World According to Monsanto, pt 10, Taking Over

by Natasha Chart

categories: Biodiversity, Corporate Kneebiters, Gene Modification, Indigenous Rights

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.