The number of people affected by food shortages is starting to rise again. Is the solution a new biotech version of the Green Revolution, or a green Green Revolution based on organic farming? The New York Times brought together six experts to address those questions. Most fall squarely on one side of the fence or the other, but I'm interested in the more balanced opinion of Jonathan Foley, director of the Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota. I've done a lot of research on agriculture issues recently, both for National Geographic News and Discover magazine, and Foley's "third way" seems to make the most sense to me, in context with what I've been hearing from global agriculture experts.
Currently, there are two paradigms of agriculture being widely promoted: local and organic systems versus globalized and industrialized agriculture. Each has fervent followers and critics. Genuine discourse has broken down: You're either with Michael Pollan or you're with Monsanto. But neither of these paradigms, standing alone, can fully meet our needs.
Rather than voting for just one solution, we need a third way to solve the crisis. Let's take ideas from both sides, creating new, hybrid solutions that boost production, conserve resources and build a more sustainable and scalable agriculture. There are many promising avenues to pursue: precision agriculture, mixed with high-output composting and organic soil remedies; drip irrigation, plus buffer strips to reduce erosion and pollution; and new crop varieties that reduce water and fertilizer demand. In this context, the careful use of genetically modified crops may be appropriate, after careful public review.
Can Biotech Food Cure World Hunger, in the New York Times, via the Science and Development Network.
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One big problem with GMO food is that once it is out in the wild, you can never take it back.
We are also seeing a end of biodiversity in our crops. Where we used to have hundreds of breeds of corn, we see just a few. This makes widespread plague much more likely.
GMO was touted as reducing the amount of pesticides used, but it has increased it. Most Soy in the US is Roundup ready soy. Soy that has been modified by Monsanto, so that it is immune to Roundup, the weed killer made by Monsanto.
People eat soy to be healthy. Do you really want to eat soy that has been sprayed with Roundup?
Maybe we can all just eat ideological purity, self-righteousness and outrage. Lots of energy from that.
"food shortages" don't mean there is not enough food to feed everyone in the world. what it means is that global capitalism has re-structured the world so that most people are so poor that they have no have no way to buy food, so the distribution infrastructure doesn't get set up to ensure food security for people in haiti, bangladesh, much of africa, etc. etc.
this is how it's been for decades, maybe a century. gm is moot.
Just to point out, but research on famines has shown that in most cases famine is less the result of food shortages than it is a breakdown of food supply networks and political structures. Even during the worst years of the Irish Potato Famine Ireland was exporting food to England. Not to say GM foods aren't helpful, but they aren't necessarily going to solve some of the real causes of hunger.
Why do so many of these people take our current population growth rate as the given that must be dealt with? We know that we are over carrying capacity, and we know that exceeding carrying capacity will ultimately lower future carrying capacity if/when we ever return to sustainable population/consumption levels (be it through voluntary change or through a crash). The planet cannot sustain 6 billion people forever, and we know this, so why are we trying to figure out how to feed 9 billion?
Reading Foley's essay in the New York Times, he doesn't seem to be saying much of anything other than take the best of all ideas from all types of agriculture.
Well, duh.
I don't disagree with him (there's not really anything in his piece one *could* disagree with). But it leaves me...if you'll pardon the phrase...hungry for more.
Maggie, do you have any pointers to articles that go more in-depth, perhaps profiling examples of this "third way" agriculture in practice?
how about curbing population growth, in concert with any of these other solutions? pls remember, i'm just asking the question.
Caveat: I skew toward the Michael Pollan demographic. However, I think there is a middle ground to be found. The root cause, it seems, of a lot of famine is political unrest and instability. And the malnutrition of urban children that Paul Collier is concerned about probably isn't going to be due to price spikes but the lack of access to fresh foods in urban areas. I don't mean that stores won't be able to carry it due to price issues, it's that they already don't. Urban areas are way, way underserved with grocery stores. Christian Science Monitor has an interesting story here: http://features.csmonitor.com/innovation/2008/06/27/wanted-inner-city-supermarkets/.
I also liked what Raj Patel had to say. I don't think we can look at GM seeds as a way to get around the fact that our agriculture (at least here in the US) is entirely too dependent on petroleum and its by-products. There has to be a fundamental shift in the way we see growing food. I don't have the answer to what that shift might be though.
