Claire Kelloway: I’ll be the first to admit that I have an ideological predisposition to dislike GMOs. Reasonable or not, I tend to be skeptical of agricultural practices that mess with the environmental status quo. Chemical inputs that allow farmers to ignore soil health, or monocultures that oversimplify agroecosystems are just two examples of technological short cuts that degrade our environment and undermine public health. So naturally I want to pigeonhole genetic engineering as an “unnatural and destructive” technique, especially since GMOs are currently used to increase herbicide application.
Still, these articles reaffirmed my complicated feelings about GMOs. I’ve never been quite convinced that they can feed the world, but I’ve also never seen them as inherently unsafe. As Nathanael Johnson makes clear, the risks of genetic engineering are still hypothetical. But because I believed the benefits of GMOs largely went to “the Big Six” (Monsanto, Dow, and so on…), I used to argue that the unpredictable widespread risks outweighed GE’s concentrated benefits.
Now, I am not sure that genetic engineering is riskier than traditional methods of plant breeding (for instance, I was surprised to learn that wild or in plant breeding is just as likely to activate toxin producing genes as GE). I am also surprised that the economic gains of GMOs are not clearly as concentrated as I thought. Nonetheless, I felt this series got caught up in the debate over genetic engineering itself, and glossed over the current applications of GMOs that bother so many sustainable agriculture advocates.
Taylor Gee: I would say I generally share that disposition, although I can tell you have a much greater background in the subject, and maybe my relative ignorance allows me to be easily swayed. At least, I was swayed by these articles. Previously, I knew that the WHO and the UN had declared GMOs totally safe, although I still harbored some suspicion. These articles, however, convinced me that GMOs are worth pursuing despite the risk of undetected allergens etc.
As to the issue of GMO applications – I think you are right that the series of articles glossed over the issue. At least in the six articles I read. A classmate in our discussion yesterday explained to me that GMOs often enable unsustainable large-scale farming, and I see why that’s problematic. Still, the article implied that GMOs can have sustainable applications as well. At the university level, a professor at UC Davis was creating strands of rice that could be sustainably self-pollinated in Bangladesh.
It seems to me the major roadblock to applying GMOs in sustainable farming is that organic-certified products are not allowed to contain GMOs. Therefore, there is no market for the sustainable applications of GMOs. Of course, the reason this is so is that the same consumers who are interested in organic products tend to fear GMOs perceived health risks. I hope that fear fades away as people realize that health risks are not the problem with GMOs, and I hope that realization will lead to a market for sustainable GMO applications in organic farming. Whether GMO labeling is needed to clear the mystery of GMOs and eliminate the fear, I am not sure. I can sympathize too with the worry that consumers will see the label, and interpret it as a health warning, contributing to the fear.
CK: Exactly, I think you present some really key considerations about labeling and the organic standard. To clarify what our classmate may have been referring to, at present some of the most common GMOs are RoundUp ready seeds that allow farmers to freely use RoundUp (or glyphosate) without worrying about killing their crops. But after almost 20 years of excessive RoundUp use, several “super weeds” have evolved to withstand glyphosate. Now, more GMOs are being developed to tolerate restricted use and experimental pesticides, allowing greater use of chemicals linked to childhood cognitive disorders, respiratory issues, and cancer. Hawaii in particular has become a questionable concentrated testing ground where BASF, Dow/DuPont, Pioneer, Monsanto and Syngenta are all applying dangerous pesticides at levels that “far surpass the norm on most American farms.”
Thus, it’s important to understand the current application of GMOs in order to see how “anti-GMO” got lumped in with the organic label, and why organic consumers tend to avoid GMOs (because many GMOs increase agrichemical usage). But to your point, I also feel that this does not necessarily have to be the case.
I think you make an important observation by recognizing that GMOs will continue to be developed for less-sustainable or non-organic agriculture if there is no market for food that is both sustainably grown and genetically engineered. I had never considered this before, but from an economic perspective it makes a lot of sense. Companies will continue to invest in the type of GE crops that have a strong market, and at present the most successful models are RoundUp ready corn and soy, or plants the produce their own pesticides, like BT cotton.
By boycotting GMOs, sustainable agriculture advocates could prevent the potential for more sustainable applications of genetic engineering. This is where I also wish the misled fears about genetic engineering were clarified. If people could disconnect the process of genetic engineering from its current applications, and isolate the actual risks associated with the scientific technique, perhaps more people would be willing to accept the inherent risk for the potential sustainable benefits (especially when we objectively compare the risks of GE to traditional breeding).
Yet, as these articles make clear, the GMO debate can be confusing, complicated, and contradictory. It does not help that it is also one of the most well funded issues, with special interest groups on both sides funneling a lot of money into misleading PR campaigns. For me, I think PR plays a big role in muddling and polarizing the debate, but as someone in the process of learning about this issue, why do you think it is so difficult for the average consumer to get a full and honest picture on the benefits and concerns around GMOs?
TG: I agree with your assessment that aggressive PR campaigns and special interest money probably make already convoluted science even less accessible to the average consumer. Although if I can take a cynical point of view, I would also propose a second reason: fundamental lack of interest. While it is easy to get caught in the whirlwind of polarizing GMO politics when reading Nathaniel Johnson’s Grist articles, I am not convinced that the GMO issue is really a top priority for the majority of consumers. I have little evidence to back this claim up, other than my own experience and a conversation I had with friends this afternoon. My friends, generally speaking, felt that GMOs should be something they knew about, as it felt important to them, but clearly not so important that any of them had gone out of their way to research or read about GMOs. What little they did know they came across waywardly, or hazily recalled from an AP Environmental Science lesson in high school.
If I were to theorize as to why there is a lack of public interest in GMOs, I would point to GMOs’ relatively low impact on consumers. GMOs make a big difference for farmers and their techniques, particularly in large-scale farming, but rarely translate into changes in price or taste for the consumer. If health risks do exist, we either a) do not know what they are, b) have been unable to associate them with GMOs, or c) they have yet to materialize. These are not favorable conditions, I believe, for sparking serious consumer interest. While the issue may be important for agricultural interests and the foodie fringe, I don’t see the passionate debate being carried over to the mainstream in a big way.
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