The Atlantic Monthly, October 2003
THAT genetic engineering may
be the most environmentally beneficial technology to have emerged in decades,
or possibly centuries, is not immediately obvious. Certainly, at least, it is
not obvious to the many U.S. and foreign environmental groups that regard
biotechnology as a bête noire. Nor is it necessarily obvious to people who grew
up in cities, and who have only an inkling of what happens on a modern farm.
Being agriculturally illiterate myself, I set out to look at what may be, if
the planet is fortunate, the farming of the future.
It was baking hot that April day. I traveled with two Virginia state
soil-and-water-conservation officers and an agricultural-extension agent to an
area not far from Richmond. The farmers there are national (and therefore
world) leaders in the application of what is known as continuous no-till
farming. In plain English, they don't plough. For thousands of years, since the
dawn of the agricultural revolution, farmers have ploughed, often several times
a year; and with ploughing has come runoff that pollutes rivers and blights
aquatic habitat, erosion that wears away the land, and the release into the
atmosphere of greenhouse gases stored in the soil. Today, at last, farmers are
working out methods that have begun to make ploughing obsolete.
At about one-thirty we arrived at a 200-acre patch of farmland known as the
Good Luck Tract. No one seemed to know the provenance of the name, but the best
guess was that somebody had said something like "You intend to farm this?
Good luck!" The land was rolling, rather than flat, and its slopes came
together to form natural troughs for rainwater. Ordinarily this highly erodible
land would be suitable for cows, not crops. Yet it was dense with wheat—wheat
yielding almost twice what could normally be expected, and in soil that had
grown richer in organic matter, and thus more nourishing to crops, even as the
land was farmed. Perhaps most striking was the almost complete absence of any
chemical or soil runoff. Even the beating administered in 1999 by Hurricane
Floyd, which lashed the ground with nineteen inches of rain in less than
twenty-four hours, produced no significant runoff or erosion. The land simply
absorbed the sheets of water before they could course downhill.
At another site, a few miles away, I saw why. On land planted in corn whose
shoots had only just broken the surface, Paul Davis, the extension agent,
wedged a shovel into the ground and dislodged about eight inches of topsoil.
Then he reached down and picked up a clump. Ploughed soil, having been stirred
up and turned over again and again, becomes lifeless and homogeneous, but the
clump that Davis held out was alive. I immediately noticed three squirming
earthworms, one grub, and quantities of tiny white insects that looked very
busy. As if in greeting, a worm defecated. "Plant-available food!" a
delighted Davis exclaimed.
This soil, like that of the Good Luck Tract, had not been ploughed for years,
allowing the underground ecosystem to return. Insects and roots and
microorganisms had given the soil an elaborate architecture, which held the
earth in place and made it a sponge for water. That was why erosion and runoff
had been reduced to practically nil. Crops thrived because worms were doing the
ploughing. Crop residue that was left on the ground, rather than ploughed under
as usual, provided nourishment for the soil's biota and, as it decayed,
enriched the soil. The farmer saved the fuel he would have used driving back
and forth with a heavy plough. That saved money, and of course it also saved
energy and reduced pollution. On top of all that, crop yields were better than
with conventional methods.
The conservation people in Virginia were full of excitement over no-till
farming. Their job was to clean up the James and York Rivers and the rest of
the Chesapeake Bay watershed. Most of the sediment that clogs and clouds the
rivers, and most of the fertilizer runoff that causes the algae blooms that
kill fish, comes from farmland. By all but eliminating agricultural erosion and
runoff—so Brian Noyes, the local conservation-district manager, told
me—continuous no-till could "revolutionize" the area's water quality.
Even granting that Noyes is an enthusiast, from an environmental point of view
no-till farming looks like a dramatic advance. The rub—if it is a rub—is that
the widespread elimination of the plough depends on genetically modified crops.
IT
is only a modest exaggeration to say that as goes agriculture, so goes the
planet. Of all the human activities that shape the environment, agriculture is
the single most important, and it is well ahead of whatever comes second. Today
about 38 percent of the earth's land area is cropland or pasture—a total that
has crept upward over the past few decades as global population has grown. The
increase has been gradual, only about 0.3 percent a year; but that still
translates into an additional Greece or Nicaragua cultivated or grazed every
year.
Farming does not go easy on the earth, and never has. To farm is to make war
upon millions of plants (weeds, so-called) and animals (pests, so-called) that
in the ordinary course of things would crowd out or eat or infest whatever it
is a farmer is growing. Crop monocultures, as whole fields of only wheat or
corn or any other single plant are called, make poor habitat and are vulnerable
to disease and disaster. Although fertilizer runs off and pollutes water,
farming without fertilizer will deplete and eventually exhaust the soil.