The planet's "carrying capacity" is not a fixed number, it depends on what means our species uses to sustain itself. If we still lived in a hunter/gatherer society we would have exceeded the planet's ability to feed us long before we reached one billion people, let alone six.
Population growth has been slowing for decades and may well level off before we hit the big one-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh. There's no inherent reason we could never find a sustainable way to feed that many people if we adjusted our practices and lifestyles accordingly.
Don't get me wrong- it would still be hard. Real hard. But so was learning how to grow crops after centuries of hunting mammoths.
The Future of Agriculture will be a continuation of the History of Agriculture: altering crops to raise efficiency and increase production. It's highly possible I'm missing the point, but isn't genetic modification exactly what makes agriculture Agriculture?
Kudos to you for exploring the nuances of the food debate from a position that preemptively addresses our biases. I've really been enjoying your contributions here lately.
@Anonymous ~#7 -- Daniel Quinn explored this in The Story of B. People are made of food. Increases in global food production lead to increases in population, which leads to...etc.
Because of their numerous shenanigans, Monsanto has made GM food easy and fun to hate, especially from a stance that over-romanticizes our understanding of "natural".
I am a huge supporter of GM food stuffs. I am no fan, however, of patented genomes, infertile crops, and the business practices of organizations like Monsanto.
In short: YAY SCIENCE, BOO SHORT-SIGHTED PLANNING.
As for people that claim we've hit or exceeded the planet's carrying capacity: poppycock! We've barely touched the land area of the planet, let alone the seas. I'm not suggesting we should run rampant and pillage every resource we can, but there's a difference between "can" and "should". We could easily double our population, if we built the infrastructure to support it. Easily. We could probably double that again, before we can even honestly talk about the planet's carrying capacity.
There's always something disturbing to me about the overpopulation alarmists. There are only two ways to shrink the population: kill them, exile them, or have someone decide that other people can't breed. A disturbing idea, to me. Exile/colonization is a charming, but woefully impractical idea, for the near future. We'll have 12 billion people on the Earth well before we have the equipment and will to scrape a life out of Mars.
Reduce population, improve distribution.
Is the number of people affected by food shortages really starting to rise again? If so, to what extent is this a result of bad farming technique or bad political/economic culture? Most examples I can think of where hunger has been a big problem were the result of things like war, or government discouraging people to do anything other than subsistence farming on marginal land. It's clear that modern farming can produce plenty of food. It's also clear that nonexistent distribution channels, protectionist policies that discourage not only trade but immigration can keep people hungry.
Carrying capacity does not refer to the max number of people we can fit on the planet. It refers to the max number of people that the planet can sustain indefinitely.
We already expect population growth to slow, due mostly to improved education and affluence globally. Most people expect our numbers to peak somewhere between 9 and 12 billion, then plateau or slowly decline.
Even if population were to stop growing today, food demand would continue to increase as people become wealthier and want to eat more resource-intensive foods- livestock, fish, fruits, vegetables.
For me, it's an intellectual property issue. Monsanto sues farmers as part of their business model. They're basically the RIAA of biotech.
Want more? Here's a good Vanity Fair article. Or, just look at what Monsanto says on their own website.
There should definitely be a push for more local agriculture, even in cities, and not just for food necessity-- think how much more livable New York City would be if there were community gardens on every rooftop? Even if it's just tomatoes and peppers growing in 5 gallon buckets, it will make a difference.
I'm not 100% opposed to GM plants, but we need to be careful with them-- so far the GM plants with the Bt gene in them have created Bt resistant insects, thus negating the usefulness of Bt as an organic farmers ideal pesticide; breeding super plants helps breed super bugs.
Our crops have been 'modified' and 'unnatural' for longer than we've all been alive. You don't need gene splicing in culture to do it, cross-breeding works just as well. The only thing we've changed is the rate at which we can do it. Selling sterile crosses is also not new; they got that idea from pet breeders, who have been doing it forever.
If you don't like it, fine, but don't aspire to some fictional past where it didn't happen. That stuff is our history; if you want to change it, the way out is forwards, not back.
