced perspective, be included in our “transaction” with the grocer.
But that stuff is all over the edge of the flat earth, outside the box, and as we all know from the maps of old Europe: “there be monsters.” I think it’s about time we bring the monsters out into the open, give those economists a whip and a chair and see if they can make it in the real world, instead of in their little Flatland that they’ve dreamed up and elaborated on to such a degree that it all seems so cogent and predictable. Otherwise we will be making Medieval decisions in a post modern world, which is a recipe for continuing disaster.
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In plant pathology, an infectious agent can’t harm a plant unless it possesses the proper genetic key to break down the resistance of the plant to its attack. This process is well described by plant breeder Raoul Robinson:
Each resistance gene in the host corresponds to a tumbler in a lock. And each parasitism gene in the parasite corresponds to a notch in a key. An individual plant host may have several of these resistance genes, these tumblers, which collectively constitute a biochemical lock. And an individual parasite may have several of these parasitism genes, these notches, which collectively constitute a biochemical key.[25]
The human body, on a molecular level, operates by a similar method, with each human having particularly conformed locks, and each molecular substance taken into the body presenting itself to these locks. If it has the right molecular conformation, then whatever cellular process was underway continues; if not, then the process halts – the substance has no effect.
It is common knowledge that any person who catches a cold develops an antibody to that strain of the cold virus. […] Unfortunately, there are many strains of the cold virus, and we are often infected by a strain for which we have no antibody. This is why we keep catching new colds, although we tend to get fewer colds as we grow older, and accumulate more and more antibodies. Roughly speaking, each resistance gene in the plant host corresponds to an antibody, and each parasitism gene in the parasite corresponds to an antigen.[26]
It has long been assumed that people with a high proportion of fruits and vegetables in their diet are less likely to develop certain diseases due to the presence of substances called anti-oxidants, and an epidemiological study reported ten years ago in the New York Times seemed to show, specifically, that beta-carotene in winter squash and carrots (as well as some other vegetables) could help prevent cancer and heart disease.[27] That was really exciting, so a group of scientists decided to test the idea more thoroughly. According to the report, they administered a synthesized beta-carotene supplement to a group of subjects, but in the end they were forced to conclude that it had no statistical effect on their health[28]. That is, it had lost its apparent efficacy.
More recent studies have found either no effect, or even negative health effects, at least among smokers.[29] “Taken together, the results of [these studies] clearly tell us that beta carotene is not a magic bullet,” according to Charles Hennekens, Associate Editor of HealthNews, a published by the New England Journal of Medicine. “It can neither substitute for a good diet nor compensate for a bad one.”[30]
This should not be too surprising, though. What is actually in the vegetables is not just beta-carotene, but actually a range of nearly 600 beta-carotenoids, of which about 50 are known to be biologically active in humans. Now if you take five hundred people and give them a range of six hundred carotenoids, you are going to see a different effect than if you take one of those carotenoids, mass produce it and feed it to those same five hundred people, only some of whom are likely to respond to that particular one – to have the matching biochemical locks. A single, synthetic substance, while easier to study – and, I might add, to manufacture and distribute profitably – does not have the inherent variability and adaptability of the natural substance.
Mass production and distribution require commodification – the reduction of diversity to a reproducible, consistent “product” across time and space. Thus the “industrial paradigm” of modern production. agriculture.
The ultimate commodified foods are Budweisers and Big Macs; you can go anywhere and count on them being the same, today, tomorrow, a year from now, whether in Moscow, Marrakech, or Middlebury, Vermont. And along the way our health has been affected by this simplifying commodification.
Americans arguably have one of the highest standards of living in the world: pathogen free drinking water, due largely to treatment and safe sewage disposal; abundant food year round at the lowest percentage cost in the world, only 11% of income on average; and among the well-off there is little incidence of malnutrition or infectious epidemic disease. But there are costs associated with these benefits: we now have high rates of obesity, heart disease and cancer. In fact, I am, statistically, three times as likely to develop cancer as my grandfather, who was born only fifty years earlier.[31]
As Dr. Ross Welch of Cornell University, an international authority on plant nutrition, pointed out to me over lunch at a recent conference where we were both speaking, “We have really just traded third world diseases for first world diseases.”[32]
Notes and References
1. USDA data cited in “The Costs and Benefits of Industrial Agriculture,” at http://www.ucsusa.org/food/ind.ag.costs.html, accessed 2/19/01.
2. “Industrial Agriculture: Features and Policy,” accessed 2/19/01 at http://www.ucsusa.org/food/ind.ag.html.
3. Lewontin, Richard, verbal remarks noted during panel discussion “Evolution of the Biotechnology Industry”, International Conference on Biotechnology in the Global Economy, Harvard University, September 2-3, 1999.
4. Ibid.
5. Holdrege, Craig, “The Tyranny of the Gene”, NETFUTURE #80, 11/24/98, http://www.oreilly.com/people/staff/stevet/netfuture/1998/Nov2498_80.html#3 accessed on 2/19/01.
6. Baum, J.A., et. al., “Bacillus thuringiensis: Natural and recombinant bioinsecticide products,” in Biopesticides: Use and Delivery, Hall, F.R., & Menn, J.J., eds., Humana Press, Totowa, NJ, 189-210.
7. Kumar, et. al., “The Insecticidal Proteins of Bacillus thuringiensis,” Advances in Applied Microbiology 42, 1-43, 1997.
8. Bernhard, K., and Utz, R., “Production of Bacillus thuringiensis Insecticides for Experimental and Commercial Uses,” in Entwistle, et. al., eds., Bacillus thuringiensis, An Environmental Biopesticide: Theory and Practice, 1993, John Wiley & Sons, Chichester, UK.
