GMO can’t be left to only scientists

Mr Isaac Ongu, the executive director of the Science Foundation for Livelihoods and Development, in a comment in Daily Monitor of September 13, says in order for us to continue increasing food output, while “reducing the climate change impacts linked to agricultural practices and meeting international goals related to sustainable development,” we need to embrace, in essence, ‘modern’ biotechnology, including, presumably GMOs.

His key argument appears to be that while food supply has increased “more than 30 per cent over the last 60 years” largely due to the use of industrial fertiliser, the challenges we are facing now (declining soil fertility, pests, drought) are best addressed by adopting “agricultural biotechnology”. He laments the President’s refusal to accent to the Biosafety Bill.
Mr Ongu’s comment is proof, if it were ever required, that some issues are too important to be left only to scientists and their handlers.

Science is a tool for enquiry, it is a method. Science cannot tell you what questions to ask. It can only tell you how to answer them. It provides one way to answer questions, not the only way. The problem is that many scientists lack broad education to appreciate this truth.

Albert Einstein said we can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them. Modern agriculture and its contribution to climate change are a result of a narrow reliance on lab and industrial technology solutions to narrowly defined problems.

American farmers in the 1930s experienced low farm outputs due to over mechanisation/overuse of soils without any attempt at nutrient cycling (performed over the centuries by the Bison that roamed the country). The solution of the industrially-minded was to introduce chemical fertiliser.

In the beginning, this was heralded as the solution to end all soil fertility problems. However, with time, we now know that chemical fertlisers destroy long-term top soil health, and their manufacture and transportation contributes to green house gas build up, release of toxins into the atmosphere.

So now that we know this, what do the Ongus recommend? Of course more narrow, industrial technology solutions. Not enough iron or zinc in poor African’s diets? Why, go to the lab and develop iron-enriched beans! (Perhaps a more holistically-driven thought process might have recommended promoting the growth and consumption of bugga - red amaranth! But, never mind!)

In addition, what no one tells you about the current Western, highly mechanised, industrial fertiliser-dependent mono-cropping agricultural system and the push for “genetically engineered crops” is that that system is not necessarily an unalloyed improvement on what came before: It is actually less efficient than other older systems.

Start here: In his wonderful 1911 text Farmers of Forty Centuries, Prof F. H. King recounts his observations of ancient agriculture in highly populated China, Korea and Japan before they fell under the influence of Western farming methods. The farmers of Asia practiced a traditional form of nutrient cycling, which included careful application of organic animal and human waste, use of cover crops, crop rotation, etc.

The Asian farmer was, at the time, able to feed, on average, 2.5 people per acre of farmed land. According to recent research, the corresponding number for America today, with all its whizzbang technology (fertiliser, GMOs, etc) is one person per acre of farmed land.

So much for progress! Modern agriculture has its strong points, but it is also terribly inefficient and even destructive because of its narrow focus on short-term productivity.

Suzanne Kayondo

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