The Small Farm Future Blog

GM Crops and agribusiness: a long view

Posted on October 2, 2013 | 2 Comments

Today I thought I’d post some thoughts on the thoughts of another blogger (hey, the blogosphere can be so self-referential, no?). The man in question is Steve Savage of Applied Mythology, a blog that aims to make the case for the virtues of business-as-usual biotech agri. I’ve been following Steve’s blog for a while now, and though I disagree with the position he takes in virtually every one of his posts, I’ve definitely learned a few things along the way. Some relate to agronomic issues based on his insights as an industry insider, others have more to do with seeing how pro-biotechnology arguments get framed rhetorically.

Quite often, Applied Mythology attempts to present socio-economic and political issues as agronomic or biotechnological ones – as in this argument about the basis of US agriculture’s export success, or this inference that American slavery may have emerged as a result of a plant disease. But here I want to focus more specifically on a rhetorical strategy used to support transgenic crops, which is deployed in one of the site’s recent posts, and indeed in several previous ones, as well as more widely within the debate over GM. Its general structure is as follows: Pest or disease A threatens to wipe out the entire crop of B in country C; fortunately, transgenic variety D is available to save the industry, except irrational and anti-scientific environmental organisations Eⁿ are trying to prevent its implementation. Let’s stop them!

There are various lines of weakness in this kind of argument. I’ll just mention a couple. The first is the notion of ‘saving’ an industry. I suppose the phrase is defensible, but rather than ‘saving’ the industry I think it would be more apposite to say ‘temporarily averting a crisis until the next one comes along’. Media treatments of transgenic crops regularly proceed as if the technology has somehow overcome the problem of plant pests and diseases once and for all. The truth is otherwise. Surely the best that can be said for it is that it may enable plant breeders to respond to emerging threats with new varieties more quickly. Actually, that brings to mind another rhetorical strategy among GM proponents, which is to assert strongly but very briefly the weakest part of its case (that GM crops put an end to plant disease problems) and then wax lengthily on the weakest part of its opponents’ case (that there is demonstrable evidence of harm to human health). Here’s how it’s done (this article is also noteworthy for displaying another common mechanistic logical chain: population A has a low incidence of disease B, apparently as a result of eating a lot of C, which is high in ingredient D – so if we can synthesise D cheaply and add it to diets worldwide we can reduce the global incidence of B. I’m not saying that that reasoning is necessarily always misguided, but I wouldn’t say it’s always guided either…transfats spring to mind).

Anyway, my basic point is that GM proponents are often guilty of not taking a longer view. So I was interested to see that Dr Savage, most definitely a GM proponent, has given a talk called ‘Humans vs pests, the long view’. Dodgy asides about slavery excepted, I thought it was a pretty good talk and a decent introduction to the issue of crop pests, albeit one that didn’t have much to say about transgenic technology as such. But what did ring out clearly from the talk – and this is my second point – is that export-oriented, cash-crop agriculture is often hugely reliant on a handful (or less) of crop varieties that possess the demanding suite of characteristics making them suitable for mass cultivation, export, storage and remote sale. This monocultural tendency makes them vulnerable to emerging pests and diseases, as in the story of gros michel bananas, so major commercial varieties often have a limited lifespan before they must be replaced by another variety, often one bred in part from some obscure variety growing non-commercially in a centre of diversity.

In this respect, the case for GM dovetails with the case for a large-scale, monocultural, export-oriented, cash-crop agriculture. A small-scale, polycultural, locality-oriented, self-provisioning agriculture is not without its pest and disease problems, but generally it has fewer such problems (or at least fewer ones of such gravity that it requires biotechnology to ‘save’ it) and many more potential solutions to them up its sleeve than its big-scale counterpart. And indeed its big-scale counterpart may rely on it for keeping alive potentially useful crop diversity from which new varieties can be created, even as it attempts to supplant it economically. Despite GM proponents touting it as a technology for poor small farmers, it seems to me to have much greater relevance to and affinity with big agri cash cropping. Certainly, there are instances where losses of key crops among peasant farmers can be severe, no joke when you’re living on the margins of subsistence (the reasons for that, of course, being entirely political and not fundamentally remediable by improved crop varieties). The rhetorical strategies typically employed by GM proponents in this instance though tend to the emotive – like here and here. But what would be the long-term consequences of such farmers accepting a transgenic fix to the problem (from whom? at what cost?) compared with solutions derived from their own long adaptive engagement with crop diversity and cultural controls, as excellently analysed in Paul Richards’ book Indigenous Agricultural Revolution and possibly also by the IAASTD report? I don’t know, but I’d be interested in seeing some good analysis.

Until then, I’m inclined to the view that if you think it’s a good thing to have a global agriculture dominated by export-oriented cash-crop industries, then you’ll probably think it’s a good thing to have transgenic technology to help get you out of the holes those industries find themselves in. Whereas if, like me, you think we’d be better off moving towards a social model of agriculture based more on locality self-provisioning, then transgenic technology seems less relevant, and indeed something of a threat to the agriculture we favour. Wouldn’t it be great if we could look into the future and see how all these various technologies and farm systems will play out in the truly long view, way beyond our individual lives? Then we’d know if our cherished ambitions for the kind of farms, and thus the kind of societies, we want to see turned out to be prescient or mere historical dead ends. But since that’s not possible, all we can do is work for the future we want to see as best we can with the knowledge currently available to us. Steve Savage’s talk basically assumed a labour-shedding, export-oriented agriculture of commercial monocultures. In the food systems I’d like to see in the future such an agriculture would be vastly curtailed, and I think that probably means the importance of GM crops would be vastly curtailed alongside it.