Gene Modification
Surprise! Farmers Grow Hearty Crops to Survive War
Published November 07, 2009 @ 06:00AM PT
Subsistence farmers in African war zones keep themselves alive in dangerous circumstances by leaning on intuition and age-old farming logic that goes like this: when in tough conditions, reuse whatever field you've got, grow the hardiest plants and when fleeing, take the hardiest seeds with you. Doing this allows farmers to create the crops best adapted to their needs; a surprise stroke of agricultural genius that apparently leaves scientists reeling.
A new study reports the unexpected emergence of hybrid rice in West African countries like Gambia, Ghana, Senegal and Togo, whose African and Asian rice varieties (Oryza glaberrima Steud and Oryza sativa L.) have only previously been interbred in a lab and there produced sterile offspring, according to SciDevNet.
The authors of the study, which appears in this month's issue of PLoS ONE, report that these two species of rice are interbreeding in the fields in part because of disruptions caused by war.
Science Front and Center at USDA
Published November 02, 2009 @ 06:00AM PT
Change is in the air at the USDA; the agency has taken it upon itself, in the words of President Obama, "to restore science to its rightful place" with the creation of the National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA), according to a USDA press release.
The new Institute, a product of the 2008 farm bill, replaces the Cooperative State Research, Education, and Extension Service (CSREES), and is intended, in the words of Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, to "be the Department's extramural research enterprise."
While science should indeed be incorporated back into the fold in all aspects of life, its application to agriculture is a particularly hot-button tonic, as I discussed on Friday. For those concerned with the advancement of the use of genetically modified organisms, the formation of this new Institute should hold kernels of concern.
GM Food Fight
Published October 30, 2009 @ 06:00AM PT
In the debate over genetically modified food, one thing is clear: we can't agree. And not only do we disagree but we disagree passionately and intransigently. Statistics are hurled back and forth, each one seemingly contradicting the last, until everyone has pie in their face and no one knows what's fact and what's fallacy.
Change.org member Dawn Gifford noted the intensity of the debate in a recent comment: "this issue is more divisive than almost any other international issue, barring war."
So what's a thinking person to do? Many people I talk to feel a sense of unease with GM foods, but don’t have a clearly defined opinion and don’t know which information to trust.
Bill Gates Enchanted by the GMO Idol
Published October 27, 2009 @ 06:00AM PT
I wrote last week about the Gates Foundation's efforts to help improve agricultural systems in the developing world. Gates's conclusion: the Foundation's investment should empower poor farmers to grow more crops and get them to market, which will help them pull themselves out of poverty.
Sounds like a plan, right? Not so fast, says alert reader and fellow blogger Greg Plotkin, who pointed out an important thread underlying the story: "Gates is hoping to prompt a second Green Revolution and has shown very little concern about the potential negative impacts that [genetically modified (GM)] crops could bring."
This is a crucial point to bring to light, not least because the architect of the Gates Foundation's plans, Rajiv Shah, is now a part of the Obama Adminstration. In April, he became Under Secretary of Research, Education and Economics and Chief Scientist at the USDA, a position in which he can work to entrench this particular "green revolution" agenda into national policy priorities.
U.S. Farmers Love Biotech...Apparently
Published July 16, 2009 @ 06:00AM PT
Farmers in the United States are continuing to plant genetically engineered crops at unprecedented levels according to a report released recently by the USDA's Economic Research Service.
The report found that the adoption (the percentage of farmers planting a certain kind of crop) of GE soybeans reached 91 percent; the adoption of GE cotton reached 88 percent; and the adoption of all biotech corn climbed to 85 percent in 2009.
Farmers are doing this despite claims that growing biotech crops in the U.S. has done little to increase yields. According to the Failure to Yield (pdf) report (previously cited on this blog) conducted by the Union of Concerned Scientist's Doug Gurian-Sherman:
...genetically engineering herbicide-tolerant soybeans and herbicide-tolerant corn has not increased yields. Insect-resistant corn, meanwhile, has improved yields only marginally. The increase in yields for both crops over the last 13 years, the report found, was largely due to traditional breeding or improvements in agricultural practices.
So why are U.S. farmers continuing to plant biotech crops?
Nation's Food Policy Pro-Pus, Pro-E. Coli, Pro-Bribery, Pro-GMOs
Published July 10, 2009 @ 05:19PM PT
Practices that were infuriating to me under Republicans have simply become disheartening under Democrats. I will explain.
