GEO Watch | ‘Come to Jesus’ moments in the history of transgenics
Agricultural scientists ‘discover’
diversity-resilience link?
AS TRANSGENIC
TREADMILLS WEAR OUT, AGROECOLOGY LOOMS ON HORIZON
Devon G.
Peña | Seattle, WA | March 19, 2014
Even with biotech crops,
farmers still need to make use of ageold practices such as crop rotation to
fight insect pests. That’s the lesson to be drawn from the latest discovery of
resistance to the pest-fighting toxins added to maize — also known as corn.
- Brian Owens, Nature, March 17, 2014
The March 17 edition of Nature includes a review of recent research on rootworm resistance
to transgenic corn (Gassmann et al 2014). The author of the Nature review Brian
Owens opens with the comment that even biotech crop farmers “still need to make
use of age-old practices such as crop rotation to fight insect pests.” I am
intrigued by the implications of this statement as much as by rootworm
resistance to Bt corn because this should open a window to the critique of
biotechnology from the vantage point of a likely successor science,
agroecology.
 |
| Corn rootworm. Photo courtesy of Kansasbugs.org. |
One of the first lessons we explore as students of agroecology
is the shibui scientific principle that
diversity is the key to resilience. In Leopold fashion, whenever I teach this
material, I might wax poetic about how this applies to the coupling of biological
and social systems. I encourage students to think about how agroecology is a strong reason we can challenge the one-sided concept of the Anthropocene as a nasty
coupling by which the social – and I mean specifically the capitalist political
economic – system has undermined Earth life support systems and most organisms.
I remind students that good
farmers are producers of food and habitat, along with myriad other ecosystem
and economic base services. The Anthropocene need not be remembered as the age
when capitalism led to the destruction of ecosystems and mass extinctions.
The environmental anthropology and economics
literature on the principle of diversity and how it plays out in the
anthropogenic possibility of human cultures that produce ecosystem services is
quite vast and dates back more than a century. These contributions to the
science of sustainable and resilient agriculture are derived, frankly, from frequently
unacknowledged sources grounded in millenary indigenous place-based cultures.
However, the ethnoscience of agroecology remains institutionally marginalized.
This is so both in the context of the public universities with a handful of
notable exceptions and by acts of a Congress beset by a know-nothing and reactionary Tea Party majority and acquiescent Democrats willing
to impose pro-corporate policies through the all-powerful budgetary framework
of neoliberal ideology.
In the governmentality of agriculture the biopolitics
permeating the struggle for control of food and agriculture place the USDA in
what is perhaps an irreconcilable internal contradiction, one in which the
mission of the public sector institutions including the historically and
predominantly Black and Latina/o serving institutions,’ may finally be emerging
as an organized force ready to challenge the hegemony of neoliberal politics encoded in budget priorities of the Farm Bill and thus involving control over the actual allocation of
public funding to programs – including SNAP (which is more than
70 percent of the budget) – that favor biotechnology over agroecology.
The USDA
is undoubtedly favoring these corporate interests and their financial backers. We need to
recognize that the Farm Bill always
rewards the investors for producing “value” but not necessarily food while real
life organic and agroecological farmers are ignored or punished for producing
food and ecosystem and economic base services. We should be receiving payments for ecosystem services (PES). We have already reported on how the USDA offers a discount
for crop insurance for growers who plant transgenic crops. What this means is that public funding, our
common wealth, is going to debt-ridden growers enslaved to GMOs backed by investment bankers who know nothing about the land or farming but are in turn now able to use this indirect USDA support to create additional “value” by
investing in derivatives like credit default swaps on crop insurance or
commodity futures. No food; plenty of value. So they say.
This political economic context is part of what
creates limits on the USDA capacity to be a change maker and what taxpayers, farmers, farm workers, and
consumers might expect it to do realistically in order to extract itself from a subordinate, deeply
unethical and troubling relationship it has with the corporate Gene Giants. This amounts to unequal protection and displays the sort of lack of due process in plain
sight that beckons another round of civil rights litigation such as that which started with Pigford v.
Veneman, 292 F.3d 918, 185 FRD 82 (DC Cir. 2002).
