This article originally appeared at Forbes and has been republished here with permission of the author.
The New York Times has a “thing” about the genetic engineering of plants—the same sort of thing that Creationists have about Darwinism.
The newspaper continued its reprehensible decades-long campaign of misinformation last week with a biased and inaccurate front page article–by an “investigative reporter,” no less–headlined, “Doubt About the Promised Bounty of Genetically Modified Crops.” Talk about getting off to a bad start.
The thesis of the interminable story, written by Danny Hakim, is that “an extensive examination” by the paper shows that although we no longer need to worry about the safety of genetically engineered, or modified, crops (which the Times’ commentaries, editorials and news stories questioned for decades, bucking the scientific community’s consensus), there is now “a more basic problem—genetic modification in the United States and Canada has not accelerated increases in crop yields or led to an overall reduction in the use of chemical pesticides.”
Actually, it looks a lot like an extensive examination en route to a predetermined–and wrong–conclusion.
As economist Graham Brookes wrote about Hakim, he makes “spurious comparisons that will mislead readers,” because he fails to understand that, “[t]here are numerous factors that affect yield such as weather, soil quality, husbandry practices, use of inputs such as fertilizers, pesticides and seeds, knowledge and skills of farmers, price of inputs, effectiveness of existing technology to control pests, diseases and weeds, etc.”
In other words, by comparing yields in Western Europe to those of Canada or the United States, Hakim was, in effect, comparing apples and oranges.
More fundamentally, however, Hakim begged the question about the goal of molecular genetic engineering: The purpose of the genetic modification of most of those crop plants—namely, the ones modified for increased resistance to herbicides (see graph below)–was not, in fact, higher yields; it was greater efficiency and lowering the cost of farming inputs.
Some background, from which Hakim could have benefited before composing his hatchet-job… To this point, there have been two major purposes of genetic engineering with modern molecular techniques (although many more are emerging): insect resistance (IR), which has most often been accomplished by the insertion of one or more genes from a common, innocuous bacterium called Bacillus thuringiensis, or “Bt.” Bt-cotton, for example, is used to control several major pests, the cotton and pink bollworm and the tobacco budworm, which used to account for a quarter of all losses due to pest infestations in the United States and cost farmers more than $150 million annually. When the Bt-cotton varieties were introduced, states that had a high rate of adoption of Bt-cotton showed a significant reduction in the need to treat fields with chemical insecticides. Treatments were cut from an average of three treatments per acre to about one and a half. Since it was introduced twenty years ago, Bt-cotton has eliminated the need for tens of millions of pounds of chemical insecticides.
The advantages of this significant reduction in the use of chemical insecticides are obvious. In purely economic terms, Bt-cotton produces benefits to farmers both by reducing the need to apply chemical insecticides and by increasing the yield of cotton. Bt-cotton provides the highest per acre monetary benefits to farmers of all the Bt-containing crops, which include corn and soybeans.
But these economic benefits pale beside the environmental advantages. According to environmental regulators, aquatic wildlife is threatened by three of the chemicals that must be used in much greater amounts on conventional, non-Bt-cotton–endosulfan, methyl parathion and profenos. The adoption of Bt-cotton and the resulting lessened need for chemical pesticides also reduces occupational exposures to the toxic chemicals by the workers who mix, load and apply the pesticides, and who perform other activities that require their presence in the field. (Homo sapiens are also part of ecology.) Moreover, the less insecticides that are applied, the less runoff into waterways, a significant problem in many of the nation’s agricultural regions.
One of the most dramatic yield-increase sagas has occurred over the last quarter-century in Hawaii. Beginning in the 1970’s, papaya ringspot virus began to infect papaya trees in Hawaii (the source of the state’s second most important agricultural export, second only to pineapple) and was decimating the $64 million a year industry. By 1991, scientists had developed virus-resistant papaya varieties using molecular genetic engineering techniques, and today more than 80% of the state’s papayas are those varieties. A dramatic photograph of the unmodified, virus-susceptible papaya trees and the genetically engineered virus-resistant ones growing side by side may be found here. N.B., Mr. Hakim, since you’re so preoccupied with yield: The ones on the left have a marketable yield of approximately nil, while the ones on the right have normal yields. Unlike those in your article, this is a valid comparison.
