J O N A T H A N R A U C H • C A N F R A N K E N F O O D S A V E T H E P L A N E T ? 3 7 1

regard to meat eating would supposedly beundermined by the prospect of animal flesh beingproduced without pain, suffering, and killing. Butfirst, this view shows Uttle understanding of whatvegetarianism is all about (see the final section ofthis article and Fox 1999). Second, synthetic meatis merely a possibility today; we are very far firomseeing it drive conventional factory farms out ofbusiness. And if it did, this would cause as big aneconomic upheaval as a large-scale transition tovegetarianism. Third, if meat eaters so desperately

want meat that they will queue up for fake,laboratory-cultured versions, let them do so andleave the fresh, healthy, naturally grown plants tothe rest of us.

7. I have, and it is a profoundly disturbing experience.For readers with strong stomachs who might bewilling to "visit" an abattoir through the pages ofa book, I recommend Coe (1995) and Eisnetz(1997).

3 9

Can Frankenfood Save the Planet?JONATHAN RAUCH

Jonathan Rauch is a writer for the Atlantic Monthly. In this essay he presents evidenceto the effect that genetically engineered food could provide enough nutrition to save futuregenerations from starvation. He argues that environmentalists who oppose genetically modified food are actually working against the best interests of humankind and their pets.

That genetic engineering may be the mostenvironmentally beneficial technology to haveemerged in decades, or possibly centuries, is notimmediately obvious. Certainly, at least, it is notobvious to the many U.S. and foreign environmental groups that regard biotechnology as a betenoire. Nor is it necessarily obvious to people w^hogrew up in cities, and who have only an inkling ofwhat happens on a modem farm. Being agriculturally illiterate myself, I set out to look at what maybe, if the planet is fortunate, the farming of thef u t u r e .

It was baking hot that April day. I traveled withtwo Virginia state soil-and-water-conservation

officers and an agricultural-extension agent to anarea not far from FUchmond. The farmers thereare national (and therefore world) leaders in theapplication of what is known as continuous no-tillfarming. In plain English, they don't plough. Forthousands of years, since the dawn of the agricultural revolution, farmers have ploughed, oftenseveral times a year; and with ploughing hascome runoff that pollutes rivers and blights aquatichabitat, erosion that wears away the land, and therelease into the atmosphere of greenhouse gasesstored in the soil. Today, at last, farmers are workingout methods that have begun to make ploughingobsolete.

Reprinted from the Atlantic Monthly (October 2003) by permission of the author.

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At about one-thirty we arrived at a 200-acrepatch of farmland known as the Good Luck Tract.No one seemed to know the provenance of thename, but the best guess was that somebody hadsaid something like "You intend to fann this? Goodluck!" The land was rolling, rather than flat, and itsslopes came together to form natural troughs for rainwater. Ordinarily this highly erodible land would besuitable for cows, not crops. Yet it was dense withwheat—^wheat yielding almost twice what couldnormally be expected, and in soil that had grownricher in organic matter, and thus more nourishingto crops, even as the land was fanned. Perhaps moststriking was the almost complete absence of anychemical or soil runoff. Even the beating administered in 1999 by Hurricane Floyd, which lashed theground with nineteen inches of rain in less thantwenty-four hours, produced no significant runoffor erosion. The land simply absorbed the sheets ofwater before they could course downhill.

At another site, a few miles away, I saw why.On land planted in com whose shoots had only justbroken the surface, Paul Davis, the extension agent,wedged a shovel into the ground and dislodgedabout eight inches of topsoil. Then he reacheddown and picked up a clump. Ploughed soil, having been srirred up and tumed over again and again,becomes lifeless and homogeneous, but the clumpthat Davis held out was alive. I immediately noticedthree squinning earthworms, one grub, and quanri-ties of tiny white insects that looked very busy. As ifin greeting, a worm defecated. "Plant-availablefood!" a delighted Davis exclaimed.

This soil, like that of the Good Luck Tract, hadnot been ploughed for years, allowing the underground ecosystem to retum. Insects and roots andmicroorganisms had given the soil an elaborate architecture, which held the earth in place and made it asponge for water. That was why erosion and runoffhad been reduced to practically nil. Crops thrivedbecause worms were doing the ploughing. Crop residue that was left on the ground, rather than ploughedunder as usual, provided nourishment for the soil's,biota and, as it decayed, enriched the soil. Thefarmer saved the fuel he would have used drivingback and forth with a heavy plough. That saved

money, and of course it also saved energy andreduced pollution. On top of all that, crop yieldsw e r e b e t t e r t h a n w i t h c o n v e n t i o n a l m e t h o d s .