Pro-Pus
So Michael Taylor, Monsanto's former lawyer and a fan of adding extra pus to the nation's milk supply by way of giving all our dairy cows chronic mastitis from rBST/rBGH, has indeed been hired to the newly created position of Deputy Commissioner of Food with the Food Safety Working Group at the FDA.
In theory, Taylor might not be as bad as all that, he shilled for rBST as a young, impressionable executive and he seems to have grown as a person.
Though adding insult to injury, Pennsylvania's Dennis Wolff is a finalist for Undersecretary of Food Safety. A willing and enthusiastic participant in Monsanto's campaign to prevent rBST-free labeling on milk, Wolff tried to sneak a 2008 ban on the labels under the noses of Pennsylvania citizens who were outraged and forced the governor to overturn the policy.
But really, two, TWO people appointed or being considered to head food safety in the Obama administration who opposed the public's right to know when their milk came from cows being treated with a hormone that gives them chronically inflamed and infected udders!?
(BTW, people would have heard about the bovine growth hormone controversy more widely as of the year 2000, perhaps, if Monsanto hadn't instigated the firing of two journalists who tried to expose rBST/rBGH for the carcinogenic, bovine mastitis-causing health disaster that it is. Though also, and this is funny, ha-ha, as part of the resolution of the ensuing litigation, a judge ruled that it wasn't illegal for a news station to lie. F*ers!)
So, I think we can safely say that there are those in our national food safety leadership who don't consider pus a worrying contaminant in the milk supply. Even if they don't hire Wolff, that this didn't immediately disqualify him, that they'd consider adding to the shame of hiring Taylor, is a mark of some serious concern.
Pro-E. coli
As reported, again at ObamaFoodorama, this is another of goals of the Obama administration's food policy:
World According to Monsanto, pt 10, Taking Over
Published July 09, 2009 @ 07:43AM PT
This last episode of the documentary covers the GMO-mediated takeover of South American farmland, replacing small, diverse farms with a desert of genetically engineered soybeans that will be fed mainly to livestock in wealthier nations.
But, but, but ... we need to feed the world, right? Yes. And there are much better ways to do that.
Dr. Doug Gurian-Sherman, an expert in genetic engineering, explains as much in an interview at The Ethicurean.
First, he explains the difference between types of yield. There's intrinsic yield increase, higher food production capacity mediated by the genes and environmental interactions of the plant. Then, there's operational yield increase, where losses from pests and weed competition are cut, therefore boosting net yield.
Gurian-Sherman worked on the Union of Concerned Scientists' report demonstrating only very slight operational yield increases due to the introduction of GMO crops in the US. But they don't have any traits on the market that can increase intrinsic yield. He explains the problem with trying to do that, specifically recent obstacles to realizing the company's claim that they can 'get more out of every raindrop':
... In the report we cover an interesting case. One problem with some drought-tolerant crop varieties is that under normal moisture conditions, the variety doesn’t yield as well as varieties without drought tolerance. The New York Times recently covered a potential breakthrough with a particular gene that reportedly conferred drought tolerance but didn’t show that downside. But then a few months later, another lab working on the gene for different reasons found that it made plants more susceptible to various plant diseases. So the same gene that confers drought tolerance makes plants more susceptible to disease. Farmers may have to use pesticides to control these diseases if this drought tolerance gene is approved. How will this balance out in terms of benefit and risk?
Such unintended effects are not publicized because companies don’t like to talk about failures. The bottom line is that there has been a huge amount of effort to produce a lot of crops over the years with success of only a few traits: Bt and herbicide tolerance. They have not resulted in significant yield gains at all in the U.S. And we also have to put any yield gains in the context of the expense and other factors and compare GE technology to other technologies and production methods. ...
Gurian-Sherman also details more of the things that can go wrong when trying to boost yield through adjusting complex, multi-variable traits. There are often unintended consequences, such as the increased lignin production in the cell walls of Bt corn plants. Lignin isn't harmful, to my knowledge, but it's not edible either to us or the majority of microorganisms, so it would probably take longer to break down.
What would the effects be of having corn residue that's less digestible to the soil microfauna? I don't know, though it could conceivably reduce biodiversity and the available food supply for communities of organisms that make soil healthy. It might considerably alter the makeup of soil ecosystems by favoring different microbes, or not have any effects.
Though it would be nice if we could know for sure. Especially nice if our food was labeled so that we knew if we were participating in the experiment.
