Whole Earth Discipline

by Stewart Brand

  By some estimates, Norman Borlaug saved more lives—perhaps a billion—than any other human in history. The famines that Ehrlich predicted never occurred, in part because Borlaug, as obsessed as Ehrlich about the dangers of overpopulation, took the approach of providing more food now and striving for lower population later. It worked. As a bonus, there was a direct environmental benefit from higher-yield crops. In 2007 Borlaug wrote that “if the global cereal yields of 1950 still prevailed in 2000, we would have needed nearly 1.2 billion more hectares [4.6 million square miles] of the same quality, instead of the 660 million hectares [2.5 million square miles] used, to achieve 2000’s global harvest. Moreover, had environmentally fragile land been brought into agricultural production, the soil erosion, loss of forests and grasslands, reduction in biodiversity, and extinction of wildlife species would have been disastrous.”

  The environmental movement, with its customary indifference to starvation, adopted the position that the green revolution was somehow a mistake. When Norman Borlaug set about working his magic in Africa in the early 1980s, environmentalists persuaded the World Bank and the Ford and Rockefeller foundations not to fund him. (Ryoichi Sasakawa in Japan eventually did provide support, and Borlaug now has programs in twelve African countries.) Al Gore summarized the environmentalist critique in his Earth in the Balance: Although the Green Revolution produced vast growth in Third World food production, it often relied on environmentally destructive techniques: heavily subsidized fertilizers and pesticides, the extravagant use of water in poorly designed irrigation schemes, the exploitation of the short-term productivity of soils (which sometimes leads to massive soil erosion), monocultured crops (which drove out diverse indigenous strains), and accelerated overall mechanization, which often gave enormous advantages to rich farmers over poor ones.

  (Gore went on to recommend a second green revolution that will focus on poor farmers and the environment, employing, among other things “new advances in plant genetics [that] make it possible to introduce ‘natural’ resistance to some crop diseases and predators without the heavy use of pesticides and herbicides.”)

  Gore’s book came out in 1992. Twenty-four years earlier, in 1968, a gentleman known as “the father of the Green Revolution in India,” told the Indian Science Congress:Intensive cultivation of land without conservation of soil fertility and soil structure would lead ultimately to the springing up of deserts. Irrigation without arrangements for drainage would result in soils getting alkaline or saline. Indiscriminate use of pesticides, fungicides and herbicides could cause adverse changes in biological balance as well as lead to an increase in the incidence of cancer and other diseases. . . . Unscientific tapping of underground water would lead to the rapid exhaustion of this wonderful capital resource left to us through ages of natural farming. The rapid replacement of numerous locally adapted varieties with one or two high-yielding strains in large contiguous areas would result in the spread of serious diseases capable of wiping out entire crops.

  The speaker was plant geneticist Monkombu Sambasivan Swaminathan, one of India’s most distinguished scientists, honored in 1987 with the World Food Prize. To me, M. S. Swaminathan is a prime example of the best criticism of a new technology coming from players within that technology, where knowledge is firsthand and correctives can be applied directly and quickly, while the new field is still taking shape and bad habits haven’t yet set in.

  Despite Swaminathan’s warnings, the Indian government oversubsidized the pumping of water for irrigation, draining ancient aquifers, and many farmers overapplied pesticides and herbicides to the point where they did poison the waters and cause medical harm. Of the world’s twelve worst “persistent organic pollutants,” seven are pesticides, including chlordane, endrin, toxaphene, DDT, and dieldrin. All have been phased out in developed countries, but some are still used in developing countries, and they persist in the environment, causing cancer, birth defects, endocrine disruption, immune dysfunction, and, it now appears, diabetes.

  From Swaminathan’s sequence of positions of responsibility as head of the International Rice Research Institute; the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources; the World Wildlife Fund for Nature (India), and cochair of the UN Millennium Task Force on Hunger, he has pushed for what he calls the “Evergreen Revolution—food for all and forever, on an environmentally friendly and socially sustainable basis.” He is a proponent of ecotechnology, which he defines as “technologies that are rooted in the principles of ecology, economics, gender and social equity, employment generation, and energy conservation.”

