Evolutionary breeding, just like weeds

September 2022

Despite all the toxins, genetic devices, and shear physical destruction we throw at them, pests of all kinds continue to thrive in our fields. As climate change imposes all manner of unusual stresses on the environment, farmers and their crops struggle, while pests go from strength to strength.

It's not too difficult to see why. 

Gene-edited farming - rescue or last straw?

December 2021

Modern 'conventional' farming: too big, too uniform, too much fancy technology, too hype-ridden, and unsustainable.

Paving the way for the acceptance of Westminster's consultation on the regulation of genetic technologies, an opinion piece, written by a top UK crop-pest scientist, was published in the Guardian newspaper. Its headline was:

"Science can rescue farming. Relaxing gene editing rules should be the start"

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The villains that farming needs to be rescued from are "new (climate-change driven) plant diseases moving rapidly around the world", and some old plant diseases (such as the blight which caused the Irish potato famine in the 1840s) which still plague us, and the skill and patience required for the long process of conventional plant breeding.

The heroes which will rescue farming are super-fast, precise, trait-specific new crops courtesy of gene editing.

The article also acknowledged that, before farming can be rescued by gene-editing, gene editing will have to be rescued from negative consumer opinion.

Take a step back and look at why our agriculture is being caught so far on the back foot that it needs rescuing.

In old-style 'conventional' plant breeding (a.k.a. 'domestication'), seed is saved, exchanged locally, and possibly selected for planting the following year. The plants evolve* alongside the farmers and everything else which shares their mutual environment. Farmers are producers with key skills in food production, while their naturally genetically-diversified crops evolve into new genetically-diversified crops.

* Note Evolution is an ongoing, ecosystem-wide shifting to new states of equilibrium as all organisms interact with each other and with their non-living environment. "Like all organisms, humans alter the environments around them in ways which have evolutionary consequences" (Mueller and Flachs)

Seventy years of the inappropriately named 'green' revolution have given us new-style 'conventional' (a.k.a. 'traditional') intensively-bred crops which are mainly inbred-hybrids. Such crops have uniform genetics and often include desired traits induced by humans using random mutagenesis (absent safety testing). They are developed off-farm with a prime focus on high yield to supply a globalised market. Key to growing such crops are chemical inputs (fertilisers and pesticides), the cash to buy the inputs and new seed every year, water, and the machines to enable uniform planting, multiple chemical applications, and harvesting on a vast scale. Add to these, government subsidies and an elaborate market infrastructure. Farmers growing them have become consumers of whatever seed, chemicals and machines their suppliers want to flog them.

The green revolution's monocultures and transportation of seeds around the world are big players in the global spread of plant diseases (the ones gene-editing will 'rescue' farming from), and climate change.

The focus on yield, uniformity and scale has long side-lined the nutritional value, taste and sustainability of the crop, and the needs and knowledge of the local people, and evolution. While the on-farm environment keeps changing, just like it always has, industry-supplied inbred-hybrid seed has no capacity for evolution.

The latest shift in agriculture is to crops which have been genetically modified (GM) or gene edited (also GM). These have desired specific traits engineered into them in the laboratory. In a desperate attempt to normalise these GM creations, genetic modification has been absurdly described as "a continuation of the ancient process of (crop) domestication" by which humans "have been manipulating their crops for millennia". Gene-editing takes the public sedation exercise a stage further: it "could happen in Nature" and “allows us to give Mother Nature a helping hand to accelerate the process of evolution". Since all GM traits are bred into existing crops varieties with uniform genetic backgrounds, they are quite clearly nothing to do with old-conventional, evolving, plant breeding and everything to do with new-conventional, non-evolving, green revolution crop production.

Consumers have every reason to be just as uncomfortable with gene editing as they were with genetic modification.

For one thing, there's the science (which isn't difficult to find or to grasp):

• Apart from the question of functional disturbances in the genome caused by the intended DNA change, there's a mounting body of evidence that the gene editing process itself induces damage elsewhere in the genome [1,2,3].
• The latest alarming discovery is the possibility that CRISPR gene editing can cause the chromosome to shatter and re-assemble haphazardly, with who-know-what effects on the GM organism.
• Crop scientists check the success of their genetic engineering by looking for the desired edit at the 'precise location': random wreckage elsewhere remains invisible.

