The greatest humanitarian of the 20th century
Norman Borlaug died yesterday at 95. He was the father of the agricultural boon and rejuvination of the 70s termed the Green Revolution. This clip of Penn and Teller’s Bullshit is a pretty decent 10-minute introductory primer on Borlaug and GMO. Also check out the NTY obit and oddly enough, the Fark thread is a pretty decent read.
It’s a crap introduction to GMO’s and the Green Revolution.
The green revolution was not just the introduction of different strains of crop, but also the introduction of industrial food production techniques including oil based fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides.
The effects of which are long enduring and catastrophic to both bio-diversity and the purity of the food chain.
And GMO’s are hugely problematic because you are throwing alien DNA into the complex mechanism of a cell without fully understanding how that gene will express itself. People often think of Frankenstein when you talk about topics like this, but it ain’t Frankenstein, a big monster that can be contained with torches and mobs.
It’s more like killer bees. Swarms of an alien species that we are helpless to watch spread and we can only hope nature will contain. Swarms of pollen blown from a GMO plant to a pure plant, pollenating it and polluting it with industrial DNA.
And that’s where it gets insidious, because the GMO assholes, like Monsanto, want to patent and own DNA as m,intellectual property, which means farmers can no longer own their seed once it’s been polluted by neighboring GMO crops.
I want this to be clear. They want to take the physical objects we know as crops and livestock and own the intellectual rights to them, meaning you have to license every copy of the genes your organisms happen to have, but not own.
Here are those nice, altruistic GMO folks at work
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2008/05/monsanto200805
And here is a nice introduction as to why people are trying to slow down GMO development and change the way we grow food in monocultured fields full of water polluting fertilizers and poisons.
http://online.sfsu.edu/~rone/GEessays/Klebsiellaplanticola.html
The difference between innovation in food and invocation in the consumer market is that the production of one is contained in a factory, the production of the other takes place in the environment where we all live. The output of one sits as the monitor on your desk, the output of the other sits in your stomach and becomes a part of you. You want to be very careful with the kinds of innovations you absorb, especially if you have to license what’s in your stomach.
Comment by thimbles — 9/13/2009 @ 10:22 pm
Jesus Christ you’re the most hyperpartisan person I sorta know. Wackjob nonsense devoid of concern for actual food production capability. Totally disjointed asinine arguments in favor of delussioned policies guaranteed to ensure maximinzerd world poverty. Your are truly out of you mind. Chavez aint got nothing on you.
Comment by Jack — 9/13/2009 @ 11:56 pm
Thanks for the love, ad homoneim style.
Comment by thimbles — 9/14/2009 @ 1:52 am
You’re right. There are some measurable ramifications of the increased availability and use of technology to increase crop yields. This is one of my favorite from the LA Times:
In 1960, before his techniques were widely adopted, the world produced 692 million tons of grain for 2.2 billion people. By 1992, largely as a result of Borlaug’s pioneering techniques, it was producing 1.9 billion tons for 5.6 billion people — using only 1% more land. India and Pakistan are now agriculturally self-sufficient as a result of his intervention.
Yields were nearly tripled in thirty years while using only one percent more land. There are two conceivable alternative ways to enjoy a similar boon of food security.
The first would be to simply triple the amount of land used for food crops but not artificially increase crop yields, maintaining the same density of non-fertilized and non-weeded crops. This would be pretty catastrophic for bio-diversity since we’d have to clear and use three times the current amount of land for mono-strain agriculture, decimating natural ecosystems in the process of feeding ourselves. Aside from the environmental issues with this solution there are practical problems as well. Massive agricultural sprawl is not always possible due to decreasing efficiency of non-ideal growing locations. This means that it’s conceivable that instead of a mere tripling of the land needed to grow the food we could have been talking about a five-fold increase in the amount of land required to sustain the lives of humans. I can’t help but wonder if you really believe such a solution is really preferable to a measly 1% increase in farm land coupled with the use of scary chemicals.
The second method can be found in The Lottery. Are you really suggesting that the world would have been better off if we maintained the same level of food production in 1992 as we had in 1960? Are you really comfortable condemning hundreds of millions or even billions of human beings to death by starvation? Because that’s the kind of world that we’d be living in had these yield increasing revolutions not occurred. It’s also fairly conceivable that food wars could have occurred which could have added a few hundred million more to the death count.