  In a 2006 speech, Swaminathan decried the organic-farming movement’s shunning of genetic engineering and applauded “what we call ‘green agriculture,’ which is now becoming very popular in China. The difference between organic farming and green agriculture is: You use integrated pest management, integrated nutrient supply, scientific water management—all methods by which the production potential of the soil is not reduced—and also you can use molecular breeding or Mendelian breeding, whichever is most appropriate.” He added, “Our ability to face the challenges of global warming and sea level rise will depend upon our ability to harmonize organic farming and the new genetics.”

  • Another old green-revolution hand with an insider’s critique is agricultural ecologist Sir Gordon Conway. While working in Borneo in the 1960s, he became one of the pioneers of “integrated pest management.” From 1998 to 2004, he was president of the Rockefeller Foundation, and during that time he wrote an important book, The Doubly Green Revolution (1999). It noted the shortcomings of the original green revolution (excessive water use, excessive advantage to rich farmers, neglect of soil maintenance) and proposed how to remedy them. Conway expects the doubly green agricultural revolution to expand opportunities for the poorest farmers and to emphasize conserving natural resources and the environment while using GE to increase yield yet further. “Our capacity to build ecology into the seed,” he writes, “is largely a consequence of modern biotechnology.” The new “gene revolution” will be more adroit than the green revolution for two reasons but harder to implement for one reason, which he is trying to fix. The advantages this time are the boon of increasingly sophisticated ecological science and the boon of GE, but, as I mentioned before, GE carries an impediment much more serious than what environmentalists worry about.

  The problem is intellectual property. “Food biotechnology,” Conway said in a 2003 speech,was introduced just as globalization changed the boundaries between public and private—from public good, public domain, public obligation to private enterprise, private decision-making, private advantage. International rules controlling the rights to private ownership of research and technology have been changed, while, at the national and international levels, governments have appeared almost passive, as if ceding basic responsibilities for the public good to the private sector. . . .

  Universities, particularly in the US, now license most of their scientific innovations to private companies, including important enabling technologies—the technologies for conducting further research. As a result, three-fourths of the new biotechnology products, including those originally made possible by publicly supported research, are controlled by the private sector. . . . Private interests now dominate all aspects of research, production and the marketing of biotechnology. Even the regulatory systems favor big corporations with cadres of lawyers. . . .

  Fierce competition and low margins in the seed industry compel companies to stockpile IP [intellectual property] that does not have sufficient market value for development, so as to keep it out of the reach of competitors. This tends also to make it unavailable to public scientists still willing to work on crops for poor farmers. The number and complexity of ownership rights that must be negotiated and paid for to take a product to market have multiplied so quickly that some useful products are sitting in greenhouses going nowhere and some useful ideas are not being pursued.

  While at Rockefel
ler, Conway opened two formal pathways around the intellectual-property problem. The first, built in collaboration with the McKnight Foundation, works with universities to keep their biotech IP that is licensed or patented for private use also “available for public-sector humanitarian work.” (The name of that one is the Public IP Resource for Agriculture—PIPRA, based at UC Davis.) The second is a fiendishly clever partnership machine. The African Agricultural Technology Foundation (AATF), based in Kenya and led by Africans, handles nothing but information and agreements. As Conway describes it,It is a way of giving very poor nations the tools to determine what new technologies exist in the public and private sectors, including but not limited to biotech; which ones are most relevant to their needs; how to obtain them and how to manage them; and how to develop nationally appropriate regulatory and safety regimes within which to introduce them. . . . [It will offer] its partners access to advanced agricultural technologies that are privately owned by companies and other research institutions on a royalty-free basis. In exchange for access to these technologies, the AATF will identify partner institutions that can use them to develop new crop varieties that are needed by resource-poor farmers, conduct appropriate biosafety testing, distribute seed to resource-poor farmers, and help create local markets for excess production. Most of the major international seed companies and the US Department of Agriculture have expressed a serious interest in working with the AATF to accomplish its goals.

