Green
Central: Charles in his own words
It is hardly a secret that the Prince of Wales objects to genetically modified
crops. It is now a decade since he criticised GM scientists for entering
“realms that belong to God and God alone”, and he has since repeatedly
voiced opposition to biotechnology and advocated organic farming.
His latest comments on the issue, however, are easily his most inflammatory
yet. This time he has not only expressed his concern about the unnatural
nature of GM food in particular and modern agriculture in general but has
claimed that such meddling is already causing environmental catastrophe.
For the Prince many of the world’s greatest ecological problems — food
security, soil salinity, biodiversity loss, even climate change — are rooted
in the excesses of modern agriculture. He portrays a world in which gigantic
companies systematically exploit farmers to make huge profits, with
devastating consequences.
An analysis of the Prince’s claims, however, indicates that few of them are
founded on data from the real world. While some of the agricultural and
environmental problems he highlights are clearly genuine, his explanations
for them are long on bombast and short on evidence.
Claim: Genetic engineering is guaranteed to cause the biggest
environmental disaster of all time
Analysis
The hyperbole here is clearly excessive. It is hard to believe that the Prince
truly believes that GM crops could cause more environmental damage than the
Permian mass extinction 250 million years ago in which 90 per cent of the
world’s species were wiped out.
Neither does he do his case much good by claiming that catastrophe is
“guaranteed”. While he may think there is a high risk that biotechnology
will cause ecological damage, he cannot possibly know it for certain.
No scientist who favours GM crops would ever make such a sweeping declaration
of their benefits. Even their most outspoken advocates speak of promise, and
acknowledge the limited achievements to date.
The Prince’s language here belies a lack of understanding of the scientists
whose work he is seeking to criticise. Science does not deal in certainty,
but in probabilities and risks.
Claim: Biotechnology is a gigantic experiment with nature and the whole
of humanity that has gone seriously wrong
Analysis
Many critics of GM crops see their introduction as a mass experiment, with
some justification. When the first transgenic plants were grown and sold in
the United States they had not been subjected to rigorous field trials of
the sort recently run by the UK Government to assess their impact on
biodiversity. The safety of GM foods has been assessed more rigorously, but
evidence of harm was always more likely to emerge once they reached the
market and were consumed on a large scale.
If it might once have been legitimate to describe the roll-out as a “gigantic
experiment”, it is hard to find any evidence that it “has gone seriously
wrong”. Hundreds of millions of consumers in the United States have been
eating GM food for 12 years, with no evidence of any health problems. In
2008, 114 million hectares of GM crops were cultivated in 23 countries,
according to the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech
Applications (ISAAA).
The evidence for environmental impacts is harder to assess, but there is
nothing in the data to justify claims that a catastrophe is underway. It is
true that two of the three UK field trials of herbicide-tolerant GM crops
found that they could reduce farmland biodiversity, but the third suggested
potential environmental benefits. Crop scientists argue that it is possible
to mitigate any risks by changing the way GM crops are used on the farm.
The UK trials are limited in scope, relevant only to evaluating particular
crops under a particular management regime. They say nothing about how other
applications of GM technology, such as salt-tolerant or drought-tolerant
plants, will affect the environment.
Other research has found that adopting GM crops has brought substantial
environmental gains. A recent report from the consultancy PG Economics has
shown that GM crops have reduced global pesticide use by 286 million
kilograms — the equivalent of 40 per cent of all pesticides used annually in
the European Union.
Claim: GM crops are a cause of climate change. Why else are we facing
all these challenges, climate change and everything?
Analysis
There is no scientific evidence implicating GM crops in climate change, which
is a problem that long predates their invention. Other intensive
agricultural practices probably have raised the amount of carbon dioxide
released by the soil, but there is good evidence that GM crops can actually
help to reverse some of this damage.
Many GM crops can be grown with minimal soil tillage, which is the major cause
of carbon dioxide release by agricultural land. Those that make their own
pesticides, or that resist herbicides, also require less frequent spraying,
which saves on agricultural fuel use. The PG Economics report estimated that
these two factors combined to save the equivalent of 14.8 million tonnes of
carbon dioxide in 2006.
Genetic engineering is also being explored as a method of producing more
efficient biofuels. While the present generation of biofuels are largely
considered to have few benefits for reducing greenhouse emissions,
transgenic varieties that convert more biomass to energy are thought to have
significant potential.
Claim: Salination problems in Western Australia are caused by excessive
approaches to modern forms of agriculture
Analysis
Increasing salinity of soil is one of the greatest environmental problems
faced by Australian agriculture, and the Prince is right to highlight it as
a consequence of farming practices. However, it has nothing at all to do
with GM crops.
