Tom Abate covers the technology sector for GlobalPost, where this article first appeared. Any views expressed are his own.
It seems like a science fiction novel: Near-starvation of much of the world’s population results in the development of patented seeds and widespread livestock cloning.
But that scenario is not pure speculation. Rather it is a possible future envisioned by analysts for the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, in a new report titled “The Bioeconomy of 2030.”
The report, which extrapolates current trends into the year 2030, deals with every aspect of biotechnology from medicines to plant-based chemicals, and projects their impacts on the world economy. It raises the fictional starvation scenario to prod the public and policymakers into considering biotech agriculture in a new light.
“Two consecutive years of extreme drought and high temperatures in the major grain growing regions of the world between 2016 and 2017 … caused an explosion in food prices,” says the report published last month. “The ‘Malthusian years’, as they were quickly called by journalists, fueled further investment in agricultural biotechnology.”
Thomas Malthus, a British economist and demographer, famously predicted that population growth would outpace food production, resulting in famine. But over the past two centuries, a series of technological advances — the Industrial Revolution, for example — have greatly expanded the world’s ability to produce food and his theory has been largely discredited.
The report’s sections on agriculture stand out because they evoke provocative concepts to revive the policy debate over what opponents have sometimes call “Frankenfoods.”
There has been public opposition to the genetic modification of foods, particularly in Europe, since herbicide-resistant soybeans were introduced in the mid-1990s. Consumers have questioned the health and environmental risks of the products.
The genetically modified crops currently on the market have been designed to resist insect damage and viral infections and to tolerate certain herbicides, according to the World Health Organization. They are widely grown in North America, South America and China, but only a handful have been approved in the European Union.
The report says that overcoming this unease will require some policy response — possibly driven by an unwanted disaster.
“The goal is to get people thinking about the way the world is changing (population, consumption patterns, climate change, etc.) and encourage them to take a hard look at how society is going to cope,” OECD analyst and report co-author David Sawaya said in an e-mail exchange from Brussels.
In the sections focusing on agricultural issues, the report anticipates that growing middle classes in China and India will increase demand for meats and grains. It predicts a global trade pattern in which manufactured goods flow from the East to the West, while edibles flow back from bread-basket regions such as North and South America.
The report envisions that population growth, coupled with trends like water scarcity, will increase the pressure to obtain greater yields from arable lands. The OECD planners also think that an increasing demand for biofuels and biochemicals will lead to the development of non-edible plants designed to be grown on arid or other marginal lands.
All of these trends, they say, will increase the need for genetic modifications to design drought-tolerant crops, optimize non-edible plants for fuel and chemical production, and improve livestock through advanced breeding and cloning techniques. “The use of biotechnology in primary production is therefore likely to be pervasive by 2030 for the production of plant and animal food sources and for plant sources of feed and fiber,” the report suggests.
Biotech-skeptic Michael Sligh, director of the sustainable agriculture program for the U.S.-based Rural Advancement Foundation, said such a technology-centered view of the future ignores the social, economic and environmental issues that should be considered when planning how to feed the world.
“There’s always been a great deal of rhetoric and promise around agricultural biotechnology but issues of hunger are far more complex than any technological fix,” Sligh said. “Do farmers have access to fair credit, good roads, open markets? All of these are factors that have to be taken into account.”
Among other objections, Sligh said biotech agriculture will increase the number of patented seeds and other inputs that farmers will have to purchase year after year, making them more dependent on global trade and credit flows and decreasing self-reliance.
“When you shift from a very long tradition of 12,000 years of farmers saving seeds to a technology that is patented that is a fundamentally different paradigm,” Sligh said.
Biotech advocate C.S. Prakash, a plant geneticist at the University of Tuskagee in Alabama, thinks the OECD report correctly predicts that global warming will increase the need for genetic modifications.
“The whole geography of farming is going to change,” he said. “You will have more water in some places and less elsewhere, and we will need to redesign crops quickly to meet these new stress factors.”
Prakash said he hopes the report’s fictional scenario spurs debate, especially in Europe, where opposition to genetically modified foods is strongest.
“Unless Europe changes in a big way I don’t think the rest of the world will follow,” he said.
In addition to the public opposition that could impede biotech agriculture, the authors of the OECD report noted another issue that could diminish its usefulness in avoiding the Malthusian possibilities.
In a follow-up email to GlobalPost, they noted that mass-market crops like corn, soy, cotton and canola have been the focus of biotech development because they are most profitable. There has been far less development of the niche crops and local adaptations that are sorely needed.
