Palmer amaranth (aka pigweed) infests a soybean field. Photo: United Soybean Board/Flickr

The epidemic of weeds that have developed resistance to glyphosate herbicide, used on glyphosate-resistant GMO crops, is an important symptom of the problems with our current farming system. Mismanagement of this weed control system has predictably led to glyphosate resistant weeds, and along with them, greatly increased herbicide use and harm to farms and the environment.

Some have noted that resistance to pesticides is nothing new. True. But the almost exclusive use of these GMO crops, and the glyphosate used with them, has led to exceptional evolutionary pressure for resistance to develop. For example, for most of the last decade, over 90 percent of soybeans grown in the US have been GMO glyphosate-resistant. This exacerbates weed resistance tendencies inherent in monocultures and the problems that come with them. The lack of regulations that could require methods to prevent or reduce the development of resistant weeds is also an important key to this problem. As a consequence, USDA is poised to approve the next generation of GMO herbicide resistant crops without adequate safeguards.

A New Direction for Innovative Weed Management is Sorely Needed

Monsanto, Dow and the rest of the biotech industry claim to develop advanced agricultural technology, but in fact their response to resistant weeds and greatly increased herbicide use is more of the same—new herbicide-resistant crops that are immune to older, nastier herbicides like 2,4-D, dicamba, and isoxaflutole. Yesterday, UCS released an animated video that illustrates the problems with GMO herbicide resistant crops, and challenges us to implement real, sustainable solutions that have multiple benefits for the environment and the economy.

Some have argued that even though herbicide use is higher than it would have been without herbicide-resistant crops, glyphosate is less harmful than other herbicides. This may be true for some types of harm. However, glyphosate use in these crops has likely caused substantial environmental harm already, in particular as a major contributor to the decimation of monarch butterfly populations. These defenders of glyphosate resistant crops also rarely mention the next generation GMO herbicide-resistant crops waiting in the wings, which will usher in greatly increased use of more harmful herbicides.

Industry’s Toothless Response

The dramatic increase in herbicide-resistant weeds has sounded an alarm among weed scientists and farmers, and has led to several meetings instigated by the USDA or the National Academy of Sciences. The response of farmers to the onslaught of resistance is probably the reason for an increase in the use of other herbicides as well as glyphosate in the past several years. This use of multiple herbicides may slow the advance of herbicide resistant weeds….temporarily.

This is because different herbicides work through different effects on the weeds, and it is harder, but still possible, for a weed to develop resistance to several of these mechanisms simultaneously.

The problem is that weeds resistant to multiple herbicides, including glyphosate, have developed already. And some serious weeds, like waterhemp in the Midwest, have separate populations resistant to glyphosate or 2,4-D, the latter one of the main herbicides to be used with the next generation of herbicide resistant crops (these weeds may also be somewhat resistant to dicamba, which is similar to 2,4-D). This means that these already resistant weeds need develop resistance to only one of these herbicides, not multiple herbicides, to evade the control from the new GMO crops. Alternatively, these separate singly-resistant populations may eventually mate, producing multiple herbicide resistance that way.

This also means that the industry solution—new herbicide resistant crops—may make them a lot of money in sales, but it will only forestall the problem. Because there are no new, broadly useful herbicides on the horizon, this could lead to a situation where farmers have few, and sometimes no effective herbicide solutions for these resistant weeds.

Real, Sustainable, Solutions

Herbicide resistant weeds are mostly a symptom of an inherently vulnerable and brittle agriculture system. Growing huge expanses of the same few crops over and over favors the buildup of pests, and using the same few means to control them is susceptible to resistance.

This means that the way we grow crops needs to change in more fundamental ways that increase diversity on the farm. These methods, collectively called agroecology, are not only more resilient to pest resistance, but also to climate change. They also can greatly reduce pollution from fertilizers, climate change emissions, and help maintain biodiversity, as we laid out in a recent UCS report on healthy farms.

Specifically applied to weed control, as described in another recent UCS report, agroecology can greatly reduce or eliminate the need for herbicides.

Recommendations by Monsanto, in addition to the predictable use of more herbicides, include approaches such as crop rotation and the use of cover crops. While that is clearly desirable as far as it goes, it does not go very far. Farmers overuse certain herbicides and GMO crops for reasons that are mostly sensible to them, such as convenience or labor reductions.

The same reasons will apply to the new GMO crops, unless measure are taken to prevent this. It has been generally known for a long time that alternating herbicides and other measures can slow resistance, but they were not widely adopted. Perhaps there will be some heightened awareness of a need to act under the current circumstances. But given the barriers and perverse incentives, such as subsidies for growing a limited number of crops, many farmers will not adopt the best practices. And I suspect the majority, if they adopt any, will only go as far as relying on the more familiar practice of using different herbicides. As noted above, that will not be enough.

Simply recommending that farmers adopt sustainable practices will fail because making these changes, even though better in the long run, can be challenging. It requires new ways of farming and thinking, investments in new equipment, new reliable information about how to make it work, and so on. There also needs to be disincentives to continue on the current path. This requires policies, support and incentives from sources such as the USDA, which are in short supply at best. Even merely using multiple herbicides usually results in higher costs or more labor than relying on herbicide resistant GMO crops alone.

The companies know this. So forgive my skepticism, but talk is cheap. Until there is real muscle behind creating real change in the way we farm, we will get more of the same. That change will only happen when enough pressure is brought to bear on policy makers and others, it will not come from those who have created the current problems in the first place.

Kudzu enveloping a Mississippi environment. It is not on the federal noxious weed list. USDA photo by Peggy Greb.

The article notes that Scotts Company is going forward with plans to commercialize GMO Kentucky bluegrass. Mentioned in passing was that this grass, engineered for resistance to the herbicide glyphosate (AKA Roundup), is not regulated by USDA, and that company employees will begin planting the grass at their homes.

What was that? Historically, unapproved GMO crops have been grown only in controlled plots, regulated and monitored by USDA (leave aside that these are not adequately regulated either). So why are Scotts employees allowed to grow this grass in an uncontrolled environment?

We have to go back to two little-noted decisions by USDA in July of 2011 to understand this. First, the USDA denied a petition from the Center for Food Safety to regulate the GMO bluegrass as a noxious weed under the Plant Protection Act of 2000 (PPA), despite fitting the agency’s criteria.

Second, USDA decided that because the genes used to make the GMO grass did not come from known plant pests (e.g., plant pathogens), and did not use a plant pest to introduce the genes into the grass, it would not be regulated as a possible plant pest. To grasp the importance of this, it must be understood that virtually every previous GMO plant or crop has been regulated as a possible plant pest.

These two decisions mean that the GMO bluegrass will not be regulated by USDA, and hence can be grown freely, even though it has not gone through the typical regulatory process. This has implications far beyond the specific case of GMO bluegrass.

In the earlier days of genetic engineering, the large majority of engineered crops contained genes or parts of genes from plant pests (such as from plant viruses), or used a modified bacterial pathogen (called Agrobacterium) to introduce the genes into plants.

But in most cases, it is now easy to avoid these constraints, as Scotts did. The use of pest genes as a reason to regulate GMOs was always unsupportable scientifically. Many genes from pathogens are no more (or less) harmful than genes from non-pathogens. But because our GMO regulations are based on inadequate laws already in existence in the 1980s, the agencies were left trying to fit a regulatory square peg into a statutory round hole, and came up with the pest-gene ruse.

The result of the two 2011 decisions is to eviscerate the already weak environmental regulation of GMOs.

A noxious weed standard that doesn’t cover kudzu

Despite new language and legal authority in the PPA, USDA has narrowly interpreted its mandate. In its bluegrass decision, it used an earlier standard for noxious weeds, which set an extremely high bar. Not even the notorious kudzu is listed as a federal noxious weed.

In fact, only the most destructive and damaging weeds rate as noxious under the old standard. Here are a few examples:

“Mile‐a‐minute vines (Mikania cordata and M. micrantha) can entirely smother fields and forests in a dense, tangled mass of vines. A single plant of the aquatic weed giant salvinia (Salvinia spp.) can blanket 40 square miles in 3 months, and produce an underwater mat 3 feet thick.”

According to USDA, only the worst of the worst weeds justify noxious weed status:

“….weeds are invasive, often non‐native, plants which impact natural and managed ecosystems, often with significant negative consequences due to lost yields, changes in management practices, altered herbicide use, etc. Only a fraction of these problematic weeds are considered to be so invasive, so harmful, and so difficult to control that Federal regulatory intervention to prevent their introduction or dissemination is justified, and these are the focus of the regulatory controls placed on them by APHIS.”

This is an abdication of the agency’s responsibility to protect the public. Part of the reluctance to include weeds on the noxious weeds list is the high cost of obligatory control of already disseminated weeds. But preventing the initial introduction of a possible weedy GMO would often be far less expensive than the cost of ongoing damage after introduction and spread. Many weeds that are not classified as noxious cause many millions of dollars of harm per year in the cost of herbicides, crop loss, or other environmental damage. They are already part of the environment, but yet-to-be-approved GMOs are not.

In addition, the newer PPA version of the noxious weed law includes consideration of economic harm to farmers or the public. But USDA has not written regulations for the PPA, so this authority remains unused.

Protecting the public?

Even with these caveats, the USDA concluded that GMO (and non-GMO) Kentucky bluegrass fulfilled the criteria of a noxious weed, scoring 24 on a 32 point scale. Despite this, USDA decided that it did not have enough evidence to classify GMO bluegrass as a noxious weed.  The agency claimed that it did not find enough evidence of harm from non-GMO bluegrass, even after acknowledging reports of invasiveness in prairie ecosystems. As pointed out by the Nature Conservancy, bluegrass is a pervasive and serious invasive plant in prairies.

On the other hand, Agriculture Secretary Vilsack noted in his letter to Scotts that contamination of non-GMO pastures may cause economic problems, and exhorted the company to work to prevent them. No mention was provided in the Dispatch article as to whether the company had made such arrangements. How would organic markets respond to cows grazing on GMO bluegrass that has invaded pastures?

In any case, it is highly unlikely that spread of the GMO bluegrass could be prevented. An Ohio State University scientist noted in the Dispatch article that heavier pollen from bluegrass is not as likely to spread as lighter bentgrass pollen, which escaped from an Oregon field trial at distances in excess of 20 kilometers. But spread it will, even if at a somewhat slower rate than bentgrass. A report 10 years ago from the National Research Council noted that gene spread from commercialized GMOs is virtually inevitable.

Whether GMO bluegrass is commercialized or not, its exclusion from regulation points to dysfunction at USDA. It seems that the only reason for the noxious weed assessment was the petition from Center for Food Safety, because it is not done for other GMOs.

And the ridiculously high noxious weed standard used by USDA means that even very harmful GMOs, or weeds resulting from GMO use—such as the glyphosate resistant weeds now plaguing the country—would not be regulated as noxious weeds, even if the agency began using its noxious weed authority.

As noted in my last post, USDA has not written regulations for noxious weed standards for GMOs under the PPA. And it will be relatively easy for others to evade regulation by USDA by avoiding the plant pest trigger, unless reasonable and protective noxious weed regulations are written. Add to that the lack of mandatory food safety regulation by FDA, with tests largely determined by the regulated industry, with no long-term testing requirements, and it is clear that the US regulation of GMOs is inadequate and in urgent need of overhaul.

The photo shows 2,4-D damage to a grape leaf. It is unlikely that this kind of harm would fit the definition of a plant pest under the PPA. Photo by Ontario Agriculture Ministry

As I noted in my last post, and in our new short report on GMO crops resistant to 2,4-D and dicamba, these crops will only exacerbate resistant weed problems and environmental risks. 2.4-D has also been associated with human health risks, such as non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and is considered by some health agencies to be a possible human carcinogen. The herbicide is also notorious for causing severe damage to many fruit and vegetable crops from drift after spray application. Despite these problems, some of which were acknowledged by USDA, the agency claimed that its existing regulations require approval (called deregulation in USDA parlance).

The legal basis for USDA regulation

As the agency notes, NEPA is largely a procedural law, and it is generally agreed that it does not provide for interventions like preventing the commercialization of GMO crops.

The legal authority to prevent the commercialization of a GMO instead is found in the 2000 Plant Protection Act (PPA). Under this law, USDA decides whether the engineered crop can be deregulated based on whether it is a plant pest. But a plant pest is not something that is usually associated with crops, or even weeds. Instead, as the term suggests and as the law specifies, plant pests are typically plant diseases, caused by bacteria, fungi, viruses, or nematodes (microscopic worms).

The only plants that typically fall under the definition of a plant pest are parasites like broomrape or striga. The large majority of weeds, or GMO crops, would not be parasitic, even if they caused harm. Because the law covers indirect harm to crops, it is not out of the question that USDA could stretch the definition of a plant pest to include GMO crops. But the historic use of the term, and the organisms specified by the law, mitigate against this, and could allow for legal challenge.

USDA explains the plant pest provisions in the executive summary of the draft EIS this way:

Weeds do not typically cause these types of harm, but rather compete with other plants.

GMO crops that encouraged excessive use of an herbicide that harmed the environment or human health, led to more resistant weeds, or harmed populations of desired organisms, like monarch butterflies, are excluded by USDA from the definition of a plant pest.

Because of the regulatory limits of NEPA, the earlier decision by USDA that the 2,4-D resistant crops are not plant pests was the action that really opened the door for the approval of these crops.

USDA’s inadequate regulation of GMOs is self-imposed

To listen to USDA’s explanation, one might think that the agency’s hands had been tied by Congress or an act of God. But in reality, the agency itself is to blame.

From USDA’s description of the PPA, one could assume that there are no other options than evaluation of GMOs as potential plant pests. But that’s not so. The PPA also contains a broadly worded noxious weed provision that would give USDA the ability to evaluate and regulate GMOs based on a wide range of direct and indirect harms.

Quite simply, USDA is using the wrong standard to evaluate the environmental impact of GMOs.

But despite being passed 14 years ago, USDA still has not developed regulations to implement the PPA. So the noxious weed provisions of the law are not being used.

The Bush administration, in its final days, proposed regulations under the PPA. But their definition of noxious weeds would have set the bar so high that even GMOs that cause a large amount of harm could evade regulation. For example, USDA listed some of the very most invasive weeds and their properties to define the standard for GMOs, such as those that “completely overrun the environment,” or cause damage to farm machinery. Lesser, but still very substantial harm, could escape regulation.

Fortunately, the Obama administration has not finalized those regulations. They would have been worse than nothing. But that leaves the agency in its current state of inappropriate and inadequate regulations.

Does USDA really want adequate regulation for GMOs?

Major regulations take a lot of work and time to complete, but 14 years is more than enough. This leads me to wonder how serious USDA really is about getting out from under its inappropriate plant pest standard.  The federal government, and the executive branch in particular, has been a supporter of GMOs domestically and internationally. USAID has been a vocal proponent of GMOs. As but one example, the agency’s web site promotes Bt eggplant in India, despite strong opposition within that country.

This raises the question of whether USDA’s regulatory body for GMOs, the Animal Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS), is avoiding finalizing reasonable PPA regulations for noxious weeds because it really does not want that authority. Does it prefer to retain weak regulations for the very reason that it gives it a legal excuse to avoid hard decisions that the industry would not like?