Pesticides can harm the health of human beings and kill desirable or harmless
bugs along with pests. Irrigation leaves behind trace elements that can
accumulate and poison the soil. And on and on.
The trade-offs are
fundamental. Organic farming, for example, uses no artificial fertilizer, but
it does use a lot of manure, which can pollute water and contaminate food.
Traditional farmers may use less herbicide, but they also do more ploughing,
with all the ensuing environmental complications. Low-input agriculture uses
fewer chemicals but more land. The point is not that farming is an
environmental crime—it is not—but that there is no escaping the pressure it
puts on the planet.
In the next half century the pressure will intensify. The United Nations, in
its midrange projections, estimates that the earth's human population will grow
by more than 40 percent, from 6.3 billion people today to 8.9 billion in 2050.
Feeding all those people, and feeding their billion or so hungry pets (a dog or
a cat is one of the first things people want once they move beyond a
subsistence lifestyle), and providing the increasingly protein-rich diets that
an increasingly wealthy world will expect—doing all of that will require food
output to at least double, and possibly triple.
But then the story will change. According to the UN's midrange projections
(which may, if anything, err somewhat on the high side), around 2050 the
world's population will more or less level off. Even if the growth does not
stop, it will slow. The crunch will be over. In fact, if in 2050 crop yields
are still increasing, if most of the world is economically developed, and if
population pressures are declining or even reversing—all of which seems
reasonably likely—then the human species may at long last be able to feed
itself, year in and year out, without putting any additional net stress on the
environment. We might even be able to grow everything we need while reducing
our agricultural footprint: returning cropland to wilderness, repairing damaged
soils, restoring ecosystems, and so on. In other words, human agriculture might
be placed on a sustainable footing forever: a breathtaking prospect.
The great problem, then, is to get through the next four or five decades with
as little environmental damage as possible. That is where biotechnology comes in.
ONE
day recently I drove down to southern Virginia to visit Dennis Avery and his
son, Alex. The older Avery, a man in late middle age with a chinstrap beard,
droopy eyes, and an intent, scholarly manner, lives on ninety-seven acres that
he shares with horses, chickens, fish, cats, dogs, bluebirds, ducks, transient
geese, and assorted other creatures. He is the director of global food issues
at the Hudson Institute, a conservative think tank; Alex works with him, and is
trained as a plant physiologist. We sat in a sunroom at the back of the house,
our afternoon conversation punctuated every so often by dog snores and rooster
crows. We talked for a little while about the Green Revolution, a dramatic
advance in farm productivity that fed the world's burgeoning population over
the past four decades, and then I asked if the challenge of the next four
decades could be met.
"Well," Dennis replied, "we have tripled the world's farm output
since 1960. And we're feeding twice as many people from the same land. That was
a heroic achievement. But we have to do what some think is an even more
difficult thing in this next forty years, because the Green Revolution had more
land per person and more water per person—"
"—and more potential for increases," Alex added, "because the
base that we were starting from was so much lower."
"By and large," Dennis went on, "the world's civilizations have
been built around its best farmland. And we have used most of the world's good
farmland. Most of the good land is already heavily fertilized. Most of the good
land is already being planted with high-yield seeds. [Africa is the important
exception.] Most of the good irrigation sites are used. We can't triple yields
again with the technologies we're already using. And we might be lucky to get a
fifty percent yield increase if we froze our technology short of biotech."
"Biotech" can refer to a number of things, but the relevant
application here is genetic modification: the selective transfer of genes from
one organism to another. Ordinary breeding can cross related varieties, but it
cannot take a gene from a bacterium, for instance, and transfer it to a wheat
plant. The organisms resulting from gene transfers are called
"transgenic" by scientists—and "Frankenfood" by many
greens.
Gene transfer poses risks, unquestionably. So, for that matter, does
traditional crossbreeding. But many people worry that transgenic organisms
might prove more unpredictable. One possibility is that transgenic crops would
spread from fields into forests or other wild lands and there become
environmental nuisances, or worse. A further risk is that transgenic plants
might cross-pollinate with neighboring wild plants, producing
"superweeds" or other invasive or destructive varieties in the wild.
Those risks are real enough that even most biotech enthusiasts—including Dennis
Avery, for example—favor some government regulation of transgenic crops.
What is much less widely appreciated is biotech's potential to do the
environment good. Take as an example continuous no-till farming, which really
works best with the help of transgenic crops. Human beings have been ploughing
for so long that we tend to forget why we started doing it in the first place.
