ISIS Report 28/11/07
Announcing Science in Society #36
Winter 2007
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From the Editors - When Bad Genetics Can Kill
Contrasting fortunes of two Nobel laureate
geneticists
James Watson, who shared
the 1962 Nobel Prize for the double-helix structure of DNA, sparked outrage
among fellow scientists for saying to a newspaper reporter that he was “inherently
gloomy about the prospect of Africans” and “all our social policies are based
on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours, whereas all the testing
says not really.” That was not the first time Watson abused his position to
promote what the Federation of American Scientists condemned as “personal
prejudices that are racist, vicious and unsupported by science”. Previously,
for example, he suggested that people with low IQ had genes for stupidity,
and he would like to prevent them from being born or give them gene therapy
(Why Genomics Won't Deliver,
SiS 26).
Within a week of his latest
transgression, Watson was suspended, and subsequently resigned, from his post
as chancellor of the prestigious Cold Spring Harbour Molecular Biology Laboratory.
Nonetheless, it was precisely
such eugenicist, genetic determinist propaganda that Watson has used so effectively
in selling the Human Genome Project back in the 1980s. And if anything significant
had come out of sequencing the human and other genomes, it was to explode
the myth of genetic determinism once and for all (see Living with the Fluid Genome,
ISIS publication). Some of us had been arguing all along that
genes and environment are inseparable well before the Human Genome Project
was conceived. The surprise is how readily the environment could specifically
mark and change genes and genomes to influence later generations. ‘The inheritance
of acquired characters’ is nowhere as evident as in molecular genetics (see
Life After the Central Dogma
series, SiS 24).
Another Nobel laureate (Nobel
Peace Prize 1970) who should know his genetics better is Norman Borlaug, father
of the Green Revolution, a reductionist approach to agriculture based on breeding
genetically uniform high yielding varieties (HYVs) that has brought short-term
increases in crop yields at tremendous environmental and social costs.
Borlaug has persisted in
promoting this failed approach, especially in the form of genetically modified
(GM) crops, as made clear in a recent Nature
editorial, “Feeding a hungry world”.
Far from suffering disgrace,
Borlaug is showered with awards, the latest being the US Congressional Gold
Medal, America’s highest civilian honour. At the presentation
event, M.S. Swaminathan, father of the Green Revolution in India, gave the
keynote address.
India meanwhile
is caught in a worsening epidemic of farmers’ suicide as the result of the
Green Revolution. Its agricultural minister acknowledged in the Indian Parliament
that an estimated 100 000 farmers have taken their own lives between 1993
and 2003; and the introduction of GM crops to the country since
has escalated the suicides to 16 000 a year (Stem Farmers’ Suicides with
Organic Farming, SiS 32).
Borlaug is doing a great
deal more damage to the world than Watson with their bad genetics. The difference
is that while Watson is now seen as a liability in attracting grants and investments,
Borlaug serves as ideal mouthpiece for the biotech industry’s fake moral crusade
of feeding the world.
Failures of the Green Revolution widely acknowledged
The failures of the Green
Revolution are widely acknowledged. Swaminathan himself referred to a Green
Revolution “fatigue”: a drop in yield, as well as a sharp drop in the yield
of grain per unit of fertilizer applied.
The Green Revolution packaged specially bredHYVs with fertilizers, pesticides,
and irrigation. And given optimum inputs, these HYVs did indeed increase yields
dramatically, especially in the short term. In the longer term, the soils become depleted and
degraded, and yields fall even as more and more fertilizers are used. Similarly,
pests become resistant to pesticides, and greater amounts have to be applied.
Farmers and the general public become increasingly at risk from the toxic
effects of pesticides and fertilizers that contaminate ground water. At the
same time, heavy irrigation results in widespread salination
of agricultural land, while aquifers are pumped dry.
The high costs
of fertilizer and pesticides put small farmers at a disadvantage right from
the start, driving them off the land while big farmers grow bigger, thereby
deepening the divide between rich and poor.
But
even farmers who manage to keep going are soon plunged deeper and deeper into
debt by the spiralling costs of more fertilizers and pesticides, coupled with
falling income from reduced crop yields, or massive crop failures from droughts,
pests and diseases to which the genetically uniform HYVs are especially susceptible.
For many of these farmers, the only exit from debt is suicide.
The
Green Revolution’s success in raising yields has blatantly failed to reduce
poverty or hunger. India’s 26 million tonne grain surplus in 2006
could feed the estimated 320 million of its people who are hungry, but starving
villagers are too poor to buy the food produced in their own countryside.
