SeekerBlog

The captioned essay is by organic farmer Bry Lynas who happens to be the father of Mark Lynas. Like his son Mark, Bry Lynas was an anti-GM activist:

(…) I have undergone a slow conversion in my thinking over the last 15 years from strongly anti-GM to cautiously pro. Here, I want to explain why.

But as the years have passed and as it has become abundantly clear that people are not dying in droves because of GM, I’ve changed my mind. The famous economist John Maynard Keynes is alleged to have said to a critic who accused him of a U-turn, “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” I am a scientist by training and so I constantly question and revise my views according to the evidence available. Sadly, the organic movement and other mainstream ‘green’ organisations remain as intransigent as ever in their views on genetic engineering: they seem to be stuck in a time warp 30 years out of date. Perhaps they, like politicians, don’t wish to be seen performing a U-turn despite good reasons for doing so.

Basically, I don’t understand why certain types of GM crops can’t be approved for use with organic systems. It’s hard enough growing organically as it is without constantly shooting yourself in the foot by refusing to move with the times. Let’s just take one example. Last year, potato blight struck early in the soggy, damp non-summer. The result was that my potato crop was about a quarter of what it normally is. Yet there is a blight resistant GM potato which has been developed in the public domain. If only I could have used that! But I can’t because it’s against the organic regulations and even if I wasn’t organic, I still wouldn’t be able to use it because of all the ‘green’ protests which have made sure that it never sees the light of day; not for organic growers nor for any conventional growers.

What’s so terrible about this potato? Is it Frankenfood? No, it’s just an ordinary potato with one gene inserted from a wild potato which happens to show resistance to the dreaded Phytophthera infestans, the fungal late blight which caused the Irish potato famine in the 1840s when over a million people died of starvation. Alarmingly  the fungus has begun to reproduce sexually over recent years which makes it much more virulent. It had previously reproduced itself asexually and was relatively easily controlled by spraying fungicides or growing somewhat resistant potato varieties.

So why not embrace this GM potato? The introduced gene comes from the same genus - Solanum - and so is not even transgenic. Why is this potato ‘bad’ whereas the blight resistant Sárpo potato, bred over many years by conventional means, is good? (I was growing a Sárpo variety and it succumbed to the blight like the others.)  Of course, blight resistant GM potatoes, like the Sárpo varieties, will sooner or later be overcome by P. infestans. It’s an arms race and this is where GM potatoes can leap ahead because it only takes a year or two to splice blight resistance into the genome and grow the resulting plant. It took the Sarvari family, who developed the Sárpo potatoes, some 40 years of careful selection of resistance traits to produce truly blight resistant varieties. As Pamela Ronald, Professor of Plant Pathology and Chair of the Plant Genomics Program at the University of California, Davis says: “To meet the appetites of the world’s population without drastically hurting the environment requires a visionary new approach: combining genetic engineering and organic farming”. She and her husband co-authored ‘Tomorrow’s Table’ which, argues Stewart Brand, makes ”a persuasive case that, far from contradictory, the merging of genetic engineering and organic farming offers our best shot at truly sustainable agriculture”. 

(…) consumers who buy overpriced organic foods in order to avoid pesticide exposure are focusing their attention on 0.01% of the pesticides they consume. (…) 99.99 percent (by weight) of the pesticides in the American diet are chemicals that plants produce to defend themselves.

Physician and molecular biologist Henry I. Miller reviews the furor generated by the recent article by Stanford University researchers that was dismissive of health or nutritional benefits of organic foods. Dr. Miller provides some excellent references to give needed context to the unwarranted fears of pesticide residues — which are presumed to be more harmful in conventionally-farmed produce. 

(…) Ironically, the designation ‘organic’ is itself a synthetic construct of bureaucrats that makes little sense.  It prohibits the use of synthetic chemical pesticides – although there is a lengthy list of exceptions listed in the Organic Foods Production Act  – but permits most ‘natural’ ones (and also allows the application of pathogen-laden animal excreta as fertilizer).

These permitted pesticides can be toxic.  As evolutionary biologist Christie Wilcox explained in a September 2012 Scientific American article (‘Are lower pesticide residues a good reason to buy organic?  Probably not.’): ‘Organic pesticides pose the same health risks as non-organic ones.  No matter what anyone tells you, organic pesticides don’t just disappear.  Rotenone is notorious for its lack of degradation, and copper sticks around for a long, long time.  Studies have shown that copper sulfate, pyrethrins, and rotenone all can be detected on plants after harvest—for copper sulfate and rotenone, those levels exceeded safe limits.  One study found such significant rotenone residues in olives and olive oil to warrant ‘serious doubts…about the safety and healthiness of oils extracted from [fruits] treated with rotenone.’’  (There is a well-known association between rotenone exposure and Parkinson’s Disease.)

There is another important but unobvious point about humans’ ingestion of pesticides: The vast majority of pesticidal substances that we consume occur in our diets ‘naturally,’ and they are present in organic foods as well as conventional ones.  In a landmark research article published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, University of California, Berkeley, biochemist Bruce Ames and his colleagues found that ‘99.99 percent (by weight) of the pesticides in the American diet are chemicals that plants produce to defend themselves.  Only 52 natural pesticides have been tested in high-dose animal cancer tests, and about half (27) are rodent carcinogens; these 27 are shown to be present in many common foods.’

The bottom line of Ames’ experiments: ‘Natural and synthetic chemicals are equally likely to be positive in animal cancer tests.  We also conclude that at the low doses of most human exposures the comparative hazards of synthetic pesticide residues are insignificant.’

In other words, consumers who buy overpriced organic foods in order to avoid pesticide exposure are focusing their attention on 0.01% of the pesticides they consume.

(…) 

In an article entitled ‘The Organic Fable,’ New York Times columnist Roger Cohen had some pithy observations stimulated by the Stanford study.  ‘Organic has long since become an ideology, the romantic back-to-nature obsession of an upper middle class able to afford it and oblivious, in their affluent narcissism, to the challenge of feeding a planet whose population will surge to 9 billion before the middle of the century and whose poor will get a lot more nutrients from the two regular carrots they can buy for the price of one organic carrot.’

(…) 

Please read the entire article.