The conservation people in Virginia were full ofexcitement over no-till famiing. Their job was toclean up the James and York Rivers and the rest ofthe Chesapeake Bay watershed. Most of the sediment that clogs and clouds the rivers, and most ofthe fertilizer runoff that causes the algae blooms thatkill fish, comes from familand. By all but eliminatingagricultural erosion and runoff—so Brian Noyes,the local conservation-district manager, told me—c o n t i n u o u s n o - t i l l c o u l d " r e v o l u t i o n i z e " t h e a r e a ' swater quality.

Even granting that Noyes is an enthusiast, froman environmental point of view no-till farming lookslike a dramatic advance. The rub—if it is a rub—isthat the widespread elimination of the ploughdepends on genetically modified crops.

It is only a modest exaggeration to say that asgoes agriculture, so goes the planet. Of all the humanactivities that shape the environment, agriculture isthe single most important, and it is well ahead ofwhatever comes second. Today about 38 percentof the earth's land area is crop land or pasture—atotal that has crept upward over the past few decadesas global population has grown. The increase hasbeen gradual, only about 0.3 percent a year; butthat 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 fami is to make war upon millions of plants(weeds, so-called) and animals (pests, so-called) that inthe ordinary course of things would crowd out or eator infest whatever it is a fermer is growing. Cropmonocultures, as whole fields of only wheat or comor any other single plant are called, make poor habitatand are vulnerable to disease and disaster. Althoughfertilizer runs off and pollutes water, farming withoutfertilizer will deplete and eventually exhaust the soil.Pesticides can hami the health of human beings andkill 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. Oi^anic farming, for example, uses no artificial fertilizer, but it

J O N AT H A N R A U C H • C A N F R A N K E N F O O D S AV E T H E P L A N E T ? 3 7 3

does use a lot of manure, which can pollute waterand contaminate food. Traditional famiers mayuse less herbicide, but they also do more ploughing,with all the ensuing environmental complications.Low-input agriculture uses fewer chemicals butmore land. The point is not that farming is an environmental crime—it is not—^but that there is noescaping 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 populationwill grow by more than 40 percent, from 6.3 billionpeople today to 8.9 billion in 2050. Feeding all thosepeople, and feeding their billion or so hungry pets(a dog or a cat is one of the first things people wantonce they move beyond a subsistence lifestyle), andproviding the increasingly protein-rich diets that anincreasingly wealthy world will expect—doing allof that will require food output to at least double,and possibly triple.

But then the story will change. According to theUN's midrange projections (which may, if anything,err somewhat on the high side), around 2050 theworld's population will more or less level off. Evenif the growth does not stop, it will slow. The crunchwill be over. In fact, if in 2050 crop yields are stillincreasing, if most of the world is economicallydeveloped, and if population pressures are decliningor even reversing—all of which seems reasonablylikely—then the human species may at long last beable 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 weneed 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 sustainablefooting forever: a breathtaking prospect.

The great problem, then, is to get through thenext four or five decades with as little envirormientaldamage as possible. That is where biotechnologyc o m e s i n .

One day recendy I drove down to southernVirginia to visit Dennis Avery and his son, Alex.The older Avery, a man in late middle age with achinstrap beard, droopy eyes, and an intent, scholarly

manner, lives on ninety-seven acres that he shareswith horses, chickens, fish, cats, dogs, bluebirds,ducks, transient geese, and assorted other creatures.He is the director of global food issues at the HudsonInstitute, a conservative think tank; Alex works withhim, and is trained as a plant physiologist. We sat in asun-room at the back of the house, our afternoonconversation punctuated every so often by dogsnores and rooster crows. We talked for a littlewhile about the Green Revolution, a dramaticadvance in farm productivity that fed the world'sburgeoning population over the past four decades,and then I asked if the challenge of the next fourdecades could be met.

"Well," Dennis replied, "we have tripled theworld's fann output since 1960. And we're feedingtwice as many people from the same land. That was aheroic achievement. But we have to do what somethink is an even more difficult thing in this next fortyyears, because the Green Revolution had more landper person and more water per person—"

"—and more potential for increases," Alexadded, "because the base that we were startingfrom was so much lower."