The short answer: weed control. Turning over the soil between plantings
smothers weeds and their seeds. If you don't plough, your land becomes a weed
garden—unless you use herbicides to kill the weeds. Herbicides, however, are
expensive, and can be complicated to apply. And they tend to kill the good with
the bad.
In the mid-1990s the agricultural-products company Monsanto introduced a
transgenic soybean variety called Roundup Ready. As the name implies, these
soybeans tolerate Roundup, an herbicide (also made by Monsanto) that kills many
kinds of weeds and then quickly breaks down into harmless ingredients. Equipped
with Roundup Ready crops, farmers found that they could retire their ploughs
and control weeds with just a few applications of a single, relatively benign
herbicide—instead of many applications of a complex and expensive menu of
chemicals. More than a third of all U.S. soybeans are now grown without
ploughing, mostly owing to the introduction of Roundup Ready varieties.
Ploughless cotton farming has likewise received a big boost from the advent of
bioengineered varieties. No-till farming without biotech is possible, but it's
more difficult and expensive, which is why no-till and biotech are advancing in
tandem.
In 2001 a group of scientists announced that they had engineered a transgenic
tomato plant able to thrive on salty water—water, in fact, almost half as salty
as seawater, and fifty times as salty as tomatoes can ordinarily abide. One of
the researchers was quoted as saying, "I've already transformed tomato,
tobacco, and canola. I believe I can transform any crop with this
gene"—just the sort of Frankenstein hubris that makes environmentalists
shudder. But consider the environmental implications. Irrigation has for
millennia been a cornerstone of agriculture, but it comes at a price. As
irrigation water evaporates, it leaves behind traces of salt, which accumulate
in the soil and gradually render it infertile. (As any Roman legion knows, to
destroy a nation's agricultural base you salt the soil.) Every year the world
loses about 25 million acres—an area equivalent to a fifth of California—to
salinity; 40 percent of the world's irrigated land, and 25 percent of
America's, has been hurt to some degree. For decades traditional plant breeders
tried to create salt-tolerant crop plants, and for decades they failed.
Salt-tolerant crops might bring millions of acres of wounded or crippled land
back into production. "And it gets better," Alex Avery told me. The
transgenic tomato plants take up and sequester in their leaves as much as six
or seven percent of their weight in sodium. "Theoretically," Alex
said, "you could reclaim a salt-contaminated field by growing enough of
these crops to remove the salts from the soil."
His father chimed in: "We've worried about being able to keep these
salt-contaminated fields going even for decades. We can now think about centuries."
One of the first biotech crops to reach the market, in the mid-1990s, was a
cotton plant that makes its own pesticide. Scientists incorporated into the
plant a toxin-producing gene from a soil bacterium known as Bacillus
thuringiensis. With Bt cotton, as it is called, farmers can spray much
less, and the poison contained in the plant is delivered only to bugs that
actually eat the crop. As any environmentalist can tell you, insecticide is not
very nice stuff—especially if you breathe it, which many Third World farmers do
as they walk through their fields with backpack sprayers.
Transgenic cotton reduced pesticide use by more than two million pounds in the
United States from 1996 to 2000, and it has reduced pesticide sprayings in
parts of China by more than half. Earlier this year the Environmental
Protection Agency approved a genetically modified corn that resists a beetle
larva known as rootworm. Because rootworm is American corn's most voracious
enemy, this new variety has the potential to reduce annual pesticide use in
America by more than 14 million pounds. It could reduce or eliminate the
spraying of pesticide on 23 million acres of U.S. land.
All of that is the beginning, not the end. Bioengineers are also working, for
instance, on crops that tolerate aluminum, another major contaminant of soil,
especially in the tropics. Return an acre of farmland to productivity, or
double yields on an already productive acre, and, other things being equal, you
reduce by an acre the amount of virgin forest or savannah that will be stripped
and cultivated. That may be the most important benefit of all.
OF
the many people I have interviewed in my twenty years as a journalist, Norman
Borlaug must be the one who has saved the most lives. Today he is an
unprepossessing eighty-nine-year-old man of middling height, with
crystal-bright blue eyes and thinning white hair. He still loves to talk about
plant breeding, the discipline that won him the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize: Borlaug
led efforts to breed the staples of the Green Revolution. Yet the renowned plant breeder is quick to mention that he began his career, in
the 1930s, in forestry, and that forest conservation has never been far from
his thoughts. In the 1960s, while he was working to improve crop yields in
India and Pakistan, he made a mental connection. He would create tables
detailing acres under cultivation and average yields—and then, in another
column, he would estimate how much land had been saved by higher farm
productivity. Later, in the 1980s and 1990s, he and others began paying
increased attention to what some agricultural economists now call the Borlaug
hypothesis: that the Green Revolution has saved not only many human lives but,
by improving the productivity of existing farmland, also millions of acres of
tropical forest and other habitat—and so has saved countless animal lives.