“This will often be in areas without huge (in a monetary sense) markets,” the OECD authors wrote, suggesting that research subsidies and public support would have to be part of the scenario for “fulfilling the promise of biotechnology.”
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(Pictured above: Alberta farmer Dwayne Marshman measures the height of his wheat crop, which should be at his waist, on his farm in the Canadian prairies near Rockyford, Alberta June 30, 2009. REUTERS/Todd Korol)
I think the whole idea of eating is for nutrition. It is possible to create genetically modified foods that will grow in all sorts of terrible soil conditions, but then I would not benefit from the nutrition. I'm sure we can create a type of cocoa that can grow on iron-depleted soil, but then we would not gain much digestible iron from the cocoa. Fruits, vegetables and livestock convert the substances from the soil into a form that we can more easily digest. Genetic modification might just cause us to eat more to compensate for the lack of nutrition.
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The problems with genetic modification of the food supply are related to three facts:
1. That genes express multiple traits.
2. These traits aren’t even close to being understood in a comprehensive framework.
3. The viruses that are used to insert the DNA can have unforeseen consequences.
Ask any geneticist what they call 95% of all DNA they come across in their daily functions: Junk DNA. This “Junk” has evidently just been hanging around not doing much. This “filler” is just what nature puts around it’s creamy center of DNA that actually does anything they say. I say it’s function is as yet unknown.
They just realized some of this “Junk” was actually the source of the Epigenetic behavior that had been observed since 1942, but whose mechanism was unknown. This portion of the “Junk” was shown to directly effect the expression of traits of later generations based on the conditions of the parents prior to conception. So people who were exposed to pesticides could condemn their family to four generations of cancer. Greed and unforeseen consequences can be poor mix for the public at large.
“Malthusian years” are not about food supply.
It is all about social development and population growth.
The painful truth is, that in developing countries population growth is only checked by food supply. As soon as food production drops hanger comes. But extra food immediately leads to population hike to unsustainable level. Most Africans communities cannot sustain current population with current development level. But next development level only comes with more stable societies.
Sending food to Africa will change result in more starvation, we must finance nation building.
I am afraid your argument does not add up. Were these massive stockpiles sufficient to combat the food crisis, there would be no starvation in Africa.
But there is. There is not enough food, even with all the cheap stuff from Europe. And according to the law of demand and supply, that means there is plenty of demand for African farmers to sell their own food, were they capable of meeting that demand.
So what is the solution? Sell the stockpiles at a realistic price which Africans can’t afford? Give all the food away for free, and remove the very incentive for producing stockpiles in the first place? Genocide or population control, when the population refuses to control their own growth?
My argument is that the food problem is going to get much worse in the future, for a variety of reasons. Global warming is a possibile factor. Fuel crisis and population growth are a guarantee.
And it is absolutely true that GM companies only look out for their own profits and interests. But that in itself does not have any relevence to a possible food crisis, or the fact that GM crops may be the only practical solution.
Anon, there are already “stock piles” of butter, milk, sugar, tomatoes and a welter of other products being brought by the EU by over-producing farmers, who over-produce certain products in the knowledge it will be brought with tax-payer funds. Then there are yet other farmers being paid by the same organisation NOT to produce anything!
Some of these over-produced products ends up in “emerging markets” such as can be found in Africa (where most of your starving people are to be found) which knocks their own farmers into oblivion as they can’t compete with subsidised products that are dumped on them. These products are sold at uncompetitive prices and aren’t used to feed starving people at all, they simply undermine the farmers who should be being encouraged, not undermined.
The suggestion that unfortunate starving people in the third-world can only be saved by GM just doesn’t stack up. GM food producers want to control the markets for their own benefit, not anyone elses.
Perhaps, Peter.
But a new bug can be fought, assuming the possibility even arises. Humans are good at wiping things out. And even if we can’t, quarantine can still manage the problem.
But if people are starving, and we don’t have enough food to feed them, then they will starve. Simple as that.
So until we make the flesh-eating corn which will wipe out mankind in the early summer of 2037, I would say GM crops and cattle are the lesser of two evils.
In the spirit of creating future scenarios to scare the worlds citizens to meekly accept the corporate food company products…
The year is 2034 and a high-rise multi-storey grazing building hums with the sound of cattle happily fattening themselves on bio-tech feed grown completely within the confines of the new farm model which only takes up a quarter of an acre footprint. There are 2,000 identical cloned cattle who grow predictably and at the end of their growth-cycle line up for the transport to the local abbatoir.