"By and large," Dennis went on, "the world'scivilizations 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 plantedwith high-yield seeds. [Affica is the importantexception.] Most of the good irrigation sites areused. We can't triple yields again with the technologies we're already using. And we might be lucky toget a fifty percent yield increase if we firoze our technology short of biotech."

"Biotech" can refer to a number of things, butthe relevant application here is genetic modification:the selective transfer of genes from one organismto another. Ordinary breeding can cross relatedvarieties, but it cannot take a gene from a bacterium,for instance, and transfer it to a wheat plant. Theorganisms resulting from gene transfers are called"transgenic" by scientists—and "Frankenfood" bymany greens.

Gene transfer poses risks, unquestionably. So,for that matter, does traditional crossbreeding. But

3 7 4 C H A P T E R 7 • F O O D E T H I C S

many people worry that transgenic organisms mightprove more unpredictable. One possibility is thattransgenic crops would spread from fields into forestsor other wild lands and there become environmentalnuisances, or worse. A further risk is that transgenicplants might cross-pollinate with neighboring wildplants, producing "superweeds" or other invasiveor destructive varieties in the wild. Those risks arereal enough that even most biotech enthusiasts—including Dennis Avery, for example—^favor somegovernment regulation of transgenic crops.

What is much less widely appreciated is biotech'spotential to do the environment good. Take as anexample continuous no-till farming, which reallyworks best with the help of transgenic crops.Human beings have been ploughing for so longthat we tend to forget why we started doing it inthe first place. The short answer: weed control.Turning over the soil between plantings smothersweeds and their seeds. If you don't plough, yourland becomes a weed garden—unless you use herbicides to kill the weeds. Herbicides, however, areexpensive, and can be complicated to apply. Andthey tend to kill the good with the bad.

In the mid-1990s the agricultural-productscompany Monsanto introduced a transgenic soybeanvariety called Roundup Ready. As the name implies,these soybeans tolerate Roundup, an herbicide (alsomade by Monsanto) that kills many kinds of weedsand then quickly breaks down into harmless ingredients. Equipped with Roundup Ready crops, farmers found that they coiald retire their ploughs andcontrol 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 grovmwithout ploughing, mosdy owing to the introductionof Roundup Ready varieties. Ploughless cotton farming has likewise received a big boost firom the adventof bioengineered varieties. No-till farming withoutbiotech is possible, but it's more difficult and expensive, which is why no-till and biotech are advancingin tandem.

In 2001 a group of scientists announced thatthey had engineered a transgenic tomato plantable to thrive on salty water—water, in fact.

almost half as salty as seawater, and fifty times assalty as tomatoes can ordinary abide. One of theresearchers was quoted as saying, "I've alreadytransformed tomato, tobacco, and canola. Ibelieve I can transform any crop with thisgene"—just the sort of Frankenstein hubris thatmakes environmental ists shudder. But considerthe environmental impHcations. Irrigation has formillennia been a cornerstone of agriculture, but itcomes at a price. As irrigation water evaporates, itleaves behind traces of salt, which accumulate inthe soil and gradually render it infertile. (As anyRoman legion knows, to destroy a nation's agricultural base you salt the soil.) Every year thew o r l d l o s e s a b o u t 2 5 m i l l i o n a c r e s — a n a r e a

equivalent to a fifth of California—to salinity;40 percent of the world's irrigated land, and 25percent of America's, has been hurt to somedegree. For decades traditional plant breederstried to create salt-tolerant crop plants, and fordecades they failed.

Salt-tolerant crops might bring millions ofacres of wounded or crippled land back into production. "And it gets better," Alex Avery told me. Thetransgenic tomato plants take up and sequesterin their leaves as much as six or seven percent oftheir weight in sodium. "Theoretically," Alex said,"you could reclaim a salt-contaminated field bygrowing enough of these crops to remove the saltsf rom the so i l . "

His father chimed in: "We've worried aboutbeing able to keep these salt-contaminated fieldsgoing even for decades. We can now think aboutcenturies."

