Why we need GM crops

|PIC1|What's the dilemma for Christians in this area? We can see the need to produce more food. We've got to produce it in a sustainable way. We have to feed a another 2-3 billion people. Where's the dilemma?

Well, Christian Aid and some other NGOs have set themselves, rather unwisely in my view, against modern technology and particularly against genetically modified crops and arguably, they say, it's because of their concern for poor farmers in less developed countries. I'm quite willing to discuss that - I won't delay on it at the moment but there are some serious concerns about their argument.

Now the Nuffield Council on Bio-Ethics, which is an independent organisation, not funded by Government, specialises in the analysis of complex bio-ethical issues and it concluded in the year 2000 that the large scale introduction of genetically modified crops was a moral imperative on the basis of the ethic 'to each according to need.' And the joint study which I chaired at the Royal Society of the UK's Academies of Science and the US National Academy of Science in Washington, the Third World Academy of Sciences, the academies in Brazil, China, Mexico and India, all concluded that GM crops can be used to produce foods that are more nutritious, stable in storage, in principle health-promoting, and bringing benefits to consumers in industrialised and developing countries.

Now the academies also recognise that multi-national private corporations of research and institutes should share their technology with scientists in less developed countries to enhance food production per acre and hence food security; and schemes have been developed by UNEP specifically to do that so that this technology is now shared, and in my experience some of the brightest young molecular biologists in this field are from less developed countries who when they go home are fully equipped to use this new technology for enhanced food production and food security, but a central fund is needed and this is another international requirement: a central fund is needed to help those who work in less developed countries to protect their new discoveries, to patent their new inventions with the help of the World Bank and the IMF and the Rockefeller Fund. And if that was done, many of us believe it would be a potent signal to the next generation who are coming along that there is a social, political and humanitarian will to eliminate hunger and address climate change by rewarding innovation and by providing income generation for local institutions in less developed countries.

|PIC2|Now there are hard data which I think we need to just bear in mind in this area of GM crops [see image on left]. This is the growth, total growth, of bio-tech crops worldwide. Here it is in industrialised countries; here it is in developing countries and particularly in connection with soya bean, maize, cotton and rape, canola; there are other crops: rice, squash, papaya and alfalfa, and the traits: herbicide resistance, insect resistance, and the combination of both.

In South Africa, the benefits from GM maize are illustrated by these black bars - the percentage increase in different parts of South America where GM maize is grown or here, another example where GM cotton has been used, which has a 32% higher yield, a 68% reduction in labour associated with spraying the crop and here's an interesting development of a form of maize that has now been made resistant to one of the particular problems in South Africa, the European Corn Borer, which then gives a much better yield of the crop when it's carrying this particular gene.

Now, no-one expects and no-one has ever said, as far as I know, that genetically modified plants will solve the problems of food insecurity - problems which we've created to quite a degree by anthropogenic-induced climate change, but many of us will argue that they should be part of our armamentarium. They provide additional options for the future. This technology can increase yields of food crops, it can improve resistance to disease so that farmers are exposed to far lower levels of pesticides and there is some interesting data coming out from China showing a reduction in the number of farmers who have been poisoned in agricultural pursuits because they have adopted GM crops. And also it is now possible to produce flood-resistant rice. Of course, conventional plant breeding will still be needed. There's no question about that, but its impact is much less specific and much less predictable than GM technology.

Now, of course, there have been all sorts of exaggerated claims made, by both sides in the argument, and consequently one of the problems that has arisen is that some of the data have had to be suppressed. Look at these data that have just come out from Italy:

• Yield
conventional varieties - 11.0, 11.1 tons per ha
engineered varieties - 14.1, 15.9 tons per ha
• Increase - 28 to 43%
• Economic loss - 300m to 1bn euros pa due to prohibition of Bt crops
• Increase of health risk in conventional maize - dramatic increase in fumonisin levels, engineered varieties had between 100 and 130 times less of the toxin
Source: http://pubresreg.org

Yields of GM and non-GM maize, conventional varieties, tons per hectare, increase by GM 28-43%. Those data have been suppressed by the Italian Government because the Italian Government is ideologically against GM. The economic loss 300 million to 1 billion Euros per annum due to the prohibition of GM crops. Now, there's a programme coming out on the BBC quite soon in which they are putting forward the question: ' How many million people are dying in the world because we are not using the potential of GM crops?' Increased health risk in conventional maize, a dramatic increase in fumonisin levels (this is a fungus; engineered varieties have between 100 and 130 times less of the toxin) and, of course, as I was saying, there are exaggerated claims and this has led to the question: 'Who benefits from these crops?' Is it the industry, is it Monsanto and the corporate-driven GM crop revolution - as Friends of the Earth International have said?

Patrick Moore, who is a co-founder of Greenpeace and a former activist, strongly criticised Greenpeace recently on the basis that the campaign of fear being waged against GM foods is based mostly, he said, on fantasy. He believed that GM crops are the best hope of feeding the planet because they will require fewer pesticides and less fertile land. And it's that point that I find so persuasive: that the decrease in available land for the expansion of food production is just not there and, consequently, it's going to be extremely important to have crops that will grow in what had been previously considered hostile environments. A friend of mine in India who is deeply involved in the green revolution in India, has now succeeded in transferring salt-resistant genes from mangrove plants into rice so that it becomes possible to grow rice in salt water. So, Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace, says the opponents of transgenic golden rice are "simply anti-human"; and one of the effects of global warming is that in Mexico farmers are already moving to the USA to find employment, they are migrating because they are exposed to climate change and economic restructuring that has left them with declining returns for their products and higher prices for water and fertiliser, the so-called 'double-exposure effect'.

So, I think as Christians we need to make up our minds about GM crops and avoid the campaigns of misinformation.


This article was produced by the Jubilee Centre www.jubilee-centre.org/ and re-printed in Christian Today with permission.