Sex, Bombs and Burgers
Page 22
“If they think it’s somehow going to work because they are going to have one form of clever genetic engineering after another then again, count me out because that will be guaranteed to cause the biggest disaster environmentally of all time.”20
Kill Your Enemy, Fill Your Belly
The rhetoric on the other side of the argument is also ratcheting up. While American corporate interests have been and continue to be a big driver of GMOs, an increasing number of scientists, both social and biological, are voicing their support as well. While GMO critics argue that the world has enough food and that it simply isn’t being distributed correctly to the people who need it, many social scientists disagree. The world may actually be heading for disaster because of rampant population growth. Over the past half-century, the world’s population has grown more than it did during the previous four million years and is expected to double again over the next fifty years.21 Just about all of that growth is expected to happen in the developing world, where eight hundred million people already have insufficient food.22 At the same time, arable land is decreasing at the rate of about 1.5 percent a year because of the three deadly “ations”— desertification, salinization and urbanization.23 China and India, the world’s two most populous nations, are already near a crisis point, each using about three-quarters of its available farmland.24
These facts set the stage for what indeed could be, to use Prince Charles’s words in a different context, “absolute disaster.” There’s a concept, called the population-national security theory, that was postulated by social scientists during the Green Revolution and that neatly sums the situation up. It goes like this: a growing population results in overcrowding and exhaustion of resources, which in turn leads to hunger and political instability. Political instability then leads to communist insurrection, which is a danger to American interests. And what’s the ultimate result of threatening American interests? In many cases, it’s been war. President Harry Truman vouched for this theory in his inaugural address in 1949. “More than half the people of the world are living in conditions approaching misery. Their food is inadequate ... Their poverty is a handicap and a threat both to them and to more prosperous areas,” he said. “Greater production is the key to prosperity and peace. And the key to greater production is a wider and more vigorous application of modern scientific and technical knowledge.”25
The theory has been repurposed for modern times, with the word “terrorist” replacing “communist,” and it has many supporters within government and the scientific community. Right up until his death in 2009, Norman Borlaug backed the use of genetically modified crops as a tool to boost food production levels and fight the conditions that create war and terrorism in developing countries. “This is the most fertile ground for planting all kinds of extremism, including terrorism. And the people of the developed nations won’t live in peace and tranquility with that pot boiling over,” he said. “First, it’s internal conflict in a country, civil war. Then other countries get involved and here we go again. Those are the dangers.”
Borlaug, who in addition to the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded a litany of accolades, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Congressional Gold Medal, the National Medal of Science and the Padma Vibhushan (India’s highest honour to non-citizens), carried considerable weight in the debate. Having already been credited with saving more than 240 million people from starvation, he continued to campaign on into his nineties for the cause of using technology to solve hunger.26 He even appeared in Monsanto promotional videos to defend the company’s genetically engineered crops. “What we need is courage by the leaders of those countries where farmers still have no choice but to use older and less effective methods,” he said in one video. “The Green Revolution and now plant biotechnology are helping meet the growing demand for food production while preserving our environment for future generations.”27
But how much of a factor is hunger in driving people to take up arms? While a number of inputs, including politics, religion and simple aggression all contribute, social scientists and war historians agree that poverty, hunger and the hopelessness they create are among the biggest motivators. Peter Singer, a social scientist at the Brookings Institution in Washington D.C. and author of several books on war, says it’s no different from why people turn to crime. “You have people go into crime because of desperation or they go into it because of the context of how they were raised where poverty was a driver. You have people go into crime because they’re greedy or they’re downright evil and they were born that way. Much of the same parallel can be made as to why conflicts and wars start.” Poverty and desperation tend to hollow out the social and political institutions that are needed for good governance and for stability and prosperity, he says. “Conflict entrepreneurs take advantage of that absence of good governance.”28
Food and the escape from poverty are among the key drivers of recruitment for conflicts in Africa, particularly among children. As many as 250 million children live on the street, more than 210 million must work to feed themselves and their families and one-third of all children suffer from severe hunger. In Children at War, which looks at the horrific rise of child soldiers over the past few decades, Singer found that such hopelessness presents a huge pool of labour for the illegal economy, be it organized crime or armed conflicts.29
The children themselves point to food as a major reason for why they enlisted as soldiers. Fighting may be a dangerous choice of profession, but in many cases it’s better than the alternative. “I don’t know where my father and mother are. I had nothing to eat. I joined the gunmen to get food,” said one twelve-year-old soldier in the Congo.30 “If I left the village I would get killed by the rebels who would think I was a spy. On the other hand if I stayed in the village and refused to join the army, I wouldn’t be given food and would eventually be thrown out, which was as good as being dead,” said another, aged fourteen. “I heard that the rebels at least were eating, so I joined them,” said yet another.31