@MrsBug (#8) - One of the aims of at least *some* GM crops is to make those plants less dependant on added carbon and phosphorous. I agree that distribution is still a problem, but wouldn't it be great if we could plant drought-resistant crops on marginal land?
Which option provides for a peaceful, sustainable society with fresh air, fresh water and biodiversity?
Given 21st century technology shouldn’t option Four be Utopia?
What’s so funny about peace, love and controlled population growth?
It amazes me how this is still a debate. To put it plainly, the answer to the problem is permaculture. Using the techniques of permaculture could allow anyone to grow more than enough food - organically - within very little space in almost any climate (logic applies; the desert and arctic would be impossible, but I've seen impressive results in hot Arizona).
Organic farming is an uphill battle without working with nature (using livestock, bugs, and (especially) other plants to repel disease and pests as well as provide ideal growing conditions), though the food it produces is highly nutritious. GM crops have continually shown in numerous studies to produce less yield and are not healthy in the least (likewise, there are a number of problems with the fact that they're patented, and can potentially cause environmental issues).
Take a look at what urban homesteaders are doing in the city. The Dervaes family are a common example of what can be achieved using permaculture. A grown family of 4 is able to grow all their own food on only 1/10th of an acre without using any chemical pesticides or GM crops.
I love comment sub-threads. As for GM food, I support it. But only an idiot disputes the potential for disaster. So I think the hazards need to be quantified and then regulated under some system that allows innovation while limiting dangerous practices as specified by its charter.
As for the planetary population: How much is enough? We could probably expand our population pretty easily by further dominating the Earth's biosphere. However, more importantly, shouldn't we act to stabilize our current population while we work on educating and improving the billions of people who are currently dead weight in our planetary infrastructure? Only a small fraction of the world population are able to contribute to global innovation and development. The rest are uneducated, without any opportunity for personal development, too fixated on daily survival to ever think about creativity, entertainment, infrastructure, world population, all the things we're discussing right now.
When the entire world has our level of education and investment, THEN we should think about improving or reducing the world population.
I used to make GM plants- "save the world" junk, total pie in the sky.
Last time I checked, there were no GM foods designed explicitly to boost production. This is to say, all the foods that had jumped through the regulatory hurdles were those that added endogenous pesticides (taken from a gene in a bacterium used on organic foods) in conjunction with an herbicide linker gene to make selection easier. Although one might presume there's some increased production there by squashing insects, there's no gene explicitly to produce larger or more fruit.
In fact, doing so is very risky; tinker with one gene to make the fruit larger (assuming we could find ONE GENE that would do it), then you need to tinker with the stem- that needs to be larger, or the fruit detaches. Or the stems larger, lest the plant lodge or collapse. And so forth. It's a real house of cards- all sorts of undesirable consequences come from GMO feed-the-world stuff. Hybridizing is faster and more effective; the results are apparent within one season (within 120 days when corn is raised 3 generations/year in Hawaii), and tens of thousands of plants can be produced and screened with a variety of genes (thanks to gene assortment), rather than tens of thousands of plants with the same genes that are just stuck in different parts of the genome.
Norman Borlaug kicked butt. Unfortunately, there's only so many steps one can take before consumption outstrips production capacity. We're like bacteria on agar, and we're starting to see the edges of the Petri dish; unfortunately, we run the very real risk of outstripping our capacity, leading to systemic collapse. It's a very ugly picture.
There's always something disturbing to me about the overpopulation alarmists. There are only two ways to shrink the population: kill them, exile them, or have someone decide that other people can't breed. A disturbing idea, to me.
Exactly. Furthermore, fertility is already dropping on its own, even in developing countries. In Iran, fertility was 7 children per adult woman in the mid-80s, and it's now dropped below the replacement level.
In other words, if you want to control the population, spread education and wealth. These indirect methods actually work. The direct method also works, but it has the downside of being totalitarian and immoral, telling people who can and cannot breed. Why do that when people voluntarily control their population on their own?
The trick is that we need to learn how to reduce the environmental impact each person has without, again, the totalitarian, immoral approach of having the rich of the world pull up the ladder on the poor and saying "we've got ours, screw the rest of you."
