Genetic Engineering vs. Biotechnology: 

An Organic Vision of Sustainable Agriculture 

Benedikt Haerlin, Greenpeace 

Biotechnology: the Science and the Impact Conference 

Proceedings US Embassy, Netherlands Congress Centre, the Hague 20jan00 

The Dawn of the Biotech Age.

There seems to be little doubt that this brand-new century will be the beginning of the Biotech Age. Biological processes and their proper understanding and use by human ingenuity will replace today's predominately mechanical and chemical production of the industrial age. This will include subsequent replacement of pyrotechnical energy and transformation systems by organic, phyto-technical and biotechnological systems, In combination with the ongoing, revolution of information technologies biology will be the lead science base of technological innovation and transformation of our production system. We all know that today's industrial system is about to destroy and exhaust this planets life support systems and will be unable to sustain future generations. But let's not fool ourselves, there is no automatism or guarantee that the bio-technological revolution will be more sustainable.The only difference is that it has the potential to be sustainable.

What is Biotechnology?

Biotechnology is probably nearly as old as humankind and can be defined very generally as the use of biological processes or organisms for human purposes. Plant breeding and animal husbandry, beer brewing and yoghurt fermentation as well as more advanced technologies of using micro-organisms, phyto-pharmacology, vaccination or the use of biomass for energy production - All these technologies are forms of biotechnology. Progress in all areas of biology, but especially in molecular biology and biochemistry have added powerful additional tools to biotechnology over recent decades.

What is Genetic Engineering?

There is also the remarkably diffuse term of "modern Biotechnology" which some PR guys have coined to avoid calling genetic engineering genetic engineering. However there is a precise definition for genetic engineering, which is the direct intervention on the genetic makeup of an organisms usually by introducing foreign DNA into it's gene pool by means that would not occur naturally. This very specific subset of biotechnology enables humans since less than three decades to create artificial organisms, which are no longer the result of the natural rneans of evolutionary development.

What is GPs position on Genetic Engineering?

Greenpeace is not fundamentally opposing or condemning genetic engineering technologies. Given the still very limited experience with this technology as well as the even more limited understanding of it's overall impacts however we advocate utmost precaution in using this technology, especially on a large scale. However we appreciate the biomolecular insights this type of manipulations have provided over the past years and we believe that genetically engineered organisms can play an important role in the production of new pharmaceutical substances as well as in the conversion of other chemical production methods. The only limit we suggest to this use of GMOs is that they should be kept in hermetic containment and not enter the biosphere.

Why are we opposed to releases of GMOs into the environment?

The fundamental disagreement we have with some genetic engineers and their employers is whether or not such genetically engineered organisms should be releases into the environment. At this point we principally reject the release of GMOs into the environment and the reasons for this fundamental position are probably well known to most of you. So I will repeat then here only in a nutshell:

1. Genetic engineering of organisms creates unprecedented and qualitatively new transgenic lifeforms that have not occurred in nature before.

2. The present scientific knowledge about the functionality of DNA but even more about the dynamics of interaction between organisms are completely insufficient to assess the possible impacts of the release of such new lifeforms the environment. Only a portion of all existing organisms is even known today. And our understanding of their interactions is in its infancy. There are no valid concepts nor is there substantial experience to especially assess long term evolutionary effects of transgenic organisms. While we do not know too much about the possible direct, indirect, cumulative and synergistic effects of GMOs in the environment, we do know that organisms reproduce and adapt to their environments. They are neither stable in their genetic composition nor in their behavior, location and interaction with the environment. Once released into the environment however we have to assume that GMOs cannot be recalled.

This leads us to the conclusion that the only responsible way to handle this technology in the foreseeable future is to prevent tile release of GMOs into the environment. We derive this conclusion primarily from our assessment of what is not known and want cannot be known and to a much lesser extend from what is and can known about the possible impacts of GMOs on the environment. The combination of massive uncertainties about possible detrimental effects of GMOs in the environment and the global and long time potential of such possible effects leads us to demand the strictest possible application of the precautionary principle to refrain from releasing GMOs into the environment.

What are the challenges of Agriculture in the new century?

We certainly all agree that agriculture and food production faces tough challenges and choices, which are determined by environmental and demoscopic imperatives. It has:
· To supply access to sufficient food and a balanced diet for an estimated world population around 8 to 9 billion people in 2030,
· To drastically reduce its emission of climate gases and persistent organic polluters from inputs, production, transport and food processing,
· To stop and reverse soil erosion,
· To stop contamination of water and adapt to the regional levels of sustainable water supply,
· To reduce its destructive impact on habitats and biological diversity,
· To and it will finally have to adapt to highly probable but still unpredictable effects of climate change over the next century. In addition rural production and distribution structures will be decisive for the question of employment and social security of the majority of citizens of this planet. It will determine the speed of emergence and growth of entirely unsustainable mega-cities all over the world. And it will shape the development of global consumption patterns. The total challenge to agriculture in this context is therefore to provide for an increasing number of rural jobs and livelihoods.

