I-522 | Part 4 in a series | Science and anti-science in the GMO debate

Elias
Schewel/Flickr

Whose science? 

AGROECOLOGY &
BIOTECHNOLOGY

ⁱⁿ THE FUTURE OF AGRICULTURE

Devon G. Peña | Seattle,
WA | November 5, 2013

A lot of naïve science has been involved in
pushing this technology.

David
Williams, cellular biologist, UCLA

Quoted
in Scientific American

 September
2013, p. 80

 

Food is
the cover story of the
September 2013 issue of Scientific
American. The issue features a fascinating “Truth About GMOs” brief that
mostly reads like an apologia to
Monsanto et al. (pp. 80-85), perhaps for the proliferation of problems both
scientific and political economic. The briefing uses a sardonic and hyperbolic
title, “Biotechnology: Are engineered foods evil?” This obviously derisive
reference targets the anti-GMO movement’s
tendency to use cutesy semiotic code words like “Frankenfood” and “Frankenfish”.

More than
anything this illustrates the danger of using humor while engaged in the act of
conveying scientific evidence on the environmental and public health risks and
impacts of the production and consumption of transgenic foods; I admit to
partaking in this nerdy guilty pleasure from time to time. But the language
games of the anti-GMO community are not a betrayal of a commitment to the high
quality and interdisciplinary science that usually lies behind the assertion of
such dark Adbusters-styled humor.

The four-page Sci Am briefing was written by David H.
Freedman* and is by no means the last word on GMOs in this specific issue of a
reputable magazine. What drew me to the brief is not Freedman’s conclusion but
an interesting, and quite damning, statement made by a molecular biologist from
UCLA by the name of David Williams. The entire passage is worth quoting:

A lot of naïve science has been
involved in pushing this technology [GMOs]. Thirty years ago we didn’t know
that when you throw any gene into a different genome, the genome reacts to it.
But now anyone in this field knows the genome is not a static environment.
Inserted genes can be transformed by several different means, and it can happen
generations later. Williams quoted in Scientific
American, p. 80 [brackets added]

Freedman
misses the mark and focuses only on uncertainty with respect to the effects of
the consumption of GMO foods. This, by the way, is not due to some imaginary
consensus and is instead a result of the fact that we are mostly still waiting
to see funding for the first long-term (longer than six months) studies by
independent third parties.

Tangled webs. 30Ssubunit, back view (1462x1745)

These
conditions matter and should be considered by voters in Washington State on the
eve of the I-522 vote: Voters need to understand that the opposition claims
there is no evidence of harm. I will simply counter that we are only now
starting to see independent third party research that challenges the claims of
the core research material produced by the very same biotechnology corporations
that are supposed to be regulated. The FDA and USDA have approved most GMO
foods and transgenic crops without fully considering the state of risk
science. 

Instead, they
have largely relied on the corporations themselves for research on the risks
posed both for the production and the
consumption of GMOs. The corporate research becomes the principal record
used to make what increasingly seems like a perfunctory federal review towards
near universal approval for large-scale commercial use of these transgenic
product lines. We need to offer further consideration of the profound
implications posed by David Williams’ statement:
Introgression happens all the time. What does this mean for the production of
GMO or transgenic crops. 

The debate
over the environmental effects of GMO seed is pretty much over. The scientific
consensus is that introgression is real; indeed, it is quickly becoming
ubiquitous; horizontal gene transfers from GMO to organic and heirloom crops are
common events; transgenes are unstable and promiscuous; so, they easily cross
with the native heirloom varieties. This process is a proven threat to the
genomic integrity of the entire planetary stock of crop genetic diversity.
Nothing less than our living agroecological heritage is at stake. 

There is no
longer any debate about this production
side of the debate: The environmental and genome impacts are serious; it is
a deadly mess out there in terms of the decline of in vivo preservation of heirloom food crop biodiversity. Should
consumers care? That is one of the issues we must address; consumers should
care but may not yet understand why.

There are
definite additional risks and harms associated with the use of GMO crops that
go beyond the clearly demonstrated harmful effects on the genetic integrity of
heirloom varieties of maize, canola, cotton. This includes harms to underlying
ecosystem processes including impairment at the micro and macro scales alike.

At the small
end of the scale, scientific evidence shows that repeated application of
herbicides like glyphosate are damaging the soil microbiome and impairing the
critical role played by a diverse microflora that usually inhabits the rhizome
and root zone of vegetation systems. There are also many other microorganisms
that contribute to the maintenance of soil fertility and have been lost as a
result of the repeated application of increased treatment protocols for
herbicide. 