Aside from secret mass sterilization programs or outright genocide, I'm not exactly sure what people are suggesting when they suggest that we reduce or control the population. We aren't the North American gods who get to exert our omnipotence over the poor, uneducated people if we decide that they are more of a detriment than a benefit to the planet.
The only trend which seems firmly attached to birthrate is wealth. More wealth means fewer children. How do you make people more wealthy? Well, if people don't have food security, then food security is a pretty huge step in the wealthier direction.
The biggest potential problem with GM food is that it will not supply food security at all. Being able to grow healthy, nutritious crops to feed yourself is great, but only being able to do so at the whim of a foreign corporation puts you in a very tenuous position.
When the entire world has our level of education and investment, THEN we should think about improving or reducing the world population.
I think history has shown that higher standard of living, more education, and lower birth rates are all mutually reinforcing. (And the same can be said of their inverses.)
Last time I checked, there were no GM foods designed explicitly to boost production.
I'm confused how you could make that statement and mention Norman Borlaug in the same post.
@#20, Mary - yes, I agree! It'd be great for marginal land to be used. I'm thinking of parts of Africa that are undergoing desertification with the growth of the Sahara.
Another thing I think about, though, is flavor. GM'd tomotoes you get at the grocery? Gross. Maybe GM is better for crops that are broken down more: wheat, corn, soybeans. Almost a Big Three of American farming, eh? :)
The Union of Concerned Scientists recently released a report entitled: Failure to Yield - Evaluating the Performance of Genetically Engineered Crops (http://www.ucsusa.org/food_and_agriculture/science_and_impacts/science/failure-to-yield.html) that might be of interest.
News flash: pretty much all of the food you eat today is genetically modified. If you look at the history of just about any modern crop you'll find a long history of selective cultivation, hybridization, and other techniques used to engineer crops to our liking. Direct gene splicing is certainly a new technique with potentially different risks, but it's a mistake to imagine that we haven't been eating frankenfoods for centuries.
one could argue that the planet is already overpopulated and a reduction in growth rate and eventual plateau of population is irrelevant. just because by some range of factors a group of scientists can determine that the food supply for XX billion humans can be sustained (and i'm not even questioning this), that doesn't mean it's objectively acceptable.
we are not the only species on the planet. what about food supplies for other species? what about other impacts of the -current- size of human population?
the number one cause of animal extinctions in the last 20 years is loss of habitat. that means despite all the other direct causes like overhunting etc -- we still cause more species to disappear simply by pushing them out of the way...whether it's building houses in suburbia, taking away wetlands or clear-cutting rainforest to cultivate beef.
one could argue that the root cause of all these behaviors is current population size / growth. even a reduced growth rate and eventual plateau will exacerbate such conditions.
don't get me wrong - i believe there are a number of delicate issues to deal with when contemplating human population control. i also believe the discourse around sustainability and innovation in food supply strategies has enormous value regardless of the overpopulation argument.
however, the criteria for defining overpopulation in my opinion is not seriously debated, and we often gravitate to "clinical" definitions (like quantifiable food supply) that only take into account our own species.
Overpopulation is judgmental classism at best. Rich people with houses and yards making urban Indians laugh.
As for GM foods, yes Monsanto is evil and self-serving MAFIAA of food, but some cross-breeding has been good, for taste, quality, or longevity. But sometimes the changes are not great, they're just greedy.
I personally miss smaller, fleshier tomatoes. My biggest loss, though, is the soft and fuzzy peach. Peaches nowadays are 90% nectarine.
Famine is caused by problems of distribution, not production, as many would have you believe. Amartya Sen won a Nobel prize for his work on this.
There are several problems with GMO (or rather, transgenic modification) as I see it. One major problem is that GMO really has to do with IP, Intellectual Property and patents. It has nothing to do with feeding people (that's just marketing) but owning and controlling something. The other major problem is that transgenic modification is relatively new and untested.
Farming sustainably and organically doesn't mean being anti-science. In fact, farmers have been producing food this way for millennia. In fact, we have been genetically modifying our food crops by selectively breeding over this same time frame. The important difference is that our food crops have evolved over a long time frame by thousands of farmers versus practically overnight by one company.