Unfortunately, the lack of regulations that could address potential risks from GMOs leaves farmers and the public without sufficient regulatory protection. As things stand, the USDA can figuratively shrug and say, “Gee, we just don’t have the authority under plant pest standards to consider those risks.” But when we look a little deeper, we see that it is the USDA itself that is responsible for the current state of affairs.

Glyphosate resistant weeds have resulted in greatly increased levels of herbicide use, and an estimated 404 million pounds more pesticide (when insecticide savings from Bt GMO crops are counted) than may have been the case without these crops. They make it harder to grow crops, adding substantial expense and reducing yields, and are leading to increased tillage, which reduces soil fertility and leads to soil loss from erosion.

A new briefing paper by UCS, “The Rise of Superweeds — and What to do About It” concisely lays out how these crops are causing big environmental problems, how the seed and pesticide industry’s proposed solution will only make things worse, and how we can resolve this problem sustainably while achieving multiple benefits.

The paper shows that resistant weeds are mainly a symptom of a broken industrial agriculture system, which needs fundamental reform to address not only resistant pests, but also a host of other problems. Proposed solutions that do not recognize these underlying issues will only make matters worse.

In fact, the seed and pesticide industry is set to exacerbate the problem, because waiting in the wings are a new generation of engineered crops resistant to old herbicides like 2,4-D, developed in the 1940s. 2,4-D is a possible carcinogen, and threat to natural vegetation and fruit and vegetable crops due to its high toxicity to those plants and its propensity to drift beyond the soybeans, corn, and cotton it is intended for.

Not Just Your Parent’s Resistance Problem

The science community recognizes that glyphosate resistant weeds are not just another pest resistance problem (which are bad enough), as a few uncritically pro-GMO scientists have suggested. The National Academy of Sciences charged the Weeds Science Society of America with the task of holding a “weed summit,” convened in the spring of 2012, to address the problem, recognizing its severity. Another summit is being planned.

Almost two years later, though, nothing has changed to reduce the epidemic. In a recent meeting hosted by the USDA Economic Research Service on November 8, long-time leading USDA weed scientist Harold Coble said that we are heading for a train wreck, and that technological solutions will result in the same problems as in the past. Other weed scientists concur with this assessment.

Most importantly, it does not have to be this way, because, as the briefing paper shows, cost effective, highly productive alternatives are available. And these alternatives—such as cover crops and crop rotations—combined with minimal tillage and, in non-organic systems, minimal herbicide use, also provide big environmental payoffs.

Cover crops, besides suppressing weeds, can provide nutrients to crops, greatly reduce soil erosion, and increase soil fertility. Crop rotations reduce pest damage and improve yields. So moving to these systems is a win-win solution.

Different from Other Weed Resistance

Some commentators, including some scientists, have tried to downplay the crisis facing farmers. They have noted, correctly, that resistance has been a problem for many years for all chemicals, and even for genetic traits.

But despite the similarities to previous weed resistance, glyphosate resistant crops have exacerbated the problem substantially. And for the same reasons, the new generation of these crops in the pipeline, resistant to other herbicides, will only throw fuel on the fire.

Crops designed to allow an herbicide to be applied without harming the crop initially made weed control easier and more convenient for farmers, giving them more flexibility for when they could spray their crops.

But this advantage led to overuse of glyphosate, greatly increasing the selection of rare resistant plants, and giving them a huge competitive advantage over their susceptible siblings. It’s a case of Darwinian selection on steroids. Without regulations, or other means, to make sure this technology was used wisely, it has instead has become a liability. Without herbicide resistant GMOs, this perfect storm of selection for resistance would not have happened.

It is not a coincidence that this has come about. The industry has lobbied hard against better regulation. USDA has not developed better regulations under the 2000 Plant Protection Act, and has instead been greasing the skids to allow more “deregulated” engineered herbicide resistant crops under older, inadequate, rules. And industry has prioritized research development of these crops because, through patents and contracts and high cost, they have allowed increased control over the seed supply, increased seed costs, and increased herbicide sales. As noted in the new briefing paper, 13 of 20 GMOs in the regulatory pipeline at the time of writing were for new herbicide resistant GMOs.

It is also unlikely that glyphosate-resistant crops would have been made without genetic engineering. Some crops resistant to other herbicides have been developed without engineering, but they have not been nearly as successful as glyphosate resistant crops. And for various reasons, alternatives to engineering, such as mutagenesis, did not work for developing glyphosate resistant crops.

Therefore, in several ways, GMO technology has contributed greatly to the resistant weed problem.

As also analyzed in the briefing paper, the next generation of resistant crops will inevitably lead to weeds with resistance to multiple herbicides. Some weeds resistant to glyphosate already are resistant to other herbicides, and some populations of these weeds are already resistant to 2,4-D or dicamba.

It is only a matter of time before several serious weeds become resistant to all or most of the herbicides available, leaving no good herbicide choices. And, as several weed scientists have noted, there are no new herbicides in the development pipeline. This is the coming train wreck that Coble was referring to.

When in a Hole, First Stop Digging

Meanwhile much of the mainstream weed science community seems unable or unwilling to take effective action, perhaps because of the heavy involvement of the pesticide industry. For example, at the weed summit in 2012, there was essentially no mention of the herbicide resistant crops, poised to be approved, and little evidence since that they will tackle this 800 pound gorilla. If these crops are approved without big restrictions on their use—and given USDA’s record, that seems probable—history is likely to repeat itself with a vengeance.

The resistant weed problem should be a good teachable moment. Much better solutions are available, but also could be improved and made more farmer friendly with the right research agenda at USDA, and the right policies. There is also a need to adapt these practices to local conditions in various regions. This agenda has long been neglected, and this needs to change.

But as long as we are led by the nose by those with a vested interest in the current failing status quo, we will only see things get worse for everyone but the companies that stand to sell more of their products.

It is in this production context that genetic engineering (GE) is often said to be essential. But when we look at the assertions that GMOs will be needed to address these challenges, including from scientists in peer-reviewed articles, we find little substantive support. In other words, these statements are conjecture, not science.

It is important to understand the arguments about the need for GMOs, because they make up the foundation of attempts to convince a wary public that this technology should be welcomed with open arms.

Better alternatives

Arguments for the need for GMOs are usually based on several assumptions. First, that genetic solutions are an important part of the “tool box” to improve production. GE is argued to be better, adequate, or at least needed to supplement other technologies. Second, and critical, is that technologies and methods other than GE are likely to be inadequate.

Genetic improvement has been a major part of agriculture since the beginning. Small farmers have long developed crops suited to their environments by selecting seed from plants that fit their needs. And in countries like the US, about half of the huge productivity increases over the last century came from genetic improvements (the very large majority from breeding, not GE). So it is probably a fair assumption that genetics will also be important for further improvements.

But the argument breaks down when considering the relative efficacy of different approaches to food security. So far, breeding continues to be responsible for the large majority of genetic improvement of crops, not GE. We have shown this in detail in our reports, but any search of the literature for traits from pest resistance to drought tolerance will reveal many important examples of breeding in recent years, while GE has brought forward almost nothing since Bt and glyphosate herbicide resistance.

The lack of important GE contributions to food security so far was well summarized recently by prominent global environmental scientist Jonathan Foley of the University of Minnesota. Foley has never been associated with either “side” of the debates about GE:

“Maybe GMOs can actually do some good, if used wisely. So I try to keep an open mind about them.
“But I am unsure whether GMOs are actually delivering substantially more food to the world. In fact, as far as I can tell, they aren’t. Why? Just consider how GMOs are used: Roughly 10 to 15 percent of the world’s cropland is growing GMOs today, mainly for five crops — feed corn, soybeans, cotton, canola and sugar beets. The vast majority of those crops are not feeding people directly, but rather are being used as animal feed, biofuel feedstock or fiber. Of this list, only canola and sugar beets are mainly “food” crops. Furthermore, the GMO traits currently being used today mainly give plants the ability to fight off insects (the so-called “Bt” trait) or to withstand herbicides (the so-called “Roundup Ready” trait). While reducing losses to insects and weeds is important in maintaining high crop yields, most farmers, especially in the U.S., simply switched one method of insect- and weed-control (e.g., more frequent tillage, a broader mix of herbicides and pesticides) with another. These GMOs haven’t made fundamental changes in plant growth or photosynthesis (that has not yet been done with GMOs in practice); they mainly traded one set of pest- and weed-control systems with another. These “turnkey” solutions for pests and weeds have made big farms more efficient, more profitable, and maybe offered some environmental benefits because of reduced tillage and chemical use. But large, sustained yield improvements have not been a major outcome, except for possibly cotton in India, where pest losses were quite severe and ongoing.
“While future genetically modified crops could add other beneficial plant traits, which might help boost productivity in crucial crops, I think the best answers lie elsewhere.”

No-till (and conservation tillage) corn acreage rose substantially to almost 20 percent from the 1980s until GE crops were introduced in around 1996. Gains since then have been small. Similar results have been seen with cotton, with slightly better results for soybeans. GE made no-till easier, but clearly was not necessary.

[Note that yield increases from Bt cotton in India are probably actually relatively small, as detailed by Washington University anthropologist Glenn Stone, and most of the increases in conservation tillage in the US occurred before GE crops came on the scene in the mid-1990s, so GE is not necessary for con-till (NAS 2010, figures 2-4, p. 65), and its contribution should not be exaggerated.]

Foley’s alternatives of reducing food waste and eating sensible amounts of animal products, low-tech solutions to support smallholders, as well as reducing the amount of food crops (like corn and sugar cane) used for biofuels, are better targets for emphasis.

Past as prelude?

But what about the future? Some have said that breeding, the genetic alternative to GE, is played out—great in the past, but at a dead end now. That argument has no merit. Molecular analyses over the past 10 or 15 years have consistently shown that we have barely scratched the surface of the potential for breeding, as scientists writing in the prestigious science journal Nature have recently attested.

Plateaus in the productivity of some crops in recent decades, often cited as the reason we need GE, do not take into account the neglect of these untapped resources. They do not, for example, recognize that this plateau corresponds to large reductions in public resources for breeding over the same interval.

And breeding has been making its own advances on many fronts, from the recognition of the power of participatory approaches with farmers, to genomic methods. We should not make the mistake of thinking that breeding is static, but recognize that as with other technologies, from TVs to phones, it is advancing. As but one example, GE resistance to papaya ringspot virus has been argued to be the only recourse. But advances in breeding that have improved access to closely related plant species have resulted in progress for developing resistance against several major strains of the virus.

Examples like papaya ringspot virus or citrus greening need to be taken in context. In the big picture of overall global food production and nutrition, they are minor blips. And in most cases, arguments that GE is the only viable option are wrong or premature.

Beyond genetics

The undue focus on GE, and production, also ignores the critical importance and value of non-genetic approaches. Empowering small farmers and women through food sovereignty and agroecology is critical, as I argued in my previous post, and is persuasively analyzed in a new peer-reviewed paper that shows the advantages that small farms, agroecology, and food sovereignty have for biodiversity and poverty reduction, as has the UN Food and Environment Program in a recent report.

For example, if we simply rotated our crops, we would not even need one of the main Bt traits for control of corn rootworm in most regions. And if we really cared about increased yield, crop rotation routinely gives higher yields than monoculture using GE. And agroecological practices can reduce pollution dramatically.

The discussion presented here is not, per se, an argument against GE. But this context is important in the overall evaluation of the role of the technology. It is important to understand that when we pull back the curtain, and look past the flashy props, the arguments about the necessity of GE are revealed to be little more than a faith that new technologies inevitably represent progress.

“Why not keep our options open?”

Genetic engineering will probably make some contributions to production, but these will likely be modest based on what we have seen so far, the challenge of using GE for complex traits like drought tolerance, and the much higher cost of GE compared to breeding.

But possible contributions from GE do not mean it is needed if, as seems likely, other approaches will work. Analysis of the coming constraints on food production (like climate change) and the potential of different approaches to improve food production and distribution are needed before any such declarations can be made with confidence. But for my part, I am with Foley—the best answers lie with solutions other than GE.

Still, even if GE is not likely to be among the important solutions to sustainable food security, doesn’t it make sense to continue to invest in it, to keep our options open?

There is a real risk to food security behind this argument. First, GE has been part of monoculture food production systems that are a big part of the problem, not the solution. Whether or not some applications of the technology may be useful, that will not address or reverse this problem.

And, as I have argued before, there are opportunity costs in pursuing GE. Money invested in GE will not go to cheaper and better solutions. GE should be a much smaller part of the public agriculture research portfolio than other mentioned approaches, which are currently neglected.

But that should happen only if important issues are addressed. Measures that would reassure the public about the technology and assure its safety and equitable use are needed: mandatory labeling, better regulations, protection of non-GMO farmers from contamination, and the assurance that any traits developed with public funds would be open source, rather than fodder for further control by transnational corporations like Monsanto and DuPont, are prerequisites to public support.

Data from 15 Kenyan farmers over a period of 6 to 8 years, demonstrating that push-pull not only more than doubled yields, but provided consistency over time. From “Stories of Our Success: Positive outcomes from push-pull farming systems“, 2013

Mark Bittman, in a recent article, cites the Etc. Group, which notes that small peasant farms feed about 70 percent of of the global population.

Producing enough food is a necessary, but not nearly sufficient, condition for alleviating hunger. Even though we produce enough food now, 1 billion go hungry. India has more malnourished people than any other country, yet exports food.

Well of course, you may say, there are so many more small farms, it is not surprising that they feed more people than large farms do.

But small farms also tend to produce more per acre than large farms. There has long been debate about this among economists and development scholars. It has perplexed many of them—so much so they have given it a name, “the inverse relationship,” meaning that if graphed, productivity per unit of land goes down rather than up with increasing size. Skeptics have turned the data inside out trying to see if it really holds up.

But a recent paper that carefully looks at the issue using new methods has, once again, confirmed that the higher productivity of small farms does not seem to be an artifact of measurement bias, as has sometimes been suggested.

Recognizing the productivity of small farms has huge policy implications. As the authors note, the productivity of small farms suggests that policies should especially target support to them—the opposite of what we do in the U.S., with our subsidies of a few commodity crops like corn and soybeans that favor the largest farms (small farms should be supported anyway for a number of reasons, but higher productivity can be added to the list). Favoring small farms is also the opposite of what the corporate end of the food system does.

Of course, where small farms have been marginalized on very poor land, and have few if any resources, productivity can be very low. But give them decent land and half a chance and they outproduce large farms under similar circumstances.

Instead of huge land grabs by countries and companies that kick small farmers off their land, we need to get more good land into the hands of more small farms and make sure they have the resources and social support they need.

World Food Prize Comes off the Rails

This situation is yet another reason why the World Food Prize this year is going to the wrong people—developers of genetic engineering that has yet to make a meaningful positive difference, despite providing some small yield increases.

To understand why this year’s prize goes to Monsanto and Syngenta, we may need to look no further than the large money trail that leads from their doors to the WFP organization. Is it a coincidence that a Monsanto scientist is one of those honored with the prize, given the substantial financial support provided by that company (and others)?

