This week, San Diego hosted BIO 2008, an international gathering of biotechnology companies, scientists, lawyers, public servants, professors, and even Arnold Schwartzenegger himself. The rest of the local sustainable food community made plans to protest. I made plans to get media access to the conference.
My focus was entirely on food and agriculture, as you might have guessed. I certainly do not lump those doing research to cure cancer into my category of "eco-terrorists." Of course there's an ethical dimension to all biotechnology but I am not the one to make judgments about anything outside my area of expertise, particularly if its intent is saving human lives.
The funniest session I went to was on new media (YouTube, MySpace, Google, and BLOGS!). I'm thrilled to know that I am the bogeyman these multinational corporations are afraid of. Click to read more to help me strike even more fear into the hearts of Monsanto executives!
I attended 5 different sessions plus the lunch where the Governator spoke. I missed the keynote addresses given by Jeb Bush, Neil Cavuto, Deval Patrick, and Colin Powell. Talk about all-star lineup. Goddamn do these people have political power. (Of course - we're no slouches ourself if you look at our speakers at our conventons!)
(A funny note about Arnold... he was introduced as one of the most progressive governors - notice they didn't call him liberal - and then he stood up and immediately began bashing Democrats.)
This diary will just be an overview on my thoughts about the conference and biotech as a whole. If there's demand for it, I would be glad to cover the individual sessions in future diaries.
My hunch is that 3 of the sessions will be of most interest here. In addition to the one about blogs, there was one about climate change and drought resistant plants, and one called "A Safe and Sustainable Food System: The Fight to Use Modern Biotechnology." An Indiana state senator spoke at that one, and let me just say that it wasn't hard to guess he was a Republican.
Aside from the obvious political power held by the biotech industry, you couldn't help but notice the amount of money that obviously went into the event. The breakout session rooms had flat screen TVs running videos about various companies on them. One night we were invited to a private party aboard the USS Midway aircraft carrier where we were entertained by acts on 2 different stages and stuffed with food and booze to our hearts' content. In the exhibit hall, one company had a virtual reality roller coaster ride at their booth. I think they've figured out how to clone the proverbial money tree.
Are They Really Eco-Terrorists?
Probably not all of them. One conference attendee I met was an environmental science high school teacher who got his class to brainstorm ideas to save the earth and then actually go out and do them. He was a good guy. Like him, most of the people I met were very well-meaning.
That said, if a member of al Qaeda truly believes his God commands him to kill Americans and he means well by doing it, we still call him a terrorist. So who can say if the name eco-terrorist is a good fit or just an overly inflammatory diary title. You can read on and decide for yourself.
What was plainly obvious was the awareness and concern by all involved of the food and environmental crises facing our country and the world. Global warming, hunger, population growth, drought, malnutrition, sustainability... these were the motivations behind most of the companies and researchers, so they said.
And yet - with all of their concern about the environment and humanity - the conference was anything BUT sustainable. We used plastic, disposable EVERYTHING. With all of the international travel required for the event, I saw no mentions of carbon offsets. And local food? Forget about it.
This convention was for the rich, by the rich. Your cheapest ticket in the door for the full convention was over $1000 and the prices go up to $2845. Thank goodness the media gets in free.
Think of the stark contrast between that and Netroots Nation. We price our convention as affordably as possible and then fundraise like crazy to ensure that people can attend regardless of financial status. We specifically select only unionized venues. When our attendees care about an issue, they try to do more than just talk about it in a panel. I've heard Kossacks bring up recycling, community service, local food, and grassroots organizing all as ideas for our conventions. We haven't managed to make those all realities just yet but we have done a lot.
I point this out before moving on because I found the altruism expressed at BIO to be very self-serving and short-sighted. By self-serving, I mean that instead of examining all of the tools available to solve the problems that concern them, they only promote the ones profitable to them.
By short-sighted, I mean that they fail to view the ecosystem as a whole. They would discuss the plants as if they grew in a vacuum with a handful of variables like water, sunlight, and pests. Of course the scientific method lends itself to that, in which you set controls and test set variables, but nature is no controlled laboratory environment.
The Experts' Defense of Biotech
Several of the speakers presented the so-called anti-biotech perspective, followed by their reasons why those arguments are wrong. For example:
Yes DNA certainly is a chemical but it’s present even in ordinary tomatoes. H2O is a chemical, but we need that chemical obviously and we eat DNA all the time even though it’s a chemical. It’s natural and it’s everywhere. It’s in all of our foods. For some people getting them to grasp it is a really difficult challenge.