I think the game here is to see who really benefits from wide spread GMO acceptance and who really loses.
@anonymous #32
well said
Brainspore> Borlaug was a hybridizer. Best as I know, he never produced any foods that were transgenic. He was one of the best breeders of all time- hybridizing crops- and although I believe he was a supporter of transgenic plants, AFAIK his efforts did not include the production of GMO crops.
Indeed, I seem to recall that his most prominent work- that in Mexico and Asia- predates GMO technology, and certainly any production of proven GMO crops.
I'd be less bothered by GM foods if the companies behind them weren't unremittingly evil.
For anyone that would like the full story on GM foods, you should check out Food Inc on DVD. It is scary how much of our food is regulated by a few powerful companies, including Monsanto.
@#31, Anon: There's a stark difference between cross breeding and GMO; saying the two are the same is simply not true.
The point has already been made several times here, but arguing in favour of GM to "feed the hungry" is bogus. The cause of hunger is not that there is not enough food in the world. The problem is access to food, and that has a lot more to do with politics than agriculture, and the solutions are inevitably going to be a lot more complicated than paying Monsanto for exclusive, patented magic plants (from which seeds cannot be saved, and which grow only with the merry addition of plenty of expensive petrochemical derivatives- also, surprise! available from Monsanto).
I get that it is frustrating when the Michael Pollan-ite, local, organic, backyard-gardening-fiend people point to themselves as examples of how food should be done (and I'm one of them). Leisure time and access to land for small-scale food-growing are all functions of incredible privilege in most post-industrial settings. I get that for people who do not have this grow-your-own, know-your-farmer enthusiasm, or the privilege to practise it, the noise from that crowd can sound smug & strange & anti-science.
But- but. Local farming techniques mean using open pollinated seed from varieties that have been long-term genetically modified via selective breeding to be best suited to the land they are grown on. That's genetic modification, sure, but it's the essential opposite of the pushing of GM crops, which is a function of monocultural agriculture and the trend away from genetic diversity & localisation in crops. It strains credulity to imagine that concentrating arable land, water access & seed patents into the hands of a smaller & smaller group of corporations (which is what is happening globally, right now) is any solution at all to world hunger. It may allow those few companies who control access to the land, water & seed to produce mammoth quantities of a very small variety of food plants at high levels of efficiency- possibly. But the efficient production of food IS NOT the same thing as people's ability to access food, and access to food is what stops people starving. I have seen no evidence, no argument, that the introduction of GM crops would expand access to food. It would seem to be designed, rather, to further restrict production of food into a less diversified & less robust system, which can't be a good thing for global access to food.
Vandana Shiva has been conducting interesting research on the impact of GMO crops, yield and farmer debt.
http://www.navdanya.org/campaigns/gmo-free
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vandana_Shiva
gm food is exactly that.modified. Its changed on cellular level.Our bodies cannot process this food. Thats why we have obese people who are nutritionally starving.Microwaves and cooking food in general denaturs the food. Stop producing meat and produce more veggies. This would solve so many problems. Obeseity, starvation and global warming.
I can't express how happy I am to see so many nuanced, carefully considered opinions on the implications of GMO and industrial agriculture here. I expected a much more dismissive "hippies are just afraid of science, GMO will solve everything!" techno-utopian attitude, but it's encouraging that i was wrong.
a reduction in growth rate and eventual plateau of population
Who says population has to plateau? What's to prevent the birth rate from going below the replacement rate (which it already is in a number of countries) and staying down?
i believe there are a number of delicate issues to deal with when contemplating human population control.
Well, I suppose one could laws against procreation "delicate." Sounds more like dystopian sci-fi to me.
GM did a crap job building cars for 40+ years and now we want them to mess with our food? Oh, man....
Try a poll to find out how many people could successfully grow their own food now, even assuming access to seed and such. There's a body of information on how to do it that most people simply do not have...and in the worst case scenario would have a few months to figure out.
When do we plant the parsnips and potatoes to get us through winter?
When do we plant the parsnips and potatoes to get us through winter?
We have orange blossoms at Christmas. What is this "winter" that you talk about?