From the 1960s through the 1980s, for example, Green Revolution advances saved
more than 100 million acres of wild lands in India. More recently, higher
yields in rice, coffee, vegetables, and other crops have reduced or in some
cases stopped forest-clearing in Honduras, the Philippines, and elsewhere.
Dennis Avery estimates that if farming techniques and yields had not improved
since 1950, the world would have lost an additional 20 million or so square
miles of wildlife habitat, most of it forest. About 16 million square miles of
forest exists today. "What I'm saying," Avery said, in response to my
puzzled expression, "is that we have saved every square mile of forest on
the planet."
Habitat destruction remains a serious environmental problem; in some respects
it is the most serious. The savannahs and tropical forests of Central and South
America, Asia, and Africa by and large make poor farmland, but they are the
earth's storehouses of biodiversity, and the forests are the earth's lungs.
Since 1972 about 200,000 square miles of Amazon rain forest have been cleared
for crops and pasture; from 1966 to 1994 all but three of the Central American
countries cleared more forest than they left standing. Mexico is losing more
than 4,000 square miles of forest a year to peasant farms; sub-Saharan Africa
is losing more than 19,000.
That is why the great challenge of the next four or five decades is not to feed
an additional three billion people (and their pets) but to do so without
converting much of the world's prime habitat into second- or third-rate
farmland. Now, most agronomists agree that some substantial yield improvements
are still to be had from advances in conventional breeding, fertilizers, herbicides,
and other Green Revolution standbys. But it seems pretty clear that
biotechnology holds more promise—probably much more. Recall that world food
output will need to at least double and possibly triple over the next several
decades. Even if production could be increased that much using conventional
technology, which is doubtful, the required amounts of pesticide and fertilizer
and other polluting chemicals would be immense. If properly developed,
disseminated, and used, genetically modified crops might well be the best hope
the planet has got.
IF
properly developed, disseminated, and used. That tripartite qualification turns
out to be important, and it brings the environmental community squarely, and at
the moment rather jarringly, into the picture.
Not long ago I went to see David Sandalow in his office at the World Wildlife
Fund, in Washington, D.C. Sandalow, the organization's executive vice-president
in charge of conservation programs, is a tall, affable, polished, and slightly
reticent man in his forties who holds degrees from Yale and the University of
Michigan Law School.
Some weeks earlier, over lunch, I had mentioned Dennis Avery's claim that
genetic modification had great environmental potential. I was surprised when
Sandalow told me he agreed. Later, in our interview in his office, I asked him
to elaborate. "With biotechnology," he said, "there are no
simple answers. Biotechnology has huge potential benefits and huge risks, and
we need to address both as we move forward. The huge potential benefits include
increased productivity of arable land, which could relieve pressure on forests.
They include decreased pesticide usage. But the huge risks include severe
ecological disruptions—from gene flow and from enhanced invasiveness, which is
a very antiseptic word for some very scary stuff."
I asked if he thought that, absent biotechnology, the world could feed
everybody over the next forty or fifty years without ploughing down the rain
forests. Instead of answering directly he said, "Biotechnology could be
part of our arsenal if we can overcome some of the barriers. It will never be a
panacea or a magic bullet. But nor should we remove it from our tool kit."
Sandalow is unusual. Very few credentialed greens talk the way he does about
biotechnology, at least publicly. They would readily agree with him about the
huge risks, but they wouldn't be caught dead speaking of huge potential
benefits—a point I will come back to. From an ecological point of view, a very
great deal depends on other environmentalists' coming to think more the way
Sandalow does.
Biotech companies are in business to make money. That is fitting and proper.
But developing and testing new transgenic crops is expensive and commercially
risky, to say nothing of politically controversial. When they decide how to
invest their research-and-development money, biotech companies will naturally
seek products for which farmers and consumers will pay top dollar. Roundup
Ready products, for instance, are well suited to U.S. farming, with its high levels
of capital spending on such things as herbicides and automated sprayers. Poor
farmers in the developing world, of course, have much less buying power.
Creating, say, salt-tolerant cassava suitable for growing on hardscrabble
African farms might save habitat as well as lives —but commercial enterprises
are not likely to fall over one another in a rush to do it.
If earth-friendly transgenics are developed, the next problem is disseminating
them. As a number of the farmers and experts I talked to were quick to mention,
switching to an unfamiliar new technology—something like no-till—is not easy.
