Resolved: That the United States should substantially change its federal agricultural policy.
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|Source: Harper's Magazine, Oct 1997 v295 n
Resolved: That the United States should substantially change its federal agricultural policy.
|home||online coaching||research articles||research links||definitions||workshop information||plan ideas|
|Source: Harper's Magazine, Oct 1997 v295 n1769 p13(5).
Title: A techno-pox upon the land.(negative side-effects of the Green
Full Text COPYRIGHT 1997 Harper's Magazine Foundation
The modern history of agriculture has two faces. The first, a happy face, is turned toward nonfarmers who live in the developed world. It speaks brightly of technological miracles, such as the "Green Revolution" and, more recently, genetic engineering, that have resulted in the increased production of food for the world's hungry. The second face is turned toward the few remaining farmers who have survived these miracles. It is downcast and silent, like a mourner at a funeral.
The Green Revolution, a fundamental change in agricultural technology, arose in the 1960s and '70s from the assumption that poverty and hunger in poor countries were the result of low agricultural productivity, that subsistence farming as it had occurred for centuries was the basis of a brutish existence. In response to this assumption, plant breeders hit on an elegant method to increase dramatically the yield of the world's most important crops, especially wheat and rice. Put simply, this plan involved redesigning the plants themselves, increasing the size of the plants' reproductive parts -- the seed that we eat -- and decreasing the size of the vegetative parts -- the stems, roots, and leaves that we throw away. From a technical point of view, this worked. Unfortunately, that's not the end of the story. As in other seemingly simple, technical manipulations of nature, there have been undesirable and unintended consequences.
The primary problem is that Green Revolution agribusiness requires vast amounts of energy to grow and sustain these "miracle crops." Oil must be burned to make the large quantities of nitrogen fertilizer on which these plants depend. Farmers also must invest heavily in toxic herbicides, insecticides, and fungicides; in irrigation systems; and in spraying, harvesting, and processing machinery for the weakened, seed-heavy plants. Large sums of money must be borrowed to pay for these "inputs" before the growing season starts in the hope that crop sales will allow farmers to repay the debt later in the season. When that hope is frustrated, the farmer often loses his farm and is driven into a migrant pool of cheap labor for corporate-farming operations or is forced to seek work in the landless, teeming cities.
The Green Revolution is an early instance of the co-opting of human needs by the technoeconomic system. It is not a black-and-white example: some farmers have been able to keep on farming in spite of the high inputs required; others are mixing traditional methods of farming with selected newer technologies. But the latest manifestation of corporate agriculture, genetic engineering, is black-and-white. Excluding military spending on fabulously expensive, dysfunctional weapons systems, there is no more dramatic case of people having their needs appropriated for the sake of profit at any cost. Like high-input agriculture, genetic engineering is often justified as a humane technology, one that feeds more people with better food. Nothing could be further from the truth. With very few exceptions, the whole point of genetic engineering is to increase the sales of chemicals and bioengineered products to dependent farmers, and to increase the dependence of farmers on their new handlers, the seed companies and the oil, chemical, and pharmaceutical companies that own them.
Social problems aside, this new agricultural biotechnology is on much shakier scientific ground than the Green Revolution ever was. Genetic engineering is based on the premise that we can take a gene from species A, where it does some desirable thing, and move it into species B, where it will continue to do that same desirable thing. Most genetic engineers know that this is not always true, but the biotech industry as a whole acts as if it were. First, genes are not like tiny machines. The expression of their output can change when they are put in a new genetic and cellular environment. Second, genes usually have multiple effects. Undesirable effects that are suppressed in species A may be expressed when the gene is moved to species B. And third, many of the most important, genetically regulated traits that agricultural researchers deal with are controlled by multiple genes, perhaps on different chromosomes, and these are very resistant to manipulation by transgenic technology.
Because of these scientific limitations, agricultural biotechnology has been largely confined to applications that are basically simpleminded despite their technical complexity. Even here we find problems. The production of herbicide-resistant crop seeds is one example. Green Revolution crops tend to be on the wimpy side when it comes to competing with weeds -- hence the heavy use of herbicides in recent decades. But many of the weeds are relatives of the crops, so the herbicides that kill the 