Last week the Economist wrote about the movement to “vote with your trolley” [shopping cart] and essentially argued the best thing that concerned citizens could do to fight global warming was to boycott organic food.
I’m joking, but the article inspired a thousand Web rants and refutations – even making it into Dan Mitchell’s What’s Online column in the New York Times. I was going to post my own rant-y take this weekend, but I was forced to play trilingual Scrabble nonstop by the Potato’s Dutch-Indonesian relatives. And at this point, I feel it’s all been said better than I can, here:
- Salon: In How The World Works, Andrew Leonard asks whether the ideals of organic farming and the triumphs of Nobelist Normal Borlaug’s Green Revolution have to be locked in mortal combat, or is there a middle ground? Basically, can’t we merge technological innovation with state-of-the-art ecological conscientiousness?
- U.S. Food Policy: Food economist Parke Wilde tackles the claim that organic agriculture offers significantly lower yields than conventional.
- Gristmill: Smarter-than-your-average-American readers — including Samuel Fromartz, author of “Organic Inc.” — debate the Economist’s key points.
After these links, you will then read this St. Louis Dispatch story about how poor Africa is caught in the middle on the GMO debate with a much more skeptical eye.
The reporter is Eric Hand, who wrote an earlier piece about how the Green Revolution has passed Africa by. While both articles are well reported and clearly Hand has done a lot of homework, he doesn’t question Borlaug’s opinion that “organic farming is a luxury.” For those who think it’s more like a necessity for survival, the Minnesota Institute for Sustainable Agriculture has put together an excellent resource site.
As Salon’s Leonard opines and Hand’s articles illustrate, the pro- and anti-GMO camps have their own standards for “truthiness.” For example, writing in the second Dispatch article, Hand describes the European Union’s environmental policy as employing the precautionary principle, in which lack of knowledge or certainty about a risk means that steps should be taken to limit that risk. The U.S., meanwhile
tends to celebrate risk-taking. The burden of regulation is on government agencies to show evidence that a company’s product is risky before steps are taken to stop the company.
It might be more accurate to say that the U.S. corporate culture celebrates risk-taking. If companies were so sure that their products weren’t risky, then they would be willing to label ingredients as being genetically modified. But they won’t — because to do so would basically pin a big liability bull’s eye on their stock price should lawsuits should health problems develop.
Back to Andrew Leonard’s question of why we can’t all just get along. I am no Luddite, afraid of technology and scientific advances. I am a geek and proud of it. But I can’t help feeling that — with cross-species genetic modification, synthetic hormones, regular doses of antibiotics, showers of pesticides, irradiation, and all the rest of the Big Ag toolbox — U.S. corporate goliaths are experimenting willy-nilly on the entire U.S. population with no goal but to lower their costs and get us to buy more things.
Except, as UC Berkeley professor Ignacio Chapela said recently at campus talk: “Experiment is the wrong word. When I do an experiment, I have a control group and I can control the variables. Monsanto and the rest of them are just trying things out with no oversight.”
Bill Gates, are you listening? Africa needs a hand … but not another Green Revolution.
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