They’ll help us fight global warming. Or would they?
Pierre-Henri GOUYON tells us: ‘What really frightens me are people who think that technical progress will solve all the problems caused by technical progress‘.
(Words from my PhD advisor mentor).
Filed under: English, Evolution, Food, Plant stuff, Pseudosciences, Science, Shameless Promotion
All of human history is a story of using new technologies to solve new problems.
People domesticated horses cause it was better than walking., They invented cars because they require less maintenance than horses and don’t produce huge amounts of waste. They’re working on electric cars now since we’re running out of oil and because it pollutes.
Agricultural technology advances 2 steps forwards and 1 step back just like everything else that humans touch.
I don’t know where to start!
Dr. Gouyon claims that seed companies are developing GMOs to secure their markets and destroying seed diversity in the process. Implicit is the requirement that farmers are being forced to choose GMOs and abandon local varieties, which is the furthest thing from the truth. Not only are seed companies focusing their GMO efforts on just a few large acreage row crops which lend themselves to transgenic solutions (corn, cotton, soybean), they are doing so almost exclusively with elite germplasms – it makes no sense to bear the cost of breeding the technology into low yielding, local varieties. If farmers choose to purchase elite transgenic seeds, it is because it offers them an advantage, not because the local varieties are no longer available. In reality, however, it is large-scale, technology-friendly farmers who are growing the seeds, not resource poor farmers trying to eek out a living on a quater acre. Those large-scale farmers were doing large-scale agriculture before GMOs were available, and they’ve chosen them because of the tremendous reduction on inputs required – advantages that are well documented, such as the drastically lowered pesticide applications to cotton in the US, Australia, and India and the ability to control weeds using herbicides with more benign environmental profiles such as glyphosate rather than the less effective cocktails of more noxious chemicals that they previously used.
Most disturbing, however, is Dr. Gouyon’s “guarantee” that transgenic plants with drought-tolerance will “produce nothing” – it is quite evident that he knows nothing of the active research in this area. To make such a blanket guarantee strains credibility.
The anti-GMO forces have been calling wolf for 15 years now, and all that has happened is dramatic reductions of chemical inputs and increased yields. Directing their collective energies to problems more real than imagined, such as CO2 emissions and deforestation would have much more tangible benefit to the environmental movement.
I dont know how to start… :)
First, Dr Gouyon is known for setting things controversially, but then it is feeding debate. Not necessarily a bad thing.
Then maybe controversies are the kind of things Seeds Aside needs to foster debate and readership, so I’ll take responsability for this… I hope I’ll find time to make follow-ups.
My very personal take is probably less controversial than my ex-PhD advisor, but it is also probably disagreeing with some of the points made above .
Last, let’s be clear that I never take disagreeing on specific points personnally…
Maybe we could go partitioning arguments in single comments, so that we can comment point by point? I don’t mind and I think it is a safer mode of discussing on blogs, or at least it has my preference… :)
I would say first that I heartedly go with that GMO will only prove good at improving quality on final products. That is why it won’t replace classical quantitative genetics, just add things at the end of the process (at best). This is also what is meant by working on elite varieties. But this is also the point with regard to drought resistance: I don’t see where single genes can do much with regard to productivity when everything else makes it hard. This is even truer because integrative approaches are teaching us there are dramatic tradeoffs, and energy spent to resisting such stressful conditions will inevitably be at the expense of productivity… I think his point here is completely valid, and we can’t expect productivity to be competing those of ‘classical’ crops. Allowing agricultural production at places conventionally/ecologically poor may still be part of the answer though…
I’m also reluctant to fully consider the argument of GMO lowering chemicals use. It is somewhat true, but it is less clean than claimed. Once you grow a glyphosate resistant crop, then indeed you reduce other chemicals. But the following year, when the field is seed with another crop (culture rotation is common in France, I don’t know much about agriculture in the USA), then you have to go back to alternative herbicides to eradicate the glyphosate crop of the previous year now growing “weeds”. This is especially true for rapeseed, which has the further inconvenient of hybridizing with other brassicaceaes wich are weeds. Inflicting a strong selection on glyphosate resistance may only be a very transient solution to the reduction of chemicals in agriculture…
[...] for Laurent’s other post — OMGs GMOs — I am going to say absolutely nothing. It hinges on a video about GMOs as a [...]
@Matt:
All of human history is a story of using new technologies to solve new problems.
Sure. But let’s consider this other example: some people claim that global warming could be solved by sending aerosols in the atmosphere in a controlled manner.
A simpler, safer and technically less costly answer might be to reduce carbon dioxyde emissions.
That’s not only possible and easier thant the scientistic one, but it’s also more than probably safer. That’s the way of Pr Gouyon’s claim (because this is another frightening scientistic example): solvability is not claimed by a weirder, more hazardous and uncontrolled answer to issues.
This is an interesting article,
http://healthjournalclub.blogspot.com/2009/11/armageddon-bug.html
on how researchers in Australia tried to devise, using genetic engineering a contraceptive virus for mice and instead created a version of mousepox that was incredibly lethal
Hum. I find sterilizing viruses particularly scary. There are non-null odds that such viruses mutate and cross species (viruses do the jump naturally all the time). Given mouse and human have somewhat similar egg proteins, it is the open door for a general sterilization of mankind.
There are other ways to limit mouse expansion. Of course, we might prefer the unsafe way, which will require other technologies to bypass unintended side effects (we already master in vitro conception, don’t we?).