One of the first biotech crops to reach the market, in the mid-1990s, was a cotton plant that makesits own pesticide. Scientists incorporated into theplant a toxin-producing gene from a soil bacteriumknown as Bacillids thuringiensis. With Bt cotton, as it iscalled, farmers can spray much less, and the poisoncontained in the plant is delivered only to bugs thatactually eat the crop. As any environmentalist can tellyou, insecticide is not very nice stufF—especially ifyou breathe it, which many Third World farmers doas they walk through their fields with backpacksprayers.

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Transgenic cotton reduced pesticide use by morethan two million pounds in the United States from1996 to 2000, and it has reduced pesticide sprayingsin parts of China by more than half Earlier thisyear the Environmental Protection Agency approveda genetically modified com that resists a beede larvaknown as rootworm. Because rootworm is Americancorn's most voracious enemy, this new variety has thepotential to reduce annual pesticide use in Americaby more than 14 million pounds. It could reduce oreliminate the spraying of pesticide on 23 millionacres of U.S. land.

All of that is the beginning, not the end. Bio-engineers are also working, for instance, on cropsthat tolerate aluminum, another major contaminantof soil, especially in the tropics. Retum an acreof farmland to productivity, or double yields on analready productive acre, and, other things beingequal, you reduce by an acre the amount of vii^;inforest 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 mytwenty years as a joumalist, Norman Borlaug mustbe the one who has saved the most lives. Today he isan unprepossessing eighty-nine-year-old man ofmiddling height, with crystal-bright blue eyes andthinning white hair. He still loves to talk aboutplant breeding, the discipline that won him the1970 Nobel Peace Prize: Borlaug led efforts tobreed the staples of the Green Revolution. (See"Forgotten Benefactor of Humanity," by GreggEasterbrook, an article on Borlaug in the January1997 Atlantic.) Yet the renowned plant breeder isquick to mention that he began his career, in the1930s, in forestry, and that forest conservation hasnever been far from his thoughts. In the 1960s,while he was working to improve crop yields inIndia 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 beensaved by higher farm productivity. Later, in the1980s and 1990s, he and others began payingincreased attention to what some agricultural economists now call the Borlaug hypothesis: that theGreen Revolution has saved not only many human

lives but, by improving the productivity of existingfamiland, also millions of acres of tropical forest andother habitat—and so has saved countless animalhves.

From the 1960s through the 1980s, for example,G r e e n R e v o l u t i o n a d v a n c e s s a v e d m o r e t h a n 1 0 0million acres of wild lands in India. More recendy,higher yields in rice, coffee, vegetables, and othercrops have reduced or in some cases stopped forest-clearing in Honduras, the Philippines, and elsewhere. Dennis Avery estimates that if farmingtechniques and yields had not improved since 1950,the world would have lost an additional 20 millionor 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 mypuzzled expression, "is that we have saved everysquare mile of forest on the planet."

Hab i ta t des t ruc t ion rema ins a se r ious env i ronmental problem; in some respects it is the most serious. The savannahs and tropical forests of Centraland South America, Asia, and Africa by and largemake poor farmland, but they are the earth's storehouses of biodiversity, and the forests are the earth'slungs. Since 1972 about 200,000 square miles ofAmazon rain forest have been cleared for crops andpasture; from 1966 to 1994 all but three of theC e n t r a l A m e r i c a n c o u n t r i e s c l e a r e d m o r e f o r e s tthan they left standing. Mexico is losing more than4,000 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 fouror five decades i s no t t o f eed an add i t i ona l t h reebillion people (and their pets) but to do so withoutconverting much of the world's prime habitat intosecond- or third-rate farmland. Now, most agronomists agree that some substantial yield improvementsare s t i l l t o be had f r om advances i n conven t i ona l

breeding, fertilizers, herbicides, and other GreenRevolution standbys. But it seems pretty clear thatbiotechnology holds more promise—^probably muchmore. Recall that world food output will need to atleast double and possibly triple over the next severaldecades. Even if production could be increased thatmuch using conventional technology, which isdoubtfiil, the required amounts of pesticide and

3 7 6 C H A P T E R 7 • F O O D E T H I C S

fertilizer and other polluting chemicals would beimmense. If properly developed, disseminated, andused, genetically modified crops might well be thebest 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 hisoffice at the World Wildlife Fund, in Washington,D.C. Sandalow, the organization's executive vice-president in charge of conservation programs, is ataU, affable, polished, and slighdy reticent man in hisforties who holds degrees fi*om Yale and theUniversity of Michigan Law School.