To put it a bit simplistic, the challenge is to replace toxic, energy intensive and otherwise detrimental inputs by smart and qualified intensive labor using the state of the art of biotechnology.

Over the past decades, during which we have realized these imperatives, little consequences have been drawn.
· Food production and distribution related energy consumption and climate gas emissions are still steeply growing
· Water consumption is not reduced and increasingly relies on non renewable resources
· Toxic emissions are still unacceptably high and accumulating · Soil erosion continues in most regions of tile world
· All we know about man made extinction rates indicates they are still increasing
· The number of rural livelihoods is decreasing dramatically in most parts of the world, especially in relative terms to the growth of populations.

Further rationalization by increasing industrial input and emissions leads to further extermination of rural livelihoods and employment as well as invaluable so called traditional know-how about the land, the weather and the habitats. The proportional share of industrial inputs, transport, processing and distribution in food production is continuously increasing. The diversity of crops and varieties used in agriculture Is still decreasing and so is the pool of germplasm these varieties are based upon. And last not least the inequality in access to food as well as total per capita use of arable land has rather increased than decreased and is still one of the ftindarriental shames of this world, which leaves hundreds of millions of people hungry and malnourished at a stage of substantial overproduction of food.

Why do we cafi our vision organic?

Over the two decades of Greenpeace campaigns against the emission of persistent toxic substances into the environment and especially during the last years of campaigning against the release of GMOs into the environment, we have come to distrust more and more any short term technical fixes offered by industry in this area. Our conclusion today is that there are fundamental contradictions between industrial agro-chemical production, including genetic engineering and sustainability.

Let me name a few of these contradictions and opposing visions:
· the pursuit of principally unlimited growth and accumulation as opposed to the search for appropriate and sustainable equilibria
· the tendency to speed up and optimize processes to the achievable limit as opposed to adaptation to natural life cycles
· the tendency to optimize single aspects of the production at the expense of it's broader context, resulting in technical solutions frequently creating more problems than they solve
· the tendency to fully exploit economies of scale at the expense of the best small scale solution
· the tendency to standardize processes, products and knowledge at the expense of optimal adaptation to varying local and regional needs and conditions of biological and cultural diversity
· the need to cut costs irrespective of their nature, which leads to destructive exploitation and enforces neglect of unprized or underprized common goods
· the exclusive search for commercially viable products, which progressively include science, know-how and information and the inability to develop, provide and share free access to science, know-how and common goods
· a tendency for short term technical fixes as opposed to longer term integrated and systemic solutions
· the tendency to develop high tech and high risk systems requiring continuous control and elimination of errors as opposed to decentralized small scale and diverse, error-friendly and error-utilizing systems

Organic farming today

Derived from these structural contradictions we have come to learn that the movement and concept of organic farming is by far the closest to address these problems and provide an integrated and forward looking vision of future agriculture.

Let me name some of their basic principles as codified in IFOAM organic standards:
· To produce food of high quality in sufficient quantity
· To interact in a constructive and life-enhancing way with natural systems and cycles
· To consider the wider social and ecological impact of the organic production and processing system
· To encourage and enhance biological cycles within the farming system, involving microorganisms, soil flora and fauna, plants and animals
· To develop a valuable and sustainable aquatic ecosystem
· To maintain and increase long term fertility of soils
· To maintain the genetic diversity of the production system and its surroundings, including the protection of plant and wildlife habitats
. To promote the healthy use and proper care of water, water resources and all life therein
· To use, as far as possible, renewable resources in locally organized production systems,
· To create a harmonious balance between crop production and animal husbandry
· To give all livestock conditions of life with due consideration for the basic aspects of their innate behavior
· To minimize all forms of pollution
· To process organic products using renewable resources
· To produce fully biodegradable organic products
· To produce textiles which are long lasting and of good quality
· To allow everyone involved in organic production and processing a quality of life which meets their basic needs and allows an adequate return and satisfaction from their work, including a safe working environment
· To progress toward an entire production, processing and distribution chain which is both socially just and ecologically responsible.

We know that organic agriculture is still a niche economy, just like solar energy is today in the field of energy production. Despite the fact that it is actually one of the fastest growing businesses in many developed and less developed countries, organic farming is still in its infancy. Not only regarding the scale of the operation, but also regarding it's technological and scientific development.

Organic farming at its present stage of development is not and does not claim to be a drop in solution for all problems in food production today. In order to meet the global challenges outlined above, organic agriculture needs a boost of scientific and technological input and development. In 1998 according to FAOS agricultural committee 0,01% of USDAs research budget is directed to organic farming. EU figures may not look much better.