The
Green Revolution also led to the loss of crop biodiversity, compromising food
security for small farmers and increasing malnutrition for all. Bangladesh lost nearly 7 000 traditional rice varieties
and many fish species. In the Philippines, more than 300 traditional varieties disappeared.
Instead of learning from the failures of the Green Revolution, Borlaug, Swaminathan
and the biotech industry are offering the world a second ‘doubly green’
revolution in GM crops, and they are taking it to Africa.
Beware the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa
Bill & Melinda
Gates and the Rockefeller Foundation announced a joint $150 million Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA)
on the grounds that the Green Revolution had bypassed Africa.
But as the Food First Institute points out, the Consultative Group on International
Agricultural Research, which brings together the key Green Revolution research
institutions, has invested 40 to 45 percent of their £350 million annual budget
in Africa; which shows that the Green Revolution must have failed Africa,
not bypassed it. The Green Revolution failed Africa for the same reasons it
failed Asia and Latin America: it did not address the causes of poverty and
hunger. On the contrary it contributed to
increasing hunger and poverty in the midst of plenty.
Borlaug claims to have reduced
hunger in the world through the Green Revolution, and even many of his critics are willing to give
him credit for that. But this too, turns out to be a myth. In the two decades from 1970 to 1990 spanning the Green
Revolution, the total food available per person in the world rose by 11 percent
while the estimated number of hungry people fell from 942 m to 786 million,
a 16 percent drop. However, if China is left
aside, the number of hungry people in the rest of the world actually went
up by more than 11 percent, from 536 to 597
million.
Rural Africa has been devastated
by 25 years of ‘free trade’ policies imposed by the World Bank, the International
Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organisation, the US and EU. The forced privatization
of food crop marketing boards - which once guaranteed African farmers minimum
prices and held food reserves for emergencies - and rural development banks
- which gave farmers credit to produce food - left farmers without financing
to grow food and without buyers for their produce. Free trade agreements have
made it easier for private traders to import subsidized food from the US
and EU than to negotiate with thousands of local farmers. This effective dumping
drives local farm prices below the costs of production and puts local farmers
out of business.
Introducing GM monoculture
crops will further narrow the genetic base of indigenous agriculture, increase
farmers’ indebtedness in paying for patented seeds, and bring extra environmental
and health risks (see GM Science Exposed.,
ISIS CD book).
Given appropriate
land reform and institutional support in finance and marketing, there is no
doubt that farmers in Africa, India and elsewhere can free themselves from
the cycle of indebtedness, increasing poverty, hunger, malnutrition and ill-health,
especially with zero-input organic farming methods based on indigenous crops
and livestocks (see How to Beat Climate
Change & Be Food and Energy Rich - Dream Farm 2 also Organic Now series, SiS 36). The really green revolution has started in Ethiopia
a few years ago, when the government adopted organic agriculture as a national
strategy for food security. Crops yields have doubled and tripled while reversing
the damages of the failed Green Revolution (see Greening Ethiopia for Self-sufficiency series,
SiS 23).
Contents
- From the Editor
- Science Betrayed
- Actonel & Dog that Did Not Bark in the Night
- Biotech Canada SLAPP Scandal
- Science and Scientist Abused
- USDA Watch
- Udder Disregard for Safety
- GM Tobacco for Preventing Mastitis in Cows
- USDA Proposes Further De-regulation of GMOs
- Unregulated Release of GM Poplars and Hybrids
- Organic Now
- Scientists Find Organic Agriculture Can Feed the World & More
- FAO Promotes Organic Agriculture
- ISIS Review
- The Return of the Whale Dreamers
- Rethinking HIV/AIDS
- New Strategy HIV Vaccine Fails
- More Infected with HIV
- Controversy Over European Framework Programme
- AIDS Vaccines
- ISIS Lecture
- The Importance of Being a Science Activist
- Health Watch
- Food Colouring Confirmed Bad for Children. Food Standards Agency Refuses to Act
- Cold fusion Hots Up
- From Cold Fusion to Condensed Matter Nuclear Science
- Transmutation, The Alchemist Dream Come True
- How Cold Fusion Works
- Climate Change
- Global Action on Climate Change. A Third World Perspective
- Biofuels Watch
- UN ’Right to Food’ Rapporteur Urges 5 Year Moratorium on Biofuels
- Jatropha Biodiesel Fever in India
- Letters to the Editor
- GM Free
- Bt Crops Threaten Aquatic Ecosystems
- UK Government’s Dirty GM Secrets
- GM-Free Europe Beginning?
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