Some weeks earlier, over lunch, I had mentioned Dennis Avery's claim that genetic modification had great environmental potential. I wassurprised when Sandalow told me he agreed.Later, in our interview in his office, I asked him toelaborate. "With biotechnology," he said, "thereare no simple answers. Biotechnology has hugepotential benefits and huge risks, and we need toaddress both as we move forward. The huge potential benefits include increased productivity ofarable land, which could relieve pressure on forests.They include decreased pesticide usage. But thehuge risks include severe ecological disruptions—from gene flow and from enhanced invasiveness,which is a very antiseptic word for some very scarys tufl f . "

I asked if he thought that, absent biotechnology,the world could feed everybody over the nextforty or fifty years without ploughing down therain forests. Instead of answering directly he said,"Biotechnology could be part of our arsenal if wecan overcome some of the barriers. It will never bea panacea or a magic bullet. But nor should weremove i t f r om ou r t oo l k i t . "

Sandalow is unusual. Very few credentialedgreens talk the way he does about biotechnology,at least publicly. They would readily agree with himabout the huge risks, but they wouldn't be caughtdead speaking of huge potential benefits—a pointI will come back to. From an ecological pointof view, a very great deal depends on other

environmentalists' coming to think more the waySanda low does .

Biotech companies are in business to makemoney. That is fitting and proper. But developingand testing new transgenic crops is expensive andcommercially risky, to say nothing of politically controversial. When they decide how to invest theirresearch-and-development money, biotech companies will naturally seek products for which farmersand consumers will pay top dollar. Roundup Readyproducts, for instance, are well suited to U.S. farming, with its high levels of capital spending on suchthings as herbicides and automated sprayers. Poorfarmers in the developing world, or course, havemuch less buying power. Creating, say, salt-tolerantcassava suitable for growing on hardscrabble Afiicanfarms might save habitat as well as lives—but commercial enterprises are not likely to fall over oneanother in a rush to do it.

If earth-friendly transgenics are developed, thenext problem is disseminating them. As a number ofthe farmers and experts I talked to were quick tomention, switching to an unfamiliar new technology—something like no-till—is not easy. It requirescapital investment in new seed and equipment, mastery of new skills and methods, a fragile transitionperiod as farmer and ecology readjust, and an oftencons ide rab le amoun t o f t r i a l and e r ro r t o find ou twhat works best on any given field. Such problemsare only magnified in the Third World, where thelearning curve is steeper and capital cushions are thinto nonexistent. Just handing a peasant farmer a bagof newfangled seed is not enough. In many casespeasant 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 away that actually benefits the environment. Oftenthe technological blade can cut either way, especiallyin the short run. A salt-tolerant or drought-resistantrice that allowed farmers to keep land in productionmight also induce them to plough up virgin land thatpreviously was too salty or too dry to farm. If theeffect of improved seed is to make farming more profitable, farmers may respond, at least temporarily, bybringing more land into production. If a farm becomesmore productive, it may require fewer workers; and

J O N AT H A N R A U C H • C A N F R A N K E N F O O D S AV E T H E P L A N E T ? 3 7 7

if local labor markets cannot provide jobs for them,displaced workers may move to a nearby patch ofrain forest and bum it dow n̂ to make way for subsistence farming. Such transition problems are solvable,but they need money and attention.

In short, realizing the great— p̂robably unique—environmental potential of biotech will requirestewardship. "It's a tool," Sara Scherr, an agriculturaleconomist with the conservation group ForestTrends, told me, "but it's absolutely not going tohappen automatically."

So now ask a question: Who is the naturalconstituency for earth-friendly biotechnology?Who cares enough to lobby governments to underwrite research—frequendy unprofitable research—on transgenic crops that might restore soils or cutdown on pesticides in poor countries? Who caresenough to teach Asian or African farmers, one byone, how to farm without ploughing? Who caresenough to help poor farmers afford high-tech,earth-friendly seed? Who cares enough to agitatefor programs and reforms that might steer displacedpeasants and profit-seeking farmers away from sensitive lands? Not politicians, for the most part. Notfarmers. Not corporations. Not consumers.