The ecological, but also socioeconomic successes of organic ventures are striking and by far outpace anything we have heart from genetic engineering which has absorbed billions of R&D investments and public spending.

Still the organic vision will require the collaboration and concerted efforts of governments, business and civil society in order to make it happen over the next one or two generations. While it is a widespread myth that it could not provide comparable and sufficient yields over the long run, organic conversion does require the investment of reduced yields over a period of transition. And we are about to run short of time: With progressing depletion of farm land, water resources and diversity and increasing numbers of people on this planet it is actually conceivable that there will be a time where short term and unsustainable yield increases may appear as the only option left. This would be obviously shortly before we face real and massive catastrophic consequences of the present farming system. The political and moral strength needed for change by then might go beyond our capabilities.

If there is one lesson we have learned from closer and closer collaboration with the organic movement, but also with more thoughtful scientists and experts in the field, than it is that there are no quick fixes and there is no such thing as a free lunch, as Americans would say. To pursue this organic vision requires substantial investments and the ability to wait for their return sometimes a little longer than the next shareholder meeting or the next election.

This appears to be one of the most challenging aspects to the conversion from unsustainable, destructive agricultural practices to more and more sustainable and ultimately organic solutions.

The whole concept does not lean to the short term perspectives of corporate and political decision makers and it appears to contradict the business concepts of major companies in the field. How could Monsanto, however it will be called by then, DuPont, .Aventis, Syngenta actually become organic players? Where is the profit for them? What kind of products could be organic blockbusters? Certainly not pesticides, certainly not monocultural wonderseeds, and probably not even copyrighted or patented software packages. There is most likely no "Agricultural Windows 98" or "Farm Office 2000" that could effectively serve the world- wide diverse need for appropriate information, training, exchange and interaction (however truly effective you might deem Microsoft's products in reality

We have started to talk to more open minded representatives of Life Science companies, to scientists, farmers, politicians about this. We are committed to pursue this discussion further and one of the messages I am trying to get across to you today is that we would like to invite all of you to participate in trying to solve that riddle. However Our preliminary conclusion at this point is that an organic future also requires, if I may say so, more organic business structures and that size as Well as the type of customer-relation required may not match with present company structures.

This is no good news from our perspective. Because from a Greenpeace campaign point of view telling a company to simply get lost, is the least promising of all proposals you can make to them. We certainly love confrontation as a special form of public dialogue, but we do not seek to make real enemies. Whatever action we do - it is always an invitation to cooperate. So we are still -working hard oil this problem.Yet maybe the reason we have not found fully satisfying solutions also has to with the fact, that industrial agriculture as it works today, is an open invitation to a majority of farmers and their communities to get lost. And from what I have said so far, YOU Will Understand that Greenpeace would obviously never subscribe to such a concept of food production.

So where will we be in 10 to 20 years time from now and where might the "battle royal" as Dan Glickman dubbed the great global debate about the use of GMOs in agriculture have taken us by then?

You will not be surprised to hear that I do not see any future for GMOs in agriculture and that my prediction is that we may be smiling about a few arguments we are exchanging now. There are two reasons for this prediction. The first is the presently unfolding global rejection of GMOs in food, which has already significant repercussions in the very few countries that have embraced this technology so far.
We are hearing of reduced GMO planting in the USA in the range of 10 to 30 percent. And we expect similar developments in Canada as well as Argentina. We also realize that major commodity traders are preparing for full segregation of GMO and non-GMO products. We also realize that the great expectations on the future of so called functional foods seem to work pretty well without food producers embracing any GMO inputs. We also realize that major players in the Life Science business are planning to spin off their ag-biotech departments as they are seriously concerned about their future and do not want them to hurt their pharmaceutical business. And we read about consumer attitudes in North America coining closer and closer to those in Europe.

But there is a second reason, which leads me to that prediction the more we will understand about the functionality of genes and the genetic composition of organisms the more likely we %\,-III develop much more elegant and less intrusive and brutal methods of achieving our goals in plant breeding. The better we will be able to combine classical methods of breeding and selection with genomic information and understanding, the smarter and easier we will be able to achieve and use certain traits of plants without shooting foreign DNA at random places of their genome or infecting them with genetically manipulated viruses to incorporate bits and pieces of entirely unrelated genetic information from other species. Genetic engineering as we know it today will soon be seen as an extremely primitive and ignorant way to interfere with the filigreed and complex genetic makeup of individual organisms as well as the web of life.