I must ask what sort of would you would have wished for instead of the one brought about by the Green Revolution? Do you have a better solution to the problem of how to feed the world? If your answer is no, which of my outlined alternate histories would you have wanted to occur instead of the Green Revolution? Would you pick the first, opting to truly decimate the planet by trying to grow crops at the inefficient pre-Green Revolution densities, with no guarantee that exploding land use would even work? Or would you have preferred to condemn hundreds upon hundreds of millions of souls to death?
Maybe you’d pick the first, which essentially mirrors the current trend towards ‘organic’ food. I wonder whether such a solution is truly thought out well. Is it really environmentally beneficial to use more land less efficiently or to use less land more efficiently and use man-made substances to do so? The problem with world wide adoption of ‘organic’ farming methods is the reversal of the increasing crop densities enjoyed by the entire world during the 20th century. And the awkward fact is that there’s a dearth of equally productive arable land.
To me the second option is unthinkable. Perhaps it is thinkable to you, however. Maybe you don’t care about millions or even billions dying because they’re far away. Or maybe you don’t care because they don’t speak English. Or maybe you don’t care because they are poor. Or maybe you don’t care because their skin color is different.
Me? I choose fertilizer, pesticides, herbicides and high yield crops. I choose to feed billions with those technologies. If I was forced to choose between the survival of billions of human beings or the decimation of some lakes due to fertilizer run-off, I’d side with human beings every time.
I really don’t know how you can argue against the results of the Green Revolution without arguing for the death of people in poorer countries. Are you arguing for genocide? If so, fuck you.
GMO is our generation’s Green Revolution. The promise of GMO is the promise of additional increasing yields and resistance to insects and disease. The promise of GMO is a vast reduction in the need for external substances like pesticides. By engineering our food we can improve upon nature. Such a process is identical but more efficient to the process that humans have been engaging in ever since we domesticated animals and bred human desired species of crops. Corn was originally a scrawny little plant with relatively small and scarce kernels. Generations of human intervention eventually yielded a plant with incredible food production capability. The intervention of humans has always screwed with nature. That’s what makes humans as remarkable as we are: we bend and shape nature to suit our purposes. By creating docile cows and fat chickens we’ve essentially built our own custom species.
Genetic modification is simply another step along this path. By directly manipulating the genes of plants we can accomplish in decades or even years what it used to take centuries to do. Imagine a world where it is possible to grow rice in Death Valley. How awesome would that world be? Imagine if there was no need for fertilizer because we created plants that used the nitrogen in the soil more efficiently? Imagine if there wasn’t a need to spray against insects because we were able to create plants that weren’t tasty to insects. Just as the Green Revolution saved lives by increasing yield density, the use of GMO can do the same today.
I wanted to get to your complaint about cross-contamination and intellectual property rights but it’s getting late. I’ll post a followup tomorrow.
Comment by Cameron — 9/14/2009 @ 3:11 am
This is kind of funny in a way. You see, I’m usually the guy calling for more investment in health care, low cost drugs, education for the poor, and I’m the one who gets shouted at for being sentimental.
But when it comes to supporting the unchecked march of industrial agricultural system, including GMO’s, suddenly I’m the realist and you guys are the sentimental ones.
I’m not saying that industrial farming must be stopped immediately and people should all die or convert to organic farming now, what I am saying is that the current system of farming is resource intensive and its wastes are pollutive.
And those resources are getting are getting scarcer and those wastes are getting harder to contain. It’s not a sustainable system.
If I was the coach of a successful weightlifting team would you support my giving students multiple steroids? They’re increasing the kids’ yield. Their performance is miles beyond anyone else. Do you want these kids and the school to lose? How could you support that?
Well modern agriculture has increased yields, but it comes at a future cost. If the increased performance now comes at the cost of a future breakdown, then it’s shortsighted and wrong to indulge in the activity.
“But what about the people?” you ask.
Well you could make the argument that increased food yields has made the unsustainable increase in population possible, that maybe 2.2 billion people held in check by a limited food supply would have been a lot more sustainable and that our use of artificial roidriculture had meerly postponed uncomfortable decisions which have only been made more uncomfortable since.
But that’s not exactly true. Yes there are more people on the earth, yes people are producing more food, but that’s a correlation, not a causation. People are always reproducing, often more in poor countries than in rich ones, more in undernourished countries than in well fed ones. We’re making more food, and we have the techniques and land to make even more food, so why are people starving?
Because food is tied to money.
One used to make food using land, water, seeds, and sun. One used to make food to eat now and save seed for later.
Now land costs money. Seeds cost money. Water costs money. Food needs to make money to buy these things. Food needs to go to a market. Food needs to be competitively priced to sell.