Whatever one thinks about the potential of GE to improve food security or availability in the future, it has not done much so far when compared to either the need or the success of other farming methods and technologies.

For example, engineered Bt corn in South Africa, which is a food staple rather than livestock feed, has been reported to provide yield increases of about 17 to 32 percent in one study. That’s good as far as it goes. But it does not go very far. Given the extremely low yields that Bt is building on, these improvements are not very impressive. And they do not improve the general resilience of the crop to withstand the many other problems that can occur from one year to the next, such as other insect pests and disease, drought, floods, and so on.

Only systems approaches, based on agroecology, address the overall resilience of the farm.

Compare the results for Bt maize in South Africa to the push-pull method, based on sophisticated agroecology principles, designed to grow several crops that complement each other. This method often more than doubles yields (see figure) by controlling the same insect pest as Bt, as well as the worst weed of grains in Africa (striga). It also enriches soil and provides high quality livestock fodder. Women grow one of the complementary crops, desmodium, and make income from selling the seed. And all of this comes without the high costs of transgenic seeds and pesticides.

Adoption has been growing steadily, up about 7 fold since 2006, to about 70,000 farmers last year.

Ironically, one of the main developers of push-pull, Dr. Zeyaur Khan, has been considered for the World Food Prize, but was not deemed worthy.

Smarter Methods

Small farms traditionally have grown multiple crops adapted to local conditions (so-called landraces) as intercrops and in rotations (alternating crops by season).

Alternating crops has consistently been shown to improve the yield of each crop compared to growing them in monoculture or short rotations, such as growing corn, soybeans, or alternating corn and soybeans on over 150 million acres in the US. This has been demonstrated over and over again in developing and developed countries alike.

This is so well known that it is also given a name—the rotation effect. One recent review shows that crops in rotation typically produce 10 or 30 percent more than when the same crops are grown in monoculture or short rotations.

Monsanto’s products have done nothing to reverse the trends toward more corn and soy and more monoculture. So in a sense, they contribute to lower yields than could be attained if we used ecological principles to grow our crops. Another reason why this year’s WFP is a travesty.

The Real Food Prize

Although the WFP has relinquished its claim to relevance, the Food Sovereignty Prize has got it right, honoring the peasant farmers that are the real backbone of global food production. Groups like previous winner La Via Campesina, or this year’s winners, including the Tamil Nadu Women’s Collective, deserve such recognition and support.

They are also the stewards of the critical genetic diversity found in the well-adapted crop varieties they developed and grow, and that we will all depend on to provide traits to improve crops everywhere.

For more on the World Food Prize, see my colleague Karen Stillerman’s blog post, Monsanto Scientist Pockets “World Food Prize”…But For What, Exactly?

In contrast, an article in the New York Times in late July used the dramatic example of citrus greening disease, which is threatening the citrus industry in the US, to tout the possibility of GE to remedy challenging pest problems. Whether these will eventually work is far from certain. But we should keep in mind that while such future promises catch the public’s eye, breeding continuously makes significant advances in crop improvement.

Soybean aphids, and invasive pest casing billions of dollars of damage per year. Photo by Stephen Ausmus

We also need to take claims that genes are not available to crop breeders against pests like citrus greening with a grain of salt. For example, it was claimed that resistance genes to papaya ringspot virus did not exist, while GE provided resistance to the virus in Hawaii. That has long been a favorite story of biotechnology advocates of the value of GE over breeding. But overall, the reality is very different, with breeding producing new commercially useful traits all the time, while so far new engineered traits have been scarce.

And, more specifically, breeders have found promising genes that may turn out to be as (or more) effective than the engineered gene used in Hawaii to combat papaya ringspot virus. Even the possibility of breeding for resistance to citrus greening (or, at least the insect that transmits it) has recently been demonstrated.

The biggest limitation for breeders is often not the technology, but the dearth of funding available for breeding of crops other than major grains. Limited resources have been available to look for useful genes, and to develop new crop varieties with them. More effort—i.e., public research funding—would increase the prospects for success.

As an agricultural scientist, I am interested in what works more than bells and whistles. GE may have a role to play, especially in crop research, but let’s keep things in perspective.

Breeding may complement sustainable agriculture

Part of that perspective is the need to fundamentally transform agriculture to make it more resilient to climate change, respond to new pests, conserve scarce resources like water and phosphorus, reduce environmental impacts, and establish food sovereignty. In other words, we must make a serious effort to develop ecologically-sound agriculture systems that address the huge shortcomings of industrial monoculture agriculture. And, like industrial ag, it must be highly productive.

Agroecology provides the principles and practices to accomplish this, and breeding and agroecology can work together. Research on soybean aphid resistance breeding and the value of natural aphid enemies in diverse landscapes provides a good example of how this can work, and how the big ag companies are sabotaging this kind of smart, scientifically sophisticated agriculture.

Research shows that where farms are situated near uncultivated areas, natural enemies that consume soybean aphids, like ladybird beetles (AKA ladybugs), reduce the need for insecticides by about 25 to 43 percent, based on 2005 and 2006 data, compared to areas where monoculture is extensive and uncultivated areas scarce.

If soybeans resistant to aphids are deployed where good agroecological principles are used—e.g., farms embedded in uncultivated areas, using cover crops, long crop rotations, and reduced pesticides—the resulting reduced number of aphids may improve soybean yield more than crop genes alone. It also reduces the possibility that the aphids will develop resistance to the protective soybean genes. As a bonus, insecticides would not generally be needed.

Insecticides from Monsanto and friends make things worse

Instead of promoting smarter farming, the big seed and pesticide companies like Monsanto, DuPont, Bayer and Syngenta make matters worse by supporting the current industrial monoculture system, which reduces the number of natural pest enemies.

The companies treat the large majority of corn seed, and most soybean seed, with pesticides, including neonicotinoid insecticides. I have previously discussed how these seed treatments are likely contributing to the loss of bees–critical for food production–birds, and natural pest enemies.

Research published last year provided data that suggests that neonicotinoid seed treatment of soybean harms the very natural enemies that help keep soybean aphid under control!

On top of that, as with neonic-treated corn seed, this and other research strongly suggests that soybean seed treatment does not meaningfully control soybean aphid or other important soybean pests, or improve yield.

It’s a great deal for the seed companies, not so good for the environment, farmers, or anyone else.

The need for more public crop varieties and agroecology

In the end, we need public policies that encourage agroecology and public sector crop breeding, which makes up a small fraction of public spending on agriculture. The USDA’s National Institute for Food and Agriculture (NIFA) provides agriculture research grants, and needs to put in place a dedicated program to develop public crop varieties to complement agrocologically-sound farming systems.

Many programs that support sustainable farming, begun under the last several farm bills, are currently under threat from a dysfunctional congress. A new Farm Bill needs to be passed that builds the Conservation Stewardship Program (CSP)–which supports many agroecological practices by partnering with farmers–and is slashed in the House version of the Farm Bill.

Programs stranded without funding by the current Farm Bill impasse, like the Organic Research and Education Program (OREI) need to be bolstered.

UCS and other organizations we collaborate with are working to improve the current situation. You can help by contacting your congressperson or senator, or the USDA, and tell them to support breeding and agroecology research, and pass a new Farm Bill that supports ecologically-based farming.

Update: I contacted Dr. Maureen Fitch of the Hawaii Agriculture Research Center, who works on both transgenic and non-transgenic resistance to papaya ringspot virus (PRSV) for an update on the efficacy of breeding efforts. The paper linked above on breeding for resistance tested the non-transgenic gene(s) against the Philippine strain of the virus, where it showed efficacy. There are several other strains that had not been tested at that time, including the Hawaiian strain. This limitation, along with other ways a gene (transgenic or not) can fail between field tests and commercialization, is why I noted that this non-transgenic gene may be as or more effective than the Hawaiian transgenic trait. According to Dr. Fitch, the non-transgenic gene appears to be ineffective against the Hawaiian strain of PRSV. Further tests are being planned for other possible non-transgenic resistance to the Hawaiian strain. The transgene that controls the Hawaiian strain of the virus is not effective against other strains. So, as  of now, there appears to be a non-transgenic gene effective against at least one important strain of PRSV not controlled by the current transgene.

Genetic engineering to the rescue? Have Monsanto and the other big seed/pesticide companies finally found another blockbuster, after largely failing since the introduction of Bt and herbicide resistant crops over 15 years ago?

So far, only these few engineered genes have been widely successful, despite huge investments of time and resources. Most GE traits on the horizon are more of the same: herbicide-resistant crops that promise to greatly increase herbicide use and lead to multiply-resistant weeds—a treadmill that farmers will have a hard time exiting, as long as they are in the thrall of GE/pesticide companies.

Monsanto’s first attempt at GE drought tolerance can only be called disappointing for a technology associated with such high expectations and hype. My report from last year showed that this gene is likely to be useful only in areas where moderate drought is relatively predictable, and that would produce a national yield benefit of only about 1 percent—a small fraction of the progress from conventional breeding and improved management. As my colleague Mardi Mellon detailed in her recent blog post, Monsanto’s drought tolerance gene is also overshadowed by cover crops, part of the sound agroecological farming systems that need to replace our current unsustainable practices.

The biotech industry clearly needs a new success to try to win over the many skeptics around the world to “the promise” of GE. Could this be it?

The short answer is no, because the genes I referred to above are found in some soybean varieties and soybean wild cousins, and are being utilized by conventional crop breeding, not GE.

First spotted in U.S. fields in spring 2000, the soybean aphid has since spread to at least 24 states. Besides reducing yields, they can transmit deadly viral diseases to a crop.
Photo by Stephen Ausmus

Enter the villain

The insect pest described above is called soybean aphid. It arrived in the U.S. from Asia in 2000. Small numbers of aphids cause little direct harm. But they can reproduce rapidly through an asexual process called parthenogenesis, and before long, susceptible plants can harbor thousands of these bugs. They can also sometimes transmit plant viral diseases.

Even though the aphid resistance genes have been known for at least seven or eight years, you probably have not heard about them. Unlike the hype that follows genetic engineering, these naturally occurring, effective genes  get little attention.

Given the role of breeding in this story, you may wonder about the title of this post. What does breeding have to do with “Genetic Technology”? Breeding is a process by which genes are manipulated and shuffled between plant varieties, and is therefore a form of genetic technology. In many ways it is every bit as sophisticated scientifically as GE, and more effective, but unfortunately does not get its due.

Even though it’s not GE, is the private sector taking the lead?

So who is responsible for discovering these genes and doing the important research to develop them? You might expect that given the impact of the pest, Monsanto and its competitors would have been all over this. After all, the big seed companies have big breeding programs, as well as GE.

Having read or examined many of the research papers on these genes, it is striking that the scientists and the funding have been from the public sector, not the chemical/seed industry.

And so far, the big seed companies have released very few soybean lines containing these genes, as seen from this recent review from Iowa State University, the heart of soybean country. Most are from small seed companies and the public sector. To be fair, it has not been very long, in breeding terms, since these genes were discovered. But had the big seed companies been excited about this from the beginning, we would expect to see more from them, even by this time.

So far, the companies seem more interested in the lucrative business of selling insecticides to combat the soybean aphid, including neonicotinoid (neonic) seed treatments implicated in seriously harming bees and other beneficial organisms. (More on this in my next post.)

The public sector comes through

Even though funding for public sector breeding has languished, it continues to be highly productive. According to a recent report by the President’s Council on Agricultural Science and Technology (PCAST), the returns on agricultural research are often 10 to 1 (in other ways, though, the report was disappointing, as I described in an earlier blog post).

And it is more and more clear, based on our latest research, that the potential of breeding is largely untapped, as the authors of a recent paper from the journal Nature point out:

“Since the mid-1990s, progress in conventional plant breeding has slowed, despite the phenomenal yield gains of the past. Part of the reason is that only the tip of the biodiversity iceberg has been explored and used.”

Biodiversity in this case means the great variety of unexplored genes found in crop varieties and wild relatives around the world that are accessible through breeding, and often under the stewardship of small farmers who should be supported in their efforts.

From drought tolerance and flood tolerance to pest resistance and nutritional enhancement, numerous examples show over and over again that despite the meager funding noted by these scientists, breeding continues to greatly outperform GE. This does not mean that GE cannot or will not make some contributions to agriculture. But the relative merits of these technologies should be considered when arguments about the necessity of GE are made.

Breeding alone will not solve our agricultural challenges either. It must be done in the service of agroecological farming methods, and with the participation of the farmers who will use these varieties. For example, use of agroecology can reduce the number of soybean aphids (see my next post), reinforcing the effectiveness of resistance. In the past, breeding, like GE, has mostly served the needs of industrial monoculture agriculture, rather than sustainable agriculture, and this must change.

We must encourage public agencies that conduct or fund agricultural research, like the National Institute for Food and Agriculture, and the Agricultural Research Service of the USDA, to increase funding for these types of vital but neglected research, rather than continuing to favor the wrong kind of agriculture.

In my next post, I will discuss how the big seed companies are actually increasing the need for insecticides for controlling soybean aphids, while agroecology can work with breeding to control this pest with little or no need for insecticides.

When I was a doctoral student doing research using molecular biology in the 1980s (and in the early 90s as a post-doctoral researcher at USDA), the contributions of Chilton and Van Montagu were invaluable. Thirty years later, the science of applied molecular biology in agriculture, genetic engineering, is mired in controversy.

While these awardees have made some important contributions to science, it has not translated into major positive contributions to agriculture and food security—the supposed purpose for awarding the World Food Prize.

Barcodes on genetically modified crops help researchers to identify individual gene makeups.

Feeding the world?

Although genetic engineering has been widely adopted in a few major crops—mainly soybeans, corn, cotton and canola—only two general types of engineered genes, for resistance to herbicides and for killing certain insects, have been widely commercially successful after 30 years of trying.

These have provided some benefits, such as a reduction of chemical insecticide use on some of these crops, and some relatively small yield increases. Most of the yield increases for small farmers are from cotton, a low value crop, which is unlikely to pull these farmers out of poverty.

At the same time, in the countries that have used these technologies the longest, big problems are emerging. Weeds resistant to the herbicide used on Monsanto’s crops have reached epidemic proportions in the U.S., reportedly infesting about 60 million acres and increasing rapidly. This has increased herbicide use by hundreds of millions of pounds above where it probably would have been had these crops not existed.

And now insects resistant to Bt are emerging around the world. I was at the University of Illinois recently, where I heard a respected corn entomologist bemoaning the intention of corn farmers to return to the use of chemical insecticides to control rootworms that have developed resistance to Monsanto’s Bt gene for controlling that important pest.

On top of that, USDA does not even count the over 90 percent of corn seed—that’s close to 90 million acres—that is treated with neonicotinoid insecticides that are implicated in seriously harming bees and other beneficial organisms. One of the major producers of these insecticides is Chilton’s company, Syngenta.

The point is that the static and narrowly focused economic analyses that have touted the (limited) benefits of GE do not take into account that these products have been developed for use in monoculture agriculture systems, where their nominal value is very temporary (the industry’s solution is more of the same, e.g. new herbicide-resistant crops that will further increase herbicide use).

