The cover of the latest issue of Nature is scarcely a stunner, as far as front pages go. It depicts two rows of trees facing each other across the page. One row is tatty, the other clean and healthy. And apart from a few grubby bushes in the background, that’s your lot. It makes a gardening catalog look exciting.
But this restrained imagery rewards closer inspection. Those trees, bearing papayas, are growing in a Hawaiian plantation and the difference between the two rows has critical importance to the world’s mounting food crisis.
It transpires that the stunted trees on the right, each bearing only a handful of fruit, are victims of papaya ringspot virus, a disease that devastates yields and is endemic in Hawaii. By contrast, the papaya trees in the other row, on the left, are healthy and disease-free, because they have been genetically modified to resist ringspot.
As a demonstration of the potential of modern plant technology, the image speaks volumes. Transgenic crops may be disparaged and dug up every time scientists grow them as part of their trials in the UK, but as Nature’s cover shows, the technology seems ripe to help feed a planet whose population will rise from 6.5 billion people, many of them already hungry, to around 9 billion by 2040.
It is a point stressed by crop experts such as Chris Pollack of the University of Wales.
“To stop widespread starvation, we will either have to plough up the planet’s last wild places to grow more food or improve crop yields. GM [genetic modification] technology allows farmers to do the latter — without digging up rainforests. It is therefore perverse to rule out that technology for no good reason.
Yet it still seems some people are willing to do so. That picture of transgenic papaya plants on Nature’s cover shows how wrong they are,” he said.
The trouble is that GM crops represent everything that the environment movement has come to hate, though it was not the technology itself that originally made greenies froth at the mouth. It was its promotion and marketing by international conglomerates such as Monsanto a decade ago that raised the hackles. As a result, GM crops have become a lightning rod for protests about globalization.
“GM technology permits companies to ensure that everything we eat is owned by them,” campaigner George Monbiot said.
Perhaps he is right. However, it is questionable to go one step further and insist, as some campaigners do, that because GM technology has been misused by biotechnology conglomerates, it is therefore justifiable to ignore its usefulness completely. The science can still help feed the world, particularly through the introduction of drought and disease resistance to staple crops such as potatoes and rice.
“Britain and Europe have isolated themselves from the rest of the world over transgenic crops,” said Bill McKelvey, principal of the Scottish Agricultural College in Edinburgh.
“We have decided the technology, for no good reason, is dangerous. The rest of the world doesn’t thinks so and has got on with using it. For example, GM soya is grown throughout America and Asia. It doesn’t worry people there for the simple reason that no one has ever died of eating GM food. On the other hand, a lot of people could soon die because they have no food of any kind,” he said.
Tough luck, you might say. That’s not Europe’s problem. It’s the developing world that will get it in the neck. Why should we care? What have we got to gain by turning to GM? These are interesting questions to which there are several answers and one of the most important concerns climate change.
The world is warming and is destined to do so for decades to come as cars, factories and power plants continue to pump out carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. As a result, many grain-producing regions — in North America, Australia and parts of Africa — are expected to suffer significant changes in climate that will devastate crop production. By contrast, other regions — northern Europe and Canada, in particular — will find weather changes will boost crop growing. They will become the world’s food stores, an issue highlighted by Les Firbank of North Wyke Research Station in Devon, England.
“Our best knowledge suggests Canada and countries in Europe will have to take on an even greater share of world food production,” he said. “It is therefore important to ask now if we have the moral right to continue to ignore technologies, including the genetic manipulation of crops, that in a few years could insure this food production reaches an absolute maximum and will help the planet provide enough food for the 9 billion people who will be living on it.”
Britain and many other European countries have considerable expertise in plant and crop biology research, it should be stressed. But that work is constantly frustrated. Crop trials are dug up and funding is blocked by governments embarrassed to be seen backing such work. The effects are rarely beneficial. Consider the example of potato blight. Its prevalence rose rapidly last year, threatening a crop that is a staple foodstuff for many people round the world.
Yet scientists insist it would be relatively easy to introduce a basic gene construct into potatoes that would make them resistant to blight. Europe has the expertise but is thwarted by gangs of men and women who trash GM crop fields. As Sir Robert May, the British government’s former chief scientific adviser, once remarked, these individuals display “the attitude of a privileged elite who think there will be no problem feeding tomorrow’s growing population.”
May was speaking, with remarkable prescience, at the turn of the century.
This is not to say that transgenic crops alone will save the world from starvation. Major improvements in transport, which will allow fresh food to be taken to market without rotting, are needed, for example. Simply bringing political stability to a country would also help.
“Zimbabwe’s food problems won’t be helped through GM crop technology,” McKelvey said. “It needs a political solution. Nevertheless, the technology has a key role to play in tackling the overall problem of global food shortages — but only if we let it.”
That is the crucial issue. Is society ready to change its attitude to GM crops? Major companies — Debenhams is the latest — still announce GM bans, no doubt under pressure from protest groups.
But given the science’s growing role in helping world food shortages, such decisions should really be seen as acts of shame, not pronouncements of pride. And some scientists believe they can now detect shifts in public attitudes.
“I think we are approaching a tipping point when society will start looking at this as a science that is not going to damage the planet but actually help it,” McKelvey said.
I hope he is right, though I am not so confident. Environmental campaigners, although they do great work, can often display remarkable intransigence. For example, they remain committed to the idea that nuclear energy has no role to play in helping to combat global warming. They react with equal scorn to GM crops.
The latter is certainly not a panacea for the ills we will face. On the other hand, it certainly has a role to play in helping to save people from starvation, a fact that is worth repeating now and again.
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