Environmental Justice and Climate Change | Part 2 of 4

Climate change chaos. Beehive
Collective.   

Part 2 | The panacea of GMOs

INDIGENOUS RIGHT LIVELIHOODS and CLIMATE
CHANGE ADAPTATION

Devon G. Peña | Seattle, WA |
November 8, 2014

One result of the current wave of transgenic
crop failures is that it further undermines the sustainability argument for
models that purport to follow a capital-intensive, industrial mass production
monoculture strategy. Our global food systems are now more vulnerable precisely
because of the widespread adoption of GMO technology and concentrated larger-scaled operations, which combine a decisive
lack of structural and species diversity.

A significant number of scientific
studies show that diversity is the key to resilience in biological systems and social systems. In an article
appearing in the prestigious journal, Bioscience,
Barbara Lin (2011:183) argues “that climate change could have negative
consequences for agricultural production [and] has generated a desire to build
resilience into agricultural systems.”  However, instead of promoting a biotechnology
agenda Lin focuses on the importance of “diversified systems” as resilient
adaptations to climate change, in many ways reflecting perspectives championed
in the International Assessment of Agriculture Science, Technology, and
Development or IAASTD (2009):

One rational and
cost-effective method may be the implementation of increased agricultural crop
diversification. Crop diversification can
improve resilience in a variety of ways: by engendering a greater ability
to suppress pest outbreaks and dampen pathogen transmission, which may worsen
under future climate scenarios, as well as by buffering crop production from
the effects of greater climate variability and extreme events. Such benefits
point toward the obvious value of adopting crop diversification to improve
resilience, yet adoption has been slow. Economic incentives encouraging
production of a select few crops, the push for biotechnology strategies, and
the belief that monocultures are more productive than diversified systems have
been hindrances in promoting this strategy. However, crop diversification can
be implemented in a variety of forms and at a variety of scales, allowing
farmers to choose a strategy that both increases resilience and provides
economic benefits. [Brackets, italics added]

Clearly then the option of promoting
biodiversity-based agroecology is not a matter of science but politics. This requires
an active defense against the imposition of the government-approved orthodoxy
of GMO monocultures.

Research on resistance of Palmer
[sic] and rootworm suggests GMO monocultures are deficient in resilience
capacity due to the over-simplification of the agroecosystem and this has
cumulative environmental and economic costs that are seldom considered by the overeager
proponents of biotechnology.  These costs
remain a hidden negative externality [sic] ignored, in USA context, by those
involved in technology assessment including executive branch policymakers and
decision makers, legislators, and corporate scientists and executives (because
they can).

Despite this regulatory chicanery, the
real and unfolding crisis of transgenic technologies threatens to result in a
reversal of our ecological fortunes: More not less chemical usage is envisioned
and the companies have had to admit it. The GMO Emperor has no clothes and is
sheathed in a veneer of chemical poisons dripping and evaporating into our
land, water, and air.

The other veneer worn by Gene Giants
is that of scientific respectability and this applies to the misuse of even the
most basic sort of industry-related data. Here is an interesting example of
such hubris. Norman Borlaug, the so-called Father of the Green Revolution,
established the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-Biotech
Applications (ISAAA) to promote what he viewed as the logical extension of his
earlier work modernizing export-oriented monocultures.

To make the case for GMOs, ISAAA’s
website presents as evidence for the safety of GMOs the fact that transgenic
crops are already grown in 27 countries around the world.
This somehow indirectly eliminates biosafety concerns. What is left unsaid is
that six countries – the USA, Brazil, Argentina, India, Canada, and China –
account for 156.6 million hectares of the total of 175.2 million hectares
planted with GMO crops. Also left unsaid is that most of the rest of the list
reads like a whose who of authoritarian countries in the firmer Soviet bloc and
SE Asia; marginalized African nations with serious post-colonial contradictions
and a surplus of political and sectarian violence, and Australia, Mexico, plus
Cuba – the last two special cases deserving of further consideration. Left
unsaid is that none of these countries
requires independent third party risk assessment of GMOs and the corporations
provide their own data and analyses.

From Bt to B.S.

Despite the widespread failure of
first and second generation transgenic technologies, Monsanto, Dow, Syngenta,
and other biotechnology corporations are now offering growers the “option” of waiting
for the next stacked traits products while adding older classes of chemical
agents to the patented formulas currently used with Bt and glyphosate-resistant
crops. This includes a set of even more toxic and carcinogenic substances like
2,4-D and isoxaflutole, IFT (see post of September 5, 2013).