Add to this the questions raised about monopoly control of the seed supply via intellectual property (patents), weak-kneed regulators, and the challenge of using GE successfully for developing genetically and physiologically complex traits like drought tolerance, and the successes of this technology as applied so far are seen to be meager, and substantially outweighed by its faults.

And what about the opportunity costs of using this expensive technology instead of more effective and cheaper breeding methods and agroecology? It is often argued that we need all the tools in the toolbox to meet the coming challenges of agriculture (this is merely an assertion–there is really no real science behind it one way or the other). But with finite public resources for improving agriculture, it is also important to focus on the most cost-effective approaches, and those that give the best social outcomes. This is not an argument against GE per se, but against the facile, but convincing-sounding, argument that we “must” use it.

U.S. policy in support of corporate goals

Sadly, Secretary of State John Kerry also overstated the case about GE in his address at the World Food Prize announcement ceremony, claiming “dramatic increases in yield,” (not really very dramatic, and importantly, less than what crop breeding and agroecology provide). He made several aspirational claims, saying that biotechnology will reduce pesticide use (that is not the trend, as I have discussed above), or will reduce nitrogen fertilizer pollution. We have carefully analyzed this last claim, and while traditional breeding has made some progress toward improving nitrogen use efficiency, so far GE has not, and there is no good evidence that GE will improve upon what breeding can do. His claim that it has dramatically reduced loss to disease is simply wrong, unless one means the mere few thousand acres planted to a few virus-resistant crops.

Biotech has made some narrowly-defined progress on a very few crop traits, but they have been underwhelming when examined in the context of better alternatives like breeding and agroecology.

Given all of the real problems surrounding the use of this technology in the real world, how could the caretakers of the Prize possibly present it to these scientists?

Follow the money

Is anyone surprised to find that the biotech industry is a major supporter of the World Food Prize? Monsanto, according to the NYT article, has donated $5 million. Included in the long list of sponsors are other biotech giants, such as DuPont Pioneer, and supporters including the Gates Foundation and the Syngenta Foundation (not Syngenta Company, but we know who butters that bread).

The caretakers of the WFP have claimed that industry money did not influence their decision. Of course they would say this; can you imagine them saying something different? That is why the strong appearance of conflicts of interest is considered to be almost as important as a more direct smoking gun, because the latter is usually very well hidden. The current award of the WFP fails the appearance test miserably.

This is, unfortunately, all a part of the perverse influence that multinational industry money is having on science. For example, my colleague Gretchen Goldman recently posted a blog revealing a trail of corrupt influence by Syngenta on the process of science.

The role of private money in leveraging influence on science is exacerbated by congressional ideologues that have been hacking away at productive public sources of funds for decades, making scientists at public research institutions more and more dependent on handouts from the private sector that come with long strings attached, as I discussed several months ago. Unless this trend is reversed, we will all pay a high price when we can no longer have confidence in the independence of such a major facet of our society.

Photo: Flickr user the_silver_angel_13

The cultivation of tens of millions of acres of corn in monoculture (corn planted year after year), or in short rotations (corn followed by soybeans), inevitably leads to resistance and dependence on large amounts of insecticides.

Even More Pesticide

But Mr. Berry substantially under-reports the amount of pesticide used now and in the past several years. He writes that corn acres treated with insecticide fell from 25 percent in 2005 to 9 percent in 2010, according to the USDA.

But these numbers greatly undercount actual pesticide use in corn. Apparently the USDA data reported by Mr Berry does not include the use of pesticides as seed treatments, and that makes a BIG difference. By many accounts, almost all corn seed is now coated with neonicotinoid insecticides. So is much of the soybean seed. Most corn seed is also treated with fungicides. Corn and soybeans are our two most widely planted crops, at about 170 million acres, so these seed treatments add up to lot of pesticide use. And most of this is a recent occurrence, increasing rapidly beginning in the 2000s.

So instead of 9 percent of corn acres being treated, as reported by the WSJ, the reality is probably closer to 95 percent.

These insecticides, now the mostly widely used in the world, are strongly implicated by the peer-reviewed science literature as causing substantial environmental harm. Here are two of the many recent studies strongly suggesting harm to bees, which along with other pollinators are responsible for the productivity of about a third of our food–mostly fruits, vegetables, and nuts–and harm to aquatic invertebrates that fish and other animals depend on for food.

These and other studies have led to a moratorium on these insecticides in the EU, at least until the issues can be sorted out. Unfortunately, US EPA is not scheduled to decide what to do until 2018, by which time harm could be much more substantial.

Unnecessary Harm

And it is not as if the use of corn seed treatments is really needed. As recently noted in the farm press, one entomologist has pointed out that recent tests have shown little if any yield benefit from corn seed treated with neonics. This also jibes with recent discussions I have had with another corn-belt entomologist. Instead, it seems that the almost ubiquitous use of these insecticides in corn may be a response to marketing by pesticide companies, and the perception by farmers that it is a “cheap” insurance policy to protect their investment in corn that is selling at near-record prices—even if it is not really needed.

We do not know exactly how much impact these seed treatments, and other uses of neonics, are having on the environment. Other factors such as loss of habitat and varroa mites are likely also playing a role in bee decline.

But data on neonicotinoids shows that levels are often high enough to cause mortality or impaired behavior in bees and other invertebrates, and that exposure is likely to occur frequently, through consumption of tainted pollen, or exposure to tainted soil or water. Harmful levels of pesticides in the environment and likely routes of exposure—these are the two parameters that add up to actual harm. And while there remain some gaps in the data, what we already know is pretty damning.

In addition, combined exposure to neonics and other pesticides, including some fungicides, can have harmful synergistic effects.

USDA needs to collect data on how much neonics are being used to treat seeds ASAP, tight budgets or not, and EPA needs to show some real urgency in addressing the issue of harm to the environment. The use of these insecticides should be suspended while we determine more accurately how much impact they are having. The cost of doing so will be small, at most. In fact, the cost would likely be nil if we were growing our food using the best principles of biology. The cost of delay, on the other hand, could be huge.

2,4-D injury of a grape leaf. Photo by Ontario Agriculture Ministry.

Dicamba and 2,4-D herbicides have been known to travel considerable distances from the fields where they are applied, harming fruit, vegetable and other crops, and natural areas that provide pollinators and other beneficial organisms for crops. This is because they not only drift beyond crop fields when they are sprayed, they also volatilize from crops after being applied. Broadleaf crops like grapes and cotton, as well as many others, are extremely sensitive to even low concentrations of these herbicides. In fact, they have been considered to be the most destructive herbicides of neighboring vegetation.

While the pesticide companies claim that new formulations of these herbicides will greatly reduce volatilization, that remains to be seen, because public data supporting this assertion have been scarce. And in any case, some improvement in reducing volatilization may be offset by greatly increased use and new use patterns. In particular, the herbicide-resistant corn and soybeans will allow spraying directly on the growing crops, later in the season, when other crops and wild vegetation have leafed out and are more vulnerable. Previously, most uses of these herbicides have been for pre-emergence (pre crop germination) or post crop harvest.

There is also considerable epidemiology linking these herbicides to certain cancers in farmers and farmworkers. While not conclusive, it does suggest caution. In general, pesticide laws are not as protective of farmers and farmworkers exposed through work as for consumers exposed via residues on food.

In addition, weed scientists predict that the widespread use of these crops will simply speed up the development of more resistant weeds, leading to even more herbicide use. They are especially concerned about the ongoing development of weeds resistant to multiple herbicides, which will further limit farmer options.

The Walking Dead—USDA Regulation of GE Crops is Barely Breathing

It will be important to monitor how thoroughly the USDA does its job. In the past, it has neglected important considerations of harm to growers from contamination by engineered genes or the development of resistant weeds. That was the reason for previous lawsuits that USDA usually lost.

Also important will be how USDA handles the requirement under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) to seriously consider alternatives to approving the engineered crops without restriction. In the past, USDA has not adequately fulfilled this requirement. It should fully consider the best alternatives to the main reason for these crops, the epidemic of glyphosate-resistant weeds.

That should include practices that are known to work well, and to be profitable and highly productive, in particular, crop rotation, judicious tillage (conservation tillage), cover crops, and for non-organic systems, minimal use of various herbicides. Substantial research is accumulating that shows that this approach is viable, and much better for the environment and workers.

Another huge problem, confirmed in its press release, is that USDA is using its regulatory authority under the Plant Protection Act (PPA) only to determine whether 2,4-D- or dicamba-resistant crops are plant pests. The PPA will ultimately determine whether USDA decides that these crops have unacceptable risks. That is because NEPA is a procedural, rather than proscriptive, law. Even if the EIS says that there are risks, it cannot prevent approval. And plant pests, as the term suggests, are usually pathogens, or parasitic plants. So it is unlikely that USDA will find that these herbicide-resistant crops are plant pests, even if they can do considerable harm–they have yet to do so for any GE plant.

The dependence on plant pest properties as a a definition of risk  is also vulnerable to newer ways to make engineered crops. USDA has used the biologically unsupportable fiction that engineered crops may be plant pests simply because a pathogen (Agrobacterium) has been used to deliver the genes into the plant, or that the driver of engineered gene function, called a promoter, came from a plant pathogenic virus. But it is easy to avoid these in many engineered crops now. USDA has affirmed that it would not have jurisdiction to regulate many GE crops if they do not fit these artificial criteria. It did so last year for engineered Kentucky Bluegrass. This does not pertain to 2,4-D or dicamba, which are in the regulatory hopper now, but that could change in the future.

The shame of it is that USDA also has authority under the PPA to determine whether a GE crop is a noxious weed. The statutory definition of a noxious weed under the PPA is quite broad, and gives USDA much greater purview for determining risk than under the plant pest provisions. Despite passage in 2000, USDA has yet to finalize its regulations under the PPA that would include use of its noxious weed authority.

Previous attempts to write regulations, never finalized, inappropriately narrowed the statutory definition of noxious weeds to such an extent that it could have allowed large amounts of harm to the environment, farmers and crops. Fortunately, the Obama administration has not finalized these harmful regulations.

But the lack of appropriate regulations that include a reasonable noxious weed authority greatly limits the types of real environmental impact that USDA will consider, and leaves USDA to regulate these crops with one hand tied behind its back.

One reason that USDA is performing an EIS on these crops is probably the strong public response to earlier actions. Over 400,000 comments on these crops were submitted by the public. Continuing public pressure, including pressure from scientists during the 60-day comment periods for the EIS, will be important for establishing a public record that pushes USDA to do the right thing. We should also demand that USDA develop regulations protective of agriculture and the environment under the PPA. Failure to do so is a dereliction of its responsibility to protect the public and the environment.

The nine-year Marsden Farm study—conducted by researchers from the USDA, the University of Minnesota, and Iowa State University—replicated the industrial corn-soy midwestern farming system alongside two multi-crop alternatives. A three-year rotation incorporated another grain plus a red clover cover crop (pictured here), and a four-year rotation added alfalfa, a key livestock feed, into the mix. The more complex systems enhanced yields and profits, controlled weeds, and reduced chemical fertilizer, herbicide, and energy use.

The good news is that we know how to make agriculture work for people and the environment, if we can find the political will.

To help move us forward, UCS is launching its vision for healthy farms, including a briefing paper explaining the changes that are needed in the way we farm, and a web feature that illustrates the components of a healthy farm and farm environment.

Why Now?

The ability to lay out this healthy farm vision has been made possible by the work of many scientists and farmers over the past few decades, dedicated to improving the sustainability of agriculture. That work has resulted in cumulative knowledge that demonstrates that farming based on ecological principles, or agroecology, can be highly productive and can greatly reduce our environmental impact, while improving life for farmers and farming communities.

Our healthy farm vision brief identifies four major changes in farming practices that scientists have shown will allow us to achieve our sustainability goals:

• Crop Rotations: Agronomists have worked on developing longer crop rotations (alternating crops from year to year) that greatly reduce the need for pesticides and synthetic fertilizers, recycle nutrients, increase biodiversity, and protect the water and air. They have shown that these can be as productive, or more so, than the monocultures (growing the same crop year after year) of corn and soybeans that now blanket the Midwest. Working with economists, they have shown they can also be as profitable.

• A Landscape-Level Approach: Agroecologists have demonstrated the importance of seeing the farm as part of a bigger landscape, where uncultivated areas like woodlots protect streams from pollution and runoff, and provide biodiversity that pollinates our crops and controls pests, resulting in higher productivity and reduced need for pesticides.

• Cover Crops: Are grown to protect the soil when cash crops like corn are not growing. Agronomists and weed scientists have shown that they increase soil fertility, provide nutrients to crops, and control pests.

• Integrate Livestock and Crops: Manure from livestock contains valuable crop nutrients and enriches the soil. But separating livestock from crops in huge CAFOs (confined animal feeding operations) reduces the ability to conserve those nutrients, which instead often pollute the air and water.

All of these practices also increase resilience in the face of climate change. For example, they improve soil fertility, which increases soil water-holding capacity, which improves drought tolerance. Reduced vulnerability to pests means that new pests arising from a shifting climate are less likely to reach epidemic levels.

The reduced need for pesticides means less exposure for farmers, farmworkers, and the rest of us. Reduced dependence on expensive purchased inputs like engineered seed, fertilizers and pesticides from large corporations increases food sovereignty of farmers and consumers.

Biogeochemists and hydrologists have measured the relative impact of agroecological farming on nutrient cycling compared with industrial farming, and found that agroecology provides the best options for reducing the environmental impact of fertilizers.

As time goes on, we face the cumulative effects of pollution from farming and the loss of soil fertility and biodiversity that are critical for crop productivity, unless we act to change direction.

More to Do, and More Opportunities

Farmers do not want to harm the environment, but they are often not willing to change the way they farm without clear demonstrations that agroecological alternatives can work and are economically viable. They need information, demonstrations of success, and incentives to change. Policy at the State and Federal levels can greatly help with this transition in the form of extension services, demonstration projects, transition payments, better insurance policies, conservation stewardship incentives and continuing research.

There is also much to do to make agroecological farming even more efficient and productive. For example, while we have spent decades improving the productivity of crops like corn, there has been virtually no effort to make cover crops more productive, or to fit better into crop rotations. Crop breeders can do more to develop crop varieties that better use organic sources of nutrients, reducing the problems caused by synthetic fertilizers, and that fit better into crop rotations and that contain better pest resistance. We also need more research on optimal rotations for different climates and soils, and more experimentation with, and improvement of, additional rotation crops. And we need farm equipment better adapted to crop rotations.

Congress has an opportunity to facilitate this process by passing a Farm Bill that moves us in the right direction instead of continuing to subsidize more of the same. But entrenched farm interests, such as pesticide, seed and fertilizer companies, are working overtime to continue down a path to nowhere.

Those interested in better food and a better environment, and better lives for farmers and farmworkers, must make their voices heard. The UCS vision for healthy farms will help to support those voices.

Huge algal bloom, in green, spreading across Lake Erie. NASA photo.