For another thing, as some concerned New Zealand scientists pointed out "the risk of harm from gene technology accumulates over time and scale of production". If Big Biotech gets its way on the scale of gene-tech crops grown all over the world, it's just a matter of time before the risk of harm becomes actual harm.

Then, there's the desperate and unconvincing propaganda such as that described above. As the concerned scientists in New Zealand pointed out, "the risks from technology don't disappear by calling it natural" (and, an edited gene doesn't become natural by calling it evolution).

Suggestions in the crop-pest scientist's article for tackling the public confidence deficit in gene editing include the need for transparency and a 'national debate'. That same month, a letter published in Nature Biotechnology advanced principles for 'Responsible governance of gene editing in agriculture and the environment' which included 'robust, inclusive societal engagement'. Note that no one's suggesting any need for safety testing to reassure the public. What all that transparency, debate and engagement sounds like is a smokescreen for 'educating' the public to want this new-fangled GM food, just like in the 1990s when the first old-style GM crops emerged from the field.

Relaxing gene editing rules' as suggested by the top UK crop scientist translates into a means to avoid safety testing. Indeed, the outcome of the 'consultation' is that UK regulators will now permit field trials of gene-edited crops without risk assessment, and new legislation to exclude gene-edited organisms from the definition of a GMO is now on Westminster's agenda.

OUR COMMENT

The hype surrounding all things GM hasn't changed in quarter of a century. Don't let yourself be 'educated' to think that gene-edited foods will ever be anything but a quick, commercially-lucrative patch shoring up an over-sized unsustainable system with multiple opportunities for harm to health.

The top UK crop scientist acknowledged that "Organic farming has provided us with creative and powerful alternatives for how we grow food" and hints that combining crop 'improvement' using gene-editing with organic methods could be a solution for sustainable agriculture. Obviously giving Mother Nature a helping hand ... and giving the biotech industry an even bigger helping hand while compromising our future organic food supply. Organic farming doesn't need rescued, but it will if genetic engineers get their hands on it.

Ask your MP to take action. Rather than rush simplistic gene edited 'improved' crops to market, the UK government must promote small-scale, diversified, climate-friendly, unadulterated organic, regenerative, and agro-ecological methods that work with nature and put farmers back in the driving seat. In that way, farming might actually rescue itself along with our health, our food supply and our future.

In Scotland, our Environment Minister tells us: 

"Scotland's policy towards GMOs has not changed, and we have no plans for a similar review. As for gene editing, we are disappointed DEFRA would choose to move unilaterally on this. The Scottish Government is committed to keeping aligned with the EU, and we are monitoring the EU's position closely". 

Now is a good time to tell your MSP that you don't trust the new gene technology trajectory of English agriculture and that you fully support Scotland's no GM and no gene editing policy.


Background

[1] THE PRECISION PROBLEM IN GENOME EDITING - August 2021

[2] CRISPR'S EPIGENETIC SCARS - August 2021

[3] CRISPR CATASTROPHE IN THE MAKING - August 2021

SOURCES:

·         DEFRA Consultation outcome, Genetic technologies regulation: government response, updated 29.09.21

·         Nick Talbot, Science can rescue farming. Relaxing gene editing rules should be the start, Guardian 19.09.21

·         Natalie G. Mueller and Andrew Flachs, September 2021, Domestication, crop breeding, and genetic modification are fundamentally different processes: implications for seed sovereignty and agrobiodiversity, Agriculture and Human Values

·         Barbara Van Dyck, The Stories We Trust: Regulating Genome edited Organisms, Agroecology Now! 23.07.21

·         British farmers 'could lead the way' on gene editing after Brexit, Farming UK 4.12.18

·         Jack Heinemann and others, Calling the latest gene technologies 'natural' is a semantic distraction - they must still be regulated, The Conversation, 22.09.21

·         Doria R. Gordon, et al., September 2021, Responsible governance of gene editing in agriculture and the environment, Nature Biotechnology Correspondence

·         Mitchell L. Leibowitz, et al., 2020, Chromothripsis as an on-target consequence of CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing, Preprint (subsequently published in Nature Biotechnology)

·         Chromothripsis: Bad news for gene editing, GM Watch, 22.09.21

Photo Creative Commons

Impossible, incredible, awesome, beyond...

January 2020

'... common sense?

