My job is to provide pest control options for everyone, be they organic, conventional or transgenic growers. A recent exchange of opinions on one of the social media sites made it clear to me that there is a lot of misunderstanding about transgenic crops. I have worked with them for 23 years and, as an agricultural entomologist and agronomist, my perspective comes from the trenches.
First of all, we will soon have 9 billion people in the world and will have to feed them on less land and with less water. Although it is counter-intuitive, population growth goes down when food supplies are adequate and stable, and population growth goes up when the reverse is true. (This is documented fact but we know it anyway: think of population growth in Europe vs. India or China before the One Child policy.) Organic agriculture has lower yields and higher risk of crop failure than either conventional (chemical) agriculture or transgenic crop agriculture. There is no way organic agriculture can feed the world. However, I’m glad we live in a wealthy nation where we have the option of buying more expensive organic food but, then again, we spend only about 9.8 percent of our incomes on food.
Now think about many of the poorer nations in the world where people spend 30 - 40 percent of their incomes on food (http://wsm.wsu.edu/researcher/WSMaug11_billions.pdf). If food production declines or supply can't meet increasing demand then world food prices will go up. We in the wealthy nations will not stop buying the more expensive food on the world market. We will pay more and the people in the poor countries will have less and it will cost them more. We need to grow more food on less land, else the poorer nations in the world will suffer disproportionate deprivation. (We saw this a few years ago when lower U.S. corn production and the ethanol mandate in the U.S. created a world shortage of corn. Corn went from $2.50/bushel to $8.50 and we barely noticed in the U.S. Our farmers then shifted production to corn by reducing the acres planted to wheat and soybeans; less of these commodities were produced and their prices skyrocketed on the world market. Developing nations could no longer afford to buy wheat, soybeans or corn.)
Given this, there are really no other options than to use transgenic technology – or vastly increase the use of crop protectant chemicals that are expensive and often dangerous to apply without the proper technology and protective equipment. We have transgenic crops that grow more yield on less water and fertilizer, produce more yield due to less insect damage and loss to disease, and some contain far more nutrients than conventional crops.
Transgenic crops are expensive to develop and seed companies must invest large amounts of money in research, testing, seed production and in meeting regulatory requirements. No one is forced to buy transgenic seed; farmers do it because these crops increase their yields and/or save money through reduced input costs. Yes, many farmers, because of the cost, hold their noses when they buy seed, but they understand that transgenics reduce the risk of farming and often result in higher net farm income even after paying the higher price for transgenic seed than for conventional seed.
Do I wish we could feed the world without using chemicals or transgenics? Yes. Can we? No, not even close. I work with transgenic crops because I believe they are the only way to feed the world in the future. Transgenic crops are relatively new and we have never done this before. There will be stumbles, like insects becoming resistant to some of the technology or like herbicide tolerant weeds. Part of my job is to help determine where things went wrong and help avoid making other mistakes in the future. Seed companies want to avoid these mistakes because they would reduce the value of their technology, and also because they know that transgenic crops are the best hope of feeding an increasing world population. I will also say that I know many people that work for seed companies and they are people just like us. Their motivation is not world market dominance or monopoly, it is creating crops that can feed people. I’m not going to get in to Mitt Romney’s statement that corporations are people, but I am going to say that there are many fine and well meaning people working for Monsanto, Dow, Syngenta and Pioneer. The truth is that the world needs them and their technology.
No comments:
Post a Comment