If you've been following my diaries lately, you might know that I got media access to an international Biotech conference held in San Diego this past week. I wrote it up here (warning: it's long).
A fellow food activist attended the convention some years back and when she got up to ask a question (OK - admittedly a provocative, anti-biotech sort of question) they kicked her out and invited her to never, ever come back. I suppose that's like Bill O'Reilly hanging up on you.
I wasn't in the mood to be kicked out, but I attended a session that I found so outrageous, I just HAD to get up and say something. Read on...
I attended a session on climate change and drought resistant plants. The biotech industry's idea of coping with climate change does not involve ANY efforts to PREVENT or REDUCE climate change. Nope - their idea is to PROFIT from climate change.
We've got a food system that literally eats energy (no pun intended), trucking food (or flying it) an average of 1500 miles from farm to fork. That same system grows grain to feed animals that evolved to eat grass, ensuring that we burn more calories in fossil fuels to make our meat than we get from eating it. Their ideas only involve keeping that system.
Profit isn't necessarily a dirty word. Profiting from harming the environment and humanity IS. And profiting from harming the environment and humanity while calling yourself an environmentalist is even worse.
The panel itself was about engineering drought resistant plants by locating which genes perform certain functions in the plant and monkeying around with them. During the Q&A, someone asked if they knew whether or not changing around the genes to be drought resistant might make the plants more susceptible to pests or lower yielding, etc. Good question.
So there I was, sitting in the audience thinking: I know a way to make a plant (any plant) drought resistant AND improve all other factors (resistance to pests and disease, nutrient content, ability to withstand extreme temps, etc) that is currently available to farmers, safe, legal and free! Are these people such idiots that I know more than them even though they're the so-called scientists?
What's my supersecret method? Soil biodiversity! Compost, worm castings, manure, mulch... all methods that have worked for millennia. Of course, now with our fancy microscopes and microbiology, we understand it a lot better. But you don't need to understand it to make it work - that's the beauty of it.
After a long question asked by a Russian man (in Russian) and his translator, I got a turn at the mic. So I asked:
I’ve been reading up on using soil microbiology to enhance the quality of the soil and the ability of the plants to get water and nutrients and whatnot, so... and that’s already been proven to be safe since it’s been used for millennia, legal, free to farmers, so what would you say to defend the superiority of using biotech as a solution vs just what we already have with nature?
The panelists looked at each other. I went back to my seat. And waited. Finally, one of the panelists spoke.
So is the question why aren’t we exploring, uh, soil bacterial, um...?
I replied:
Well, just, would you say that using biotechnology as a solution to our impending climate crisis is superior and are there reasons you would - if you were to make a case to a farmer to go down that road - to purchase GMO seeds vs. just trying their best with nature, what would you say to them?
Here was the response:
So my answer would be that, kinda that second slide I’ve got about functional genomics ... we already have the right tools in place to make progress and I think agricultural productivity has always been fueled by some technological advance and right now we happen to be at a point of advancement that’s being driven by functional genomic technologies.
Um, I’m not aware of the specific, uh, mycorrhizal, uh, bacteria that you’re speaking of that has this particular effect. There’s a lot of unknowns about what happens below ground. One of the most challenging areas I think in agricultural research is understanding what happens below ground, root architecture and root behavior, let alone these interactions with biotic factors in the soil environment.
So I don’t think - my personal answer is that I don’t believe we’re really at that level of knowledge and understanding to really maximize that particular aspect, but I think the industry – agricultural industry – is always looking for technology to advance the gains to feed 8 billion people. Right now we happen to be fueled by genomics.
I am fairly certain (but not 100% sure) that the response was from Chris Zinselmeier from Syngenta. I didn't call him an idiot to his face, so no one kicked me out of the convention. I have a hunch if they read this, they won't invite me back.
UPDATE: A commenter corrected me about this next paragraph. S/he said that mycorrhizal bacteria are bacteria that participate in the symbiotic relationship between roots and fungi. My bad.
The first hilarious thing in that answer is "mycorrhizal bacteria." "Myco" is from the Greek word for fungus. "Rhizal" refers to the rhizosphere, the area of soil that surrounds the roots of a plant. So if something is "mycorrhizal" then by definition it is fungi. Not bacteria.
Second funny part? The idea that I was talking about a specific bacteria. Biodiversity is the key to success when it comes to soil life. You don't need some special bacteria species that you buy at the store. If anything, you'd use compost tea to promote more microbes in the soil and more species of microbes in the soil.
Also - the idea that we need to know exactly what goes on below ground? We don't. Well, maybe if you wanted to genetically modify up some special bacteria for people to buy you'd need to understand things better, but the rest of us are just fine with the information we've got already.
With current technology, you can send off a soil sample for analysis and find out whether or not you've got enough life to really optimize growing conditions for your plants. If your soil needs help, there are a number of methods to help. Compost tea, as I mentioned before, or just plain compost. Mulch. Worms. There are even businesses that will sell you better soil.
I spoke to natasha on the phone yesterday and she pointed out that this is how Cuba feeds itself. Because they have little access to products manufactured outside of Cuba and that includes most "modern" agricultural inputs, they rely on local, sustainable agriculture for their food.
The really sad part of the answer the panelist gave me was the bit about feeding 8 billion people. Over and over, various panels at the conference brought up the world's 850 million hungry people. But we don't need biotech to feed them.
The solution to world hunger is the same now as it was back in 1971 when Frances Moore Lappe wrote Diet for a Small Planet. Stop feeding the food we grow to animals and start feeding it to people. Half the corn grown in the U.S. goes to feed animals - many of whom get sick on a diet of corn because they evolved to eat grass.
Of course, how would those 850 million people pay for the food? If the powerful elite that put on the biotech conference actually had concern for these 850 million people, they could help change the economic and political situation in the world that makes them hungry in the first place.
In reality, the biotech companies rely on this food system in which we grow massive amounts of commodity crops like corn and soy so we can feed them to animals or process them into junk food. Why? Because it takes a lot of R&D to make a genetically modified crop, so you'll want to make sure you sell a lot of it once it's on the market.
If our farmers are all growing corn, soy, wheat, rice, cotton, and canola, then the biotech firms can come up with a few different GM plants and then sell a lot of them. If our farmers were growing a wider variety of crops - food for people instead of for animals or processing plants - then there'd be a lot less money in biotech.
If all of the farmers currently growing corn switched over to growing tomatoes, broccoli, cabbage, watermelon, strawberries, apples, cucumber, carrots, etc, etc, biotech would be much less profitable. They'd have to come up with many, many more species of GM plants, and each one would have a smaller market than the current market for corn.
I didn't realize it before attending this conference, how very much Monsanto and all of the other biotech firms really depend on keeping our flawed food system as is. Their profitability comes from a system that causes global warming, contributes to our dependence on foreign oil, makes us fat and sick, and cares more about feeding cows than about feeding hungry people. That's just sick.