The 'Impossible' bleeding plant burger started out back in 2017 as textured wheat protein with fake soyabean 'blood' from GM yeast and some other stuff collectively described by its manufacturer, Impossible Foods, as "simple, all-natural ingredients" [1]. By 2019, Impossible Foods had realised their Impossible burgers weren't sufficiently beef-like and were unpopular with the gluten-intolerant sector of the population. The non-meat burgers were accordingly re-formulated with soya protein.

It seems, however, that sourcing sufficient quantities of affordable non-GM soya to suit its clean, green image and marketing aspirations proved impossible: Impossible Foods' answer was to switch to cheap and plentiful GM soya and hype its way out of the image problem [2].

Dealing with a climate-changed, salty world

October 2019

Countries across the globe are facing a future of dwindling fresh water and cultivable land, plus the prospect of social unrest if food supplies collapse. 

   

America's monocultures of herbicide- and insect-resistant GM crops are all heavily dependent on agrichemical inputs and water.  This intensive agriculture is outstripping the water supply, and what water's left is increasingly saline.   

U.S. GM 'answers' are of course what get the press coverage. 

The case for diversity

September 2019

The need for diversity in our food supply has been a hot topic lately [1, 2].

Green Revolution agriculture gave us monocultures of a tiny range of high-calorie crops.  The Gene Revolution of recent decades compounded this with GM versions of the same crops. Commercial GM plants are overwhelmingly designed to be used in conjunction with a single herbicide, and many generate a small range of very similar insecticides.

Paradoxically, the end-products of these staple crops have diversified.  The excuse for developing them may originally have been feeding the hungry, but large quantities of that 'food' are now diverted into biofuel-production, industrial chemicals and animal feed.

Those that do reach the human stomach are highly processed carbohydrates and chemicals (a.k.a. junk food, or food-like substances).  In the dietary desert we now inhabit, our animals' nutritional needs are better met than ours.

Super-simplified agri-systems support disease

August 2019

E.coli 0157 -

In 1996, an outbreak of E.coli 0157 bacterial disease in Scotland involved the largest recorded number of infected adults in whom the early digestive-tract symptoms progressed to life-threatening kidney disease. Twenty-eight of them died.

That same year, 7,966 individuals were diagnosed with E.coli 0157 infection in a single outbreak in Japan.

Because the guts of healthy cattle are a reservoir for E.coli 0157, the animals, their manure, and the land they've grazed, are potential sources of the infection. The bacteria can also make their way from fields into the water supply.

The Scottish E.coli 0157 outbreak was caused by contaminated raw meat stored next to cooked meat. The Japanese outbreak was caused by radish sprouts contaminated by infected water.

Organic foods have always been seen as an arch-enemy by biotech proponents. In a desperate attempt to trash organics, they've even been blamed for deadly infections of E.coli 0157 bacteria.

'Biofortification' - reinforcing malnutrition

August 2019

'Biofortified' crops, with increased levels of one, or a few, micro-nutrients, were first released in 2004. Since then, their use has been eagerly embraced by governments of developing countries as a cheap way to address malnutrition*.

*micro-nutrient deficiencies

In particular, iron, zinc and vitamin A in staple foods, such as rice and millet, have been a focus for biofortification schemes. Both conventional breeding and, increasingly, GM techniques are being used to achieve these 'nutritionally enhanced' crops.

Enslaving Africans again

June 2019

In 2005, the Head of the Ethiopian Environment Protection Authority suggested that GM crops would, once more, enslave the people of Africa.  Instead of being transported as slaves to grow crops in America, they would be forced to grow America's crops in African soil.

Also recognised even then was that the issue of GM food safety is a much bigger question in Africa than in the developed world.  This is because chronically malnourished people will be more susceptible to any harmful effects from their food.  In the case of GM maize, in particular, account must be taken of the quantities likely to be consumed: maize may be eaten three times a day by African populations, while it forms no more than two per cent of the American diet.

Indeed, the biotech industry's new frontier in GM crop expansion does appear to be Africa, and does appear to be focusing on GM maize.

Industry promises are, our course, yield, yield, yield, with a feel-good refrain of help the poor, feed the hungry, and improve efficiency and farmer livelihoods.

But, what does the GM-based agricultural dream model really offer the people and states of Africa?

Bullet-proof bees

May 2019

People need bees to produce over 80% of their food. Bees need flowers to produce 100% of their food. The people, the bees and the flowering plants all have to be in the right place at the right time, or none will survive.

