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Posted on February 24, 2013 | 6 Comments
I only posted a couple of weeks ago about GM crops and Mark Lynas, but a fortnight’s a long time in agriculture (and even longer in the blogosphere), so time for a few updates.
Lynas, you may recall, is the political science graduate and some time environmental activist who’s now made his peace with corporate agribusiness, the nuclear industry etc and gave a rousing speech to the Oxford Farming Conference about the benefits of transgenic (GM) technology. One of his big themes was the need to embrace science in considering the case for GM crops. Another one was the misdeeds of the organic movement – for example, dismissing as “simplistic nonsense” the Soil Association’s arguments that people in the west should “eat less meat and fewer calories overall so that people in developing countries can have more”.
Entertainingly, this Soil Association view appears to be pretty much exactly the line taken in a new report from the UN Environment Programme lead authored by Professor Mark Sutton, an environmental physicist from the Centre for Hydrology and Ecology at Imperial College London. Which all sounds pretty scientific to me. I haven’t had sight of the full report yet, but judging from the press release it advocates “lowering personal consumption of animal protein among populations consuming high rates by voluntary reduction and avoiding excess” and it also advocates a rebalancing of global agricultural nutrient distribution from the over-nutrified west to the under-nutrified south, the effects of which would seem quite akin to having fewer calories in the west so that people in developing countries can have more.
One would like to think that Lynas will now put his hand up and admit that it was simplistic nonsense to call the Soil Association’s position simplistic nonsense, given that its view has been sanctified by science. However, I rather doubt he will, since as I suggested a couple of weeks ago his talk had very little to do with actual science, and a lot to do with invoking the word “science” as a kind of religious incantation to justify his views. Meanwhile, various people have been writing interestingly on the questionable scientific case for GM – including Colin Tudge, Brian John, Ford Denison, John Vandermeer, Doug Gurian-Sherman, Eric Holt Giménez and Peter Melchett. Their credentials as scientists may vary, but collectively they’re rather superior to Lynas’s. Unfortunately their views didn’t get as much airplay – perhaps, as a political ‘scientist’, Lynas knows more about how to play the game of politics.
Ultimately, though, I think it’s a grave error to frame this whole debate in terms of “the science”. I was prompted to post on Lynas’s talk because of how blatantly rhetorical his appeal to the concept of “science” was. But as a social scientist like Lynas, I don’t have the biological background always to be able to sort the scientific wheat from the chaff in everything I read about GM. One might think that there should be public institutions employing disinterested scientists to do this on behalf of laymen like me. But that would turn scientists into priests (ironically something of a problem in contemporary society, as demonstrated in Lynas’s lecture) – and many of the questions about GM are not scientific ones anyway.
For example, to ask whether it’s possible to manipulate the rice genome in order to make it synthesise beta-carotene and produce ‘golden rice’ is a scientific question. But to ask whether we should tackle Vitamin A deficiency globally by introducing golden rice is not. Here we might turn to the skills of development experts, anthropologists, sociologists, epidemiologists and economists – though I’m a bit cautious about the economists, because of their tendency to make their analyses seem more scientific than they actually are. So how about this for a rule of thumb? Any question involving ‘can’ goes to the scientists, because they’re good at figuring out new ways of doing things. Any question involving ‘should’ goes to the anthropologists and sociologists, because they understand how effects ramify throughout societies, and also because it would be good for them to have to make some tricky policy decisions for a change rather than criticising everybody else’s. And any question involving ‘how’ goes to the economists, because they’re good at calculating how to get people to do things using tax incentives and stuff, but otherwise get above themselves. No place in my team for political scientists, but I’m sure Mark Lynas has things to be getting on with.
I mention golden rice in particular because it’s been the subject of a debate between myself and self-styled ‘ecopragmatist’ Graham Stouts. It’s been a bruising affair, the kind of testosterone-fuelled, heavyweight battle witnessed in the lower reaches of the Screwfix Western League on wet winter weekends here in Somerset. I’m not sure that Stouts’ diatribes against me really need to be taken too seriously, but he did cause me to muse over the problematic way the word ‘ideology’ is so often used these days, and the difficulties faced by anyone who questions the modern ideology of ‘progress’, since they immediately invite the charge of backwardness or anti-progressiveness from within that same ideology. The debate also raised questions concerning the practicalities of relieving diseases of poverty.