The story is similar in parts of the Middle East. In Afghanistan, where decades of war have destroyed virtually every institution, hunger is rampant. A pair of Afghan boys told Singer they had the choice of following a cow around to scoop up its excrement to sell as fuel or joining one of the armed factions. Enlisting provided them with clothes, food and a shred of self-respect.32 Graeme Smith, a Canadian journalist who covered the recent war for three years for The Globe and Mail and a former colleague of mine, says such stories are numerous. The reasons Afghans enlist with al Qaeda and the Taliban are usually not political or religious, as the Western media would have us believe. “They’re inextricably linked, hunger and war. Right now, hunger is absolutely one of the big factors driving the conflict,” he says.33
Since the American invasion in 2001, fighting and the resultant deaths have followed weather and agricultural patterns. Fighting usually kicks off after the country’s main cash crop, the poppies from which opium is derived, is harvested in the spring months and continues until it gets cold in December. Day labourers tend to get paid well during the poppy harvest, Smith says, but after that they are at a loss for ways to buy food. For many—like the cow poop boys—enlisting is the only option. As Charles Stith, the former U.S. ambassador to Tanzania, puts it, this is fertile ground for terrorist organizations on recruiting drives. “The foot soldiers of terrorist groups tend to be on the lower rungs of the socio-economic ladder,” he says. “People who have hope tend not to be inclined to strap 100 pounds of explosives on their bodies and go into a crowd and blow themselves up. People who have hope are not inclined to lie in wait outside an airport with a missile looking for a plane full of tourists to shoot down.”34
Recruiting the poor, hungry and hopeless isn’t a tactic reserved for terrorists and African warlords. It’s also a longstanding practice in developed nations, although the idea of poverty is relative in such places. Since food—especially the unhealthy, heavily processed kind—is plentiful and cheap in pro
sperous countries, recruitment of the poor usually takes advantage of a person’s lack of education or job prospects. The U.S. government, for one, has had to deal with charges of using a “poverty draft” for its forces ever since the end of mandatory conscription following the Vietnam War, despite pitching military service as a good way for recruits to earn college tuition. During the first Gulf War, African-American leaders criticized the disproportionate numbers of blacks in the military compared to whites and the population in general. African-Americans, usually from economically depressed areas of the country, made up a quarter of all troops in Iraq in 1991, but only 12 percent of the population. One study found that 33 to 35 percent of all qualified black men at the time had served in the military, more than double the percentage for white men. “This nation ought to be ashamed that the best and brightest of our youth don’t volunteer because they love it so well, but because this nation can’t provide them jobs,” said Benjamin Hooks, the president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.35
Fifteen years later, little had changed for the second Iraq war. Concerned citizens in New York, in one example, began organizing “counter-recruitment” rallies in the face of what they saw as increasingly aggressive attempts by military recruiters to draw in students from high schools in poor areas such as East Harlem. Barbara Harris, one of the protesters, passed information on to students about the financial aid they could receive for college. “If a young person wants to enlist, at least he or she knows what it’s about, what the truth about recruiting is. They can decide if that’s the best choice for them.”36
Nevertheless, the United States has moved quickly to try to fight hunger as a conflict motivator in Iraq, particularly with GMOs. In 2004 the U.S.-led Coalitional Provisional Authority government, in place since the 2003 invasion, handed control back to Iraq’s own government and issued its controversial one hundred orders. The rules were designed to transform the country from a centrally planned economy to a market-driven one, but critics suggested they were really intended to facilitate a form of American economic colonialism. Order 81—which sounds like the ominous directive given by the evil Emperor to exterminate the Jedi in the Star Wars movies—clearly opened the door for American GMO producers. The order’s Plant Variety Protection clause allows for the patenting of new plant forms, or genetically modified crops. Iraq’s agricultural system was badly shattered during the first Gulf War and wasn’t allowed to fully recover because of American and British sanctions afterward, but it is still in better shape than Afghanistan’s. With the worldwide Islamic Jurisprudence Council having approved GMOs for consumption in 2000, it will only be a matter of time before Iraqi farmers are awash in Roundup Ready products. In Afghanistan, where the agriculture system is little better than it was in the Stone Age, it’ll be a while yet.
Patenting Humanitarianism
But the enemies of GMOs don’t buy the “make food not war” argument or the promises of humanitarianism put forward by purveyors. While Prince Charles has called the playing of the Africa card “emotional blackmail,” Greenpeace continues to maintain that the only people who benefit from genetically modified foods are the shareholders of the large biotech companies. The proof is in the pudding, says Greenpeace Canada’s anti-GMO campaigner, Eric Darier. The technology to provide drought-resistant or nutrient-enhanced crops is possible, but the only seeds to have been commercialized since the mid-nineties are those that are tied to chemical fertilizers. “There’s nothing new per se. There were a lot of promises and we Greenpeace were saying that wasn’t the purpose. The purpose was for Monsanto to control the seed market and to be able to push their own herbicides,” he says. “It’s a very sophisticated way of controlling the market.”37
Some farmers who plant Monsanto seeds, both in North America and in India, have in fact complained about the company’s “technology user agreements,” which contain a number of restrictive clauses. One such limitation, for example, prevents farmers from saving seeds from year to year. Critics say this clause is intended to force farmers to buy new seeds every year, but Monsanto insists it’s because GM products, just like Norman Borlaug’s hybrid seeds before them, don’t reproduce very well.
