Genetic Engineering in Agriculture:

The
Myths
Environmental Risks
and
Alternatives

Miguel A. Altieri, Ph.D. / Food First Special Report n.1 Apr01

ISBN 0-935028-85-4 April 2001 $10.00, paperback 108 pages

"A key problem facing the public is that biotechnology companies and associated scientific bodies are making false promises that genetic engineering will move agriculture away from a dependence on chemical inputs, reduce environmental problems, and solve world hunger. Such promises are founded on philosophical and scientific premises that are fundamentally flawed, and these premises need to be exposed and criticized in order to advance toward a truly sustainable agriculture."
-- from the introduction

On March 2-4, 2000, the International Workshop on the Ecological Impacts of Transgenic Crops was held at the University of California, Berkeley, co-sponsored by Food First and the Center for Biological Control of UC Berkeley. Genetic Engineering in Agriculture: The Myths, Environmental Risks, and Alternatives is a report based on that workshop. It examines the many aspects of genetically engineered crops: biotechnology, world hunger, welfare of farmers; genetically modified crops and human health; biotechnology, agriculture, and the environment; environmental risks of insect resistant crops; and more sustainable alternatives to biotechnology. Also included are an extensive glossary, a list of Web-related resources, and bibliography.

Table of Contents

Preface
Introduction
Background Chapter One: Biotechnology, World Hunger, and the Welfare of Farmers
Chapter Two: Genetically Modified Crops and Human Health Are transgenic crops similar to conventionally bred crops? Are transgenic crops safe to eat?
Chapter Three: Biotechnology, Agriculture, and the Environment Herbicides kill more than weeds Creation of "superweeds"
Chapter Four: Environmental Risks of Insect-Resistant Crops (Bt Crops) Resistance Effects on nontarget species A precautionary tale
Chapter Five: More Sustainable Alternatives to Biotechnology Do Exist What is agroecology? Some success stories from Latin America Organic farming What is needed?
Glossary
Resources
Bibliography

BACKGROUND

Until about four decades ago, crop yields in US agriculture depended on internal resources: recycling of organic matter, built-in biological control mechanisms, and rainfall patterns. Agricultural yields were modest but stable. Production was safeguarded by growing more than one crop or variety in space and time in a field as insurance against pest outbreaks or severe weather. Nitrogen was replaced in the soil by rotating major field crops with legumes. Rotations suppressed insects, weeds, and diseases by effectively breaking the life cycles of these pests. A typical Corn Belt farmer grew corn in rotation with several crops, including soybeans, and small grain production was intrinsic to maintain livestock. Most of the labor was done by the family who owned the farm, with occasional hired help. No specialized equipment or services were purchased from off-farm sources (Altieri 1996).

In the developing world, small farmers developed even more complex and biodiverse farming systems, guided by indigenous knowledge that has stood the test of time (Thrupp 1998). In this type of farming, the link between agriculture and ecology was quite strong and signs of environmental degradation were seldom evident.

But as agricultural modernization progressed, the ecology-farming linkage was often broken as ecological principles were ignored and/or overridden. Profit, rather than people's needs or environmental concerns, has shaped agricultural production. Agribusiness interests and prevailing policies favored large farm size, specialized production, crop monocultures, and mechanization.

Today monocultures have increased dramatically worldwide, mainly through the geographical expansion of land annually devoted to single crops. Monoculture has implied the simplification and loss of biodiversity, the end result being an artificial ecosystem requiring constant human intervention in the form of agrochemical inputs, which, in addition to temporarily boosting yields, result in a number of undesirable environmental and social costs. Aware of such impacts, several agricultural scientists have arrived at a general consensus that modern agriculture confronts an ecological crisis (Conway and Pretty 1991).

The yearly loss of yields due to pests in many crops (reaching about 30 percent in most crops), despite the substantial increase in the use of pesticides (about 500 million kg of active ingredient worldwide) is a symptom of the environmental crisis affecting agriculture. Cultivated plants grown in genetically homogenous monocultures do not possess the necessary ecological defense mechanisms to tolerate the impact of outbreaking pest populations (Altieri 1994).

When these agricultural models were exported to Third World countries through the so-called Green Revolution, environmental and social problems were exacerbated. Most resource-poor farmers of Latin America, Asia, and Africa gained very little from the process of development and technology transfer of the Green Revolution, as proposed technologies were not scale-neutral. Farmers with larger and better-endowed lands gained the most, but farmers with fewer resources and located in marginal environments often lost, and income disparities were often accentuated (Conway 1997).

