Cultivating an Ecological Conscience: Essays from a Farmer Philosopher

Biotechnology on the Ground: What Kind of Future Can Farmers Expect, and What Kind Should They Create?

Biotechnology on the Ground What Kind of Future Can Farmers Expect, and What Kind Should They Create? A pragmatic assessment of any technology is complicated by the cultural love affair with technology that we have nurtured in our society since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. By now, farmers must comprehend that not all new technologies will be beneficial. Indeed, Willard Cochrane demonstrated how new technologies can be detrimental to farmers with his concept of the “technology treadmill.” Even when a technology appears to be beneficial to farmers, like tractors replacing horses for greater labor efficiency, it will put a good number of farmers out of business.1 Whether eliminating farmers from farming has been, or continues to be, a social benefit is a subject for a debate that we have never had in any democratic forum. But to argue that every new technology is a sign of progress and bound to benefit farmers is a proposition of mythology, not sound business or social policy. While every new technology usually benefits someone, not every new technology benefits everyone. Farmers need to ask whom genetic engineering will benefit. The likely beneficiaries are the corporations developing the technologies and their investors. They wouldn’t invest billions of dollars otherwise. The biotechnology industry claims that farmers will also benefit. The alleged benefits can generally be subsumed under three categories. The technology will: • Enable farmers to feed a world of expanding human population. This claim mostly promises farmers an opportunity to achieve a social 153 This is an edited version of a talk presented at the National Agricultural Biotechnology Council meeting, Lincoln, Nebraska, June 7, 1999, and later published in National Agricultural Biotechnology Report #11 (Ithaca, N.Y.: National Biotechnology Council, 1999). 154 Cultivating an Ecological Conscience goal, but it is generally assumed that it would also provide them with economic benefits. • Simplify farmers’ pest-management problems in an environmentally benign way. This claim promises to benefit farmers directly and to enable them to achieve a social goal. • Increase farmer profitability and make them more competitive in the marketplace. This claim promises direct benefits to farmers. Are these claims true? I argue, from a farmer’s perspective, that farmers will unlikely experience these benefits, given the way the technology is currently applied. Genetic Engineering Will Feed the World There is a fundamental flaw with the claim that genetically engineered foods will feed the world. Hunger is not caused by food availability, but by food entitlement. In other words, hunger is not caused by an insufficient quantity of food, but by insufficient access to food. Feeding the world is therefore largely a social and economic problem, not a production problem.2,3 Ironically, continuing to assert that hunger is a production problem without considering entitlement issues only exacerbates the problem and ends up hurting farmers economically. For example, soybean production in Brazil has increased dramatically in recent years. But the soybeans are produced primarily for export, where they are used for animal feed, which denies local Brazilians entitlement to the food-production capacity of their own country. Consequently, while soybean production has exploded, the number of malnourished in Brazil has increased from one-third of the population to almost two-thirds. Brazil’s increased food requirements will not be supplied by U.S. exports because malnourished Brazilians cannot afford them. The expansion of soybean production has pushed soybean prices down to $4 per bushel and has decreased the availability of land for local food production in Brazil. This is not a formula that feeds the world or brings benefits to the majority of farmers. Converting all the soybeans grown in Brazil to genetically engineered varieties won’t change that. Furthermore, focusing on more food as the single solution to feeding expanding human populations distracts us from a host of other problems that further overcrowding by still more humans on the planet will surely create: 155 Biotechnology on the Ground • Increased disease • Destruction of ecosystem services • Increased fragility of the entire ecosystem To my knowledge, no one ever asked farmers if they wanted to take on the responsibility of feeding the world or asked them how they wanted to do it, if they did. Genetic Engineering Will Solve Pest-Management Problems in an Environmentally Benign Manner The fundamental flaw with the claim that genetic engineering will help farmers manage pests without harming the environment is that this strategy adheres to the same paradigm that...