The Association for the Advancement of Science is converging in San Diego this week, including a Monsanto Vice President who will be speaking. The San Diego Union-Tribune printed a (mostly) rah-rah biotech piece called "Bioengineering to crop up when science group meets." It's impossible to say all that needs to be said in one 150-word Letter to the Editor, but here's what I came up with:
The "titans of agribusiness" have delivered up decades of diet-related illness and unprecedented environmental destruction, not to mention a record number of hungry people (despite a simultaneous increase in the per capita amount of food produced), so why would we trust what they say now? We've had 30 years of biotech promises with little to show for it besides herbicide-tolerant and insecticide-producing traits that result in an overall increase in pesticide spraying and don't even increase crop yield. A 2008 UN/World Bank sponsored report written by over 400 scientists (the IAASTD report) found that biotech was incompatible with the needs of smallholder farmers who make up the majority of the world's hungry. Their recommendation for feeding the world was going organic, which would increase developing world crop yields by an estimated 80 percent. Yet, for some reason, even the U.S. government continues to listen only to the biotech industry and not to independent scientists who raise concerns about biotechnology.
I'd also like to rebut the idea in the article that we need a soybean with extra omega-3s. Our problem is not a lack of plants with omega-3s. Flax seed has plenty. But omega-3s are not very shelf-stable. Flax oil has to be kept in a dark bottle in the fridge and it still has a short shelf-life. THAT is why we don't get enough omega-3s in our diet. A GM soybean won't solve the problem, as any omega-3 added to a crop will make the crop less shelf-stable and thus less attractive to food manufacturers. Of course, omega-3's and shelflife are trade offs with one another that must be balanced, but there's nothing a GMO will accomplish that existing plants don't already do.
If other folks in San Diego want to submit letters to Letters at Uniontrib dot com, please CC me and I will publish them on this blog in a future post. Remember to keep your letters under 150 words and include your full name, address, and phone. |