- snip -
We also mix genes in recipes. And again people think that there’s some kind of sin, natural sin about mixing genes together - proteins from different species - but almost all of our recipes are mixtures of different species, are they not? And I sometimes use the example of fish chowder stew in which we have both tomatoes and fish genes mixed up all at the same time in one bowl of stew.
- Alan McHughen
The guy who said that was a real pompous asshole. He was on the panel about new media and he's a professor at UC-Riverside. No doubt he's got a great big brain in his head, but part of true wisdom is realizing you don't know everything. He was one of a few panelists who gave me the sense that they would never listen to anyone who didn't have the letters P, h, and D after his or her name.
What's the difference between mixing tomato and fish DNA in a chowder vs. putting a fish gene in a real tomato? For one thing, humans have been making fish chowder for a few centuries at least. Any risks would have been apparent already.
Also, when you mix fish and tomato DNA in your chowder, you aren't sending a message to either the fish or the tomato to make certain proteins.
When you mix fish and tomato DNA in a chowder, you aren't impacting the ecology of where the fish once swam or the tomato once grew. The insects that pollinated the tomato and the microbes that lived in symbiosis with the tomato are unaffected. That tomato won't pollinate any other tomato plants, thus inserting fish genes into other varieties of tomatoes... possibly in the gardens of people who do not want fish genes in their tomatoes.
So there's an example of the kind of pro-biotech argument that was thrown around in the name of science, supposedly by people who "know better" than the rest of us. In one case the same speaker brought up an anecdote about how he spoke with a group of master gardeners and they were still too stupid to understand biotech.
Here's what he said about the master gardeners' reaction to a video he showed them about how farmers can grow organic crops and GM crops in close proximity and they are perfectly compatible.
They said what they should have done was interview a real organic farmer, and to them a real farmer was someone who didn’t grow biotech. So we’re talking to a group of people who are reasonably educated about food production and agriculture we still come across these prejudices and it makes it very difficult to do the kind of science communication we’re doing . . .
Real stupidity is when you don't realize when you can learn something from another person. These are master gardeners. They know a thing or two about growing plants. Step one should be asking them why they see biotech as unnatural. I have a hunch I know what they would say, because I'd probably say something similar after spending the last two years hanging out with farmers and reading everything about agriculture I could get my hands on.
What Wasn't Mentioned at the Conference
I find it significant to note what wasn't brought up during the sessions I attended. First of all, only one person who asked a question brought up the flavor of the GM crops they are making. I guess that's not much of a priority in the biotech world.
Only one person brought up biodiversity and the danger of losing the thousands of varieties of plants that humans once grew. The person answering did not really know what to say, other than that the big biotech firms are saving seeds of many varieties so they can use them if they need them. The moderator then cracked that when he went to Franch he saw an apple variety that looked like an oyster and we don't need that variety.
Perhaps most significantly, nobody brought up the possibility of genetic contamination (i.e. GM crops pollinating non-GM domesticated crops or even wild plants). Seeing as how that's usually one of the biggest risks I hear people mention about GM crops, it was disturbing that nobody mentioned it.
An Inherent Acceptance of Our Food System
On a similar note, I could not help but notice how those who spoke about the near future of GM crops inherently accepted our food system as is. By that, I mean that they accepted the fact that farmers grow commodity crops as monoculture to serve as the main inputs to our food system.
The 5 crops that receive most U.S. commodity subsidies are corn, soy, wheat, rice, and cotton. What were the sessions about? Corn, rice, and cotton! In the U.S. the GM crops that are legally sold as food are corn, soy, cotton, canola, and Hawaiian papaya. (There might be more by now but those are the ones I know of.)
Keeping our food system based on these commodities means keeping our food system in the hands of enormous corporations. Commodities feed factory farmed animals. Commodities are processed into the unpronounceable food ingredients you see on labels.
The session on Indian rice showed a chart describing all of the various products the bran and germ of brown rice can be processed into after the remaining endosperm is sold as (nutritionally inferior) white rice. It was quite shocking, even to me. The part of the rice that makes brown rice brown gets separated into something like a dozen different substances!