An article that Hakim and his researchers should have read is, “GM Crops: Global Socio-economic and Environmental Impacts 1996-2014,” by British economists Peter Barfoot and Graham Brookes, which concluded:
- The insect-resistant (IR) technology used in cotton and corn has consistently delivered yield gains from reduced pest damage. The average yield gains over the 1996-2014 period across all users of this technology has been +13.1% for insect resistant corn and +17.3% for insect resistant cotton relative to conventional production systems. 2014 was also the second year IR soybeans were grown commercially in South America, where farmers have seen an average of +9.4% yield improvements;
- The herbicide-tolerant (HT) technology used has also contributed to increased production; improving weed control and providing higher yields in some countries and helping farmers in Argentina grow ‘second crop’ soybeans after wheat in the same growing season.
If Hakim really wanted to learn about the subject (but why bother to delve into it too deeply when you can cherry-pick facts out of context to get to your predetermined conclusion?), he might have sought out an authoritative source like the 2010 National Research Council report on genetic engineering applied to agriculture, the précis of which states clearly that “corn, cotton and soybean that have been engineered to resist insect pests and herbicides are now planted on almost half [now more than 90%] of all U.S. cropland” and concludes that “they offer substantial net environmental and economic benefits compared to conventional crops.” (Interestingly, the benefits are even greater compared to organic agriculture, another passion of the Times’ New Agey food and agriculture writers.)
Consider the six “key findings” of the report, quoted below verbatimand in their entirety as they appear on the website of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (of which the NRC is a research component and which actually published the report):
- Many adopters of genetically engineered crops have experienced either lower costs of production or higher yields, and sometimes both;
- Genetically engineered crops may have social impacts similar to previous technological developments in agriculture;
- Targeting specific insect pests with Bt toxins in corn and cotton has been successful, and insecticide use has decreased with the adoption of insect-resistant crops;
- The transfer of genetically engineered traits from genetically engineered crops to other crops of relatives has not been a concern for most types of crops;
- Reliance on one herbicide reduces the effectiveness of herbicide resistance as a weed-management tool;
- The adoption of herbicide-resistant crops could help improve water and soil quality by reducing the need for tilling.
Although the text of the report does go on to observe that “these benefits have not been universal, some may decline over time, and potential benefits and risks may become more numerous as the technology is applied to more crops,” the context of that statement is essential. For one thing, the phenomenon of resistance to herbicides, antibiotics, pesticides and chemotherapeutic drugs is well-known and a largely unavoidable concomitant of evolutionary pressure, the result of survival of the fittest. But even if the speculation is borne out and the benefits of some genetically engineered crops do decline over time, that doesn’t diminish the prodigious gains—humanitarian, economic and environmental—that will already have accrued.
Another of the many nuances missed by Hakim is that the benefits from genetically engineered crops are not limited to those who farm and consume them. According to a 2010 study, fields of insect-resistant GM corn exert an “area-wide suppression effect” on insects, benefiting neighboring fields containing conventional corn varieties. The researchers calculated that, from 1996 to 2010, cultivating genetically engineered varieties increased farmers’ profits in three U.S. states by roughly $3.2 billion–$2.4 billion of which accrued to farmers whose nearby fields had not been planted with genetically engineered varieties. The farmers planting the conventional varieties benefit disproportionately because they reap the benefits of less insect predation but do not have to buy the more expensive genetically engineered seeds.
Hakim’s assertion that genetically engineered crops have not reduced the amounts of pesticides applied is narrowly true, but misleading. First of all, he lumps insecticides—the use of which has been markedly reduced, as discussed above—with herbicides, which kill only weeds. It’s true that regulators consider both kinds of chemicals to be pesticides, but few readers will realize that; most people think of rat poison and Raid when they hear the word “pesticide.”
Henry I. Miller, a physician, is the Robert Wesson Fellow in Scientific Philosophy & Public Policy at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. He was the founding director of the FDA’s Office of Biotechnology. Follow him on Twitter @henryimiller.
