Farming Utopia Gets a Run in The Age newspaper.

A great summary of anti-GM attitudes and assumptions has just appeared in an opinion piece carried by The Age, Melbourne.

The piece has so many disputable assertions that almost every sentence deserves a rejoinder- it's absolutely tailor made for a blog commentary. In the Pundit's opinion, it falls in the "so bad it's good" category.

Industry reaps GM bonanza, but we will pay.

We need to question our expectations and assess all the costs before we release GM crops, writes Mairi Anne Mackenzie.

The pro-genetically modified food policy seems to be: "Get on board or get run over." Clive James, speaking at the AusBiotech conference in Perth last November, enthusiastically says that the GM revolution is being led by developing countries "unconcerned about the GM debate in the West". And The Age (20/2) considers economic benefits justify a commitment to GM.

But as it is, decisions about GM take only short-term economics into account, and both sides of the debate are simplistic.

Pundit riposte: This leaves out mentioning numerous studies where the importance of GM technologies in providing sustainable land, water, and energy solutions for a future population of 8-10 billion are discussed, e.g. articles by Anthony Trewavas or Indur Goklany, and the Copenhagen Consensus Conference 2004.

Critics don't doubt that GM works in the paddock.

Pundit riposte: This Age article is one of the few published commentaries from the anti-GM camp that actually addresses benefits.

A common feature of the anti-GM network discussions is almost constant denial of any benefits. Good examples of denial are Greenpeace's repeated dismissal of welfare benefits vitamin A enhanced rice, and Australia's Network of Concerned Farmers constant denial of the evidence on GM Canola's economic success in Canada. e.g. see Julie Newman of NCF in the comments thread to David Tribe's recent Online Opinion article on GM foods.

But they might argue that GM projects reinforce the idea that we can - and should - mould nature to perpetuate the impossible: endless physical economic growth.

Pundit riposte: Endless physical economic growth? Well no: let's first remember that much economic growth in the famous modern "weightless economy" to use Alan Greenspan's apt words, is not physical increase in turnover of matter. A lot of economic activity decreases the weight of products- with emails replacing snailmail, glass fibre replacing copper, and plastics meaning lighter trains and cars.

But to address the point fully, note that improvements in agricultural productivity have been, and still are, the key to effective conservation of land, given a still growing global demand for food fibre and energy. Note also that farming productivity is linked to poverty elimination, which in turn is linked to a demographic transition in developing countries , and hence to lower birth rates in developing countries. Increases in farm productivity actually improve human welfare, eliminate poverty, promote sustainability, all intangible, weightless morally good outcomes.

GM technology needs safeguards commensurate with its power and permanence. The fact that GM products have quietly crept in to our supermarkets demonstrates the need to tame our economics. We need to understand the long-term economic and biological consequences of trying to sustain 6 billion people with industrial farming methods, spurred on and cemented in place by GM. We need to ensure the long-term health of our agricultural land. We need to make individual economic benefit coincide with wider social benefit, by assessing unassessed costs, before releasing GM crops.

Pundit riposte: Perhaps also we also should consider, on the other side of the argument, the consequences of making our farming more land and water hungry by reducing farm productivity with inefficient low-yielding methods.

Consider some of the more obvious biological, economic and political drawbacks with GM crops. Some GM crops lock us into herbicide-dependent farming - herbicide resistance would become the main difference between crops and weeds. Other GM crops select strongly for pest insects' resistance to the crop's ubiquitous GM toxin.

Pundit riposte: But these problems can be and are addressed by Integrated Pest Management approaches brought to full fruition in the GM Australian cotton industry; herbicide tolerance is a trait used both in conventional breeding and GM breeding , and is used in both cases to promote no-tillage conservation farming and good environmental outcomes.

The first farmers to adopt GM crops may enjoy a period of increased profitability, until their heightened productivity, quoted at 10-20 per cent, requires others to do likewise.

Pundit riposte: Well so far, so good. That's a 10-20% saving in needed farmland. Very good for wilderness preservation and farmer incomes.

But once the overall supply of a crop rises, the price will fall.

Pundit riposte: Well yes that will occur, and most benefits will go to the early adopters.

Being a market leader is a competitive industry prize that many clever strategists would pay dearly to achieve, so they can harvest the competitive advantages of large volumes of commercial experience. They do this for cogent reasons.

The tough fact of life is that the cost advantages provided to the first users of GM techniques will persist for a decade or more. A key factor causing this long period of real cost advantages, not mentioned in The Age piece, is that early adopters are further down a learning curve than the late adopters, and the laggards may never catch up.

Economic and technical improvement is a long, ongoing process, and in the case of agriculture occurs over time periods of decades. The Australian cotton industry took ten years to fully exploit GM cotton varieties, and can probably still learn more over several more years how to make best use of the new traits. In plain speaking business terms, the time period over which GM market leaders will have the upper hand is effectively forever.

So even assuming The Age article's premise about eventual cost premium erosion is correct (and the Pundit does not accept this premise), with the slow timetable of plant breeding, the economic penalties for the late adopters last a long time. There are many opportunities for first-movers in GM crop technologies to continue moving down the learning curve for improved productivity by continued innovationa including continued dynamic improvement of crop germplasm by breeding.