At the World Resources Institute, an environmental think tank in Washington, the molecularbiologist Don Doering envisions transgenic cropsdesigned specifically to solve environmental problems:crops that mi^t fertilize the soil, crops that couldclean water, crops tailored to remedy the ecologicalproblems of specific places. "Suddenly you might findyourself with a virtually chemical-fi-ee agriculture,where your cropland itself is filtering the water, it'sprotecting the watershed, it's providing habitat,"Doering told me. "There is still so litde investmentin what I call design-for-environment." The naturalconstituency for such investment is, of course,env i ronmenta l i s ts .

But environmentalists are not acting such a constituency today. They are doing the apposite. Forexample, Greenpeace declares on its Web site: "Theintroduction of genetically engineered (GE) organisms into the complex ecosystems of our environmentis a dangerous global experiment with nature andevolution ... GE organisms must not be released into

the environment. They pose unacceptable risks toecosystems, and have the potential to threaten biodiversity, wildlife and sustainable forms of agriculture."

Other groups argue for what they call thePrecautionary Principle, under which no transgeniccrop could be used until proven benign in virtuallyall respects. The Sierra Club says on its Web site.

In accordance with this PrecautionaryPrinciple, we call for a moratorium on theplanting of all genetically engineered cropsand the release of all GEOs [geneticallyengineered organisms] into the environment, including those now approved. Releasesshould be delayed until extensive, rigorousresearch is done which determines the

long-term environmental and health impacts of each GEO and there is publicdebate to ascertain the need for the use ofeach GEO intended for release into theenvironment, [italics added]Under this policy the cleaner water and health

ier soil that continuous no-till farming has alreadybrought to the Chesapeake Bay watershed wouldbe undone, and countless tons of polluted runoffand eroded topsoil would accumulate in Virginiarivers and streams while debaters debated andresearchers researched. Recall David Sandalow:"Biotechnology has huge potential benefits andhuge risks, and we need to address both as we moveforward." A lot of environmentalists would sayinstead, ''before we move forward." That is animportant difference, particularly because the bigpopulation squeeze will happen not in the distantfuture but over the next several decades.

For reasons having more to do with policiesthan with logic, the modem environmental movement was to a large extent founded on suspicion ofmarkets and artificial substances. Markets exploit theearth; chemicals poison it. Biotech touches both hotbuttons. It is being pushed forward by greedycorporations, and it seems to be the very epitomeof the unnatura l .

Still, I hereby hazard a prediction. In tenyears or less, most American environmentalists(European ones are more dogmatic) will regard

3 7 8 C H A P T E R 7 • F O O D E T H I C S

genetic modification as one of their most powerfultools. In only the past ten years or so, after all,environmentalists have reversed field and embracedmarket mechanisms—tradable emissions permitsand the like—as useful in the fight against pollution. The environmental logic of biotechnology is,

if anything, even more compelling. The potentialupside of genetic modification is simply too largeto ignore—and therefore environmentalists willnot ignore it. Biotechnology will transform agriculture, and in doing so will transform Americane n v i r o n m e n t a l i s m .

STUDY QUESTIONS

1. Discuss the promise of genetically modified 2. Discuss the risks involved in producing genet-food. What environmental problems can ically modified food. Why are so many envir-it solve? How can it help alleviate world onmentalists against it?h u n g e r ? 3 . H o w d o y o u t h i n k w e s h o u l d p r o c e e d w i t h

regard to genetically modified food?

4 0

The Unholy AllianceM A E - WA N H O

Mae- Wan Ho, trained as a geneticist, is a leading social and environmental activist. She isthe author of numerous books and articles, including most recently Genetic Engineering,Dream or Nightmare? She proposes an immediate moratorium on genetically modifiedfoods until their safety, in all phases, can be properly tested.

Genetic engineering biotechnology is inherently hazardous. It could lead to disasters farworse than those caused by accidents to nuclear installations. In the twrds of the author,"genes can replicate indefinitely, spread and recombine." For this reason the release of agenetically engineered micro-organism that is lethal to humans could well spell the end ofhumanity. Unfortunately the proponents of this terrifying technology share a genetic deter-minist mindset that leads them to reject the inherently dangerous nature of their work. Whatis particularly worrying at first sight is the irresistible power of the large corporations which arepushing this technology.

From TIk Ecologist, Vol. 27, No. 4 (July/August 1997). Reprinted by pemiission of 77if Ecoloj>ist, www.theecologist.org.