9. Walz, E., “Final Results of the Third Biennial National Organic Farmers’ survey,” Organic Farming Research Foundation, Santa Cruz, CA, 1999.
10. Tappeser, B., “The differences between conventional Bacillus thuringiensis strains and transgenic insect resistant plants,” Institute for Applied Ecology, Freiburg, Germany, page 4, accessed at http://www.biotech-info.net/Bt_differences.pdf on February 19, 2001.
11. Ibid., pages 4-5. The stages which are bypassed in the use of transgenic Bt involve the breaking down of the toxin into smaller sized protein, which then pass into receptors in the gut wall of the pest. Since in the natural sequence this process happens in the pest’s gut, only the pest is exposed. When the smaller molecules are present in the environment generally, the possibility that they may poison non-target organisms is increased.
12. Losey, J.E., Raynor, L.S., & Carter, M.E. Nature 399, 214 (1999). This preliminary article ignited a firestorm of criticism from industry scientists. “Scientific Symposium to Show No Harm to Monarch Butterfly,” touted a press release prepared by the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO) even before the symposium of “independent scientists” convened in Chicago on November 2, 1999. Accessed February 19, 2001 at http://www.bio.org/news/press_releases.html .
13. Hillbeck, A., Baumgartner, M., Fried, P.M. & Bigler, F. Environmental Entomology 27, 480-487 (1998).
14. Saxena, D., Flores, S. & Stotzky, G. Nature 402, 480 (1999) contains footnotes to individual assertions in this passage, from earlier work by Stotzky and other collaborators.
15. Suurkula, J., “Genetically Engineered Crops and Soil Fertility,” Physicians and Scientists for Responsible Application of Science and Technology, accessed on February 19, 2001 at http://www.psrast.org/soilfertfact.htm .
16. Ibid.
17. Charles Benbrook, former Executive Director of the Board on Agriculture for the US National Academy of Sciences, cited in “GE crops with Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) genes suspected to harm soil ecology,” Physicians and Scientists for Responsible Application of Science and Technology, accessed on February 19, 2001 at http://www.psrast.org/btsoilecol.htm .
18. For a good discussion of resistance issues, see Neppl, C., “Management of Resistance to Bacillus thuringiensis Toxins,” May, 26,2000, accessed on February 19, 2001 at http://camillapede.tripod.com/bapaper.html .
19. Freiberg, Bill. (1998). Will biotechnology bring prosperity to rural America? AgBioForum, 1(2), 76-77. Retrieved February 19, 2001 from the World Wide Web at http://www.agbioforum.missouri.edu.
20. The cost of transgenic research plus the cost of acquiring companies with genetics resources and/or distribution networks, e.g., Monsanto’s acquisition of DeKalb genetics and attempted acquisition of Delta & Pine Land. For a discussion of the relative importance of genetic technology versus genetic resources, see Kalaitzandonakes, N., “Biotechnology and Agrifood Industry Competitiveness,” in Competition in Agriculture: The United States in the World Market, Hayworth Press, Binghamtom, NY, 2000.
21. For an in depth treatment of these issues, see Renner, R., “Will Bt-Based Pest Resistance Management Plans Work?,” Environmental Science and Technology, 33:19, 410-415, October 11, 1999, accessed on the Internet 2/19/01 at http://pubs.acs.org/hotartcl/est/99/oct/ren.html .
22. Union of Concerned Scientists, The Gene Exchange, April 1999, available in print, or on line at http://www.ucsusa.org/Gene/apr99.standards.html (accessed 2/19/01). The percentage of cropland planted to non Bt crops varies all the way from a low (EPA) recommendation of 4% to a high of 80% derived recommended based on data from the International Life Sciences Institute (ILSI). Of course, at 80% one is forced to wonder what the point of planting the Bt crop is in the first place.
23. Kaesuk-Yoon, C., “E.P.A. Announces New Rules on Genetically Engineered Corn,” New York Times, A-14, 1/17/00, or at http://www.epa.gov .
24. Kirschenmann, F., President, Farm Verified Organic, Medina, ND, in “NBIAP News Report, Special Issue on Bt,” Information Systems for Biotechnology, December 1995. Internet copy at: http://www.nbiap.vt.edu/news/specials/news95.dec.html .
25. Robinson, Raoul A., Return to Resistance: Breeding Crops to Reduce Pesticide Dependence, Ag Access, Davis, CA, 1996, page 21.
26. Ibid., page 21.
27. D. Webb, “Eating Well,” New York Times, November 28, 1990.
28. This is the so-called Physician’s Health Study, reported in January 1996, that followed 22,000 male physicians who took beta carotene for more than 12 years. (Reported in the February 13, 1996 issue of HealthNews, published by the New England Journal of Medicine.)
29. Ibid. The CARET and ATBC trials found 28 and 18 percent more lung cancers, respectively, than among the portion of the groups given a placebo instead of the beta carotene supplement.
30. Ibid. Hennekens was principal investigator for the Physicians Health Study.
31. Journal of the American Medical Association, as reported in the Washington Post, February 1994.
32. Dr. Ross Welch, USDA Plant Nutritionist at Cornell University, private conversation.
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Note to readers: this paper was originally prepared for a regional meeting of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment entitled “Food and Farming in American Life and Letters” held in Unity, Maine during June 2000. The length was strictly limited, and the audience consisted of “eco-critics”. Thus the subject matter and approach were focused on their likely interests and knowledge base. Also please note that any hyperlinks above are more than eight years old. Thank you.