Salinisation is a particular issue in Australia because the country’s
subsurface soil is naturally very salty. This salt has been rising to the
surface for several decades, because of a rising water table.
The main cause has been land clearance for agriculture that took place in the
19th century, which razed trees and other native vegetation that helped to
keep the water table low. It has more recently been exacerbated by
large-scale irrigation, without which it would be impossible to grow wheat
in most of the continent.
New irrigation practices can improve the situation, and extensive
tree-planting projects are now underway. Contrary to Prince Charles’s
claims, modern agriculture is becoming more, not less, sustainable as the
dangers and causes of salinisation have become more fully understood.
GM crops have not contributed to the problem, but they may help to offer a
medium-term solution. Scientists are working actively to develop new crop
varieties that require less water and that grow in more saline soils, using
both transgenic and conventional breeding techniques.
Claim: GM crops and hybrid seeds of the “Green Revolution” have caused
environmental disasters in Punjab, India
Analysis
The “Green Revolution” describes the remarkable period in the 1960s and 1970s
in which new agricultural technology transformed crop yields in India,
Mexico and other developing nations. It was based around hybrid strains of
rice, maize and wheat — conventionally-bred “dwarf” varieties with shorter
stems, which allowed more of the plants’ effort to go into growing seeds
that provide food. Improved irrigation and greater pesticide and fertiliser
use were also key.
This phenomenon has often been hailed as one of the great humanitarian
triumphs of the 20th century: Norman Borlaug, who pioneered many of the
hybrid crops, won the Nobel Peace Prize for his role.
Between the mid-1960s and the mid-1990s, average Indian rice yields increased
from two tonnes per hectare to six tonnes per hectare, and famines that were
once common became rare. These developments have been essential to feeding a
global population that now exceeds 6.6 billion, more than 4bn more people
than were alive in 1950. It occurred without any input from genetic
modification at all.
The Green Revolution has not been without drawbacks, and it is these to which
the Prince of Wales is alluding. It has forced millions of farmers to grow
crops commercially, instead of for their own subsistence, leading many into
unsustainable debts. Critics such as Vandana Shiva, an Indian
environmentalist, also argue that it has increased soil erosion and drought,
while reducing soil fertility.
For most scientists, however, the chief problem with the Green Revolution is
that it has not gone far enough. Conventional breeding of new varieties has
become subject to the law of diminishing returns, and is no longer
delivering the huge improvements in yield on which India, with its growing
population, has come to rely. Transgenic technology is one tool that is
being explored to deliver new crops that meet this great need.
Claim: “If you are not working with natural assistance, you cause untold
problems which become very expensive and difficult to undo. It places
impossible burdens on nature and leads to accumulating problems which become
more difficult to sort out”
Analysis
The Prince is quite correct to regard modern agriculture as unnatural, but the
same is true of every system of agriculture that has been tried — including
his beloved organic methods. For as long as human beings have been farming
crops, we have been seeking to manipulate nature, to produce plants that are
higher-yielding and more nutritious, and that are eaten by as few species as
possible besides us. Conventional breeding is in itself a form of unnatural
genetic modification.
Where the Prince is right is that it is important to understand how farming
affects the environment, so that it can be pursued without killing the goose
that lays the golden egg. Past agricultural practices have indeed caused
lasting ecological damage, as with land clearances in Australia, but modern
methods — including those that involve biotechnology — are increasingly
designed with sustainability in mind.
Claim: “Gigantic corporations” are dominating agriculture, driving
millions of small farmers off their land
Analysis
Many advocates of GM crops would find much common ground with the Prince on
this issue. Global agriculture is increasingly dominated by large
corporations — big companies such as Monsanto and Dupont who produce modern
seed varieties, and the pesticides and fertilisers that are often necessary
to grow them. Many scientists are worried about the influence of this
industry, on which small farmers have come to rely.
The problem, however, is largely independent of GM crops: it predates their
invention, and would survive their disappearance. Ottoline Leyser, a plant
geneticist at the University of York, said: “If there were a total world ban
on GM tomorrow, it would have no effect at all on the dominance on big
multinational companies.”
Many efforts to develop improved seed varieties for developing countries, by
both conventional and GM methods, are also undertaken by public sector
scientists working for governments, universities and charities. It is
something of an irony that the public backlash against GM in Europe has made
it harder for these bodies to secure funding, making it easier for the big
multinationals to dominate this technological field.