We do NOT have enough food production - distribution is not the only reason over a billion people are currently living in perpetual hunger. In the 7 years leading to 2006, the world only produced enough grain to feed everyone in one of those years! That is before biofuel, before the food crisis, before the GFC.
Now in the future there will be enough demand for twice as much food as people who used to live on rice can afford more interesting and nutritious foods. Global warming, degraded environments, misguided hippies who live in cities and control elections are all big threats to agriculture meeting this challenge sustainably.
GM crops are part of a solution which involves producing enough food to bring population under control humanely. Have a serious think about what the world looks like under other scenarios - people don't starve quietly as a rule.
GM crops are not the solution, if our bodies do not process that food, why do we need it, to stuff people without any benefit, that its just waste.
Some interesting well-informed comments about GM crops. On population, a couple of things. First, wealth isn't the only thing that's been shown to slow population growth. On the positive side, feminism apparently works very well. Where women get education and independence, reproduction slows. It may be that the wealth effect is largely just because in wealthier societies women tend to have more rights.
On the less positive side--people are talking about government regulation of reproduction like it's hypothetical. Not! China, One Child Policy, ring any bells? And it is draconian, and I wouldn't want it to apply to me, but it is working . . . in 20, 30 years at the rate things are going I think I'd rather be living in China than India.
Okay, I demand empirical evidence that I can't digest a GM tomato, for example.
That is poppycock. It's beyond insane. It's religious, is what it is. It's like Muslims who say "do you know what happens if you don't cook pork enough???" Um, yeah. That's why you cook it. Have fun with your baconless lives, fellas. Its a claim that has a tiny little root in reality, but mostly is just a crazy, trumped-up magical story.
Here is how your digestive tract works:
1) Food is mashed up and watered down into a slurry by chewing.
2) Food is further dissolved in a churning vat of hydrochloric acid.
3) This mess may be further processed by resident bacteria in the intestine, releasing compounds that were not in the original food.
4) The small intestine takes what it needs from the slurry. This is many, many, many things, but the star of the show isn't nutrients; it's calories.
5) What's left gets turned into poop.
We aren't totally sure what compounds do what after being put into the bloodstream by the small intestine, but the main point of the whole thing is to just pass along lots of raw energy to keep the body working. We have evolved to be able to pull that out of everything from plants to seeds to chunks of other animals. We're awesome.
You're telling me that a GM tomato somehow cannot be rendered by mashing, watering down, dissolving with acid, and munched on by bacteria? Come. On.
You know what can't be processed like that? Rocks. Plastic. Churches. But tomatoes? Plants that sprouted from the ground but happen to have a couple fish genes thrown in (we can eat fish, too)? Please.
I think there are a lot of reasons for obesity, and I definitely think that quality of food is one of them. It's expensive to eat real food, so people eat processed crap instead--stuff packed with chemicals applied later, things we can't actually digest. But GM stuff is all-natural food. No weird chemicals. Just extra traits added from other organisms (organisms we probably already eat) to make them a little easier to handle.
But you know what I think the biggest problem with the American diet is?
Too. Much. Fucking. Food.
I've been on a diet for awhile, and it's been working great: It's called, "When your tummy is full, stop eating." I've found that I'm finishing half of my meals. It has led to social awkwardness, but I've realized that I really only need about 1200 calories a day. I try to take that up with real food, not packaged stuff. I'm not a Nazi about it or anything. I'm not hungry. I feel great. And I'm not getting fat. I'm not buying organic, either, unless I've found the organic to be tastier. I don't buy any of this hippie nonsense.
Organic is good for the planet, and that's why we should do it, but it has nothing to do with health. And yes, this has been researched empirically, and what I've said just now is true.
Unless you can point to a study proving otherwise--a study in a real, respected journal--I have no choice but to dismiss this anti-GM "our bodies can't process new varieties of tomato" noise as bunk.
There are economic downsides to decreasing population.
Stewart Brand's new book WHOLE EARTH DISCIPLINE [1] points out that some developed countries *encourage* population growth:
* The Australian government has a three-child policy—“One for mum, one for dad, and one for the country”.
* France provides many free benefits to subsidize children. And the more kids you have, the better the government benefits.
[1] http://web.me.com/stewartbrand/DISCIPLINE_footnotes/3_-_Urban_Promise.html