And here’s where roidriculture comes in. Industrial equipment and resources cost a lot of money and produce a lot of food. The increased food supply lowers the price. In order to compete, farmers need money to buy equipment or their food rots unsold because they can’t lower the price below the amount that it costs to grow.
People in an agricultural society where they’ve been locked out of their markets starve because you can’t buy food without money. They starve or they migrate to the cities to make money.
Then we can talk about the farm subsidies of the rich nations and how they export their food to the markets of the poor nations at below cost, destroying indigenous markets and keeping the poor very poor.
There’s an article here if you like:
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090921/cunningham
Or watch a movie:
http://www.livevideo.com/video/BESToftheBEST/8572389162284FFD9468AD17757C5D95/life-and-debt-1of-4.aspx
Anyways I gotta run..
Comment by thimbles — 9/14/2009 @ 4:24 am
Other 3 parts
http://www.livevideo.com/video/BESToftheBEST/5D52F7AC943849E8812F947A3F773653/life-and-debt-2of-4.aspx
http://www.livevideo.com/video/BESToftheBEST/D2121E20B3684A9BA393E0B61E8320A5/life-and-debt-3of-4.aspx
http://www.livevideo.com/video/BESToftheBEST/A21ED0E47BC54A7191549BB396A4B22B/life-and-debt-4of-4.aspx
Comment by thimbles — 9/14/2009 @ 4:27 am
I’m back. So anyways, if your big issue is people starving then you should be looking at ways to disconnect food access and food production from money. That would be the truly sentimental solution.
All I’m saying is that the caricature of the organic, anti-GMO types as heartless, unrealistic , hippie dreamer luddites who have nothing to say but bullshit – and the architects of the green revolution types as the sainted heroes of our generation who’s system of food production have made the world an unquestionably better place is overly simplistic and faulty.
And it prevents the necessary open mindedness we will all need in the coming decades as the sainted system breaks down and we search for something to replace it.
Comment by thimbles — 9/14/2009 @ 5:31 am
I like Penn & Tellers “Bullshit”, I bought the first 3 seasons, but I also realize it’s dishonest. They have a habit (or policy) of grossly distorting opposing viewpoints, showcasing the most extreme and illogical, and they pick the craziest nutjobs they can find to provide counter-arguments, this particular video being a prime example.
Comment by Dingle — 9/14/2009 @ 12:18 pm
Thimbles,
I think all of what you’re talking about are worthy topics to broach, but I feel like you’re sort of talking past the point there.
For one, you need to cleave the discussion of market practices with agricultural practices. Innovations in agricultural practices, such as those pioneered by Norman Borlaug, are rather separate in intent and design from market practices pursued by Monsanto and the likes. I don’t think even you would argue that innovation in general is bad because it might hypothetically hijacked and put to regressive use by scheming corporate entities. To use a direct parallel, you wouldn’t decry research that allows for the development of, say, a highly effective AIDS vaccine on the grounds that pharmaceutical companies might price/distribute them in obnoxious ways. Most people intuitively understand that those are two separate issues (and that applies, by the way, even when it’s the corporate entities themselves that are making the breakthroughs).
The second thing, and what I’m guessing spurred Jack’s comment, is you’re sort of blithely talking past what one would imagine would be the screamingly obvious central consideration of this discussion: the claim that these innovations saved hundreds of millions of lives. Your first comment and most of the rest refer to unspecified, unnamed, and as far as I can tell entirely opaque and even unimagined “potential consequences”. I actually agree with you, in that I think we should be wary of genetic engineering, particularly that which is rushed through and the consequences of which are not entirely clear. But when you’re weighing that against, say, global famine and the death of hundreds of millions, I don’t think a completely opaque and qualitative sense of foreboding is going to trump here. You’re going to have to do a little better than that if you’re comparing harms, since yours, at least as expressed up to this point, amounts to, well, nothing, save perhaps an entirely abstract platitude (i.e. “it’s bad to mess with mother nature”).
It IS kind of ironic that you’re usually the sentimental one, but apparently in this context, global famine doesn’t appear to chart when compared to market inequalities. I’m not sure how much progressivism and globalism you require of a market before you allow it the green light to, say, prevent a billion people from starving to death.
To be fair, you did at least glancingly address the issue in these two paragraphs:
You are certainly correct that the increase in food supply has prevented the increase in population from “being held in check.” But what, precisely, do you imagine the mechanism would have been for “holding the population increase in check”?
