Stopping the Sixth Extinction – Beyond GM Food
The global food system is a dominant force in shaping our planet and its ecosystems.
But it’s a system based faulty foundations, and with every passing year it becomes clearer that conversations about sustainability and biocapacity must begin with how we feed ourselves.
Modern agriculture is built on exploitation – the notion that we can take whatever we need for as long as we want and when Nature doesn’t ‘behave’ we can beat her into submission with machinery and chemicals.
As a result around the globe, farming is responsible for the destruction of vital rainforests, the loss of essential topsoil, pollution of the aquatic environment, desertification of once thriving farmlands, and one third of our global greenhouse gas emissions. The pesticides used so widely in farming, particularly those containing chlorinated compounds, can persistent in the environment, adulterate the food chain and are toxic to humans and other living creatures.
The ecological footprint of farming is now so enormous that we can no longer achieve sustainability without completely revamping our vision of farming.
But instead of abandoning industrial agriculture as a failed experiment we continue to propose solutions that are relics of this broken system. Genetic modification is a good example of this.
For 20 years GM advocates have promised that this technology will deliver higher yields, lower dependence on chemical inputs such as pesticides, higher profits for farmers, lower prices for the consumer, better nutrition – and of course the biggest promise of all, an end to world hunger.
And yet in the Americas, where GM crops have had their largest uptake, none of these promises have materialised. Instead farmers are using more pesticides and crucially more Roundup whose active ingredient glyphosate has just been declared a ‘probable human carcinogen’; GM yields are variable at best, GM crops offer no nutritional advantages, and globally we are no closer to ‘feeding the world’ then we were when all this started.
There are still very vocal factions who believe that GMOs are simple, safe and sustainable and that anyone who opposes them is irrational and irresponsible. But this is changing.
Commenting on an experimental strain of GM rice, altered to reduce methane emissions, the normally GM-gung-ho journal Nature recently noted that simply tweaking one aspect of the plant to make small reductions in methane emissions, had big implications for other measures of sustainability and “raises biological and ethics concerns”.
It risked, for example, unbalancing the communities of soil microbes that live around the roots of rice plants, many of which utilise methane. Loss of these microbes could encourage an overgrowth of other, potentially pathogenic, microbes. It could affect nutrient uptake from the soil, necessitating more use of nitrogen fertilisers, which in turn leads to water pollution and higher emissions of nitrous oxide (also a climate changing gas).
Simply put, there are no simple tweaks.
If we want to keep eating, and eating well, we must farm within our planetary limits and that requires a substantial shift away from the silver bullet of chemicals and techno-fixes and towards more promising direction of agro-ecology.
In 2008 the International Assessment of Agriculture Science and Technology (IAASTD) report, the most comprehensive scientific and technical assessment of agricultural practices ever completed, concluded that GM is not a suitable technology for alleviating hunger.
Agro-ecological approaches – the application of ecological concepts and principles to agricultural systems – on the other hand was delivering increased yields and greater resilience. Often agro-ecological methods involve low-input systems which use fewer of our non-renewable resources and have the democratic advantage of being available even to the poorest farmers.
A healthy, equitable, sustainable food system from a healthy, equitable, sustainable agriculture is attainable. But to get there we have to move beyond the pro-GMO mindset that lingers in our research establishments, the media and politics.
As recent surveys and reports have made clear, in all parts of the world agro-ecology provides a blueprint for survival, and is a more resilient and sustainable approach to feeding ourselves than the rusting “silver bullet” of GM.
- This is the full version of an article that first appeared on Salt as part of its seven-part ‘Stopping the Sixth Extinction’ series