Keeping our food system based on these commodities also means we won't reduce the amount of energy required by our food system. We'll keep growing several calories of food to feed to animals for every one calorie of meat produced, instead of using that land to feed the 850 million hungry people the presenters alluded to again and again. Then we'll truck all that food (or fly it) all over the world, just as we do now.
With our current commodity-based food system, the U.S. dumps its extra commodities on the developing world at low prices that their farmers cannot compete with. A farmer in the U.S. can produce the same amount of corn in a few hours that an African farmer can grow in 800 hours according to one of the presentations.
With our current system artificially lowering our corn prices (as hard to imagine as that may seem at present), we're able to put the developing world's farmers out of business as we make free-trade agreements with their countries and all of the tariffs protecting their markets dissolve away.
The enormous farms that grow these commodities also create social and economic problems in the communities where they exist. When a community's farms are divided into one class that owns farms, one class that manages, and one class that works, all kinds of problems pop up - everything from more high school drop outs to more crime.
The sustainable and local food activist community typically promotes a concept known as "food sovereignty." Each locality should be able to feed itself. Community members buy food from local farmers, who recycle their profits back into the community. Less energy is required to transport food from farm to fork. Those who produce meat have to directly answer to their customers about how the animals were raised and slaughtered (and sometimes curious customers ask to watch as the animals are slaughtered!).
A community will not feed itself on commodities alone. Soy and corn have their place in a healthy food system, but so do hundreds of other foods. Furthermore, local food systems can restore biodiversity to our food system, growing the varieties of crops or breeds of animals most suited to local conditions. Biodiversity is an important insurance system. If a late frost kills one fruit variety, others survive. If one variety of potato is susceptible to a certain pest, another variety will resist it better.
Food sovereignty won't happen overnight, but it's not insignificant that "locavore" was the 2006 word of the year. The idea is catching on. It's contagious, spread by delicious food as more and more people notice the flavor difference when they bite into fresh, local produce.
(Today I brought a coworker to an award-winning locally-owned French bakery cafe in my area that bakes bread in ovens imported from Europe and uses high quality ingredients like the jam made locally from locally grown organic fruits that I wrote about recently. She loved it so much she gushed about how good it was for the rest of the day.
Another time, I took a fellow blogger to a restaurant that purchases fresh food daily exclusively from local farms. She doesn't normally like raw tomatoes, but she practically had a food orgasm when she bit into the bruschetta. As it turns out, she only doesn't like bad raw tomatoes.)
Why don't the biotech people recognize the flaws of our mess of a commodity-based food system and the inefficiency in feeding our grain to cows who evolved to get sick from eating grain?? As they make the commodity crops drought resistant one gene at a time, the rest of us are eating diets that make us sick and drowning in a world polluted by excess fertilizer and improperly treated animal manure.
Why Not Biotech
A few of the panelists spent some time bashing those of us who "reject science and technology." I reject GM crops, but I would hardly say I reject science or technology. I embrace them. But I also embrace holistic management.
Holistic management teaches you to view the world as a whole - and as a series of wholes within wholes. For example, your body functions as a whole. The med I've found that best cures my headaches can damage other organs, so I don't take it. Similarly, a plant functions as a whole and an ecosystem functions as a whole. It's impossible to think about a plant in a vacuum without considering all of the other organisms and elements it interacts with constantly.
Within the sessions I attended, soil was an afterthought. To your average non-farmer, soil's no big deal, and it's basically all the same. It's just dirt. The few times they mentioned it was as a reason why growing plants may be difficult, i.e. if you have poor soil. Soil is no afterthought to a farmer.
Holistic management teaches that you should optimize four natural cycles - water, mineral, population dynamics, and energy. I will touch on each briefly.
Population dynamics is perhaps a precursor to the other three. If you have very few species in an ecosystems, each individual population tends to fluctuate greatly. Consider an area with just coyotes and rabbits. If there are a lot of coyotes, they eat all the rabbits, then they go hungry and many starve, until the rabbits breed and become plentiful again, and so on. An ecosystem with many species can find an equilibrium in which individual populations are relatively stable.
Why does this matter? Because the species who compete with pests for habitat or feed on the pests will keep them in check. You'll never achieve a totally sterile pest-free environment, but you won't suffer from massive pest invasions either.