In this schema, agroecologists – many of them from Native
American, Chicana/o and other indigenous communities – are often overlooked,
purposefully erased, or dismissed as being unscientific, naïve, and
romanticizing. However, given all the scientific evidence and not just that
which is selectively cherry-picked by industry scientists to defend interests
whose priority is winning the billions of dollars by their profit and loss
calculus, I’ll wager that agroecology will over the longer term prove to be a
more sustainable, socially equitable, and culturally resilient science than the narrow, highly specialized, fossil fuel-dependent, and very expensive technology designed
for the type of profiteering associated with this mad rush to centralize ownership of seeds,
plants, and other biological materials and processes in the hands of less than
a handful of global corporations known as the Gene Giants – corporations that
include Monsanto, Dow Agrosciences, Syngenta, and Bayer CropScience.
The battle over Earth futures is a realm crossing all
terrains of biopower: How social movements for food justice and resilient agriculture use science in this very deadly affair of the
future of human and other-than-human life on this planet is absolutely
important. A decolonial approach to this problem will reveal and project an alterscience movement that is already providing
sources of political transformation toward autonomy (from capital) and involves
the first steps toward the end of human sovereignty over the Earth. Only this
eclipsing of the anthropological machine can get us past the contradictions of
the Anthropocene. The planet will be fine, after us. But we’ll have screwed
ourselves out of whatever home and creative future may have lain ahead had we
soundly rejected capitalist greed and its iron law of infinite expansion and
growth while shifting to the wiser norms of steady state economics and mutual
reliance interest.
But I digress, somewhat.
In teaching about diversity and resilience I have
learned that the best way to approach the difficult work of contributing to a
healthy ecosystem as a farmer is to embrace the unique biophysical and cultural
ecological features of the place where you are farming: Let place – not
abstract capitalist space – define the basic limit and potential of your agroecosystems.
In our watershed, this means that the diversity = resilience principle favors smaller-scale,
low-input, and mostly perennial polyculture methods characterized by the use of
many land race crops with multiple alleles and their wild relatives and
companions. It favors a system that is agro-pastoral and agro-forestry based.
Importantly, this reflects a second agroecological
principle: Work with what you have in place. And a third: Diversity involves
biophysical structure (habitat) and species (viable populations). The acequia
system I participate in is an example of how this operates in practice and our gravity-driven
flood irrigated methods contribute to the landscape level of diversity with the
presence of a diverse landscape of meadows, orchards, terraces, riparian
corridors, sub-irrigated wetlands, and woodlands.
In contrast, the transgenic crops inside a typical center-pivot
irrigation circle in my Valley are the epitome of monoculture – of agriculture
as an industrial activity conducted in any convenient space, without a sense of
place or conscious correlation with biophysical and cultural ecological
surroundings.
Now, some public university scientists in the USA –
who are also enthusiastic proponents of commercial agricultural biotechnology
and especially genetically-engineered crops known as transgenics – are starting
to realize that the constrained annual industrial-scale monocultures
characterized by single crop, intensive-input (qua high energy footprint) technologies are fatally flawed and
costly in both economic and ecological terms. Everything in these modern
monoculture systems is “jacked-up” – and the coupling of the social and
ecological systems produces what economists misleadingly call “negative externalities”.
Only in the real world of risk and environmental science there is no such thing
as an externality. There are no discounts on harm and no free lunch to create
fictive capital value at the expense of the hunger of real people.
In the world of agriculture today the mainstream
grower is under a precision farming contract and hooked to a purveyor of
transgenic seed with a cocktail of required biocides, fertilizers, and other
inputs determined by GPS-remote sensing informatics. These growers are also
very heavily in debt for the acquisition and licensing of the various
technologies that come with being such a ‘high-tech bioserf’.
This is not a very happy world and these growers are
heavily leveraged because they followed someone else’s plan – one Monsanto and
the rest of the Gene Giants fabricated and foisted on them with the help of Wall
Street bankers and their USDA and WH enablers. The speculators and financial
wizards that mesmerized them all with fancy mortgages are now profiting from
that unsustainable misery and from the bets they placed on the derivatives
markets for realizing value from risk in crop insurance and commodity futures.
