Sustainability and Ag Biotech

Published in: ENVIRONMENT & HEALTH WEEKLY #686, February 10, 2000
http://www.rachel.org.

Benbrook defines "sustainable agriculture" as a food system that:[1]

** Provides a reasonable rate of return to farmers, to sustain farm
families, agricultural infrastructure, and rural communities;

** Assures a reasonable rate of return to public and private providers of
farm inputs (seeds, fertilizers, etc.), information, services, and
technologies;

** Preserves and regenerates soil, water, and biological resources upon
which farming depends, and avoids adverse impacts on the natural
environment;

** Increases productivity and per-acre yields at least in step with the
growth in demand;

** Adheres to social norms and expectations in terms of fairness, equity,
compliance with regulations, food safety, and ethical treatment of workers,
animals, and other creatures sharing agricultural landscapes.

First we should acknowledge that, by these criteria, U.S. agriculture is
not sustainable now and hasn't been for many decades.[3] Loss of
profitability is almost always the immediate cause of unsustainability in
farming, Benbrook says. "All too often in the U.S. in recent decades, the
only thing that really changes is that energetic and ambitious managers
willing to accept lower returns per bushel find the capital to expand,
maintaining their income only by expanding their acreage base," Benbrook
says. Of course when one farm expands its acreage, often another farm
family has to move off the land. As a result, the U.S. Bureau of the Census
stopped counting "farm residents" in 1993 because there were so few of them
left; their numbers had dwindled to fewer than 2% of total U.S. population
(4.6 million people).[4] (In contrast, in 1900, farm residents made up 35%
of total population.)

Benbrook believes that genetically modified seeds, crops and foods will
amplify recent trends and will have the following effects on farms:

** Increasingly serious economic surprises and setbacks for farmers because
many emerging biotechnologies are more expensive to bring to market, for
several reasons:

(a) Biotechnology results from mergers of seed companies and pesticide
companies. For example, as a result of a series of acquisitions and
mergers, DuPont and Monsanto together now own 73% of corn seed producers in
the U.S.[5] Seed companies have traditionally had a relatively low profit
margin (around 12% to 15%), whereas pesticide producers have had a higher
profit margin (20% to 30%). As pesticide companies try to raise the profit
margins of their newly-acquired seed companies up toward the levels
expected of pesticide companies, the cost of seed and chemicals will
probably continue to rise for farmers.

This has, in fact, been happening, Benbrook shows. In the midwestern farm
belt, corn and soybeans are the major crops. Since 1975, for soybean
farmers, the share of the farmer's gross income per acre devoted to seed
plus chemicals has risen more than 50%, from 10.8% to 16.3%. For corn
farmers, the increase has been even larger (from 9.5% of gross income to
16.9%, 1975-1997).

(b) Genetically modified crops are requiring more herbicides than farmers
were initially led to believe they would, thus driving up weed management
costs. Take Roundup Ready crops. These are crops genetically modified to
withstand dousing with Monsanto's premier weed killer, Roundup. The idea
was that farmers would give their crop one good dousing with Roundup and
that would solve their weed problems. Monsanto placed print ads telling
farmers Roundup was "the only weed control you'll ever need." You can see
one of these 1998 ads on the Iowa State University Herbicide Ad "Hall of
Shame" web site.[6]

Roundup Ready crops offered farmers a modest reduction in costs per bushel
if everything worked as advertised. However, the reality is different from
what Monsanto promised in its ads. Farmers using Roundup Ready crops find
they have to use two or three applications of two or more herbicides to
control weeds. Some farmers are finding they must use as many as four
different herbicides after planting a seed that supposedly makes weed
management easier. This disappointing trend is putting more of farmers'
income into the pockets of the seed and chemical giants. As Charles
Benbrook points out, the full Roundup Ready system is now costing farmers
"an amazing $68.77 per acre in 1999, about 50% more than the cost of
[other] seed plus weed management systems in the Midwest in recent years."
This trend promises to deliver "significantly lower average returns to
growers," Benbrook predicts.

(c) Some weeds are developing resistance to Roundup -- notably hemp weed or
pig weed -- so Roundup is becoming less effective, requiring additional
measures for weed control, raising costs for those relying on Roundup Ready
crops.[7]

(d) There is evidence that low-dosage herbicides can disrupt beneficial
soil microorganisms and perhaps interfere with plant uptake of phosphorus,
an essential nutrient. Benbrook believes this can have an important
negative impact on plant health and farm profitability.

(e) There is evidence of a "yield drag" associated with some Roundup Ready
crops, meaning that per-acre yields are not consistently as high as it was
once thought they would be. A yield drag quickly translates into a
profitability drag.

There are additional reasons why genetically modified crops are likely to
produce economic surprises and setbacks for farmers:

(f) The costs of creating and protecting intellectual property are already
high and they are bound to rise, Benbrook believes;

(g) The regulation of GMOs (genetically modified organisms) seems likely to
increase, and so will regulatory costs;

(h) Biotechnology is being promoted and used in a way that tends to reduce
diversity on the farm -- precisely the wrong direction for farms to be
going, in Benbrook's view. Successful pest management requires a
diversified system that spreads the burden across differing mixes of
chemical, biological, genetic, and cultural (farming technique) tools and
tactics. Reliance on a single approach to pest management will fail because
pests will successfully evolve and thrive in response to single approaches,
Benbrook says.