What is left
out of the equation by those who argue that GMO labeling is too costly are the
already existing environmental, social, and medical costs of GMO-based
production.  Consumers and
producers alike already bear the environmental, social, and cultural costs of
the agro-industrial monoculture capitalist model and the larger corporations
are already passing costs on to farm workers, the environment, other (smaller)
farmers, and consumers. These are the costs that should be internalized by the
corporation as the costs of doing business in a unsustainable and socially unjust
manner – for e.g., cleaning up non-point source pollution. These are costs that
should not be discounted and can no longer be treated as “negative
externalities”. Agricultural pollution, genetic drift, exploitation of farm
workers, displacement of small holder farmers, and all the rest can no longer
be justified as the “natural” operation of pure market principles, especially
since the state constantly subsidizes and collaborates with corporate
agribusinesses.

We have to
also consider that the farm workers, consumers, and small holder farmers and
their communities are already bearing the costs of increased damage to farm
lands, watercourses, water quality, wildlife, rural landscapes, and biotic
diversity as a result of repeated spraying of glyphosate. At the landscape
ecology level, the effects of a glyphosate-ridden environment can be seen in
the low counts of native insects and plants. The mix of plant communities and
associations are disrupted as are the habitat and other ecological roles of the
open space well-managed farmlands provide.

Ribosome.

This also
creates a new version of the “pesticide treadmill” trap. Given their problems
with resistant super weeds like pigweed and lambs quarters, many agroindustrial
soy bean growers are abandoning Monsanto's Roundup-Ready GMOs and defecting to
Bayer CropScience and its newly fangled redeployment of the old pesticide, isoxafutole
(IFT) coupled with its own line of transgenic products. One cannot easily jump
off the endless fast track of precision farming contracts and next generation
GMO products.

But Freedman
focuses on the “consumption” side of the equation and erroneously proposes that
there is consensus about the safety of GMO foods. The naïve science
notwithstanding, the argument is that there seems to be a consensus that
the consumption of transgenic (GMO) foods is
not indicated as a factor in any negative human health outcomes. I
remind Mr. Freedman that Rachel Carson’s warnings about pesticide threats were
also ridiculed as unscientific and drowned out by a cacophony of scientists
speaking on behalf of chemical and fertilizer companies. The scientific
consensus then also dismissed early scientific warnings.

There are
several caveats scientists are noting: First, given the immature state of
independent third-party risk science on GMO foods. 

Actually: (1)
The science is not all in. (2) There are some serious early warning signs
that  call for the rational exercise of the Precautionary
Principle. (3) The scientific discourse has two
principal concerns, one with and another with less of an evidentiary-based
consensus (meaning outside the community of scientists who regularly consult
with and profit from their service to the Monsanto, et al. risk science
research teams). s: environmental biosafety issues and consumer

For some, the
pivotal question is: Do consumers care? Does the average consumer care about
how food is produced? And: Are the concerns for safety and affordability
equally important to the average consumer? 

The
universities were then cranking out a steady stream of technicians who could
become the expert proponents of the new pesticide technologies. These were
designed with a specific type of crop in mind, that is, the high-yield
varieties championed by Norman Borlaug and his protégés. These agricultural
engineers [sic] apparently shared another tendency, which was to dismiss
Carson’s warnings because they naively believed that the topic of
pesticide-health correlations were not matters of fact or design for persons
dedicated to serve simply [sic] as naive agricultural engineers. 

I am certain
some of our colleagues in the science community even thought the concern over
the need for more risk science was actually unAmerican. They certainly believed
that these concerns were based on completely unfounded fears. It was ultimately
thought to be an unscientific concern and in more extreme cases was seen as actually
somewhat of an anti-science view. This meant that research on the risks of
pesticides were to be deemed less worthy of funding or other support by
university and college administrative leaders.

One thing
certain is that Rachel Carson’s warnings about the health effects of pesticides
on wildlife and humans turned out to be precisely accurate. This changed the
course of science education and literacy by creating
a space for science in the public interest. It is also true that there were
clearly identifiable interlocking relationships among the key actors from
industry, government, and academia that sought to block and demonize
Carson  and her research. In the process, many academic institutions chose
to respond to these attacks as well by marginalizing funding and academic
program development to support the study of pesticide risks for wildlife and human health. This is how the
business of academia worked then and now.

The effect was
to block funding for wildlife biologists, pesticide toxicologists, and other
scientists interested in researching taboo topics like the effects of pesticide
exposure on avian reproduction or farm worker morbidity. However, for a very
long time these scientists were considered as extremists and their fields of
inquiry  – like
wildlife (now conservation) biology, epidemiology, toxicology, etc.  –  were also seen as
dominated by women scientists with
the implicit understanding being that this was a softer science; with harder
[sic] science reserved I presume for the mostly male subculture of
technologists and technical engineers able to deliver the goods and services to
agribusiness?