On top of that, in the case of GM traits, where there punishing regulatory barriers such as created by Australian state GM bans, new investment on other crops is scared away to those markets that do allow GM, so the investment differential penalties of an anti-GM stance amplify the cost penalties. For instance, Dow is developing and marketing new popular canola varieties now for North America that will not come to Australia for years.

Meanwhile, the higher price of GM seed, the charges for using GM seed grown by the farmer, and a responsibility for non-GM crops contaminated with GM crop material from other farms, will become just additional requirements for staying in the race. A farmer's basic economic position, as one among many sellers of a uniform commodity, will not be altered by GM crops.

Pundit riposte: A farmer's basic economic position will indeed be altered if they use GM that give yield and other cost advantages, if some farmers choose to avoid using it, or are prevented against their good judgements from freely choosing to use the more productive technologies. The high cost non-users who take The Age's article's advice will ensure the cost advantages to the GM users.

Overall, the article section just quoted (see above) provides a complicated set of idealistic wishes that markets were much different than they are in practice. It also ignores one important emergent property of better farm productivity- that widespread adoption of improvements itself promotes better conservation of global land and water resources, by making more efficient use of limited inputs - land, water, fertiliser- and this anti-sustainability side effect of the anti-GM stance is in direct contradiction to the writer's stated goal of better sustainablity. It a word, the article is self-contradictory.

For farmers, forming farmers' co-operatives may be a more responsible response to dwindling farm profits.

Similarly, it is hard to see how new seed varieties, available to the West, could alter the buying power of hungry people in poor countries, once higher levels of productivity became normal.

Pundit riposte: It will help them improve their competitiveness and profitablity.
See for instance:

Economic impact of transgenic crops in developing countries,Terri Raney
http://www.agbioworld.org/pdf/raney.pdf

Monsanto’s Adventures in Zulu Land: Output and Labour Effects of GM Maize And Minimum Tillage Colin Thirtle, Marnus Gouse and Jenifer Piesse, University of Pretoria, Kings College London and University of Stellenbosch.

Evenson and Gollin 2003 on the Green Revolution.

Anyone really interested in feeding the poor or making agriculture more viable would change the system, not simply amplify it. The Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, making tiny but life-changing loans to rural women, is one example.

Pundit riposte: But why isn't providing better seeds to poor people and helping them farm better and improve their earnings "changing the system" too? Rich country opinions about these issues can be in conflict with the interests of the poorer countries.

A growth-based agricultural economy is an opportunity for GM research companies and they are the main beneficiaries of GM crops.

Pundit riposte: There are several papers showing benefits are distributed to the farmers too.
For instance PG Economics have found that "after just nine years of commercialisation...since 1996, global farm income has increased by a cumulative total of $27 billion derived from a combination of enhanced productivity and efficiency gains [created by GM crops introductions world wide]".

Geoff Brookes of PG Economics puts the extra economic returns to developing country farmers in these 9 years at US$15 billion, and this share is rapidly increasing. It is simply and plainly morally wrong to obscure the interests of these millions of poorer farmers with heated animosity directed at corporations.

GM is the logical next step for them. Food seed would be more closely controlled and privately owned, not tradeable without paying a company. We are again privatising what was public.

Pundit riposte: Conventional seed breeders also existed in the private sector prior to GM. Are they now to be eliminated in an anti-business revolution to eliminate plant variety rights? A pevious radical generation thought that property was theft. It took about fifty years for many of us to figure out why that deceptively appealing cry was stupid. This new thrust to elimanate seed company rights is in the same deceptive but stupid category. In any case farmers don't need to buy seeds a second season that don't give them better profits the first season.

Widespread GM agriculture could put legal ownership of seed for each year's food crop, and for our future breeding programs, into the hands of a few large companies.

Pundit riposte: Well not necessarily. Let's also promote public funded GM crop intitiatives, such as those in China, India, and elsewhere.

The genetic diversity of nature, until now, has given us insurance against changing circumstances. Companies, by contrast, have much narrower interests.

Concern about concentration of ownership alone is grounds for a new direction with GM.

But there is perhaps a more serious drawback to GM... It is the direction that GM farming would encourage. It would reinforce unsustainable trends in agriculture, by investing in them and making them appear to work for longer, thereby prolonging the illusion that farming the way we do is acceptable.

Pundit riposte: This is a misrepresentation of what GM is achieving. The best illustration of its errors is the Australian cotton industry today.

At present, agriculture obliterates most native species from arable land. We simplify vast tracts of country. Herbicides exclude from crops the weeds that would be the beginnings of a more stable, diverse landscape. After this, with our greenhouse-blind pricing system, we manufacture huge amounts of farm machinery and fertilisers. Then we fill the globe with uniform crops using a tiny selection of the world's plants.