The other major impediment to humanitarian uses of GMOs, critics say, is the actual patenting of the seeds themselves. In 1999 a German plant science professor named Ingo Potrykus, the biotech incarnation of Borlaug, came up with a seed he called Golden Rice while working at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology.38 The genetically engineered rice, which is yellow or orange in colour, produced significantly higher levels of vitamin A and was positioned to solve one of the biggest malnutrition problems in the world. The World Health Organization says up to 250 million preschool children in 118 countries suffer from vitamin A deficiency, which can lead to blindness and ultimately death.39 Researchers at the Institute of Food Technologists peg the number of deaths per year at between one and two million.40 Suddenly, as the new century approached, the potential to use the newest food technology to save a significant number of lives looked like it would finally be realized.
But Potrykus found that, despite the fact that he had created his rice in an academic setting free from corporate influence, the issue of intellectual property still crept up. Not only had Monsanto and other companies patented all their seeds, they had also protected the techniques used to make them. Potrykus’s Golden Rice, it turned out, was unknowingly in potential violation of seventy different intellectual and technical property rights held by thirty-two different companies. If the rice were to be disseminated to poor farmers, each of those rights would have to be negotiated, a fact Potrykus found deplorable:
It seemed to me unacceptable, even immoral, that an achievement based on research in a public institution and with exclusively public funding, and designed for a humanitarian purpose, was in the hands of those who had patented enabling technology early enough or had sneaked in a material transfer agreement in the context of an earlier experiment. It turned out that whatever public research one was doing, it was all in the hands of industry (and some universities).41
Potrykus soon changed his tune, though, when AstraZeneca, the large Anglo-Swedish pharmaceutical company that held much of the intellectual property used in Golden Rice, offered to negotiate a deal that would allow farmers free access to the patents. Potrykus then turned his criticism on the various regulatory agencies around the world, particularly in Europe, that demanded his rice jump through all sorts of hoops to get approval.
Ten years after it was invented, Golden Rice was still not available anywhere in the world. Food scientists who back GMOs are livid that such strict regulatory review is being enforced when so many people are dying. It’s a situation that illustrates just how emotional and paranoid people in the developed world have become about food, a luxury that people in the developing world don’t have. Bruce Chassy, the associate director of the biotechnology centre at the University of Illinois, says products like GMOs should receive the same sort of regulatory fasttracking that drugs like AIDS medications get. “We can’t spend thirty months monitoring a drug while people are dying,” he says. “I have a problem with this moral equation. What is it about one to two million people dying a year from vitamin A deficiency that doesn’t make you want to try out just about anything?”
Golden Rice finally went into field tests in the Philippines in 2008 and may become commercially available to farmers there in 2011, but its long road to market highlights the problems of using GMOs for humanitarian purposes. Critics say the issue of patents slows down and discourages research into non-profitbased uses of GMOs, while advocates argue it’s the overly cautious approach of regulators, influenced by the emotionally charged scaremongering of critics, that is impeding progress.
Ultimately, barring a huge disaster, GMOs will continue their spread. With the continued growth in population, food will become scarcer, which means that conflict—war and terrorism—will likely only increase. As Chassy puts it: �
�There’s this giant train barrelling down the tracks at us and it’s going to cause more civil unrest and suffering in the world than anything conceivable.”
If we think there’s a lot of conflict in the world today, we ain’t seen nothing yet. If GMOs are indeed, as Prince Charles says, a giant experiment, it may just be an experiment worth trying.
9
FULLY FUNCTIONAL ROBOTS
People are willing to have sex with inflatable dolls, so initially anything that
moves will be an improvement.1
—EUROPEAN ROBOTICS NETWORK CHAIRMAN HENRIK CHRISTENSEN
There aren’t a lot of benefits to being a journalist. The pay isn’t great, there’s the constant stress of deadlines and people are always indirectly blaming you, “the media,” for sensationalism, blowing things out of proportion or, my favourite, reporting something “out of context,” the default excuse of people caught saying something they shouldn’t have. There are a few bright sides, though. We tend to get a lot of free coffee and sandwiches and every now and then we get to interview one of our childhood heroes (kung fu action star Jackie Chan comes to mind). And on the rarest of occasions we see or experience something that completely blows our mind and makes up for all the bad coffee.
That’s what happened to me in January 2008, while I was covering the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. After wading through the crushing crowds and the sensory overload that is the convention floor, I staggered out to the parking lot for my appointment with the “Boss,” the robot vehicle built in Pittsburgh by Carnegie Mellon University engineers. Just two months earlier the souped-up General Motors SUV had won the DARPA Urban Challenge, in which fully automated vehicles raced around a ninety-six-kilometre track in a simulated city environment. After explaining how the vehicle worked—it used a combination of radar, laser sensors, cameras and GPS positioning—project manager Chris Urmson took me for a ride around the obstacle course set up in the parking lot.