The “farm” manager notices something not seen for over twenty years, one of the cows appears to be lethargic and is having trouble walking. He scans the cow and makes a notes in his log of the product identity number and makes a call to the company to send out a technician for an investigation. The next day the technician arrives, but by this time all the cows are having trouble walking and seem lethargic.
The technician hasn’t seen anything like this before and calls in his supervisor on an emergency call out. By now there is a swarm of insects not seen since the successful elimination of parasites back in 2022. These insects seem to be a more aggressive form of their predecessors, and in reality have mutated into a “super parasite” impervious to the genetic enhancements which very nearly wiped out their ancestors.
The next day the entire herd is dead, and the epidemic is spreading like wild-fire throughout all the neighboring farms as they also farm identical cloned animals whose superior resistance isn’t sufficient to protect them from the newly mutated parasites. Humanity face doom… again.
How about GM foods that ARE birth control?
The future is already here. The starvation we see now will increase, and will be much worse by next decade.
Global warming, oil prices and population growth are inevitable. They will only make the current food crisis worse.
Nothing we do to stop global warming will prevent the effects of the next few decades, if they happen at all. And population control, while it is easy to rant about, is simply not a workable solution that we will be able to bring about.
So that leaves a simple choice:
Use GM crops and try to get a solution ready for when the food crisis finally hits it’s peak, or
Forget GM crops. Those with food will survive, at the expense of those who live in the third world. And you yet to watch as millions die on the news during 2010-20.
Pick a future. Which one is the least palatable?
And for those who decry the evils of GM crops? I would say that GM crops are no different to nuclear energy or pollution.
It is easy to object, when you have the luxury to do so. But you will be surprised what humans can be ready to accept, once it becomes a necessity.
These folks have blinders on. We need genetic crops to survive Global Warming? It’s gonna dry up regions.
Let’s just create a fictional situation to scare everyone into accepting genetically manipulated food. Corn is a great example. They created a corn that got a better yield to acre ratio. The problem was it was not eatable. So they soak it in lye to soften the skin so you can eat it. Well guess what, they made more corn than they can sell. So besides getting the government to pay them not to grow it they made corn syrup and got every food company to put corn syrup in everything they make. Result…great profits and an epedimic of diabetes.
The solution is new advancements in desalination. Why not take salt out of the water to have an abundance of water to grow whatever we want. People don’t need to drink water, we got soda for that, it helps sell the corn syrup.
A desalination plant to treat ocean water to irrigate wheat fields that in turn feed huge chicken farms and to make bread products is not a viable option. We need to make food better than God did.
Oh I forgot there are a bunch of scientists that want government money to keep doing research to make a living. This is not about the future, it is about money. Crops will be in trouble starting 2016 and 2017? That will give them funding for another 10 years. Nice!!!
Earth, as an organism, has an ultimate way to resolve the human crisis: total (or partial) elimination. Before any procurers of genetically modified plants, biodegradable products, green energy and so on come up with an ultimate solution, the real cure is already being brewed,–thanks to an overgrowing population of man,– by Mother Earth. H1N1 is one form of it, which, with the help of mother nature, will significantly mutate in the nearest future yielding yet another former of a deadly virus that will effectively wipe out half of the planet’s population. Problem solved. Keep in mind, this is just one meager form of species control on our planet.
To avoid this, we must implement proper education in the countries of 3rd and 2nd worlds that are the source of overpopulation, so that the next generations will exercise some sort of birth control aside from AK-47 as somebody suggested. Working on solutions to feed the overcrowding planet will only speed up our extinction through diseases or man-induced natural disasters.
A recent article in Scientific American by their editors stated that “Scientists must ask seed companies for permission before publishing independant research on genetically modified crops.” This article goes to show that companies have silenced studies that were “not flattering” to their company.
One of the cornerstones of any ethical science is that there must be an empirical and independant scientific review of scientific claims/results.
At what point will society stop trading the health of this planet and those creatures who inhabit it for the siren song of corporations who have succesfully convinced us that we can trust in their benevolence.
We see the benevolence of the misinformation originating from corporations concerning PCB’s, aerosol, tobacco smoking, nano-material toxicity, etc…
It continues to be a mark against the human conscience to continue to trade the corporate siren song for the health of our ecosystem. It is mans Achelles Heel.