There's a steady drumbeat that we are not producing enough food, that there must be more food for the growing global population, and that traditional or organic agriculture cannot achieve the necessary volumes. Therefore, continues the argument, we need to shift all our production over to genetically engineered varieties which produce more food per acre than traditional farming techniques. And its a compelling argument. Global population at six billion and due to rise to at least nine billion. Famine conditions popping up all over the place. The future looks grim. Perhaps we should embrace a technological fix.
Just two small problems. Tiny, really. First, The genetically engineered plants we grow aren't really food. The corn and soy we grow are not intended as food, not like, say, a carrot is food. Let's call them “precursor foods”; they are feed-stocks we tear apart into their constituent molecules and then construct “edible food-like products” from them.
And the second problem is just as minor. There's no evidence. At all, really. Down in the United States, the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) sponsored a report on production differences between traditionally bred crops and genetically engineered ones, a report written by Doug Gurion-Sherman, a senior scientist in the UCS Food and Environment Program. His conclusions?
Thus a close examination of numerous studies of corn and soybean crop yields since the early 1990s gives us a good gauge of how well GE crops are living up to their promise for increasing yields. Bottom line; They are largely failing to do so. GE soybeans have not increased yields, and GE corn has increased yield only marginally on a crop-wide basis. Overall, corn and soybean yields have risen substantially over the last 15 years, but largely not as a result of the GE traits. Most of the gains are due to traditional breeding or improvement of other agricultural practices.1
This is not a minor matter. GE crops are touted as saviour seeds for farmers, for hungry populations, for the world. They are, in fact, the final development of the the Green Revolution, the ultimate expression of the technologization of agriculture. And, like the Green Revolution, not only have they largely failed, but the original goals have been forgotten in a rush to manufacture profit and privatize life. The findings of the report are clear and powerful. First, that
“[g]enetic engineering has not increased intrinsic yield. No currently available transgenic varieties enhance the intrinsic yield of any crops. The intrinsic yields of corn and soybeans did rise during the twentieth century, bu not as a result of GE traits. Rather, they were due to successes in traditional breeding.”2
Intrinsic, or potential, yield is the highest yield that can be achieved under perfect conditions. This is different from operational yield, the yield obtained under field conditions. About which, the report says:
Genetic engineering has delivered only minimal gains in operational yield.... Based on available data, it is likely that Bt corn provides an operational yield advantage of 7-12 percent compared to typical conventional practices, including insecticide use, when European corn borer infestations are high. Bt corn offers little or no advantage when infestations of European corn borer are low to moderate, even when compared to conventional corn not treated with insecticides.3 [emphasis mine]
The increases we've seen in yields in corn and soy are, primarily, attributable to non-GE plant breeding techniques. The development of salt-tolerant wheat, for example, was done by crop scientists in Australia specifically without the use of GE techniques, in order to ensure free access to the cultivar by the world's farmers.
