GMO seed

Three take-aways from the Intelligence Squared debate on GMOs:

Robert Fraley

1. Thirty-six years from now, we’re going to need twice as much food as we produce today, Robert Fraley said, repeatedly. That sobering projection comes from an article by Jonathan Foley called “A Five-Step Plan to Feed the World,” which is part of a recent National Geographic series called “The Future of Food.” Fraley, who is Monsanto’s Chief Technology Officer and thus has much to gain from the success of genetic modification, agreed with Foley’s assertion that the either/or approach to the biotechnology debate will lead to mass starvation.

“Those who favor conventional agriculture talk about how modern mechanization, irrigation, fertilizers, and improved genetics can increase yields to help meet demand. And they’re right,” Foley asserts. “Meanwhile proponents of local and organic farms counter that the world’s small farmers could increase yields plenty—and help themselves out of poverty—by adopting techniques that improve fertility without synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. They’re right too.”

From National Geographic’s series “The Future of Food”

To feed the nine billion people who will live on Earth in 2050, Foley suggests, we have to stop trying to prove that one of those rights is wrong. And to his credit, Fraley agrees. That’s good common sense.

Charles Benbrook

2. Charles Benbrook pointed out that some GMOs, such as Bt corn, are already in their fourth or fifth generation, meaning that before enough time has passed to measure long-term effects of a particular modification, it has already been amended three or four times, which means any results available now are irrelevant because the current products are no longer the ones that were studied.

“None of the GE corns that have been on the market have had a dominant position for more than five or six years,” Benbrook said. “So, we are moving from one generation of GE crops to the next to the next before we’ve even begun to understand what the impacts of the first ones are. So, I would like to have the ability to at least do two crop rotation cycles, which might be six or eight years, to see how the farming system has responded, but in that time period, just that time period, the technology has changed. So, you never really get a handle on what has happened.”

3. Half the people in the audience changed their mind about the issue during the course of the debate. Intelligence Squared functions like an egg-head version of American Idol: audience members and the remote audience watching at home get to register their position once at the start of the show and again at the end. It’s a way to judge who won. In this case the winner was clear: 32% of voters favored GMOs before the debate, and afterwards that number jumped to 60%, with most of the converts coming from the undecided camp.

Alison Van Eenennaam

If I had seen the event live, I would have been one of those vote-changers, for two reasons: because, like Foley and Fraley, I think the world needs a variety of food-production methods, not just one. I realize that one argument against GMOs is that they may effectively foreclose on their competition, which is one of the reasons I still distrust the genetic modification movement; but Fraley and his partner Alison Van Eenennaam seemed less dogmatically entrenched than Benbrook and Margaret Mellon. And also because the pro-GMO team was better prepared for the contest. Both of them spoke in long, free-flowing sentences which created the impression that they had thought about their position thoroughly enough to see how different pieces of information connected to each other. Benbrook and Mellon, on the other hand, often spoke haltingly, as if their thoughts resembled the bent scraps of paper that Mellon fingered on the table in front of her.

Margaret Mellon

I guess presentation makes a difference.

American industrial agriculture may be standing in the way of international cooperation.

“In the United States, they put anything in their mouths,” Jean Cabaret, an organic farmer who lives in the region of France known as Brittany, recently told a reporter for The Washington Post. “No, this must be stopped.”

Jean Cabaret and his unwashed chickens.

‘This’ is the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, an agreement that would link the economies of the United States with those of the 28 nations comprising the European Union more intimately than ever before. The horse of globalization is already out of the barn, right? Why not hitch it to your cart?

Because doing so might drench your chicken in the chemical that keeps your local swimming pool from incubating all the nasty stuff that washes off of other people’s bodies: chlorine, which was recently used to thwart the annual Midwest FurFest Convention, prompting the evacuation of a Hyatt Hotel in suburban Chicago, and sending 19 people to a local hospital.

Jean Cabaret doesn’t want to eat that stuff.

Chlorinated American chickens.

According to The Washington Post, “passage of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) could be a globalization milestone, creating a megamarket of 800 million consumers from Alaska to Finland, Hawaii to Greece.”

Isn’t that a good thing? Wouldn’t it create, like, millions of new jobs, both here and in the many European countries whose economies are in worse shape than ours? Maybe, but it would also end Europe’s ban on American “Frankenfoods” — genetically-modified, hormone-boosted, or chlorine-sanitized products most Americans eat every day.

A lot of people on the far side of the pond want to keep that ban in place: last week an online petition opposing TTIP garnered its one millionth signature, a number that forces the European Parliament to hold a hearing on the matter.

“Most of these concerns about chemical use and those kinds of things are blown up in the media to become a problem that really doesn’t exist,” Scott Russell, a professor of poultry processing at the University of Georgia (who would have guessed that poultry processing had its own professoriate?), told National Public Radio back in September. Russell reports that the American poultry industry uses only one capful of chlorine per gallon of water, and the chemical poses no health threat because it gets rinsed off the chickens (with unchlorinated water?) before they’re sold to us.

“We’re not trying to force anybody to eat anything,” Michael Froman, the U.S. trade representative, told The Washington Post. He just believes that “the decision as to what is safe should be made by science.”

Workers prepare chickens at the AIA factory in San Martino, near Verona, Italy. (AP)

But safety may not be the motivating factor here — it’s probably money. According to a study by a Dutch university, it costs the American poultry industry about 80 cents to make a pound of chicken, while European chicken growers, who can’t use chlorine or hormones, have to spend a dollar. How long can principles hold out against a profit margin differential of 20 percent? Passage of TTIP wouldn’t force Parisians to eat Purdue chicken, of course, but it may price Jean Cabaret’s birds right out of the market.

The pool at Franklin Park may offer safer swimming than Stoney Creek, but I don’t go to Stoney Creek to swim in safety. I go for the drive, and for the climb up the back side of that cliff with the jumping ledges at three different levels — high, scary, and I’ve-never-tried-the-top-one. It’s true that the last time I was there my dog pooped in the water, but he was on the other bank and the turd floated downstream pretty fast.

If every dog in The Shenandoah Valley pooped in Stoney Creek, I don’t suppose I’d want to swim there, and you may not want to swim there knowing my dog did, but how many of us would prefer a version of The Shenandoah Valley where the only place to swim is Franklin Park?

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Twice as Much Food

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