When we look at the really breathtaking progress of plant, animal and human genomics, we can see how the genetic information of organisms is revealed faster and faster. And we can foresee thousands of books. Of life to unfold literally within months. Of course it will take more than high throughput screening to make sense of this wealth of new information. It actually will take hundreds Of thousands of scientist-years to sit down and read this information carefully in order to better and better understand it I wonder how well trained today's young scientists really are in order to do that job. I am quite certain that young farmers and agricultural advisors are by no means prepared for this. And then again it may well take even longer to put this information and understanding into an ecological context and to analyze and understand exchange, communication and general interactions between all these organisms. That will, by the way, include the discovery of hundreds of thousands of new organisms we are presently not even aware of. There will be plenty of most exiting work for generations of taxonomists and ecologists and molecular biologists and farmers. They will work with devices that will probably compare to today's sequencing equipment just like the latest palmtops to mainframe computers of the early 60ies. And genetic information only the biggest and richest companies can gain and compile today will most likely be as cheap as today's throwaway chips. Probably we will ultimately see still within our lifetime paradigmatic changes in our present concept of information as such, which will be derived from advanced computer, biological and neuro-science All these developments are extremely exiting and hold enormous promises for the biotech age. Certainly this technology will also entail massive risks and probably unprecedented destructive potentials, They may put options in front of societies as well as the international community, which are far beyond our present Imagination. For certain this unfolding knowledge will require the development of ethical and cultural principles and societal adaptation that goes far beyond such simple questions as whether or not we should release GMOs into the environment today.

I personally perceive this global debate about the release of GMOs as a starting point of a much broader and complex challenge we all have to prepare for. And I see certain elements within this debate that I suspect to survive the present dispute:

· The question whether we are able to abstain from the immediate use of something that can be done, but probably should not be done

· A vastly extended realm of scientific uncertainty we will have to deal with in a responsible, which means precautionary manner

· The ability of the scientific community as well as the media and many other institutions to bring together information and knowledge from very different disciplines in a way that enables informed judgement of and democratic decision making of laypersons (who we all realize to be to a higher or lower degree at this time of knowledge and information explosion)

· The question whether governments role Is simply to regulate and adapt to corporate driving forces and structures or whether they are able to organize democratic decision making about technological options

· And finally there is the obvious and actually quite dramatic need for global ethical principles in dealing with decisions of global impact

The organic vision I have tried to sketch out and Greenpeace is pursuing is one contribution to this challenge. And so is our principal rejection of releasing GMOs into the environment. We will be happy to share our visions with other visions and to refine them together with you.

BIOSAFETY NOW!

Last not least let me put these thoughts in context with the most pressing challenge of our political agenda today. I will be flying to Montreal the day after tomorrow, where negotiations of a global Biosafety Protocol have just started and I look forward to meet quite a few of you there again. The establishment of minimal global rules and of an international body to further develop safety standards, is the most obvious prerequisite for any further discussions on this issue.

You all know that negotiations for this Biosafety Protocol, which aims to set at least minimal standards for the transboundary movement of GMOs, have collapsed nearly a year ago because the position of six nations that represent nearly 100 % of today's GMO exports appeared to be incompatible with the position of the rest of the 130 nations represented. And you may also know that the United States of America have been the most important and powerful opponent to tile adoption of that Biosafety Protocol. Negotiations basically collapsed because there was no common ground on these questions:

· Should all GMOs be regulated under this agreement or should more than 95% of all traded GMOs, which are declared as "commodities" be exempted?

· Should the Precautionary Principle guide decisions or only proven detrimental effects of GMOs allow nations to reject their import?

· Should there be a liability scheme holding GMO exporting companies responsible for possible damage or not?

· Should a clear system or traceability of GMOs be introduced or not?

· Should this agreement be guiding trading rules under the WTO or should WTO regulations override the Biosafety Protocols provisions?

Greenpeace has been following closely these negotiations ever since they have been started under the Biodiversity Convention 5 years ago. The majority consensus on this agreement by no means reflects what we would consider advisable and necessary. We never pretended that our demand to stop the release of GMOs could be imposed on the participating sovereign nations. But we equally believe that the international community must not and cannot accept that this urgently needed first international agreement on Biosafety is prevented by a single nation, however powerful it may be. The arrogance of the United States Senate's decision not to sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty of nuclear weapons last year would actually to some respect be dwarfed by the achievement of the United States administration to wreck this Biosafety Protocol.

If short term commercial interests of presently three GMO exporting nations can prevent the establishment of minimum safety rules on this issue, than any further discussions about common ground and perspectives must appear the government simply futile. Another failure of the negotiations in Montreal next week would not only be the most embarrassing declaration of bankruptcy of the worlds governments democratically establish international law under the long shadow of the WTO. It would also withdraw any reasonable common ground for further discussions about the use of genetic engineering in agriculture. And hundreds of congresses like this could never make up for the fundamental loss of credibility of a nation, whose government has chosen to be the most vociferous advocate of GMOs worldwide. It can be in nobody's interest to enter the age of Biotechnology by frivolously missing the chance to establish an international framework of Biosafety.

source: http://www.usemb.nl/bioproc.htm 20feb01