On the latter score, Stouts considers my views on GM to be “morally repugnant” and akin to “going to Bangladesh, smashing up charitably-donated children’s wheelchairs and demanding they be completely banned”. My feeling about histrionics of this kind amongst GM proponents is that they doth protest too much. And funnily enough the International Rice Research Institute has just issued a press release which rather punctures some of the overinflated claims being put about by GM ideologues proponents on golden rice. A case of the people actually doing the work being rather more modest about it than the camp followers. It was ever thus.
My view remains that when the problem is poverty but the preferred solution is bioengineering Vitamin A into a grain, it’s worth looking very carefully at the political context of the solution. The research I’ve read so far doesn’t suggest to me that golden rice is likely to be the best route to go down even for the palliative relief of Vitamin A deficiency, though I don’t think it should be ruled out entirely. Stouts may be able to clarify his position if he replies to my last posts on his website, but when it comes to the charge of ‘moral repugnance’ my feeling is that GM proponents like him are dishonourably using the emotive issue of children’s suffering to spin their own particular line on GM. I’ll come back to the issue of golden rice in a future post. In the mean time, I guess the lesson I’ve learned from the GM debate is that scientists can’t tell us what to do, so we all have to try to become our own GM experts as best we can. In truth, to quote the inimitable Sweet Brown, ain’t nobody got time for that. But maybe we just have to try.
There was an amusing little sideshow in my debate with Stouts that centred around the Amish. But this post is already too long so I’ll pick up on that next time – not because I particularly want to spin out this GM debate any further, but because the Amish issue links back nicely to last week’s post on R. Ford Denison, and forward to future posts on agrarian populism.
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Chris: Greenpeace pulled a stunt playing on irrational fears of the dangers of eating GE by releasing a scare-mongering press release: “24 children used as guinea pigs in genetically engineered ‘Golden Rice’ trial.”
This lead to the scientists involved losing their jobs, although they had done nothing wrong. It is this that Lynas referred to in his Oxford talk; it is Greenpeace who are using emotive histrionics- about using innocent children as “Guinea Pigs” to push a political campaign against Golden Rice.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/commentary/greenpeaces-golden-rice-stand-should-appall-us-all/article4541042/
“Greenpeace has long been an implacable opponent of genetically modified foods, especially Golden Rice. And it had an especially good reason to be alarmed by this trial: It was a complete success.”
I went to great trouble to get you to respond to this several times on my blog; your last comment once again ignored the issue.
At this stage to claim you know Golden Rice is not “cost-effective” is simply false. The balance of probability is that it can indeed do what it says on the tin: the IRRI press release merely emphasizes that we wont know for sure until the community-scale trials have been conducted.
The point is that Greenpeace- who you explicitly say you will not “single out for criticism” (while going out of your way to criticize Lynas) do not want any trials at all to ever take place, and are willing and able to stoop to disgraceful manipulative tactics in order to stop them.
The same is true of anti-GE activism in general- you dont want scientific trials to take place, and destroy crops to stop them. This allows you to then say, “ah, but look they dont work anyway; it is all over-hyped; it takes so long to develop it cant be cost-effective.”
You deride the science you want to destroy as “scientism” and then bring your own “alternative” High Priests – a tiny minority of activist-scientists and Big Organic Shills- to defend your political position. Just as is the habit of homeopaths, you want it both ways: accusing “Science” as resting on false authority, and then in the same breath invoking your own.
I’ve posted a brief reply at SkeptEco. I think Strouts post above pretty much undermines itself, and I don’t see much value in two people continually pointing the finger and roaring ‘ideologue’ at each other. I’ve done my best to chart out the larger ideological terrain within which the concept of ‘science’ is articulated within this debate, and I have little else to add. You can only take a horse to water…
[…] Smaje now has a new post out in which he says of Lynas his talk had very little to do with actual science, and a lot to do with invoking the word “science” as a kind of religious incantation to justify his views…. I was prompted to post on Lynas’s talk because of how blatantly rhetorical his appeal to the concept of “science” was. But as a social scientist like Lynas, I don’t have the biological background always to be able to sort the scientific wheat from the chaff in everything I read about GM. One might think that there should be public institutions employing disinterested scientists to do this on behalf of laymen like me. But that would turn scientists into priests (ironically something of a problem in contemporary society, as demonstrated in Lynas’s lecture) – and many of the questions about GM are not scientific ones anyway. […]
It’s possible to argue the pluses and minuses of gm till the cows come home. Personally, it seems to me that the pluses are mainly things that gm *could* do and the minuses are things that it *is* doing. But this is debatable.