The hegemony
established by the chemical and fertilizer companies is now getting a facelift
and reset through the panacea associated with a similar privileging of
bioengineering for powerful transnational corporations, the latest fashion of
the servant of power clique that has triumphed once again marginalizing
alternative scientific communities.

So, once again
into the breach: Across the land grant university system and the many other
components of agricultural research in higher education institutions, research
support for the type of science done by scientists like Miguel Altieri, Stephen
L. Gleissman, Victor Toledo, Ivette Perfecto, and many others has been
side-railed and marginalized.

Credit: Action
Speaks Radio

The
contemporary power structures of the “entrepreneurial universities” are
disproportionately committed to fund schools that promote applied bioengineered
products that can be used by big ag and big biotech interests. If the research
project does not translate into a “deliverable” that can be licensed to or
otherwise appropriated by private investors and capital markets, then it has a
lower priority on the scale that defines the amount of public support. In this
manner, the research subsidies favor research that focuses on delivering goods
or services to meet corporate demands.

This, of
course, is done with the idea that the environmental, social, cultural, and
legal impacts are someone else’s problem. The agricultural scientists only do
neutral technical design that meets the corporate definition of biosafety.

Indeed, the
land grant college complex has created its own kind of “monster” in the form of
the scientist and engineering graduate who must actually deliver goods and
services to the corporate sponsors of academic research, lest the university
lose the support of its private sector partners. Like Rachel Carson’s times, it
is now considered anathema among the agricultural science professoriate to
pursue research on topics that are unrelated to the science of productivity in
the field. This priority system trains faculty to train their students to serve
as technicians and purveyors of endless combinations of engineering methods to
serve corporate agribusinesses.

This is no
longer about farming. Agricultural science departments have become a part of
the rat race to the top of academic excellence defined by the ability to
businesses a fully integrated set of production technologies including genetic
engineering, global positioning systems or computer-assisted precision
farming.  The freshly Ph.D. students in the food and agricultural fields
are increasingly becoming reductionist experts on rDNA and related technical
areas of production design for corporations like Monsanto, Bayer CropScience,
Pioneer, and many others.

Carson was
clearly pitted against a particular type of post-war industrial view of
agricultural science that viewed the farm no longer as an agro-ecosystem. The
new modern paradigm saw the farm as a production unit that was to be governed
by the metrics of efficiency and a system dominated by reduction of living,
sentient, affect-driven, and complex organisms into mere inputs and outputs of
production, biological and mechanical machines that can be designed,
computerized, and automated to perform miracles in productivity.

These topics are
often regarded as anti-science or irrelevant to the engineer’s task of
designing and delivering technical fixes for the service of the corporate
entity and its feigned concern for a sustainable future. But the fact is that
the ecologists and agroecologists are
scientists and they were, and continue to be, terribly underfunded.

Carson’s focus
is the effects of pesticides on biodiversity and human health – that was
marginalized and berated by proponents of the new technology.  The scientific
consensus turned out to be scandalously corrupt and inauthentic when the
chemical and fertilizer companies went after Rachel Carson and her
world-defining book Silent Spring: The
author and the book were anti-science; Carson was a communist agitator and
perhaps even a lesbian. These endless vitriolic attacks were designed to
undermine Carson’s credibility as a scientist with a commitment to the task of
conveying the findings of a science done in the public interest and not the
factories in the fields that the land grant faculty continued to serve as
partners.

The same thing
is happening again, only this time it is the apologists and defenders of
agricultural biotechnology, and especially those who declare the unquestioned
virtues of transgenic crops. And it is their declarations that present ye
anti-science position since they errantly and arrogantly dismiss other ways of
knowing like ecology and agroecology. Ridiculing their scientific opponents for
being activists, advocates, or environmentalists, Monsanto’s defenders like to
pretend that the scientific community is limited to those who profess certainty
about environmental, legal, social, and health impacts of transgenic crops and
GMO foods.  But it is they, who –
upon making this conjecture – have left the realm of evidence-based inquiry and
entered into the infinitely fuzzy political realm of ideology.

The sooner the
scientific community can admit the limits of ideology when the engineers in lab
white have not the faintest clue about the structural violence associated with
transnational corporations like Monsanto, the faster we can transition as a
society to the process of rebuilding our food systems from the bottom-up. And
this is the true meaning of I-522. Vote Yes.

Endnotes

*Freedman is
an occasional science writer for many mainstream magazines and author of a
masterful piece of neopopulist skepticism, Wrong:
Why Experts Keep Failing Us—And How to Know When Not to Trust Them.