Who said you had to produce something to make money? That is one of the secrets
of commodity fetishism.
All this brings me back to the world of risk science
and biotechnology.
In the 1980s and 90s, I was part of a group of
outliers – let’s be nice about it – who argued that commercial agricultural
biotechnology would end up failing because the “pests” and “weeds” would adapt,
mutate, and become resistant. We also argued that you did not have to think of
these as “pests” or “weeds” and that in a diverse polyculture, the so-called
“pests” are held in check by that very same biodiversity.
Likewise: Your weed – let’s say ‘pigweed’ – is my
Mexican Lenten ritual food – our
beloved quelites. I would never think
of banishing pigweed from my polyculture milpa. That is edible delectable
biomass. Yet, look now! Look what you done brought! Super Quelites! Super weeds!
Right there in my milpa.! Where’d that come from, I wonder? “What IS that
THING? as Steve Martin asked on SNL way too long ago.
This is a world filled with ironies but – and here is
the punch line: There is always a cost. Someone always pays for someone else’s
mistakes. How’s that for co-existence?
So it is with great interest that I recently read an
article in the latest issue of PNAS
Agricultural Sciences. The
article is about the “field-evolved” resistance by western corn rootworm to
Monsanto’s Bt transgenic maize and is the work of a group of entomologists at
Iowa State in Ames (Gassmann 2014). The article is a perfect example of how
corporations fund a significant amount of the research at so-called public
universities. The conflict of interest statement for the article describes this
in clear terms: “A.J.G. has received research funding related to this project
from Monsanto and has received funding not related to this project from AMVAC,
Dow AgroSciences, DuPont-Pioneer, Monsanto, Syngenta, and Valent. A.J.G. has
filed for a patent of the plant-based bioassay described in this article.”
Which is what makes this so gosh-darned amusing. Here
is a fine example of science funded by Monsanto and its ilk to address a
problem we all – the agroecologists – told them would happen 25+ years ago! They
didn’t listen then and I doubt they’ll listen this time. Biodiversity trumps
transgenics every time.
The abstract for the article reveals a lot about the
perilous limits of transgenic technologies and the mechanistic framework these
well-intentioned scientists are locked into:
The widespread planting of
crops genetically engineered to produce insecticidal toxins derived from the
bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) places intense selective pressure on pest
populations to evolve resistance. Western corn rootworm is a key pest of maize,
and in continuous maize fields it is often managed through planting of Bt
maize. During 2009 and 2010, fields were identified in Iowa in which western
corn rootworm imposed severe injury to maize producing Bt toxin Cry3Bb1.
Subsequent bioassays revealed Cry3Bb1 resistance in these populations.
Yes! This is one of those “Come to Jesus” moments.
Any time you place intense selective pressure on an organism, as evolutionary
traits go, it will respond more aggressively in order to adapt and survive
against the raised odds. However, if the organism faces a more complex melody
of diverse chemical signals as for example is the case in a polyculture then it
will not feel that selective pressure and will instead receive a conflicted and
sometimes confusing wave of chemical signatures – allelopathy works in the
hidden code of these signals – and it therefore becomes less likely to act like
a dominant presence in such an agroecosystem.
There is a science to growing food in a manner that
is environmentally sound. Transgenics and the post-transgenic and emerging
biotechnologies like RNAi are just more of the same technological treadmill
approach to a complex living organism – the land; ecosystems; and the social
cultural couplings that often lead us too far away from our potential role as a
keystone species for all life forms on the planet.
Sources cited
Gassmann, C. J., et al 2014. Field-evolved resistance
by western corn rootworm to multiple Bacillus thuringiensis toxins in transgenic
maize. PNAS-Agricultural Science. This
article contains supporting information online at
www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi:10. 1073/pnas.1317179111/-/DCSupplemental.
Owens, B. 2014. Pests worm their way into genetically
modified maize. Broadening of rootworm resistance to toxins highlights the
importance of crop rotation. Nature (March
17, 2014). URL: http://www.nature.com/news/pests-worm-their-way-into-genetically-modified-maize-1.14887?WT.ec_id=NEWS-20140318.
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