Tillage, or plowing, is the age-old practice of turning the soil to kill weeds or incorporate plant matter or manure. But tillage often leads to increased soil erosion and loss of fertility. Erosion also contributes to silting of streams with soil carrying phosphorus, a major cause of freshwater pollution. So conservation tillage, and no-till in particular, which eliminates tillage, have some real benefits. This is especially true for industrial agriculture, which otherwise can contribute to erosion and reduced soil fertility.

And soil fertility, in turn, is critically important for ensuring the productivity and resilience of crops.

We already know that, while providing some real benefits, conservation tillage also has substantial limitations compared to agroecological approaches that reduce erosion, such as growing cover crops. Cover crops are grown to protect soil when cash crops like corn are not present in fall, winter and spring. They not only greatly reduce erosion and improve soil fertility, they also substantially reduce nitrogen loss which causes water pollution, such as dead zones in coastal areas. They can also suppress weeds and other pests, and reduce the need for synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. Conservation tillage does not provide any of these other benefits.

Another possible benefit of conservation tillage, increased carbon sequestration, is unproven. It may still turn out that it provides some additional carbon sequestration in some soil types and climates compared to conventional tillage, but that remains to be seen. On the other hand, organic and related methods probably do reliably increase soil carbon sequestration.

Toxic Green Slime

And now, new research reveals a darker side of no-till—it may actually exacerbate phosphorus pollution of waterways.

I grew up in Michigan, the heart of the Great Lakes region. These lakes, the biggest in the world, are a natural wonder that are more like fresh-water seas. Lakes are a terrific resource for recreation—from swimming to fishing to boating. The Great Lakes also have had substantial commercial fisheries of whitefish and other species. There have even been Great Lakes cruise ships. The presence of lakes, including the smaller lakes of the region stretching from the Canadian prairies through the upper Midwest to upstate New York, greatly enhances the quality of life and supports tourism.

So learning that the green slime of cyanobacteria (sometimes called blue-green algae) was back with a vengeance was a shock. Efforts to reduce phosphorus from sewage treatment plants and laundry detergents in the 60s and 70s resulted in one of the real successes of the environmental movement. Lake Erie is particularly susceptible because it is relatively shallow. But lakes in general are vulnerable, smaller lakes and reservoirs possibly even more so. So although detected in Lake Erie, it is also happening elsewhere. For example, Lake Winnipeg, a Canadian Great Lake, is also seeing increased eutrophication.

And the problems go beyond causing an eyesore or foul odors or fish kills. Two of the main species of cyanobacteria produce liver or neurotoxins, which were found in the lake at alarming levels.

The Lake Erie algal bloom of 2011 set records, eventually reaching about 5,000 square kilometers, or about 3 times larger than the next-biggest bloom. But records show that algal blooms have been increasing since the mid-1990s, after several decades of progress.

What happened? Why was the momentum toward cleaner water reversed?

No-till and Climate Change: A Bad Combination

The increase in harmful algal blooms coincides with increasing use of no-till in the Corn Belt. It turns out that without tillage, applied phosphorus fertilizer or phosphorous in manure becomes concentrated in the surface layer of the soil. Even though no-till reduces soil runoff and erosion—which carries phosphorus bound to soil particles into waterways—the resulting high phosphorus concentration at the soil surface leads to runoff of dissolved reactive phosphorus. The algal blooms that result from this are exacerbated by heavy rainfalls, which wash more phosphorus into the lake, and which are predicted to become more frequent in the region as global warming proceeds.

On top of that, phosphorous may become scarce in the future. Large deposits are found in only a few locations globally. So the loss of phosphorus from agricultural soils is also the waste of a valuable resource.

It is possible that occasional tillage will help alleviate this problem, by burying the phosphorus. But it is unclear whether many forms of tillage, such as the use of cultivators or chisel plows that do not invert the soil, or methods such as rotational tillage or ridge till, and so on, will effectively address the problem. And data are sparse about whether the other benefits of no-till would also be reduced in the process. In addition, most corn acres are still not using no-till or conservation tillage, so it is possible that further adoption could make matters even worse.

A lesson in all of this is that reductionist approaches to ecological issues that narrowly focus on solving one problem, such as soil erosion, without understanding the entire agricultural ecosystem are vulnerable to missing harmful unintended consequences. No-till is a valuable practice in some respects, but as used in industrial agriculture, it depends on heavy use of herbicides, which cause their own harm to agroecosystems, such as loss of habitat for monarch butterflies, bees, and other helpful organisms.

It is also important to remember that other agroecologically-based practices like cover crops can accomplish the benefits of no-till and much more. Not only that, but organic no-till can also be practiced without the use of herbicides.

But it is no coincidence that industrial no-till has been such a popular practice and rhetorical tool among the industrial ag community. It fits into the highly simplified and unsustainable system that the big ag industry wants to maintain. It is one of the few practices that big ag can promote that has some environmental benefits. And unlike agroecology, it depends on expensive purchased products. That’s good for the industry’s bottom line, but not so good for the rest of us.

The so-called biotech rider (S. 735), attached to the continuing resolution in the U.S. Senate, was designed to override successful lawsuits. It would overturn rulings by the courts that have protected citizens from U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) actions that subvert the legal obligations of the agency to protect farmers and the environment.

These federal court decisions have recognized that the industry-friendly USDA has often improperly interpreted its responsibilities as a regulator under federal law. For example, it has failed to adequately protect non-GE farmers, including organic growers, from contamination that can seriously hurt their sales.

Johnsongrass is considered to be one of the world’s worst weeds and is a close relative of sorghum, a major crop in the U.S. and elsewhere. Gene flow from engineered sorghum to johnsongrass in the future could, in some cases transfer genes that could make it an even worse weed. James Henson @ USDA-NRCS PLANTS Database

The courts have also recognized that the USDA has not adequately taken into account the predictable development of herbicide resistant weeds, which lead farmers back to tillage that causes soil erosion, have reduced profits in some cases, and probably will lead to a new generation of GE herbicide-resistant crops that depend on more, and more harmful, herbicides like 2,4-D. The infestation of tens of millions of acres of farmland by resistant weeds, and the dramatic increases in herbicide use that have accompanied them, is vindication of the courts’ decisions.

Threat from Contamination

The rider allows for planting of GE crops if any farmer or producer requests it, despite the careful deliberations of the courts, until the USDA addresses the court’s complaints.

Some will argue that because the court override is temporary, and the rider provides that measures will be taken to “…to mitigate or minimize potential adverse environmental effects…,” there is little risk.

History tells us otherwise–mitigation measures have been unsuccessful in the past, and are unlikely to be more reliable in the foreseeable future. In the late 1990s the biotech company Aventis assured EPA that it would take measures to keep StarLink corn, a possible allergen, out of the food supply. But within a year, and with plantings that never exceeded one percent of total corn acres, the corn supply was contaminated. The result was hundreds of millions of dollars in losses to farmers in exports, and years of effort and cost to remove StarLink from the food supply.

In 2002, corn produced by Prodigene containing a pharmaceutical gene contaminated soybeans, resulting in the destruction of 500,000 bushels, despite supposedly rigorous provisions to prevent such an occurrence. This corn was grown under a temporary permit in a small field trial.

And in 2006, unapproved GE rice owned by Bayer, probably originating from a small, short-term controlled field trial in Arkansas, was found to have contaminated the U.S. rice supply. That little incident resulted in hundreds of millions of dollars in lost rice exports and farmer lawsuits that continued for years.

There are other examples, but the point is that measures to prevent contamination from short-term planting of GE crops, especially when these crops are grown on a commercial scale, are unreliable. This was clearly affirmed by a report from the National Academy of Sciences in 2004.

Gene Flow

A similar threat exists to the environment in the form of gene flow—the transfer of genes from one organism to another—from crops to wild cousins, or from poorly domesticated cultivated plants like forest trees or grasses grown for lumber, pulp, or biofuel.

Most crop plants can mate with wild relatives, some of which are serious weeds. In the U.S., for example, one of the worst weeds of cultivated rice, wild red rice, can mate with its crop cousin. This could transfer engineered genes, such as for herbicide resistance, to the weeds, making them harder to kill and hurting farmers.

A wild relative of sorghum, johnsongrass, is one of the world’s worst weeds. Wheat is related to jointed goatgrass, which infests millions of acres of the crop, while lettuce is related to the prickly lettuce, and so on.

In fact, gene flow of glyphosate herbicide-resistant creeping bentgrass has already occurred…twice.  This also happened from temporary field trials that were conducted in Central Oregon and nearby Idaho specifically to prevent gene flow! USDA mandated an isolation zone of 900 feet around the trial, but gene flow occurred up to 13 miles from the Oregon site.

And if the engineered gene contains a trait that increases the fitness of the wild plant, very low levels of gene flow, even a single incidence, could result in the permanent escape and spread of the genes. Some of these genes could increase the competitiveness of the weed, making it a bigger problem.

So the history of this technology clearly shows that the assurance of the industry and USDA to prevent gene flow and contamination, even when the GE crops are grown for a short period, are baseless.

And what if USDA reassesses the transgenic crop, at the court’s direction, and then decides that it is indeed too risky? If contamination has occurred, the costs could be very high. As we have seen, it takes years to clean up contaminated seed. And genes that escape to wild relatives, as with creeping bentgrass, are often virtually impossible to eradicate.

A Warning to Other Countries

Beyond the specific implications for the environment or farmers is what the adoption of this rider says about the relentless efforts of the biotech industry to weaken regulations in countries where it operates or is trying to gain a foothold.

It was reportedly introduced anonymously, without accountability. But let me stick my neck out and say that it is highly likely that the biotech industry influenced the introduction and passage of this rider. Monsanto spends more money influencing our government than any other agriculture company. It spent millions, more than any other firm, to defeat the efforts in California to label engineered foods.

Once a country throws open its doors to the biotech industry, it can expect a similar effort to weaken regulations for food safety and environmental protection. The industry will also try to impose favorable legal means of controlling the seed supply, such as buying or partnering with most existing local seed companies and imposing intellectual property laws that give it dominance.

Other countries contemplating welcoming this industry should think long and hard about the implications for their sovereignty over their seed supply, the core of food security.

I am lucky to live in a city with a lot of green space, with streamside parks only a mile away in either direction from my house, as the crow flies. So if I am not too ravenous to delay breakfast, a quick walk can take me to the site of the morning concert.

Figures of speech aside, the aesthetic value that birds add to our lives is only one reason why a new report from the American Bird Conservancy is disturbing. It provides substantial evidence that the most widely used insecticides, collectively called neonicotinoids, may be harming birds. Beside their aesthetic value, birds also eat pest insects that would otherwise devour crops and other plants, annoy us, and in some cases transmit diseases.

And this report comes after numerous scientific papers, some of which I discussed in earlier posts, (and here) have provided strong evidence that treatment of crop seeds with these insecticides is causing a lot of harm to bees, which are responsible (with other pollinators) for allowing the productive cultivation of many of our fruits, vegetables, and nut crops—about a third of our food supply. The scientific evidence of harm to bees and other beneficial insects continues to accumulate.

The European Union is seriously considering banning many uses of neonicotinoids, due to their threat to bees, and the U.S. EPA has said it will reconsider them.

But the new report documents what appears to be a lax history of risk assessment and decision making at EPA when it comes to these insecticides, so there is concern that the agency will not take appropriate measures. And as I have pointed out previously, EPA’s standard for protecting the environment (and those exposed on the farm) from pesticides, is lower than its protection of consumers from consumption of pesticide residues on food. So the agency is willing to accept some, often considerable, harm to the environment. The accumulating evidence strongly suggests that the risk from many of the uses of neonics should exceed EPA’s comfort zone.

Unfortunately, EPA is moving at a glacial pace in response to the threat from these insecticides. It has denied a year-old petition to suspend the use of the neonic, clothianidin, used to coat corn and other seed. And it has indicated that it will not complete its assessment of neonics for five more years. In response to this lack of urgency, several groups have filed suit against the agency to try to spur needed action.

Unnecessary Risks

The irony of this situation is that neonics are supposed to be acceptable substitutes for older insecticides that were very risky to people and the environment, including the carbamates, organophosphates—related to some types of nerve gas—and organochlorines like DDT. Some have argued that newer generations of pesticides have acceptably low risks. But that argument is not holding up for this group of insecticides, which have become nearly ubiquitous, and are relatively persistent in the environment and mobile in water. That means that they can find their way into streams, wetlands, and lakes where they may harm aquatic life as well as birds and bees.

Seed for major crops like corn, grown on over 90 million acres in the U.S., are now routinely coated with these systemic chemicals that travel through the plant and end up in pollen (and the edible parts of the crop) where they are picked up by pollinators. Or the treated seeds may be eaten by birds, where they may cause mortality or reproductive problems.

The heavy dependence of industrial farmers on these insecticides poses a dilemma for agencies like EPA. While they want to protect the environment, they can’t ignore possible harm (or, as they typically put it, loss of benefits) to farmers’ livelihoods.

A further irony is that there are better choices staring us in the face. If we had sensible agriculture policies and research institutions, EPA would probably not be facing this dilemma. As I have discussed in my last post and elsewhere, we know how to develop highly productive and profitable alternatives to monoculture agriculture that not only require fewer pesticides, but also fewer water-polluting synthetic fertilizers (see important research at Iowa State University, linked here, and another Iowa State study linked near the end of this post, as well as a longer writeup by my colleague Karen Stillerman). Other research, such as at the University of Minnesota, has come to similar conclusions. These alternative systems are based on the science of agroecology, and include longer crop rotations, the use of cover crops and perennial crops, and the better integration of livestock manure into our cropping systems.

We also understand many of the barriers to the widespread use of these methods. Social scientists have studied them carefully—as in this article comparing the bias toward genetic engineering and against agroecology, despite the strong scientific basis for the success of the latter. In a nutshell, these barriers consist of numerous incentives and subsidies to the current monoculture system, a research establishment that has put its impressive resources behind improving industrial agriculture rather agroecologically-based alternatives, the preference of transnational companies for technologies that involve products they can sell, rather than the free knowledge of agroecology, among others. This adds up to an impressive infrastructure, reinforced at several levels, that will be hard to dislodge.

But a good place to start, to use one more avian colloquialism, would be to take our heads out of the sand, and acknowledge the problems and real solutions rather than maintaining an ideological bias toward unsustainable agriculture. Another is to support UCS and other groups in our efforts to establish productive and sustainable agriculture based on the science of agroecology.

Vilsack warned that agriculture must become more resilient by developing more diverse farming systems, supported multi-cropping–such as planting two types of crops in an area–planting cover crops between growing seasons, and integrating livestock into cropping systems. He was quoted as saying: “We hope that we will do a better job of improving our communication about the conservation benefits that will come from multi-cropping, and in turn give us yet another tool to deal with a changing agricultural and managing the risk of weather.”

The terrible drought last summer made the impacts of weather much more tangible. Even so, making necessary changes–like moving away from the resource and policy commitments to the crop monocultures that USDA has pursued for decades–will be especially difficult given current budget pressures. But the eventual result of such efforts will be improved environments, farming communities, long-term productivity, and the conservation of scare resources.

A USDA geneticist inspects hairy vetch plants, a cover crop that produces nitrogen for folowing cash crops, improves soil fertility, and reduces soil erosion. USDA Photo by Scott Bauer.

