Abstract
GMOs, their advocates assure us, offer a rational solution to the world's food problems. The UN tells us that a billion people out of seven billion are chronically hungry, and that the world population is on course to rise to about 10 billion by 2050; that individual people are “demanding” more food of higher quality – and especially more meat; so according to the British government's report of 2011, The Future of Food and Farming, we need to produce 50% more food by 2050, just to keep pace. Yet there is more and more pressure on land, and climate-change and diminishing oilfields will force us to cut down on oil-based fertilizers, herbicides, and pesticides. GM crops, then, have come on line in the nick of time, like the US Cavalry in the 5th reel. They can be tailor-made to be of the highest quality and to yield more heavily under more and more extreme conditions, to resist pests and diseases without extraneous help, but also to resist particular herbicides so that whole fields can be sprayed with impunity to get rid of the weeds without harming the crops. Those who still object to GMOs are “ignorant”, nostalgic, elitist, steeped in superstition, afraid of science, and by seeking to perpetuate “inefficient”, old-fashioned farming are self righteously condemning a large portion of humanity and our fellow creatures to a premature death. There are no dangers from GMOs that cannot be anticipated and contained. Indeed, journalist Mark Lynas has been telling the world of late (not least in the New York Times, and at the agricultural establishment's Oxford Farming Conference) that a “consensus” of scientists now agrees that GM is perfectly safe. Week after week editorials in the august and otherwise mostly excellent Nature extol the virtues of GMOs and condemn the detractors, while politicians, including successive Secretaries of State, queue up to inform us that Britain will be spending more and more on biotech research, mostly for export to countries that do not have it yet (though cutting down, for example, on expenditure on National Parks). GMOs, and high-tech in general, self-evidently spell progress, and profitable progress at that. The case for GMOs seems both humane and eminently rational. Yet these arguments are based on a misreading of the world's real problems and are driven not by rationality, but by ideology, a toxic mixture of uncritical technophilia and neoliberal economics, which says in effect that the prime purpose of all human endeavour must be to maximize and concentrate wealth, in competition with everybody else. Let us just take the GM lobby's premises one by one and see if any of them is actually true.
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