Well, the primary mechanism would have unquestioningly been: worldwide famine and mass starvation. Sure, after a billion people starved to death that might have spurred a renaissance in family planning and a return to sustainable lifestyles, maybe. But…Jesus. That sounds a lot like the anti-human caricature that the most hardline critics of the environmental movement paint it as.
Again, that’s a point devoid of context.
Certainly, food is tied to money. But it’s not as if it was free before. Particularly if you factor in what had previously been what food was tied to—effort. Which surely you would agree has value in the same way money does.
If you attach a dollar amount to the effort required throughout history to feed oneself, I feel pretty confident in saying that food, circa 2009, is cheaper than it has ever been, for everybody, than at any point in human history.
Or, the fact that less people are staving today, also, than at any other point in human history.
Those seem pretty relevant points in the context of the discussion you’re advancing, no?
Comment by Brad — 9/14/2009 @ 3:36 pm
I find myself infinitely curious as to whom thimbles would nominate for the award posited by the thread title. Ayn Rand, presumably.
Comment by Rojas — 9/14/2009 @ 5:38 pm
Ayn Rand, oh you jest.
Look, all I’m saying is that the industrial methods we are using to produce food are burning out the environments we need to produce food, using chemicals in ever increasing amounts that require oil (a limited resource) to synthesize. Organics and pure food people are pointing out that reality and are making market choices based on it.
The response is to vilify those people because they must want hundreds of millions of people to starve. That’s what pointing out reality means, they want people to starve. “The only difference between vegans and genocidal maniacs is what they put in their ovens.” Is that an exaggeration? Yes, but it doesn’t seem by much.
How do you make that argument? By claiming that starvation is inversely related to global food production, so that when one criticizes the food production method, one must also support increased starvation.
But that is not what is happening. If starvation was a simple question of math, a simple question of upping food production high enough to eliminate starvation, we could eradicate it.
But there are market forces that require supply be allocated to the demand that counts, literally. People don’t produce because of demand alone. Supplies do not get allocated without compensation. When you’ve got nothing to trade with, you starve, in spite of all the production in the modern world.
And that goes for all the other commodities I mentioned earlier: investment in health care, low cost drugs, education for the poor. Supplies of these things are not allocated based on demand alone.
In the rich, industrialized countries, birthrates are going down. Why? Because
a) the demands of career take too much from the supply of time to have a big family.
b) a society that is well educated and has health care (including birth control) needs less child redundancy because there are increased chances of each child’s survival and, the less children one has, the more resources the parents can devote to it.
If we were truly worried about the starving people, we would be less focused on food production, thereby destroying the agricultural markets of these agricultural societies, and more focused on allocating the other resources necessary for improving quality of life and, as a side effect, reducing birth rates.
But that would detract from the hippies being evil hyper partisans who want everyone but themselves to die argument. It’s the same argument people use when talking about sustainable power, sustainable industry, sustainable transportation, sustainable anything. “You claim the current methods are destructive, therefore you want to cause poor people, who haven’t had a chance to use these methods yet, to suffer.”
No not quite, and even if it were true it wouldn’t change the fact that the current system is exhausting fundamental resources, like soil and potable water, and that the market based solutions are going to create more starvation as the genetic commons is closed off and people start to hoard supplies of soil, water, and seeds.
We can either look at possible systems of sustainable agriculture, sustainable culture, with an open mind now, or we can keep doing things following the status quo and the false justifications that support it until the resources required drop to a level where mass starvation is mandated by the limits of the diminished system.
If that’s your position then answer me this. Why do you want everyone to starve in the future, you inhuman bastards, huh?
Comment by thimbles — 9/14/2009 @ 11:59 pm
News:
Comment by thimbles — 9/23/2009 @ 12:09 pm
The BBC’s Future of Food is a doc worth watching,
http://onebigtorrent.org/torrents/6069/BBC–The-Future-of-Food-Pt-1-of-3–India-XviD-AC3
http://onebigtorrent.org/torrents/6470/BBC–The-future-of-food-Pt-2-of-3–Senegal
http://onebigtorrent.org/torrents/6471/BBC–The-future-of-food-Pt-3-of-3–Cuba
As is this doc:
http://www.livevideo.com/video/mercofspeech/CD893609A0CB495D9A9CF04AC9E4AEFF/power-of-community-how-cuba-.aspx
About how community plus free markets and privatized land allowed Cuba to innovate its way out of the oil/food crisis.
And now a days, it’s threats to their free market organics are an issue Cubans are willing to protest over:
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5g42nxLGLDTNvEtNvZUdxhG82_IigD9BK9TK81
Comment by thimbles — 11/2/2009 @ 1:25 am