The other reasons it matters is that the zillions of microbes in the soil - bacteria, fungi, nematodes, bugs, etc - serve a few purposes for the plants. One involves the effect they have on the consistency of the soil. Good soil allows the plants to breathe while also allowing water to penetrate into the groundwater instead of evaporating or running off. Microbes and other small critters in the soil (like earthworms) make the soil consistency good for plants.
That brings me to the water cycle. It's true we've suffered some bad droughts - and floods - in recent years. We have better solutions available than the one the governor of GA tried (praying for rain). When the soil is hard and capped, water will evaporate or run off. When the water can penetrate the soil easily, some of it adheres to the soil particles while the rest continues to trickle down, ultimately reaching the groundwater.
Over time, if you don't get a lot of rain, you'll make the most out of what moisture you have when the water stays in the soil. The panelists made the point several times that the majority of water usage goes to agriculture. Obviously, if plants can only use a fraction of the water they receive, then a farmer would need to water them more (and vice versa).
Third is the mineral cycle. The life in the soil contributes here as well. Bacteria, fungi, and other critters that hang out near the roots of plants contain nutrients that the plants need. When they die - or get eaten and excreted - the plants have the minerals they need right where they need them (not leaching out of the soil, which often happens when you use commercial fertilizer). Fungi can even transport nutrients to plants over long distances, helping them get minerals they otherwise would not get.
Last is the energy cycle. That simply means that plants absorb sunlight and turn it into energy, which those of us higher up on the food chain can eat until we ultimately die and decay. Then the minerals in our bodies are broken down and recycled by more plants.
By keeping these cycles functioning, you can achieve a healthy environment. The biotech people didn't phrase their goals in terms of these four cycles, but the outcome of these cycles - healthy, productive crops and a sustainable environment - were the stated goals in the sessions I attended.
The next step in holistic management is to take stock of your tools. Holistic management does not advocate subscribing to only organic agriculture or ruling out convention agriculture. It merely tells you to examine all possible tools and then weigh the risks and benefits of each. Obviously, many tools used in conventional agriculture will kill your four cycles so you won't use them.
The biotech folks did not consider all possible tools. All of the possible methods of helping plants resist drought or pests do not make their companies a profit. Only one method makes them the big bucks, and that's biotech. They also never addressed soil quality, which is so vitally important that it cannot be ignored. If you plan to implement a solution while leaving the soil in poor condition, you are starting off at a considerable advantage.
I've just read too much and seen it with my own eyes to believe that biotech is our only way out of our current problems. Judith2007, a blogger I look forward to introducing to you in Austin this July, farms using holistic management. She uses no pesticides or commercial fertilizer. She focuses on cultivating biodiversity - from the smallest one celled organisms living in her soil on up. And Judith is a gifted scientist.
The tools Judith uses on her farm aren't high tech in the sense that they require millions in R&D like biotech. She's used molasses to fertilize her land, for example. No one is claiming that molasses are high tech. But her methods are reflective of the most up to date science.
The beauty of working with nature as Judith does is that you do not need to understand absolutely everything about it in order for it to work. Obviously, the more you understand, the better you can turn it to your advantage, and Judith's grip on microbiology and thus her ability to farm are certainly miles ahead of a farmer using the very same methods a few hundred years ago. But the microbes still went about their business for that farmer several hundred years ago, even if the farmer had no idea that bacteria and fungi existed in the soil at all.
When you attempt to manipulate nature instead of working with it, by monkeying around with genes that affect how a plant copes with drought for example, you MUST understand exactly how things work in nature in order to get the result you desire. And unfortunately, we can't know everything. We know a lot and we learn more constantly, but I think it's vital for us to grasp that we do not know everything. That is the biggest failure of biotech, in my opinion.
When you put a GM crop out into the world, you may know a lot, and you may predict much of what will happen - but you can't predict everything. Pests can develop resistance to GM crops, for example, making the pest species stronger than ever.
Of course, maybe nothing bad will happen if we plant GM crops. Maybe they are fine. But we need to weigh the risks and the benefits of all tools. We have low-risk, time-tested, free, legal, currently universally available tools at our disposal (such as those Judith employs, like compost teas or molasses) or we could go the biotech route - higher risk, higher cost, questionable benefit, and often not even currently available. No wonder the master gardeners didn't think that "real" organic farmers use biotech!
Check this out. They give away cute little models of the Capitol building and books listing contact info for every member of Congress with info about each of them as well as each committee and subcommittee. They had a station set up where people could contact their representatives with specific pro-biotech messages on the spot.