Ironically, high corn prices are leading to increased monoculture (planting corn or soybeans year after year in the same place), exactly the opposite of the more diverse farming that Vilsack wants.

Meanwhile, programs that support more diverse and resilient agroecological farming systems, and that make up only a small fraction of the USDA research budget, are threatened by budget cuts. These include the Organic Research and Extension Initiative (OREI) and the Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education Program (SARE).

The multi-crop systems that the secretary supports are already known to produce higher yields. But his support of two-crop systems—such as corn-soybeans in the Midwest—when longer rotations of three or more crops are needed to obtain broader benefits, suggests he is still too wedded to unsustainable systems.

More than just productivity

As readers of my blog know, there are many reasons why we need to fix the way we farm, in addition to adaptation to climate change. This also includes a lot more than the issue of productivity that Vilsack emphasizes. For example, about 400 marine dead zones world-wide are caused mainly by nitrogen from inefficient farming, and are impairing important seafood production areas.

All that extra nitrogen, mostly from synthetic fertilizer made from natural gas, is also the major contributor of atmospheric nitrous oxide, a global warming gas about 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide.

A recent and important paper by Blesh and Drinkwater at Cornell University, based on extensive measurement and modeling in the Mississippi River basin, shows that more diverse farms produce far less excess nitrogen than conventional corn, or corn and soybean farms. These diverse farms use crop rotations that include organic nitrogen-producing legumes, cover crops, and integrated livestock and crop production that recycles nutrients by using manure to fertilize crops.

Diverse farms have lower yield for a variety of reasons that are not well understood, such as recent conversion from monoculture systems (because degraded soil takes time to recover), crops bred to respond to synthetic fertilizers rather than organic sources, lack of research optimizing nutrient response in diverse systems, and predominance of these systems on more marginal land. This means that increased research in these neglected areas is likely to lead to big improvements.

We also have solid long-term, farm-scale research, such as from Iowa State University, showing that diverse farms can be as productive and as profitable as conventional monoculture-based farms. And diverse farms need far less pesticide and fertilizer than simpler farms. They require somewhat more labor, but the farmer keeps more profit per acre because less is going to pay for expensive inputs like fertilizers and pesticides. And non-engineered varieties of the crops, with their less expensive seed, seem to be as productive in these diverse systems as crops grown from engineered seed.

That is usually better for farming communities due to greater multiplier effects (more money circulating locally). It is also better for farmers and farm workers who will be exposed to far fewer pesticides, and consumers who will have fewer pesticide residues on their food.

Secretary Vilsack also noted the possible increase in crop pests that accompany climate change. Diverse systems are more resistant to pest damage, as exemplified by their lower pesticide requirements.

These proposed changes will not make the big companies that dominate farm input markets happy. As with climate change and fossil fuel-based industries, the Monsantos and Bayers of the world will fight to maintain their sales. They will push input-based approaches like herbicide dependent no-till or precision farming that may help in limited ways but will not go far enough, as Blesh and Drinkwater note. And they will continue to push transgenic herbicide-resistant crops that will lead to increased pesticide use.

And we also know that these companies invest heavily in our land grant research establishment and will no doubt want to get the most from their money. As I wrote recently, a report by the President’s Council on Agricultural Science and Technology (PCAST) lauded these “public-private partnerships” with no expressed qualms about the potentially adverse effects on the direction of ag research. Not surprising given the heavy involvement of big companies in that report.

So, it will take effort from those concerned about how we farm to make sure that the secretary follows through, and can stand up to the inevitable pressure to continue with unsustainable agriculture that will increasingly be a threat to the environment and food production. Scientists can play an especially important role in helping the public and policy makers understand that we have real alternatives.

I suppose it is hard for journalists to resist a good story: Mark Lynas, former green activist, has seen the light. The pronouncements of converted GM critic Lynas have garnered coverage from several respected media sources, despite often being misleading, wrong, or questionable scientifically.

Lynas’ main charge is that criticism of genetic engineering (GE) in agriculture is anti-science. His focus is on what he calls “the antis”—activists opposed to genetically engineered crops—but by setting up this straw man, and ignoring complex scientific concerns about GE while making summary judgments about its safety and value, he appears to be attempting to discourage real scientific debate.

What is especially disappointing, though, is the uncritical reception Lynas has received from several journalists like Andrew Revkin and Michael Spector. As University of Michigan ecologist John Vandermeer points out, Lynas’ pronouncements are sophomoric—they suggest a young student’s simplistic and sometimes incorrect understanding of science—and biased in their selectivity. That they have been received almost as gospel is surprising. The Economist called supportable criticism of Lynas, on GE and pesticide use, tendentious. Really? But dismissing debate is not?

Contrary to Lynas’ pronouncements, science does not proceed by fiat. His summary judgment on the debate about GE—that “it’s over”—is misinformed at best. One could pass this off as a rhetorical flourish, but the overall context of Lynas’ talk shows that he is quite serious. While there is broad consensus on climate science, there is anything but on many aspects of GE science. As anyone who has read my blogs or reports over the past several years knows, I have cited numerous solid peer-reviewed studies that question many aspects of the safety, impact, or sustainability of GE as it has been developed, and will probably continue to be developed.

I guess Lynas can be forgiven to some extent for asserting that the safety of GE for human health and the environment has been settled, since this is a common misconception, as I discussed in previous posts at some length. He seems to be echoing equally mistaken utterances from what should be reliable science sources, like the board of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

A few specifics

Here are some of the incorrect or misleading points that Lynas makes about the science or development of GE. I have made most of these points elsewhere in reports or blog posts, so I am not going to elaborate on them here. More detailed discussion, including links to research papers, can be found at those sources.

• Lynas argues that we need GE because other agricultural methods or technologies can’t address food production and sustainability challenges. GE may contribute, but as my reports and others have pointed out, breeding continues to outpace GE and likely will continue to do so, and agroecology is much better at addressing many of these issues, especially over-reliance on scarce resources and pesticides, and resilience in the face of climate change. He needs to read the work of Matt Liebman at Iowa State University or Jules Pretty at the University of Essex, to mention a few, or the internationally-endorsed report of the IAASTD, authored by several hundred scientists and other experts.

• Rejoice, he sayeth, GE has reduced pesticide use. A recent study by Charles Benbrook shows that in the U.S., the biggest user of GE, pesticide use has gone up dramatically due to GE herbicide-resistant weeds, mismanagement, and the monoculture system that GE supports. Millions of acres of glyphosate-resistant weeds are causing real harm, such as increased tillage that increases soil erosion. And as Mortensen and colleagues have pointed out, the next GE crops, resistant to older herbicides often linked to harm to farmers and farmworkers, will probably increase herbicide use still further. Resistance to Bt by rootworm in the US, as Aaron Gassman has shown, is likely to lead to increased insecticide use, and more resistant insects are occurring elsewhere, notably stem borer in South Africa and bollworm in China. All this is a reflection of a bigger point about ecosystems science at the landscape level, which Lynas does not seem to acknowledge: that GE has been developed as an adjunct to monoculture agriculture, which is inherently vulnerable to pest damage and pest resistance, and is less resilient to climate change impacts.

• Misguided regulations are stifling GE. Lynas incorrectly cites a recent report commissioned by the pesticide industry’s own trade group, saying that it documents costs of about $139 million to navigate regulations on GE. Instead, the report states that the large majority of those costs are for R&D and other expenses rather than regulatory compliance. Breeding, which continues to be more successful for all types of properties that Lynas mentions—drought tolerance, increased yield, nutrient enhancement, pest resistance, and more—costs about a million dollars per trait. Failure of GE traits, such as virus-resistant sweet potatoes in Africa, needs to be considered more seriously as one possible explanation for the dearth of available GE traits so far. For example, regulatory costs cannot explain the limited success at producing GE drought tolerance, or the lack of success in reducing demand for nitrogen fertilizer or increasing yield potential. These are of interest to huge companies with deep pockets, and make up potentially huge markets, so regulatory costs are not a sufficient barrier to explain their lack of development. Yet companies (and academics that would be glad to sell successful traits to those companies) have been working on them for many years.

• Lynas claims that gene exchange between different organisms is common, and therefore use of genes from various sources in GE is not an issue. This is a great exaggeration, at best. Exchange between species, or horizontal gene transfer in the vernacular (HGT)—which Lynas mistakenly calls gene flow—is common between bacterial species, but this is irrelevant to GE food. It is also true, as Lynas mentions, that some viruses insert their genetic material into food plant genomes. But the range of genes involved is extremely limited compared to the ability to use and combine genes from any source with GE. Plant viruses typically have fewer than 10 genes, for a very limited number of functions, which is a far cry from the millions of different genes potentially available to genetic engineers. There are a few cases where plants have acquired a few genes from other organisms, but these have occurred over a period of millions of years, and are rare.

The main point is not whether I am right and Lynas is wrong about any specific bunch of data—there are many wrong turns as science plays out—but rather that debating data is an important part of the process of science that Lynas seems to want to derail, despite his rhetoric to the contrary. Science is as much a social process as it is the pile of data that seems to be the basis of Lynas’ conception of it. It is also about bigger issues that science is unavoidably enmeshed in. Issues involving political economy–social sciences, anyone?–allocation of scarce public science resources, environmental justice and so on. Trying to dismiss all of this and default to some narrowly defined vision is more akin to dogma than science.

UPDATE: Jan. 14, 2013

Mark Lynas, in his response to this blog post, actually reinforces my main points. Instead of debating or discussing the actual science, Lynas casts aspersions and resorts to relying on authority rather than data or research.

Lynas refers to a statement by the board of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) to make his point that there is a consensus of scientists supporting GE, and that my criticism of several specific aspects of that board statement in blog posts is evidence that UCS is anti-science on GE (all linked in this post, above).

If Lynas was making arguments based on science, he would debate the specific criticisms that I and 21 academic scientists make about the board statement, rather than deferring to the authority of the AAAS board. And while the AAAS board has the authority to make such statements, there is no evidence that it reflects a consensus among AAAS members. There has been no referendum or survey on it, and as I note, several scientists have been vocal in their criticism.

Similarly, Lynas dismisses offhand specific criticism of scientific errors or misleading things he said in his speech. Instead of responding to these specific criticisms, he dismisses them as trivial and selective. Yes, my citations are limited, because this is a blog post, not a Ph.D thesis or journal article. But I provided several links that provide more detail, referred to several academic scientists that have published relevant work, linked my reports and referred to my numerous blog posts (which all provide links to science journal articles), which collectively provide hundreds of peer-reviewed citations.

Again, rhetoric is not the main tool of science, debate about the data and its interpretation is. Lynas fails this test in his response.

Finally, although Lynas says that we are anti-science, we are not even anti-GE. As anyone who reads our reports and other publications knows, we nowhere suggest banning GE. I encourage Mark and any readers to explore our positions and arguments, starting here.

Why should we care, given our proven ability to produce enough food? And shouldn’t we be happy that industry has stepped up its research funding?

Horticulturist Eric Brennan records data on weed seedling growth between rows of a young cover crop at USDA’s 17-acre certified organic research plot in Salinas, California. Photo by Scott Bauer.

As the report points out, we face several challenges in coming decades that private sources won’t adequately address. Increasing population, increased meat consumption, and climate change will make it harder to produce enough food. Add to that the dependence on scarce non-renewable resources like water and phosphorus, and the tremendous amount of world-changing pollution caused by industrial agriculture, and it is clear that the need for research to help address these problems is bigger than ever. Economic externalities like pollution, long-term projects, and farming systems that focus on agroecology that do not emphasize purchased products, are not effectively addressed by private sector research.

At a time when conservative politicians argue that the private sector is the be-all and end-all of economic productivity, the report puts a welcome focus on the value of public spending on research. For agricultural research in particular, the returns on this investment are about 10 to 1, according to the report. The recommendation for an increase in public funding of $700 million per year is less than is needed, but a welcome beginning. The problem in the past is that very little of that funding has gone to making agriculture ecologically sustainable, so it is critically important that new funds prioritize sustainability.

When You Come to a Fork in the Road, Take It

Despite valuable points and recommendations, reading the report reminded me of Yogi Berra’s famous quote. As is so often the case, what is omitted is as important as what is included.

It is good that the report emphasizes the need for public funds to support crop research that is not currently supported by big agricultural companies—in other words, crops other than corn, soybeans and other commodity crops. And I was glad to see explicit mention of the need for research on cover crops, which have multiple benefits for sustainability.

But there are huge unmet needs for public research into the big grain crops as well. For example, research adapting those crops to long-term rotations and to be better able to use organic sources of nutrients. As noted in a 2010 survey, about 40 percent of Illinois corn farmers already say they cannot get excellent non-GE corn varieties. So those crops should not be abandoned to research by big seed companies.

The report actually does briefly mention, near the end, that there remains a need to develop traits in major crops that are not developed by companies, but this is not in the summary and therefore will easily be overlooked as not receiving emphasis.

While the report emphasizes the value of competitive grant making, it only mentions in passing that the intramural Agricultural Research Service of USDA, which it criticizes for lack of competitiveness, supports some of the most important long-term research projects in the country. Because of the many variables that influence agriculture over time, long-term research is needed to identify clear trends that respond to research on farming methods. Grants, which are usually of relatively short duration, are often not the best way to fund long-term research. Adequate funding should be dedicated for continuing long-term experiments testing different agricultural systems.

Ecology…Anyone?

Long-term research is especially important for agroecological approaches to farming, already greatly underfunded, which are so important for decreasing pollution, conserving scarce resources, protecting biodiversity, improving soil fertility, and increasing resilience in the face of climate change. For example, typical long crop rotations—a basic practice of agroecological farming—may alternate different crops over a period of four or more years. It is often necessary to go through at least a few cycles to detect optimal benefits of increased soil fertility (which improves water and nutrient holding capacity) and reduced pest numbers, such as weed seeds that may remain viable in the soil for many years.

The possibility of reducing the number of long-term experiments due to the shorter funding cycle of competitive grants is therefore a particular threat to agroecological research.

But that may not bother the authors of the report, because they do not mention agroecology, either explicitly or descriptively.

By contrast, the report lauds genetic approaches for improving agriculture. This is not surprising given the extremely heavy weighting of committee members and expert advisors toward genetics, including four from Monsanto, two from the Danforth Center (begun with assistance from a generous multimillion dollar Monsanto grant, and focusing on crop engineering) and others whose focus is breeding or plant molecular biology.

To the extent that the report is specific about its vision for the direction of agricultural research, it emphasizes technology and purchased-inputs, such as seed, rather than the knowledge-based approach of agroecology.

Also not discussed are the distributive injustices that are largely responsible for the underfed and the structural and political solutions that are fundamental to solving these problems. By ignoring these realities, the report feeds the narrative favored by the big agricultural input companies, that increased production is the answer to food insecurity problems. As noted by a major international report, solving infrastructure challenges (roads, storage), huge food waste problems, reasonable meat consumption, and empowerment of small farmers (especially women) may be more important than increasing production.