It requires capital investment in new seed and equipment, mastery of new skills
and methods, a fragile transition period as farmer and ecology readjust, and an
often considerable amount of trial and error to find out what works best on any
given field. Such problems are only magnified in the Third World, where the
learning curve is steeper and capital cushions are thin to nonexistent. Just
handing a peasant farmer a bag of newfangled seed is not enough. In many cases
peasant farmers will need one-on-one attention. Many will need help to pay for
the seed, too.
Finally there is the matter of using biotech in a way that actually benefits
the environment. Often the technological blade can cut either way, especially
in the short run. A salt-tolerant or drought-resistant rice that allowed
farmers to keep land in production might also induce them to plough up virgin
land that previously was too salty or too dry to farm. If the effect of
improved seed is to make farming more profitable, farmers may respond, at least
temporarily, by bringing more land into production. If a farm becomes more
productive, it may require fewer workers; and if local labor markets cannot
provide jobs for them, displaced workers may move to a nearby patch of rain
forest and burn it down to make way for subsistence farming. Such transition
problems are solvable, but they need money and attention.
In short, realizing the great—probably unique—environmental potential of
biotech will require stewardship. "It's a tool," Sara Scherr, an
agricultural economist with the conservation group Forest Trends, told me,
"but it's absolutely not going to happen automatically."
So now ask a question: Who is the natural constituency for earth-friendly
biotechnology? Who cares enough to lobby governments to underwrite
research—frequently unprofitable research—on transgenic crops that might
restore soils or cut down on pesticides in poor countries? Who cares enough to teach
Asian or African farmers, one by one, how to farm without ploughing? Who cares
enough to help poor farmers afford high-tech, earth-friendly seed? Who cares
enough to agitate for programs and reforms that might steer displaced peasants
and profit-seeking farmers away from sensitive lands? Not politicians, for the
most part. Not farmers. Not corporations. Not consumers.
At the World Resources Institute, an environmental think tank in Washington,
the molecular biologist Don Doering envisions transgenic crops designed
specifically to solve environmental problems: crops that might fertilize the
soil, crops that could clean water, crops tailored to remedy the ecological
problems of specific places. "Suddenly you might find yourself with a
virtually chemical-free agriculture, where your cropland itself is filtering
the water, it's protecting the watershed, it's providing habitat," Doering
told me. "There is still so little investment in what I call
design-for-environment." The natural constituency for such investment is,
of course, environmentalists.
BUT
environmentalists are not acting as such a constituency today. They are doing
the opposite. For example, Greenpeace declares on its Web site: "The
introduction of genetically engineered (GE) organisms into the complex
ecosystems of our environment is a dangerous global experiment with nature and
evolution ... GE organisms must not be released into the environment. They pose
unacceptable risks to ecosystems, and have the potential to threaten
biodiversity, wildlife and sustainable forms of agriculture."
Other groups argue for what they call the Precautionary Principle, under which
no transgenic crop could be used until proven benign in virtually all respects.
The Sierra Club says on its Web site,
In accordance with this Precautionary Principle, we call for a moratorium on the planting of all genetically engineered crops and the release of all GEOs [genetically engineered organisms] into the environment, including those now approved. Releases should be delayed until extensive, rigorous research is done which determines the long-term environmental and health impacts of each GEO and there is public debate to ascertain the need for the use of each GEO intended for release into the environment. [italics added]
Under this policy the cleaner
water and healthier soil that continuous no-till farming has already brought to
the Chesapeake Bay watershed would be undone, and countless tons of polluted
runoff and eroded topsoil would accumulate in Virginia rivers and streams while
debaters debated and researchers researched. Recall David Sandalow:
"Biotechnology has huge potential benefits and huge risks, and we need to
address both as we move forward." A lot of environmentalists would say
instead, "before we move forward." That is an important
difference, particularly because the big population squeeze will happen not in
the distant future but over the next several decades.
For reasons having more to do with politics than with logic, the modern
environmental movement was to a large extent founded on suspicion of markets
and artificial substances. Markets exploit the earth; chemicals poison it.
Biotech touches both hot buttons. It is being pushed forward by greedy
corporations, and it seems to be the very epitome of the unnatural.
Still, I hereby hazard a prediction. In ten years or less, most American
environmentalists (European ones are more dogmatic) will regard genetic
modification as one of their most powerful tools. In only the past ten years or
so, after all, environmentalists have reversed field and embraced market
mechanisms—tradable emissions permits and the like—as useful in the fight
against pollution. The environmental logic of biotechnology is, if anything,
even more compelling. The potential upside of genetic modification is simply
too large to ignore—and therefore environmentalists will not ignore it.
Biotechnology will transform agriculture, and in doing so will transform
American environmentalism.