There is little doubt that organic farmers have been instrumental in bringing the need for ecologically based agriculture to the public’s attention. That is a good start. We now need to move beyond organic (still only ca 2% of US agriculture) and embrace other tools and farming practices that can help shift current agricultural systems towards enhanced sustainability.
The need is dire.
1 billion people are malnourished, 300,000 people continue to die each year from pesticide-related poisonings, farming on ecologically sensitive land is expanding, the water needed to sustain farming dwindles and the world’s population is predicted to increase to over 9 billion people by 2050.
How can we feed the growing population in an ecologically balanced manner? Perhaps the famous environmentalist Rachel Carson said it best:
A truly extraordinary variety of alternatives to the chemical control of insects is available. Some are already in use and have achieved brilliant success. Others are in the stage of laboratory testing. Still others are little more than ideas in the minds of imaginative scientists, waiting for the opportunity to put them to the test. All have this in common: they are biological solutions, based on understanding of the living organisms they seek to control, and of the whole fabric of life to which these organisms belong. Specialists representing various areas of the vast field of biology are contributing–entomologists, pathologists, geneticists, physiologists, biochemists, ecologists–all pouring their knowledge and their creative inspirations into the formation of a new science of biotic
In other words, we need the best biology to achieve a truly sustainable agriculture. This includes not only conventional tools for seed improvement such as pollination, tissue culture, mutagenesis, and grafting (mixing two species to create a new variety) but also, modern molecular tools such as marker assisted breeding and genetic engineering.
This is one of the points that Karl Haro Von Mogel, a geneticists, beekeeper and blogger, makes in his recent blog post. Because both genetic engineering and more conventional approaches to plant breeding lead to the creation of seed that carry new combinations of traits, it does not make sense to reject either one based on the reasoning that the processes are “unnatural”.
Every time a breeder makes a cross between two plants he or she is creating an organism that has never before existed. And every time a breeder crosses two plants, the genetic combination represented by the offspring has never before existed. And that’s how nature, how evolution works – by creating new combinations.
The question is not whether GE crops can be used in organic agriculture (they cannot as they are currently banned by the National Organic Program Standards), but rather -can GE crops be used to help shift our current agricultural systems towards enhanced sustainability?
Read his post and the recently released National Research Council report on “The Impact of Genetically Engineered Crops on Farm Sustainability in the US” and let me know if you think the use of genetically engineered crops is compatible with goals of sustainable agriculture.