  If that works, if the large corporations and northern governments join the effort, and if environmentalists join the effort or step out of the way or are heaved out of the way, then wondrous things are in the GE pipeline, for Africa and elsewhere.

  • The first order of business is biofortified food. Cassava, a root crop, is a drought-resistant major staple for 800 million people in Africa, Latin America, and parts of Asia. It has plenty of starch but is grossly deficient in protein, vitamins, and micronutrients. The daily diet of cassava in the developing world has a third of the protein a person needs and a tenth of the vitamins, and it carries a dose of cyanide that is particularly harmful to the undernourished.

  In 2005 a project called BioCassava Plus, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, undertook to engineer a radically improved cassava. It had eight goals for the new cultivar. In terms of nutrition, a daily diet should provide all a person needs of bioavailable protein, vitamin A, vitamin E, iron, and zinc. In addition, the new cassava should be free of cyanide, should be storable for two weeks instead of one day, and should be resistant to the viruses that afflict the crop. Each trait would be engineered separately and then stacked into a single all-purpose crop plant. “This is the most ambitious plant genetic engineering project ever attempted,” says the project head, plant biologist Richard Sayre from Ohio State. “One advantage of transgenics is that it’s fast when it works, so we can get a product in one year. . . . When all these traits get stacked into what will be a farmer-preferred cultivar from Africa, this work will be done by African scientists in African laboratories. We’re developing the tools mostly in the United States and Europe, but once those tools are in place, it becomes an African-owned and developed project.” Field trials have begun in Kenya and Nigeria.

  Along with golden rice, the BioCassava project is leading the way for what is called the second generation of GE innovation. The first generation—Bt corn and Roundup Ready soybeans and such—focused entirely on farm productivity and paid its way quickly. Over eighty GE crops, tested in over 25,000 field trials, proved the safety and efficacy of the technology. Now, building on the lessons from that work, the second generation of GE aims straight at the consumer to provide nutritious, delicious food, free of allergens and toxicity, that anybody can grow.

  Another venture of the Gates Foundation is the African Biofortified Sorghum Project, with Florence Wambugu’s Africa Harvest Biotech Foundation leading a consortium of nine institutions, including DuPont-Pioneer. Sorghum is a drought-tolerant staple for 500 million worldwide. The GE version will improve digestibility and add vitamins A and E, iron and zinc, and three amino acids. Greenhouse trials are under way in South Africa. (Vitamin A, incidentally, is currently distributed to the developing world in the form of 500 million capsules, costing about a dollar apiece. Getting the same amount of vitamin A from a fortified crop will cost about a fifth of a cent.) GE bananas are also being developed to provide a full daily allowance of vitamins A and E and iron for countries, like Uganda, that rely on bananas as their major food source.

  “Greenpeace will fight to keep GE bananas, cassava, and sorghum from poor countries’ fields, just as it will keep opposing golden rice, says Janet Cotter of Greenpeace’s Science Unit in London.” That quote was in an April 2008 issue of Science.

  • A journalist I know, Gregg Zachary, wrote in 2008 about a little-noticed agricultural revolution going on in Africa:Exports of vegetables, fruits, and flowers, largely from eastern and southern Africa, now exceed $2 billion a year, up from virtually zero a quarter-century ago. . . . “The driver of agriculture is primarily urbanization,” observes Steve Wiggins, a farm expert at London’s Overseas Development Institute. As more people leave the African countryside, there is more land for remaining farmers, and more paying customers in the city. . . . Multinational corporations are becoming more closely involved in African agriculture, moving away from plantation-based cultivation and opting instead to enter into contracts with thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of individual farmers. China and India, hungry to satisfy the appetites of expanding middle classes, view Africa as a potential breadbasket.