(i) Trouble has appeared in another line of genetically modified crops --
those containing the pesticidal Bt gene. Bt is a bacterium that is toxic to
a large class of common insect pests called lepidopterans. Lepidopterans
are butterflies and moths; during the caterpillar stage of their
life-cycle, lepidopterans eat leaves and can cause great damage to leafy
crops. Because of the damage they inflict, lepidopterans provoke some of
the greatest use of pesticides world-wide.

Bt is a naturally-occurring killer of lepidopterans. As such, it is a
priceless gift from nature to row-crop farmers who need to control
outbreaks of lepidopterans. Charles Benbrook makes this comparison: Bt is
to the control of lepidopterans what antibiotics are to the control of
human diseases. If Bt loses its effectiveness, it will have major
consequences for vegetable farmers across the U.S., many of whom use Bt (in
one form or another) as a foliar spray.

By inserting a gene from the Bt bacterium into plants, Monsanto and others
have created crops that are themselves pesticidal to lepidopterans. For
example, Monsanto's "New Leaf" potato, which is now sold in U.S. grocery
stores, is itself a registered pesticide because every cell in every potato
contains the Bt gene.[8] (Notably, it is one of the few registered
pesticides that is not labeled as such.)

From the beginning, Monsanto and others have acknowledged that their
Bt-containing crops might conceivably induce Bt resistance among
lepidopterans, but they have insisted that the likelihood is "remote."
Resistance is a well-understood phenomenon. When a group of insects is
sprayed with a poison, those that are least affected survive and
reproduce. Soon the only remaining insects are unaffected by that poison
-- they have developed resistance to it.

When Monsanto approach EPA [U.S. Environmental Protection Agency] for
permission to market Bt-containing plants, they came armed with numerous
studies showing that resistance to Bt might take 30 years to develop, if
indeed it developed at all. Because genetically-engineered Bt-containing
crops had been developed in almost total secrecy, when EPA asked for public
comment on Monsanto's proposal, the nation's agricultural experts had
little to say. EPA assumed their silence meant all was well.

Traditionally, farmers get reliable information from the land grant
colleges that Congress created in 1862. However, beginning with the Freedom
to Farm Act of 1996, Congress has systematically reduced the role of the
public sector in U.S. agriculture. Now development of genetically
engineered crops is largely in private hands and the new technology is
cloaked in secrecy. The veil of secrecy "raises an important public policy
issue," says Benbrook. "When scientists are unwilling to share data, are
constrained in what they can report, and/or have no opportunity to study
new technology, public institutions and regulators have to fly blind for a
period of time." So, flying blind and basing its decision on Monsanto's
science, EPA approved crops with the Bt gene inserted into them.

Now it turns out that Monsanto's science was woefully weak and incomplete.
New studies show that resistance to Bt is not nearly as rare in
lepidopterans as Monsanto claimed it was, so resistance can be expected to
develop much more rapidly than Monsanto initially projected. Furthermore,
it is now clear that Bt-corn can adversely impact populations of key
beneficial insects. Lacewing larvae, which eat lepidopteran larvae, are
killed by Bt, thus removing a natural control on lepidopterans. It now
seems clear that farmers who become reliant upon genetically modified crops
containing the Bt gene can expect unpleasant surprises in the short term
and loss of the effectiveness of Bt in the medium term.[9] It will be a
grave loss indeed.

In sum, genetically modified crops seem poised to reduce diversity on
farms, reduce farm profits, and make U.S. farms even less sustainable than
they already are. For the U.S. food system, this hardly seems like progress.

References

[2] During the early 1980s Benbrook served as an agriculture policy analyst
for the President's Council on Environmental Quality, then as staff
director of the Subcommittee on Department Operations, Research and Foreign
Agriculture of the Agriculture Committee of the U.S. House of
Representatives; from 1984 to 1990 he was executive director of the Board
of Agriculture, National Academy of Sciences. Since 1990 he has operated
Benbrook Consulting Services.

[3] David Tilman, "The Greening of the Green Revolution," NATURE Vol. 396
(November 19, 1998), pgs. 211-212.

[4] Associated Press, "Too Few Farmers Left to Count, Agency Says," NEW
YORK TIMES October 10, 1993, pg. 23.

[5] Ann M. Thayer, "Ag Biotech Food: Risky or Risk Free?" CHEMICAL &
ENGINEERING NEWS [C&EN] November 1, 1999, pgs. 11-20.

[6] http://www.weeds.iastate.edu/weednews/roundupcottonad.htm.

[7] http://www.weeds.iastate.edu/mgmnt/qtr98-4/roundupfuture.htm.

[8] The amazing story of the New Leaf pesticidal potato was told in Michael
Pollan, "Playing God in the Garden," NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE October 25,
1998, pgs. 44-51, 62-63, 82, 92-93.

[9] On Bt resistance, see http://www.pmac.net/ge.htm.

Descriptor terms: agriculture; farming; biotechnology; pesticides;
herbiocides; resistance; genetic engineering; bt; roundup ready; monsanto;
dupont; charles benbrook; economics;

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