Technological change has mainly favored the production of export and/or commercial crops produced primarily in the large farm sector, with a marginal impact on productivity of crops for food security, which are largely grown by the peasant sector (Pretty 1995). In areas where conversion from subsistence to a cash agricultural economy progressively occurred, a number of ecological and social problems became evident: loss of food self-sufficiency, genetic erosion, loss of biodiversity and traditional farming knowledge, and permanence of rural poverty (Conroy et al. 1996).

In order to sustain such agro-export systems, many developing countries have become net importers of chemical inputs and agricultural machinery, increasing government expenditures and exacerbating technological dependence. For example, between 1980 and 1984, Latin America imported about US $430 million worth of pesticides and used about 6.5 million tons of fertilizers (Nicholls and Altieri 1997). Such massive use of agrochemicals led to a major environmental crisis of yet unmeasured social and economic proportions.

What is ironic is that the same economic interests that promoted the first wave of agrochemically-based agriculture are now celebrating and promoting the emergence of biotechnology as the latest "magic bullet." Biotechnology, they say, will revolutionize agriculture with products based on nature's own methods, making farming more environmentally friendly and more profitable for farmers and healthy and nutritious to consumers (Hobbelink 1991).

The global fight for market share is leading major corporations to massively deploy genetically engineered (GE) plants (also known as genetically modified [GM] or transgenic crops) around the world (more than 40 million hectares in 1999) without proper advance testing of short- or long-term impacts on human health and ecosystems. This expansion has been helped along by marketing and distribution agreements entered into by corporations and marketers (i.e. Ciba Seeds with Growmark, and Mycogen Plant Sciences with Cargill), and the absence of regulations in many developing countries.

In the US, the policies of the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) consider genetically modified crops "substantially equivalent" to conventional crops. These policies have been developed in the context of a regulatory framework that is inadequate and, in some cases, completely absent.

The agrochemical corporations who increasingly control the direction and goals of agricultural innovation claim that genetic engineering will enhance the sustainability of agriculture by solving the very problems affecting conventional farming, and will spare the Third World from low productivity, poverty, and hunger.

By confronting myth with reality, the objective of this book is to challenge the false promises made by the genetic engineering industry. The industry has promised that genetically engineered crops will move agriculture away from a dependence on chemical inputs, increase productivity, decrease input costs, and help reduce environmental problems (Office of Technology Assessment 1992). By challenging the myths of biotechnology, we expose genetic engineering for what it really is: another technological fix or "magic bullet" aimed at circumventing the environmental problems of agriculture (which are the outcome of an earlier round of technological fixes) without questioning the flawed assumptions that gave rise to the problems in the first place (Hindmarsh 1991). Biotechnology promotes single gene solutions for problems derived from ecologically unstable monoculture systems designed on industrial models of efficiency. Such a unilateral and reductionist approach has already proven ecologically unsound in the case of pesticides, whose promoters espoused a reductionist approach, using one chemical­one pest as opposed to the one gene­one pest approach now promoted by biotechnology.

The alliance of reductionist science and multinational monopolistic industry will take agriculture further down a misguided road. Biotechnology perceives agricultural problems as genetic deficiencies of organisms and treats nature as a commodity, while in the process making farmers more dependent on an agribusiness sector that increasingly concentrates power over the food system.

NOTES

Altieri, M.A. 1994 Biodiversity and Pest Management in Agroecosystems. New York: Haworth Press. 1996 Agroecology: The Science of Sustainable Agriculture. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.

Conroy, M.T., D.L. Murray and P. Rosset 1996 A Cautionary Fable: Failed US Development Policy in Central America. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers.

Conway, G.R. 1997 The Doubly Green Revolution: Food for All in the 21st Century. London, UK: Penguin Books.

Conway, G.R. and J.N. Pretty 1991 Unwelcome Harvest: Agriculture and Pollution. London, UK: Earthscan.

Hindmarsh, R. 1991 The flawed Œsustainable' promise of genetic engineering. The Ecologist 21:196­205.

Hobbelink, H. 1991 Biotechnology and the Future of World Agriculture. London: Zed Books, pg. 159.

Nicholls, C.I. and M.A. Altieri 1997 Conventional agricultural development models and the persistence of the pesticide treadmill in Latin America. International Journal of Sustainable Development and World Ecology 4:93­111.

Office of Technology Assessment 1992 A New Technological Era for American Agriculture. Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office.

Pretty, J. 1995 Regenerating Agriculture: Policies and Practices for Sustainability and Self-reliance. London, UK: Earthscan.

Thrupp, L.A. 1998 Cultivating Biodiversity: Agrobiodiversity for Food Security. Washington DC: World Resources Institute.