  A method known as “contract farming” has become a crucial instrument of African empowerment. Buyers agree to purchase everything a farmer grows—coffee, cotton, even fish—freeing him from the specter of rotting crops and allowing him to produce as much as possible. And because the buyers—some of them domestic companies, others multi nationals—profit, they have a stake in farmer productivity and an incentive to provide such things as training and discounted seeds. . . . International buyers of major African crops from Europe, Asia, and the United States have told me repeatedly that small farmers in Africa, relying on their own land and family labor and using few costly inputs such as chemical fertilizers, are more efficient producers than plantations.

  My bet is that, as with cellphones, much of the innovation in GE foods will take place in the developing world. If the organic food industry in the North continues to ban everything transgenic, it may find that it loses market and cachet to GE foods that are better tasting, better for you, and kinder to soil and ecology.

  The leading edge in America, I suspect, will be GE foods that offer benefits seen as somehow medical. Coming soon is a GE pig whose pork has heart-healthy omega-3 fatty acids as good as those found in fish. Healthful bacon! (The operative gene comes from a roundworm, for those keeping score.) Now that we know that resveratrol in red wine is what keeps the French living longer despite all that butter, there’s a GE wine on the way from China that has six times as much resveratrol. (The relevant gene was engineered in from a wild vine mainly for fungus resistance, which is what resveratrol is originally for, from the grapevine’s perspective.) Researchers in Texas have developed a GE carrot that carries enough calcium to head off osteoporosis for people who can’t get their calcium from dairy products. And DuPont-Pioneer is bringing out a GE high-oleic soybean oil they call TREUS that eliminates trans fats from cooking—more good news for American hearts. (No exotic genes in this one; the GE technique “silences” a gene so that the soybean makes monounsaturated oleic acid—as in olive oil—instead of less healthful polyunsaturated linoleic acid. It’s an interesting borderline case. Will the anti-GE crowd still protest even though there are no transgenes involved in this engineered food from a GE corporation?)

  I presume that few will complain as genetic engineering is increasingly deployed to head off disease in humans. There are half a dozen projects under way to disable or sterilize mosquitoes so that they cannot
transmit malaria and dengue fever. Japanese scientists are developing a strain of rice that delivers cholera vaccine; Korean scientists are working on a form of tomato with a vaccine against Alzheimer’s. A dental scientist in Florida has devised a permanent cure for cavities with an altered version of the bacterium that causes them, dear old Streptococcus mutans. And mad cow disease can be eliminated totally from livestock (and thus from us) with a combination of GE and cloning. I wonder how that will play in Europe, where the 1990s mad cow outbreak is what set many people against GE in the first place.

  Next come trees. Decriers of one thing or another often declare, “Our children will never forgive us if we fail to blah blah blah.” In reality I find that later generations don’t look back much; if they do look back, they don’t notice whatever the issue was; if they do notice the issue, they don’t care about it. I grew up with an exception to that. In Michigan, where I spent all my young summers, my great-grandparents’ generation had clear-cut the whole state of its vast forests of white pine and Norway pine. “Daylight in the swamp, boys!” My parents’ cottage was in one of the two remaining groves of virgin pines in the whole Lower Peninsula; we had white pines 150 feet high. I knew what was gone, and forgiveness was not in me. You can visit a sample of the generational wrath in a fine novel called True North, by Jim Harrison. The son of one of the murderers of the northern Michigan forest misspends his life in study and loathing of his father’s crimes against the land.

  It’s not just in the past. A couple of years ago, my wife and I visited Tasmania, in part to see the tallest hardwood trees in the world, the lordly Eucalyptus regnans, nearly 300 feet high. Some are protected. Many are still being clear-cut, not for lumber but to be chipped and processed into cardboard. It’s like seeing a Stradivarius broken up to start a fire.