Biotech
has bamboozled us all
Studies suggest that traditional farming methods are
still the best
Special report: what's wrong with our food?
George Monbiot
Guardian
Thursday August 24, 2000
The advice could scarcely have
come from a more surprising source. "If anyone tells you that GM
is going to feed the world," Steve Smith, a director of the world's
biggest biotechnology company, Novartis, insisted, "tell them that
it is not... To feed the world takes political and financial will - it's
not about production and distribution."
Mr. Smith was voicing a truth which most of his colleagues in biotechnology
companies have gone to great lengths to deny. On a planet wallowing in
surfeit, people starve because they have neither the land on which to
grow food for themselves nor the money with which to buy it. There is
no question that, as the population increases, the world will have to
grow more, but if this task is left to the rich and powerful - big farmers
and big business - then, irrespective of how much is grown, people will
become progressively hungrier. Only a redistribution of land and wealth
can save the world from mass starvation.
But in one respect Mr. Smith is wrong. It is, in part, about production.
A series of remarkable experiments has shown that the growing techniques
which his company and many others have sought to impose upon the world
are, in contradiction to everything we have been brought up to believe,
actually less productive than some of the methods developed by traditional
farmers over the past 10,000 years.
Last week, Nature magazine reported the results of one of the biggest
agricultural experiments ever conducted. A team of Chinese scientists
had tested the key principle of modern rice-growing (planting a single,
hi-tech variety across hundreds of hectares) against a much older technique
(planting several breeds in one field). They found, to the astonishment
of the farmers who had been drilled for years in the benefits of "monoculture",
that reverting to the old method resulted in spectacular increases in
yield. Rice blast - a devastating fungus which normally requires repeated
applications of poison to control - decreased by 94%. The farmers planting
a mixture of strains were able to stop applying their poisons altogether,
while producing 18% more rice per acre than they were growing before.
Another paper, published in Nature two years ago, showed that yields of
organic maize are identical to yields of maize grown with fertilisers
and pesticides, while soil quality in the organic fields dramatically
improves. In trials in Hertfordshire, wheat grown with manure has produced
higher yields for the past 150 years than wheat grown with artificial
nutrients.
Professor Jules Pretty of Essex University has shown how farmers in India,
Kenya, Brazil, Guatemala and Honduras have doubled or tripled their yields
by switching to organic or semi-organic techniques. A study in the US
reveals that small farms growing a wide range of plants can produce 10
times as much money per acre as big farms growing single crops. Cuba,
forced into organic farming by the economic blockade, has now adopted
this as policy, having discovered that it improves both the productivity
and the quality of its crops.
Hi-tech farming, by contrast, is sowing ever graver problems. This year,
food production in Punjab and Haryana, the Indian states long celebrated
as the great success stories of modern, intensive cultivation, has all
but collapsed. The new crops the farmers there have been encouraged to
grow demand far more water and nutrients than the old ones, with the result
that, in many places, both the ground water and the soil have been exhausted.
We have, in other words, been deceived. Traditional farming has been stamped
out all over the world not because it is less productive than monoculture,
but because it is, in some respects, more productive. Organic cultivation
has been characterised as an enemy of progress for the simple reason that
it cannot be monopolised: it can be adopted by any farmer anywhere, without
the help of multinational companies. Though it is more productive to grow
several species or several varieties of crops in one field, the biotech
companies must reduce diversity in order to make money, leaving farmers
with no choice but to purchase their most profitable seeds. This is why
they have spent the last 10 years buying up seed breeding institutes and
lobbying governments to do what ours has done: banning the sale of any
seed which has not been officially - and expensively - registered and
approved.
All this requires an unrelenting propaganda war against the tried and
tested techniques of traditional farming, as the big companies and their
scientists dismiss them as unproductive, unsophisticated and unsafe. The
truth, so effectively suppressed that it is now almost impossible to believe,
is that organic farming is the key to feeding the world.
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