Paradoxically, modern man seems to have gone out of his way to make life impossible for the insects he depends on.

The future of potatoes

December 2018

GM potatoes with a little extra something for everyone are wending their way into American supermarkets. To please the potato processors, these wondrous spuds don't get black spots when bruised [1]. To satisfy French fry aficionados, they don't turn brown when they're old and fried.

To coax consumers, GM relieves them of the dread threat of 'acrylamide' carcinogen in their fries [2]. To suit farmers, they promise blight-free crops. These spuds are very novel and very uniform. They come at a cost, and with more than a few risks [3].

Meta analysis shows how different GM really is

August 2018

Domestic breeding has been a 'powerful evolutionary force' on our food plants, to which the introduction of GM plants has added a whole new dimension. Noting this, a Mexican team of scientists took a look at the extent of the changes now present in conventional and GM crops compared to their wild ancestors.

Re-thinking the yield obsession

June 2018

"For the last 60 years we have been on a pesticide merry-go-round, where successive generations of pesticides are released, and a decade or two later they are banned when the environmental harm they do emerges. Each time they are replaced by something new, and each new group of chemicals brings new and unanticipated problems. Considering our intelligence, it is remarkable that we humans can keep making the same mistake over and over again" signed by 12 scientists who have spent decades studying the fragile web of insects, the environment, and the crops on which we all depend for survival. 

This merry-go-round is harming both ourselves and our environment: why can't we get off it?

GM maize data mountain

June 2018

A recent article in Forbes Magazine suggested that the "mountains of scientific proof" of "how big the benefit and small the risk is from GMO crops" should "put a categorical end to (the) worries" of the apparently uninformed public in whom "GMO paranoia continues to rage".

GM in Mexican maize revisited

February 2018

One of the early embarrassments for the biotech industry was the publication of a study in 2001 which reported GM contamination in Mexican traditionally bred maize varieties (landraces - see Note).

Mexico is the centre of origin of maize and an important reservoir of genetic diversity of the species. To preserve this valuable and irreplaceable resource, the cultivation of GM maize has been banned there since 1998.

The unwelcome finding of contamination was met with a slew of pro-GM publications casting doubt on its validity by criticising its methodology.

American agricultural suicide

November 2017

A retired Senior Executive of the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recently described how American agriculture is on a "treadmill to oblivion", blinding itself to the reality of what's happening on the farm and of where that pesticide treadmill isn't going. Add to this, an "unparallelled ability ... to forget what we once know" about how to keep the soil healthy the pests at bay, and the crop yields high without fertilisers and pesticides.

Corporate Communism?

November 2017

Denying local communities the freedom to choose their own agricultural system, not only what they grow but how they grow it, has suddenly become a priority in the USA.

By August this year, 28 States had passed "seed pre-emption laws" never deemed necessary nor desirable before.

The new laws are primarily designed to block counties and cities from banning GMOs, but the language used in some bills could enable them to extend to such things as manures, fertilisers and irrigation (these could be used to promote, for example, agri-chemical corporate interests, agri-chemical dependent GM crops, and futuristic drought-tolerant GM crops).

Crop diversity disaster

September 2017

"It is agronomically, ecologically, nutritionally, and economically risky and unsustainable to rely almost exclusively on a handful of major crops to provide food for the world's (future population)" (Dempewolf).

The 'agronomic' problem is the need for crop diversification to achieve adaptation and resilience of our food production systems in the face of climate change.

The 'ecological' problem is that monocultures are an unbalanced hole in the ecosystem which can generate disease and spread toxins.

The 'nutritional' problem is that a diverse and varied diet is vital for our nutrition and health.

The 'economic' problem stems from all of the above.

Undefended maize

March 2017

The Green Revolution has been an exercise in creating extremes. We now have extreme uniformity in our staple crops and in our agricultural practices, with an extreme dependence on agrichemicals, and a globalised crop market (you can't get much bigger than that).

This has led to an extreme reduction in our crop gene pool, unstoppable pest problems, and a problem-solving mind-set limited to more-of-the-same single high-tech solutions to 'key' difficulties.

We now have food from crops which have been intensively bred for extreme yield with scant attention to whole nutritional value, taste or pest resistance.

In this one-size-fits-all agricultural system, the answer to poor soil is to add chemicals, and the answer to pests is to kill them with chemicals.