One of the earliest critics of the
use of rDNA technology in commercial agriculture is the esteemed molecular
biologist and geneticist Dr. Mae-Wan Ho who warned long ago (2000) that the pesticide treadmill would simply become the
transgenic treadmill. The return of 2,4D, IFT, and other similar older
“economic poisons” [sic] will attenuate the toxic brew that is already in use
and indicated in a wide range of human health and environmental impacts.

There are numerous peer-reviewed studies
on the harmful effects of glyphosate on everything from the diversity of soil
micro-biota to mammalian reproductive health; please consult bibliography at the end of our April
16, 2011 post on the work of Dr. Huber.

Now, the GMO relapse involves a
chemical attack protocol based on herbicides plus…IFT, 2,4D, dicamba, and
whatever else comes along as well as other proprietary chemical agents that are
part of the patented formula mixtures applied by the growers under exact
contract provisions. In personal correspondence, Dr. Huber noted that the
formulas typically include surfactants and other adjuvants that allow the herbicide
to adhere longer and more completely to the surface of the target organisms. The
toxicity of these additives is not well understood but preliminary indications
suggest they are part of the chemical interactions that destroy healthy soil
biota (see, for e.g., Banks et al 2014).

The Gene Giants want us to believe
that the next generation transgenic technology can overcome current failures and also
solve all of our future climate change dilemmas to boot. The latest panacea focuses
on drought resistance as the centerpiece of the next generation “stacked-traits”
transgenic crops that will usher a new era of sustainable [sic] agriculture.  

A recurring refrain in the
fabrication of the pseudo-sustainability of GMOs is the misleading claim that
no-till farming methods, made possible by the use of herbicide-resistant GMOs, result
in a significantly reduced carbon footprint and therefore assist with climate
change mitigation.

The Gene Giants have already begun
to rush in with technologies designed, presumably, to save humanity through
transgenic crops for climate change adaptation. For example, in December 2011 Monsanto received approval from the USDA to begun selling its
MON 87460 drought-resistant corn variety, which it developed in collaboration
with the German chemical giant BASF.

The Gene Giants

 Which are the top commercial agricultural
biotechnology companies that are using genetic engineering to develop GMO
crops? In truth, the top five are also the top chemical producers of the past
half-century. Listed alphabetically, these include: ·     
BASF (Germany)
·     
Bayer CropScience (Germany)
·     
Dow Agrisciences (USA,
Indianapolis, Indiana)
·     
Monsanto (USA, St, Louis,
Missouri)
·     
Syngenta (Switzerland)

Health Canada provides a report confirming
Canadian approval of this rDNA event. The new transgenic crop was produced
using techniques that introduce the cold shock protein B (cspB) coding sequence
derived from the common soil bacterium Bacillus
subtilis. Hmmm: From Bt to B.S.

From the vantage point of
agroecology, any agricultural system or practice that requires continued use of
extant and externally sourced fossil-fuel-dependent technologies that are also
confirmed in harmful gene flow cannot be considered as part of a sustainable,
resilient, or equitable technology for societal adaptation to climate change. Transgenic
crops still require high agrochemical inputs in the form of hydrocarbon-based
pesticides and herbicides and large-scale fossil fuel inputs to operate over-sized
machinery and irrigation systems, etc.  None
of this will change.

The growers relying on no-till
farming techniques, which may be combined with crop rotations (corn-soybean),
are large-scale operators with excessive fuel costs. It takes a lot of energy
to use today’s gargantuan GPS-piloted combines and related super-sized implements.
GMO production on a commercial scale today requires larger energy budgets than
farms of the past. If we add the cost of mechanical irrigation then this also
increases the overall carbon footprint.

A word here about no-till: It was
not invented in the USA and it is certainly a lot older than the advent of GMO
crops. The use of no-till or minimum tillage agroecological methods predates
the invention of the plow – it really is that ancient! It is time for everyone
to acknowledge that the practice of zero or minimum tillage does not require
the adoption of GMO crops. The association is inaccurate and must be
challenged. Indigenous permaculture, agroforestry, and long-duration rotation
island polycultures all practice no-till farming methods. These systems control
weeds through species and structural diversity.

Social movements must challenge the
transgenic treadmill regime by illustrating specifically how it undermines
other worthy social goals like poverty reduction, environmental health, local
economic livelihoods, the renewal of public (civic) space and common property,
and the all important objective of community-based biodiversity conservation in
the service of these goals. And this is where the examples of common property
water management institutions in India and the American Southwest come into
play since they offer a successful model of adaptation to aridity and
semi-aridity and thus replicate what might be needed for a response to climate
change in agriculture that is driven by cultural ecological techniques as
opposed to a reductionist and violence-prone biotechnology.