In this five-part series, E&E examines the asynchronous, accelerating acceptance of genetically modified crops around the world, and what it means for society when GM crops become the agricultural baseline.
For the past two decades, promises of crop improvement have been the domain of genetically modified plants: mostly, crops supplemented with bacterial genes to resist pests or weedkillers like Roundup. More than 85 percent of U.S. corn, soy or cotton grown contains such genes. But there is more than one way to transform a plant.
Europe can't feed its pigs -- at least, not by itself. Meat-hungry and short on animal feed, European nations have relied for years on protein imports, such as the ground meal of soybeans from the United States, to sustain their cattle and pig farms. While this complex chain of trade has worked reasonably well, it has started to be threatened by a microscopic foe: the dust of genetically modified (GM) crops.
Europe could have been the world leader in genetically modified (GM) crops. The research was there in the 1980s, when Belgian scientists pioneered the introduction of foreign genes in plants. So much was still to be discovered, said Marc Van Montagu, an emeritus professor at Ghent University who is one of the architects of modern plant biotechnology. "Belgium was the place," said Van Montagu, who received the prestigious Japan Prize, which honors science and technology, in 1998 for his biotech work. "There were 50 different field trials." Then came the fear, the cries of "Frankenfood" and the public backlash against the European Union's approval of its first biotech crop, a pesticide-freighted corn known as "Bt maize," in 1998. Fresh from scares about mad cow disease, the public was in no mood to tackle more food safety issues, true or not. No GM crop has been approved for growing since.
These days, there is no rarer commodity in farming than trust. Take Oregon's Willamette Valley, which for generations has been the germ of the U.S. sugar beet industry, producing nearly all the country's seeds. Such breeding is complicated when neighbors grow genetically similar crops and stiff Pacific winds, baffled by the Coast Range mountains, shove pollen every which way. But Willamette's growers have cooperated, establishing a system in which seed producers flag their plots on a collective map, giving fair warning of what is grown where. Voluntary distances between crops were established and, if abutting farms had a conflict in what they grew, well, they could usually figure it out. That changed, Moron said, when the genetically modified (GM) beets arrived.
Pamela Ronald and Raoul Adamchak have every reason not to get along.
Ronald, a plant scientist, has spent her past two decades manipulating rice from her lab bench, bending the grain's DNA to her whim. Adamchak, meanwhile, is an organic farmer, teaching college students the best practices of an environmentally gentle agriculture at his California market garden.
As Adamchak confesses, few have been more vociferously opposed to the genetic engineering practiced by Ronald than his organic movement, which has steadily grown in recent years to constitute an influential, if tiny, part of the U.S. farm system. So it can come as some surprise when Ronald and Adamchak let slip that they have been happily married for more than a decade.
Such a union should not be shocking, the couple argues. And a more modest version -- sans marriage -- must be considered by any farmer or consumer hoping for a sustainable future for agriculture.
Industrial farming, with its heavy use of pesticides, synthetic fertilizer and irrigation, is exhausting the environment, and with billions more mouths to feed in the upcoming decades, the problem will only worsen unless the efforts of organic farming and genetic engineering are combined, they say.
"The worst thing for the environment is farming," said Ronald, a geneticist at the University of California, Davis, who is best known for her work developing rice strains that survive two weeks of continuous flooding.
"It doesn't matter if it is organic," Ronald said. "You have to go in and destroy everything. So let's be efficient. Let's conserve. Let's be smart about it."
To spread their message to two communities that rarely speak in measured terms, Ronald and Adamchak have written a book, "Tomorrow's Table: Organic Farming, Genetics, and the Future of Food," which came out in paperback last month.
What Adamchak and Ronald pursue in the book is in essence a unified theory of farming. While critical of Western seed companies that have co-opted genetically modified (GM) crops for questionable business practices, the couple argues that both current and future generations of altered crops will, if responsibly managed, allow much of the world's hungry to be fed from land already degraded by the plow's slice and the tractor's compressing wheel.
"The point of our book is that you really need to look at the goals of sustainability," Ronald said. "What matters is: Are we achieving sustainable agricultures that can feed the world without damaging it?"
Ronald and Adamchak are not alone in their call for a more nuanced understanding of GM crops. Their work has inspired books by a varied clutch of professionals: an environmentalist, a historian and a journalist. The books -- Stewart Brand's "Whole Earth Discipline," James McWilliams' "Just Food" and Michael Specter's "Denialism" -- take advocates and critics of genetic engineering to task for what has become a polarized and dumbed-down debate.
Brand, who heavily cites Ronald and Adamchak, is perhaps the most incendiary in his work. While he made his name as a leader of the environmental movement decades ago, founding the Whole Earth Catalog, in recent years Brand has sought a third way, supporting "heretical" technologies like nuclear power.
He is full-throated in his defense of GM crops, writing: "I daresay the environmental movement has done more harm with its opposition to genetic engineering than with any other thing we've been wrong about. We've starved people, hindered science, hurt the natural environment, and denied our practitioners a crucial tool."
McWilliams, an agriculture historian at Texas State University and previously a critic of GM crops, said that during his recent research he has come to respect and heed the couple's message.
"I admire them for fighting an immense uphill battle," McWilliams said. "I cannot think of another issue that really sets the organic lobby [so] on edge. ... Their attempt to blend organic agriculture with genetic engineering is really quite visionary."
"They're looking into a tidal wave of opposition," he added. "Just judging them solely on the contents of their book, they do it with a great deal of knowledge and a very powerful argument."
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