So, back to that fork in the road. The lack of emphasis on employing sound ecological principles to farming seems to represent a tacit endorsement of the monoculture and purchased-input-heavy approach to agriculture that is the current default in the United States, and may also represent the political influence of corporate sector money over the research community. As noted in the report, about $800 million/year of private sector research funding is funneled to Land Grant universities. Some great research on agroecology is conducted at Land Grant universities, but it is a small fraction of the total. The direction favored by the report seems to be one of reducing the impact of purchased-input farming rather than encouraging agriculture to follow ecological principles. The glimmer of hope for moving away from monoculture farming is the recommendation that some of the proposed funding increase go to non-Land Grant universities, which may not be as dependent on, and therefore influenced by, corporate funding.

The lack of concern about the leverage that this massive influx of private funds may be having on the integrity and independence of agricultural research in the U.S. is troubling. We already know that it has had a corrosive effect on independent research. We should therefore ask how additional public funding of agricultural research may be shielded from that influence. It is remarkable that while many acknowledge that lobbying money from industry buys political favors, the recipients of such largess in our universities seem to have a blind spot when it comes to similar influence closer to home. It may be instructive to examine the history of the pharmaceutical industry and its influence over academia and safety testing to get a hint of where the food industry is, and is increasingly heading.

So while there is a lot in the report that recommends it, in the end, the de facto vision seems to be one aimed at reinforcing industry’s plan for “improving” agriculture. That is reinforced by one of the recommendations of the authors to set up a standing committee to implement the other recommendations of the report. That committee would include representatives of industry, academia, and farmers, but none from civil society that represents the interests of most citizens.

As anyone who reads my posts knows, we do not believe that the industrial vision of agriculture, even beefed up by additional research, will get us where we need to go. Perhaps there is enough left unsaid in the report for an interpretation that allows for agroecology, but the proposed composition of the oversight committee would likely preclude that direction.

In the end, the report may be an additional indication that if society wants a truly sustainable agriculture, it will have to come from public pressure.

Spraying pesticide onto apple trees. USDA photo by Keith Weller.

It was initiated by a research paper that purported to show that organic foods were not more nutritious than conventionally grown counterparts. That paper has rightly been criticized for poor methodology. There is also inherent difficulty in defining the complex nutritional status of whole foods.

But the biggest problem with the paper, and its use by those who want to discredit organic farming, is the lack of recognition of the importance of pesticide residues on foods, harm from pesticides to farmers and farm workers, and harm to the environment from synthetic-chemical dependent farming.

The land of Oz

Most recently, Dr. Mehmet Oz joined the bandwagon of the misinformed in his Time magazine story dismissing the value of organic food. While acknowledging his advice on the importance of eating more fruits and vegetables, even if one cannot get or afford higher-priced organic, Tom Philpott at Mother Jones criticized Oz for ignoring the most compelling reasons for buying organic foods.

Instead of blithely dismissing those trying to improve agriculture to make it better for nutrition, safety, workers and the environment—by setting up the straw man of an elitist food movement—critics like Oz should be asking why the best foods, from the broader perspective of sustainability and environmental justice, are not more available to all segments of society.

Why, for example, are we spending billions of dollars a year on farm subsidies that go mostly to farmers who grow corn and soybeans and do not need them—including a proposed taxpayer-subsidized insurance scheme that would not substantially reduce handouts.

Why not instead support better access for low-income consumers to better quality foods, develop better insurance policies for the diverse farms that grow those foods, and support more research to improve the efficiency of farming organically or sustainably?

Trust us? – Pesticide cocktails revisited

An important blind spot about the health and environmental consequences of pesticides can be found in a brief statement in the earlier-mentioned paper about the nutritional value of organically grown food. The authors, after acknowledging that conventionally grown foods have higher levels of pesticide residues than organic, dismiss this by writing that EPA has not found those residues to be harmful.

This belies several serious limitations of EPA pesticide regulations.

First, the highest standards for health are reserved for consumption of foods, based on a “reasonable certainty of no harm” standard laid down in the Federal Food Drugs and Cosmetics Act (FFDCA). This standard is what the organic research paper indirectly referred to in dismissing concern about consumption of pesticide residues on food. Allowable pesticide residues are based on the results of numerous tests for toxicity, carcinogenicity, harm to susceptible populations like children, and so on.

But lower safety standards apply to farmers and farm workers, who are exposed through contact with skin and inhalation. Workers are protected by the Federal Fungicide, Insecticide, and Rodenticide Act (FFIRA), essentially providing that no unreasonable harm occurs.

So allowable worker pesticide exposure can be much higher after the workers go back into the fields, often as little as 12 to 24 hours after spraying, than through consumption of food (they are required to wear protective clothing and equipment, which is far from perfect). Worker safety is based largely on avoidance of short-term toxicity—sickness shortly after exposure—not long-term harm. This is despite the fact that  several cancers, such as non-Hodgkins lymphoma,  have higher incidence for farm workers and farm families. Is it elitist to be concerned about those who grow our foods? What happened to “first, do no harm”?

Second, the EPA standard for allowable environmental harm is also from FFIRA. This is part of the reason why our Midwest has been allowed to become a virtual biological desert. Without this permissive environmental standard for pesticides, it is questionable whether our current industrial monocultures of corn and soybeans (or fruit and vegetable monocultures in California or Florida), which should be replaced with highly productive sustainable alternatives, would be nearly as productive. An illustration of the low environmental standards at EPA is that FFRIRA is fine with the unnecessary decimation of milkweeds by Roundup herbicide used on herbicide-tolerant engineered crops, which is likely harming monarch butterflies. The way we farm conventionally-grown foods is also causing other huge environmental impacts from coastal dead zones to air pollution.

Mix it up

There are also several serious shortcomings in pesticide testing requirements under FFDCA that raise questions about the safety of allowable residues on foods.

EPA barely considers the possible harm from the cumulative impact of combinations of pesticides. Typically, we are exposed to several, not just one, and several are often found in our bodies. In 1996, congress passed the Food Quality Protection Act (FQPA), which among other things, requires the evaluation of cumulative pesticide exposure. This was a real step forward, but it only involves pesticides that are known to share the same toxic mode of action. But pesticides with different modes of action may interact with unpredictable impacts. Evaluation of all of the many possibly harmful combinations of pesticides found on our foods is a challenge to our regulatory capabilities.

Second, there is still a lot that we do not know about how pesticides or other chemicals may harm us. The recent paper about the possible contribution of some pesticides to obesity exemplifies this broader point. In the past we have understandably been focused on harms such as acute toxicity, cancer, teratogenicity (harm to the developing fetus), and a few others.

It was only with the passage of the FQPA that regulation of endocrine disruption, for which obesogens are one example, was even mandated by the law. And it has only been in the past several years that EPA has developed assays for possible endocrine disruption. So far, most pesticides have not been re-evaluated for their endocrine-disruption potential. Our emerging understanding—which still has a lot of holes—of possible effects on obesity from pesticides has been even more recent, and I do not believe that EPA requires any specific tests for this effect. One particularly worrisome aspect of endocrine disruptors is that some may cause harm at extremely low levels, often in the parts per billion range.

There is still a lot that we do not know about how pesticides can cause harm. There are numerous other aspects of our physiology and biochemistry that could be affected by pesticides, leading to many other possible harms that we can’t predict and have no current tests to detect. This suggests some reasonable caution concerning our food.

So the case for organic—and sustainable food that requires much less pesticide—is about a lot more than the nutritional differences between organic and conventionally-grown crops. Respected spokepeople like Dr. Oz have an opportunity be leaders in the larger discussion about food and how we produce it. It is a shame that he squandered that opportunity.

Proteins in bread wheat have properties that make dough elastic. This allows it to trap gas bubbles from yeast, causing the bread to rise to form classic loaves not possible with other grains. Flickr photo by Dave Pullig

Bread wheat is particularly challenging to study due to the large size of the genome and because it contains a lot of repeated DNA sequences that are hard to line up in the right order. Bread wheat is actually derived from the hybridization of three different closely related grasses, so it contains many similar genes derived from each of the progenitors, making it difficult to sort out.

The DNA sequences carry a lot of fascinating information about the structure of the wheat genome that will keep biologists busy. But there are also many practical implications.

Diversity is the key

As with other crops, the genetic diversity of current commercial wheat varieties—the source of crop and food characteristics, from taste and texture to pest resistance and drought tolerance—is much lower than for wild relatives of wheat. Domestication resulted in a “genetic bottleneck” that reduced genetic diversity. Use of limited sources for wheat breeding has further restricted the genetic diversity of commercially grown wheat and other crops.

But the reduced genetic diversity of current crop varieties also presents an opportunity to greatly improve these crops and the food derived from them.

As noted by the authors:

The genomic resources that we have developed promise to accelerate [breeding] progress by facilitating the identification of useful variation in genes of wheat landraces and progenitor species, and by providing genomic landmarks to guide progeny selection. Analysis of complex polygenic traits such as yield and nutrient use efficiency will also be accelerated, contributing to sustainable increases in wheat crop production.

This conclusion reinforces other work, such as an earlier comparative genetic study of commercial wheat varieties, wheat wild relatives, and landraces—the local varieties that have been developed in place for centuries by small farmers.

Using this diversity for breeding—in conjunction with, and for the benefit of, small farmers in developing countries as well as larger farms in developed countries—and for adaptation to diverse agroecosystems (rather than unsustainable monocultures), will be crucial in coming years. Doing so will increase crop resilience in the face of climate change and improve food security and food sovereignty.

So it is troubling that this diversity could be threatened by the widespread introduction of engineered crops, without proper provisions to protect landraces from contamination or replacement.

That is why over 2,500 scientists and others have signed a petition protesting the proposed planting of engineered maize (corn) in Mexico, the place where corn originated and the region of its highest genetic diversity. It is also one of the reasons for similar concern about the introduction of engineered eggplant (brinjal) in India, the center for genetic diversity of that crop.

The relevance of breeding

The important message of the Nature paper could not be more different from the poorly informed pronouncement of the Wall Street Journal’s “Market Watch” that breeding can’t cut it:

“Indeed, by 2050 the world will need to double its food production to feed the population of what will then be an estimated 9 billion people. Sorry, traditional methods won’t hold. Both an increase in crop yields and areas are needed. And there are mitigating factors to both, climate change among them.”

By “traditional methods” Kostigen seems to mean everything but genetic engineering (GE). While GE may make some contributions, breeding, far from being outdated, and is vastly outpacing crop engineering for producing the very traits that Kostigen mentions.

If Kostigen represents the opinion of investors, it is all the more reason why the public sector needs to greatly increase investment in both conventional breeding and agroecology research.

Better to listen to knowledgeable commentators, such as Daryll Ray and Harwood Schaffer, respected agricultural economists from the University of Tennessee. Their recent blog post points out the opportunistic and self-serving “false dichotomy” set up by the big seed companies and their supporters. The companies claim that we either accept GE and chemical-centered agriculture as the solution to the challenges of food production in coming decades, or accept lower-yielding organic farming as the alternative, which would lead to the decimation of uncultivated ecosystems and possible hunger.

As Ray and Schaffer aptly put it:

“By positing organics as the only alternative to the full use of their products, they [big ag companies] hope to quash any challenge to their vision. They also ignore a lot of other actions that could be helpful in meeting the challenge of feeding 2 billion additional people by 2050—an increase of 28 percent over a 38-year period. In taking on this challenge, we need to remember that we were able to move from feeding a world population of 4 billion in 1974 to feeding 7 billion in 2012—an increase of 75 percent over a 38-year period.

From our vantage point, one needed action is to reduce post-harvest loss, which can be as much as a quarter to a third of the crop. To do this, low-input storage technologies need to be identified that use resources that are available to farm households and can be maintained over the long-haul by the poorest of the poor.”

They go on to point out that productive intercropping, the improvement of neglected crops from the global south like millets, cowpeas, sorghums, and others, and methods like sensible crop rotations developed at Iowa State and elsewhere, are the ticket.

Their prescription is similar to that of the IAASTD, an international effort enlisting several hundred scientists and others, and our recent report about drought tolerant crops. And they go on to remind us that: “The real challenge in feeding all 9 billion people in 2050 is not production; it is distribution.” For example, despite having more food-insecure people than any other country, India exports food.

Ray and Harwood conclude “The first step in meeting this challenge is to enable the farmers who are among the poorest of the poor to produce their own food using sustainable technologies that are within their resource base.”

I could not have put it better.

Here, I want to discuss why the study does not lead to the conclusion that 90-day tests are generally sufficient to determine the safety of GE foods, and more reasons why the study says little about the long-term safety of engineered foods.

Most corn in the U.S. is engineered to contain genes for insect resistance or herbicide tolerance. Photo by danellesheree

Not all that it seems

A major conclusion by the authors of the review is that long-term testing is rarely needed, because 90-day tests provide essentially the same results as the long-term tests. This paragraph from the discussion section sums up the view of Snell:

Despite the exploratory nature of the studies reviewed here, the step-by-step approach is supported by their results. Considering all of them, it is clear that GM food is not revealed to be harmful when the duration of feeding is increased to well over 90 days. Therefore, no evidence is available to show that a duration of 90 days is insufficient to assess the effects of GM food. Studies lasting two years, for example, do not seem necessary except when doubt remains after performing 90-day studies.  [emphasis added]

If true, this would refute arguments that long-term tests are needed to detect possible long-term harm. To be fair, the authors do not entirely rule out the need for long term tests, but make them contingent on troubling results from 90-day tests. This means that 90-day tests need to be able to provide an indication of possible long-term harm that would require follow-up long-term studies to substantiate.

Let’s put aside that toxicologists do not generally accept 90-day subchronic studies as a stand-in for long-term or multi-generational tests. For example, agencies like EPA require long-term tests for chemical pesticides. Or go to the bible of toxicology, Caserette and Doull, which says on page 29 (in my 1996 edition), using the example of food additives, that long-term studies are typically needed to determine possible long-term harm: “…if the agent is a food additive with the potential for lifetime exposure in humans, a chronic study up to two years in duration is likely to be required.”

It is hard to predict how long any GE trait may stay on the market, and therefore how long exposure of the population may last. Glyphosate herbicide resistance and some Bt traits have now been in our food for about 16 years, and are not likely to disappear soon.

The basic problem of the Snell review is that it really does not address the adequacy of 90-day tests as a stand-in for long-term testing. For that, one would need to have an indication of risk in a 90-day test that later showed up as harm in a long-term test. But there were no risks detected in any of the studies that Snell considered to be reliable, so there was no real test of their hypothesis that 90-day tests are sufficient.

The Snell study is analogous to a proposed medical test, say a blood test for Alzheimer’s in middle-aged people to predict whether the disease would develop later in life, but where none of the test subjects went on to develop Alzheimer’s. The results of the blood tests during middle age would not tell you whether the test could detect the disease later, because there was never any Alzheimer’s to detect.

Similarly, the long-term studies reviewed by Snell either had substantial limitations or did not detect harm. We cannot determine whether the 90-day studies were sufficient to detect harm when the long-term studies detected no harm.

Few, if any, acceptable studies

Finally, very few of the studies that Snell and colleagues reviewed are without significant limitations, according to their analysis. For example, many of the 12 long-term and 12 multi-generational studies do not use the proper and universally accepted non-GE crop variety for comparison with the engineered crop (a so-called near-isogenic variety that is nearly identical to the engineered variety, except for the engineered gene). The reviewed research also had other substantial flaws, such as too few test animals.