Pundit riposte: Genetically uniform crops are not a necessarily a product of GM. A new trait is useless without good germplasm to host it. The way Australian GM cotton varieties were introduced as a partnership with a conventional cotton seed breeder (CSD) proves this. There are numerous different biodiverse GM soybean varieties for instance, and their diversity has improved with the advent of GM. Similar arguments apply to GM corn and it has numerous distinct varieties too.

So the so-called success of GM crops would encourage the continuation of capital-intensive, low-labour, highly mechanised, perfect-monoculture-type crops. GM crops are designed to be sprayed using large, expensive machines, for which trees and logs are obstacles. This reinforces diesel-dependent farming, and increasingly uniform paddocks. We have a rate of extinction of native plants and animals higher than any other developed country. Food produced in this way might be edible, but the system is unsafe.

Pundit riposte: The real motivation of the writer emerges more clearly: the need a Social Revolution to remove conventional farming from the landscape based on an unfair and untrue charicature of reality. It's actually healthy that this motivation is made so obvious in this article. That is to say: the writer believes GM crops interfere with the plans of those who wish to destroy the existing farming system and replace it with a farming Utopia. Let's return to this in another GMO Pundit posting: the Pundit is personally glad that an agenda that has been kept out of discussion but obvious to any close observer of events is now clearly on the table.

We seem prepared to lock into this imposing technology because of our expectation of greater material wealth. As farmers, our expectation of growth in productivity deems variety after variety "unproductive". And yet there is nothing wrong with today's, or yesterday's, crop varieties.

Pundit riposte: An interesting take on the value of crop innovation. Missing from this comment is the fact that the benefits of GM technology are increasingly going to millions of poorer farmers in developing countries.

It is our idea of "improvement" - that is, ever higher yields - that is faulty and our economic aims that need fixing. As usual, we are fixing up the world instead of adjusting our expectations.

We have the kind of progress that is making us overweight, and that ensures a nutritionally deficient diet for those in the developing world.

We could use GM to attempt to unwind the human arrangements that lead to diabetes or vitamin-deficient diets.

Pundit riposte: And yes many GM crop enthusiasts are trying to do exactly that, Golden Rice for example with higher vitamin A could save thousands of lives a day. But Golden Rice is delayed by whom: Greenpeace and their allies. Let's hope Golden Sorghum has a faster track forward.

But instead, we maintain current priorities and incentives for material growth and hope to cope by redesigning nature with GM, to suit a lifestyle that is free from physical work and national diets impoverished by economic development.

Likewise, we use GM to reshape natural species to suit the weed, pest and soil environments produced by agricultural uses that biology tells us are too intense, too pure and too extensive to be sustainable. We are remaking the world in our own impoverished, utilitarian image. And we are failing to recognise it. We are failing to really connect our bulging waistlines, overfilled houses and sprawling cities with the loss of biological diversity and climatic stability.

Pundit riposte: There so much fuzzy thinking here Pundit will save it for a separate post.

The law as it stands ensures that the benefits of this brief bonanza are financial and private, while the many drawbacks are unpriced and public. By the narrow accounting standards of our economy, powerful GM technology scores some points - until the terms of reference are widened. We need to do our sums on a larger spreadsheet. The environmental damage or risk posed by GM, such as loss of organic genetic diversity within a species or aiding and abetting unsustainable trends has not been costed.

Pundit riposte: One could also add that the environmental and health cost of GM oppositon are not fully costed either, but are in the range of A$billions for Australia alone.

The narrow context and the short-termism of our market and culture ensure that it is left out of economic calculations. So the countervailing commercial arguments in favour of system-level concerns have not yet been realised.

Pundit riposte: Lets make clear the system-level objections about bringing in a farming Utopia disguised as safety and environmental concerns. There are compelling ethical and political objections to that manoever.

Many of these criticisms can be applied to other technology. But there are differences with GM that make it more alarming.

Unlike other productivity-raising technologies, which can potentially be dismantled or reversed, GM cannot be dismantled. With the exception of captive micro-organisms used for medical purposes, it makes deep-seated, inaccessible, permanent, self-perpetuating changes to the living things around us.

Pundit riposte: Most plant varieties die out when farmers don't attend to them. GM crops are no exception.

Traditional breeding is potentially reversible, can be done in the paddock, is relatively cheap, and can be controlled by farmers. GM crops have none of these desirable features.

Pundit riposte: This conclusion is contestable

Catering for the long term is often designed out of business, by the growth motive and the prices and laws that reflect and support this. So citizens and governments must act to protect the long-term health of the economy. If we lose market share in grain markets, we can build market share in a more sustainable food sector - something unfamiliar to the GM lobby and something we could say the GM lobby fears and opposes.
The Author :
Mairi Anne Mackenzie, who has a masters in environmental science, is a Victorian farmer.

Pundit riposte: Sustainable food production: let's see , how many posts does Pundit have on the link between Bt and better cotton management, or herbicide tolerance and conservation tillage, or drought tolerance and water use, or salt-tolerance and salinity management?
As far as the potential Non-GM market share in new products: let's scrutinise the economics of those too.

GMO Pundit's Bottom Line:
The Scaremongering Industry reaps a GM Bonanza, but the poor farmer deprived of technology choices will pay.