What is not debatable is the historic parallel with agrochemicals. In the 1940’s and 50’s pesticides and other ‘cides were generally seen as an unmitigated benefit. With experience some of them were found to be unacceptably harmful and have since been withdrawn. Although some are very persistent, in the end if you stop using them they leave the biosphere.
We are now at that early stage with gm. There are indications that they may be as harmful as some of the pesticides which are now illegal substances, but at this stage there’s still room to debate that. The big difference is that once they’re released into the biosphere it’s not always possible to withdraw genes. If they find their way into wild species or naturalised plants – such as oilseed rape, which is now the most successful spontaneously-reproducing brassica in Britain – you can’t change your mind and withdraw them.
To me this is the clinching argument. No amount of short term trials can tell us how gm will behave in the biosphere in the long term. We’re just taking a punt on it all turning out OK.
“The big difference is that once they’re released into the biosphere it’s not always possible to withdraw genes.” I dont see why this is the “clinching argument” – surely also debatable at least?
There is no reason to think the risks of genes escaping and causing problems are a greater threat from GMOs than from other breeding methods, eg mutagenesis, of which there are thousands of varieties and these are accepted under organic standards. Even crop rotation has been known to put selection pressure on pests.
http://reason.com/archives/2013/02/22/the-top-five-lies-about-biotech-crops/2
The whole 10,000 year-old project of farming has already changed the environment so much in ways that can never be undone, with or without GMOs. Nor does it seem reasonable to compare genetic engineering with dangerous chemicals, implying that they are all spawned of the same mindset- lets call it “Scientism” – and therefore must be equally bad. In fact, there is plenty of evidence that GE crops have reduced the use of pesticides, and allowed the substitution of dangerous chemicals with much more benign ones.
GE is a biological approach, in line with permaculture principles, and something Rachel Carson would have approved of, in line with organic principles of avoiding chemicals. Chemicals have also been unfairly demonized but this is much more understandable because as you say some were very dangerous – and have rightly been banned. I think we have to have some trust in the regulatory process- the anti-GE movement depends on a suspicion of science and flagrant scare-mongering.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2012/08/12/would-rachel-carson-embrace-frankenfoods-this-scientist-believes-yes/
GE is just another way of making new varieties and likely safer than more scatter-gun approaches including traditional breeding. It also has a lot of advantages over other methods and solves problems they cannot- eg with the Rainbow Papya. http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/feb06/aaas.gonsalves.papaya.sd.html
Also, Patrick your attitude does not explain the blanket opposition to all GE crops including potatoes which could save many fungicide sprayings each year and has negligible chance of “escaping” into the wild, a risk that is negligible for other crops as well.
http://www.biofortified.org/2010/11/the-likelihood-of-pollen-from-ge-cotton-causing-harm-to-the-environment-is-about-as-likely-as-a-poodle-escaping-into-the-wild/
The issue of escaping genes ironically is something that could have been addressed with Gene Use Restriction Technology (GURT) aka Terminator- too bad Monsanto were compelled under activist pressure to shelve it. But since we so have GE crops being grown over a larger area each year, would you prefer Patrick to see it resurrected?
http://skepteco.wordpress.com/2012/09/02/the-truth-about-the-terminator/
There is overwhelming scientific consensus that these risks are no greater for GE than other methods, most likely less; I dont like the analogy with climate science but I still think you have to explain why you dont accept the science on this.
[…] Patrick makes two main points: that he thinks there is evidence that GE can be as dangerous as some now-banned chemicals; and that with GE “The big difference is that once they’re released into the biosphere it’s not always possible to withdraw genes.” […]