In the end, they identify only six studies in total that used enough test animals according to OECD standards, including only three long-term studies, not the 12 that the AAAS Board noted. Use of too few animals means that the tests are not sensitive enough to reliably detect harm.

But when these six are examined more carefully, it turns out that only two used the proper near-isogenic control.

One of these so-called acceptable studies used salmon as the test species. But as Casarett and Doull note in their discussion of sub-chronic and chronic (long-term) tests, rodents and dogs are the standard test animals as stand-ins for humans. Fish may be used for ecotoxicology studies (to determine whether something will be harmful to fish in the environment), but they are too different from us to be good stand-ins for safety tests.

I should note that the authors of the salmon study did observe some differences, such as higher triglyceride levels in the GE-fed fish. The authors apparently dismiss this observation by saying that it may be due to genetic differences between the near-isogenic comparison variety (the control) and the GE soybeans. While that is possible, the variety they used is the proper and accepted control, and therefore significant differences should be considered legitimate unless shown by further tests to be in error. The apparent rationalization about this experiment is troubling.

The other test that seems to use the proper controls tested livestock species—chickens, sheep, and cows. Both birds and ruminants (cows and sheep) have very different digestive systems compared to people, which is problematic for food safety tests.

So really, there are no acceptable long-term or multi-generational tests that were reviewed by Snell and colleagues. It is hard to see how this study can be used to suggest that either 90-day studies are generally acceptable, or that they convincingly show that GE foods are safe.

As I briefly discussed in my last post, major science organizations have said that some GE foods produced by current methods could be harmful, and have provided some examples of the kinds of harm that might occur.

The current situation

Most corn, soybeans, and cotton in the U.S. are engineered to contain one or several genes for insect or herbicide resistance. Many more types of engineered genes are in the works. Photo by danellesheree.

No long-term safety tests in animals are required by any regulatory agency. In some circumstances, 90-day, so-called sub-chronic tests may be required in Europe. But 90 days is far short of the one to two years that usually satisfy long-term safety test requirements.

Long-term experiments are required for products like drugs and chemical pesticides, and sometimes for food additives. They are considered important or necessary for determining harm that may take years to develop, such as cancers, Parkinson’s disease, and so on.

Recently, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Board of Directors cited a review of several long-term and multi-generational studies by Snell and colleagues in support of their claim that GE foods are safe and well tested.

The study cited by the AAAS Board has made the rounds in recent months, being used to claim that long-term studies show that GE is safe, and that shorter-term tests are sufficient.

The study authors extrapolate from the reviewed research that GE crops can be safely used in foods, based on currently required tests. For example, at the end of the paper’s abstract they write: “The studies reviewed present evidence to show that GM plants are nutritionally equivalent to their non-GM counterparts and can be safely used in food and feed.” They also conclude that 90-day tests are usually sufficient, and even these may not always be needed.

The study makes some useful contributions, but a careful reading shows that it contains some serious flaws. These limitations — some of which involve the interpretation of the results by the authors — eliminate the value of this study for drawing general conclusions about the safety of GE foods, or the adequacy of current shorter tests to reveal long-term risks from engineered foods.

Missing the fundamentals

The most glaring limitation is that regardless of the findings, generalization about safety and testing of GE crops is not scientifically justified based on the review of several studies.

The safety of the very few currently available engineered traits and foods is not the only issue. There are many novel engineered genes in the pipeline, coding for a plethora of traits, from pest resistance to drought tolerance, to nutritional alterations and industrial products.

We therefore depend on the regulation of engineered traits to ensure the safety of all GE foods — current and future. We must therefore consider whether our regulations are adequate for current and future GE crops and foods.

This is important because most scientists on all sides of the debate about GE safety agree that the risk of each crop and gene combination must be considered on its own merits. In other words, just because one, or ten, or even one hundred genes are shown to be safe does not assure the safety of the next one.

This is easy to understand if we consider the wide range of functions that genes affect — virtually everything that an organism is composed of. Take a Brazil nut tree, for example. The majority of genes code for harmless things like enzymes that make sugars or amino acids in the plant, or make the chlorophyll involved in capturing light energy. But, as I have noted before, one gene also codes for the major allergen from Brazil nuts, which was unsuspectingly engineered into soybeans (and never commercialized), and which can be deadly if consumed by some sensitive people.

One could run safety tests of all of those genes that code for benign functions in the Brazil nut, and according to the review study thereby conclude that, based on current tests, GE foods can be safely used. But what if the next engineered gene was the major Brazil nut allergen? Would this broad conclusion still be valid? Certainly not.

There are obviously harmful genes (or groups of genes) from non-food plants and other organisms that we know about and would therefore avoid engineering into foods, such as the insecticide nicotine produced by tobacco, or the insecticide rotenone, produced by the roots of several tropical plants.

These are generally understood, and therefore avoidable. Rotenone is a particularly interesting example, because it has relatively low immediate (acute) toxicity in mammals, but has been implicated for its possible connection with Parkinson’s disease, which usually occurs later in life, and which was not understood until recently.

These are also extreme examples. But like most phenomena in biology, there are likely to be a range of possible health effects that genes can produce, from innocuous to extreme, and including those that are intermediate and not easily predicable or detectable with short-term tests.

Less fundamental, but important, is that the number of genes reviewed in the Snell paper is actually very small, and not representative of what may be put into crops in coming years. Of the dozen long-term studies reviewed, 10 tested the gene for glyphosate herbicide resistance (EPSPS) in soybeans, one was a Bt insecticidal gene in corn, and one a cedar pollen gene in rice.

Even if generalizations about safety were possible, that is a tiny representation of the possibly hundreds of genes that may be used in coming years, and virtually meaningless for drawing general conclusions.

For the dozen multi-generational studies, six tested Bt in corn, three were for glyphosate in soybeans, two for another herbicide resistance gene (glufosinate) in the grain triticale, and one for a similar gene in potato. This is not likely to be representative of engineered genes or crops in coming years.

For these reasons alone, the Snell paper says little about the safety of GE foods generally, or the need for long-term testing. It is therefore misleading to use the study to make broad claims that GE foods are safe based on existing long-term tests in animals, or, as the AAAS Board claimed, are equivalent to their non-GE counterparts.

But there is more, and in my next post I will discuss specific limitations of the Snell research, including why it does not demonstrate that short-term or 90-day studies are generally sufficient to determine the safety of engineered genes.

Apparently, so are other scientists. A group of 21 scientists from academia have strenuously objected to the AAAS Board Statement, making important points about why people may want to know whether they are eating GE foods, including broad issues about the lack of sustainability of GE crops, harm from resistant weeds, and herbicide use.

I will leave to others speculation on the Board’s reasons for commenting on this labeling initiative, and stick to some of the science-related points that the Board addresses.

For example, in the first paragraph, the Board’s statement declares:

“Indeed, the science is quite clear: crop improvement by the modern molecular techniques of biotechnology is safe.”

This pronouncement ignores the the findings of major science organizations over the past 10 or 15 years, that some GE crops could be harmful to eat or harmful to the environment. Given these findings, a blanket statement that GE crops are “safe” is misleading.

Scientists that have carefully considered the safety of GE foods recognize that it depends, in large part, on the particular genes involved. There is no doubt that some genes code for harmful or potentially harmful substances, while some do not. We already have one clear example of a harmful engineered gene (though not commercialized). Because the safety of an engineered food depends on the properties of the particular gene, it is misleading to suggest that we can generalize about the safety of all GE foods from the GE foods currently available.

Likewise, studies of particular GE crops, even many of them, say little or nothing about the safety of other crops with other genes that can have very different properties. So the cited European research, while useful, does not settle this question.

For example. the National Academy of Sciences through its National Research Council (NRC) wrote in its 2000 report, Genetically Modified Pest-Protected Plants, that transgenic crops, like classically bred crops, could pose “…high or low risks…” (p. 6). The report went on to support regulation of GE crops, writing: “There is an urgency to complete the regulatory framework for transgenic pest-protected plant products because of the potential diversity of novel traits that could be introduced by transgenic methods…” (p.12).

Similarly, a 2002 NRC report, Environmental Effects of Transgenic Plants: The Scope and Adequacy of Regulation, notes that both conventional methods of crop improvement and GE can introduce traits that “…can pose unique risks.” (p. 5).

And Genetically Modified Pest-Protected Plants says on page 14 that: “FDA should put a high priority on finalizing and releasing preliminary guidance on the assessment of potential food allergens, while cautioning that further research is needed in this area.”

Perhaps in response, FDA set up an advisory committee in 2002 whose first assigned task was to evaluate FDA’s allergy testing guidelines for GE foods. I was one of the ten or so scientists on that committee. We made recommendations to FDA to improve its process. These recommendations were ignored, despite assurances to us that our concerns would be addressed.

Relatively little further research, needed to develop more reliable allergenicity tests, has been conducted, and the tests that are often used have the same limitations as when the NRC report was written.

Another statement by the AAAS Board, that “In order to receive regulatory approval in the United States, each new GM crop must be subjected to rigorous analysis and testing,” and that the food must be shown to be non-allergenic and non-toxic, is simply false.

As I noted in a previous post, and as the 21 scientists above point out, the FDA review process for GE foods is voluntary, and provides no detailed guidance on how to test GE foods to ensure their safety. No “must” involved! At the end of its cursory review, the agency does not approve the safety of these foods, but reminds the company that FDA is relying on the company’s assessment of safety.

And there is also the question of whether the approval process for pesticidal GE crops at EPA can legitimately be called rigorous. Compared to the testing required for chemical pesticides, the answer is unequivocally “no.” There are extensive testing guidelines for chemical pesticides required by U.S. EPA, for example, that include long-term animal testing, mutation testing, carcinogenicity testing and so on. Even these tests are imperfect. For GE foods, EPA requires only short term animal testing, for about a month, with a single high dose of the engineered substance, and some allergenicity testing. There are no long-term tests required, no mutation testing, and so on. Some would question whether these more thorough tests are needed, but trying to pass off testing of GE in the U.S. as rigorous is dubious.

Finally, the Board tries to dispel what has become perhaps the most persistent criticism of GE food safety testing: That no long-term testing in animals is required, which is usually needed to have any confidence that slowly-developing maladies will not be caused.

They cite a recent review of several long-term studies that concludes that the GE and non-GE counterparts are nutritionally equivalent. This study has been widely cited to argue that long-term testing of GE has been conducted, shows that GE is safe, and that short-term or 90 day animal safety tests are sufficient.

Close examination of that research, however, reveals several serious flaws that invalidate these conclusions. I will look at this paper in detail in my next post.

Honey bee on an apple blossom. USDA photo

Bees are our most important pollinators, ensuring the productivity of 30 percent of our crops—especially fruits and veggies. Bees and other helpers are needed to transfer pollen between flowers of many crops including squashes, apples, and almonds.

And it is not just bees that are threatened. Studies have found that neonic seed treatments may harm other helpful  insects. There is an army of different beneficial organisms that help protect our crops. Many insects, spiders, birds and bats consume tons of insects that would otherwise harm crops and reduce food production, and neonics may be harming some of them.

But this raises the question of why so much corn seed is treated with these insecticides. And not just corn. Neocotinoid seed treatments are also being used more commonly in other major crops, such as soybeans.

The nearly ubiquitous use of insecticde seed treatments is a relatively new phenomenon. Their widespread use on seeds started in the past decade. Why is agriculture still using so much pesticide?

Genetically engineered crops, which were promoted as pesticide-reducing, have probably driven up pesticide use in the U.S. Somewhat reduced insecticide use is more than offset by increased herbicide use, driven by millions of acres of resistant weeds. Industry’s answer, more herbicide resistant crops, will likely exacerbate this trend. Some weeds have already developed resistance to multiple herbicides, including weed killers that will be used on the new engineered crops, making this a questionable (but profitable) strategy.

“It’s a joy to be simple”? Well, not always

At the root of the problem is the biological simplification of agriculture, as I discussed in earlier posts on the rise of neonicotinoids and the importance of diversity in the farm landscape. Most pests attack only a limited number of crops. When other crops are grown, those pests cannot increase their numbers as easily.

Crop diversity provides beneficial organisms with habitat that supplies them with food and shelter throughout the year.

By contrast, simple farming systems, which grow large amounts of one or two crops year after year, promote pest outbreaks.

On the simple farms in the Midwest, engineered Bt corn kills some insect pests, but leaves others uncontrolled, which is probably one reason that neonicotinoid seed treatments have replaced sprayed or soil-applied insecticides. The soil insecticides killed more types of insect pests than Bt, so switching to Bt left corn vulnerable to insects that are immune to Bt but susceptible to insecticide. The limited number of insect types killed by Bt is an environmental benefit, because it means Bt is less likely to harm beneficial insects. But it is also a limitation because of the pest insects that are not controlled.

This dilemma is largely a byproduct of the simplified farming systems where Bt is popular. In more complex systems, the pests not controlled by Bt would be less of a problem. Resistance to Bt, which is now developing  in corn rootworm and may drive up insecticide use, would also be less likely to occur.

On the other hand, there would be much less need for Bt on diverse farms. For example, rootworm is not usually a problem when crops are rotated (alternated) from year to year, because it does not survive well on most other crops. Less need for Bt would mean less demand, and therefore Bt corn seed would command a lower price. This raises the question of whether the companies could afford to produce these crops for a more sustainable farming system, given the high price tag of genetic engineering—mostly R&D and infrastructure—about $140 million per trait according to an industry study.

Meanwhile, we are learning more about practical ways to increase the biological complexity of the landscape, both on and near the farm. Longer crop rotations dramatically reduced the use of pesticides while maintaining productivity and profits, according to new research from Iowa State University (as discussed by my colleague Karen Stillerman, and also here) .

We also know that biological complexity in the non-farmed landscape is important for supplying farms with pollinators and organisms that control pests. Work at Michigan State University found that the amount of extra insecticide needed in several Midwestern states due to the reduction of hedgerows, woodlots and so on, would be enough to blanket the State of Connecticut.

Revenge of the Red Queen

In Louis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass, the Red Queen finds herself running faster and faster just to stay in place. Biologists have used this analogy in a number of contexts, such as the co-evolution between pathogens and hosts. In agriculture, our simplified systems have created their own version of the Red Queen effect. It is often called the “pesticide treadmill,” and is the legacy of the kind of agriculture favored by big ag companies, facilitated by the accommodating research and policy agenda of the USDA.

This “Alice in Wonderland” world is not the way things have to be, as recent research has shown.

Fortunately, we have seen some movement in the right direction. For example, recent Farm Bills have increased funding for sustainable agriculture research through programs like OREI and SARE, support for farmers transitioning to organic farming, and so on. But they still receive a pittance of the funding that goes toward continuing our current misguided agriculture system. And much of this progress is threatened by the dysfunctional farm bill negotiations in Congress that you can help turn around.

Farmers will do the right thing if we help or encourage them instead of pushing in the wrong direction. They have an interest in exposing themselves, their workers, and their families to fewer pesticides.

Why the current system is so entrenched is part of a much longer discussion that I hope to take up in coming posts.