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

70% of world's population fed by peasant farmers

February 2018

Of all our modern 'conveniences', the invention of the Industrial Food Chain must rank as the most unfit-for-purpose.

The Chain has a beginning, a middle and an end:

• The beginning is all the resources needed for monoculture of crops: hybrid seed, large tracts of flat land, plentiful water, machines (plus the fossil fuels needed to manufacture and run them), and agrichemicals (plus the fossil fuels needed to manufacture and apply them)
•  the middle is transport, storage, processing, packaging and retailing, all of which require an infrastructure of facilities and machines (plus the fossil fuels needed to create and maintain them) 
• The end is the food in your kitchen, profit here and there along the way, and wasted stuff. 

Like all chains, the Industrial Food Chain is only as strong as its weakest link. Unlike all chains, every one of The Chain's links is weak.

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).

Organic farmers pay the price of GM

April 2016

While America wakes up and finds itself with a GM alfalfa pollution problem [1], and Spain scrambles to control its GM maize pollution problem [2], the UK has just found itself with a GM oilseed rape which nearly became a pollution problem.

Britain doesn't, of course, grow GM anything commercially.  The offending genes were found during routine trials of seeds seeking new plant variety registration.  DEFRA quickly recalled the seeds, and ensured that all affected plants will be destroyed by the company which supplied them.  Mysteriously, the seed was imported from France which doesn't grow GM oilseed rape either.

A grass going feral and becoming a conduit for gene contamination is predictable [1].  An invasive gene-transmitting weed from the other side of the world in today's globalised market [2] is something we have to start watching out for.  The possible pollution of our entire seed supply is simply stupidity.

The problems caused by GM contamination aren't abstract or ideological threats. 

TTIP is about GM

August 2015

Photo from Creative Commons

Disquiet about the 'Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership' (TTIP) continues to grow [1].

The goal of these secretive negotiations is to open up trade between America and Europe. Since the discrepancy between US administration’s 'light-touch' voluntary attitude to GM produce and rigorous GMO regulation in the EU is irreconcilable, there is real concern the TTIP will be used to circumvent vital European GM controls.

Maize pollen travels a long way

January 2015

Field of corn. CC photo by Joel Dinda on Flickr

German scientists have come up with a large and well-controlled data-set which suggests that the management of 'Bt' insecticidal maize (the only GM crop grown on any scale in Europe) is fundamentally flawed.

Enslaved seeds

October 2014

Different varieties of rice seed. CC photo by IRRI photos on Flickr

There is a huge natural genetic diversity in all seeds, which has evolved over millions of years.Only this complex whole has the ability and the reserves to change in harmony with its ever-changing environment.
This is a resource we can't afford to waste, destroy, or compromise.
Without it, we will starve.

Realising our dependence on seed quality, and the profits that can attach to dependency, business has been grabbing control of seeds: wild seeds, commercial seeds, national and global seed markets, and the farmers who use them.

Laws have long been in place in the developed world to ensure that large-scale supplies of seed are of good quality.

However, this system hasn't worked to maintain diversity or farmer choice: it has promoted consolidation of the seed market, dependence on agri-chemicals, and high seed prices.

America's GM attitude shift

January 2014

March against Monsanto, Washington DC 2013. CC photo from Flickr

Changes in awareness of, and attitude to, GM foods in the US were very evident during 2013.

An attempt to slip a new biotech-friendly consumer-unfriendly measure into a continuing resolution in Congress led to an unprecedented backlash.

The infamous measure was written in co-operation with Monsanto (therefore dubbed the Monsanto Protection Act), and was designed to tie the federal regulators' hands if new health concerns about GMOs came to light.  

In the event, the measure was killed in the Senate, but the damage to the biotech industry had been done.  Two million people around the world had taken to the streets to 'March Against Monsanto', and ongoing awareness had been set firmly in motion.

GM food labelling initiatives in many States have ended, so far, in total or partial failure.  There are more in the pipeline, each adding it's own layer of consumer disquiet about GM foods.  However, something more subtle is afoot in the US food industry.

Take back the Earth!

April 2013

Photo of cucumbers by Muu-karhu (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html), 
CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/) or CC-BY-SA-2.0 
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)] via Wikimedia Commons

The idea that lab-made DNA concoctions are patentable 'inventions' is just about plausible. After all, Nature would never be so stupid as to put bacterial genes into food plants to make them toxic or able to accumulate chemicals.

However, the logic behind allowing patents on artificial genes has been extended in many questionable directions: rights can now be conferred not only on lab-made DNA 'inventions' but on any whole organism incorporating the novel DNA, and on any material derived from such organisms, including their future generations. With successive waves of patented genes, a bit of GM pollen in the air, GM seed spillage, and hybridisation, there's a risk much of the living world might soon belong to the biotech industry, if they have their way.

And it just got worse.

The biotech industry has found ways to bend European law to get exclusive rights over just about any seed it cares to own. A dangerous precedent is now underway to allow patents on conventional varieties of our everyday vegetables and fruits, such as cucumber, broccoli and melon.

Natural foods lead the way to GM labelling

March 2013

GMO labelling protest in California. Photo by cheeseslave on Flickr

America's march towards labelling of GM foods continues its steady pace. At least 20 US states have bills in progress to require some form of GM labelling. The latest one, introduced in February in Illinois, would require a label on any product containing more than 1 percent GM ingredients.

(Note. If you haven't been following the US GM food labelling saga, check out

• UNITED STATES STILL STRUGGLING WITH FOOD LABELS WHILE TURKEY LEADS THE WAY - May 2012,  
• UNSAFE MAIZE TRIGGER FOR US LABELLING - October 2012 
• NO GM LABELLING FOR AMERICA ... YET - November 2012).

A new phase in the awareness game is now evident as natural food retailers have now entered the arena.

On 19th March, the US-based Natural Products Association (NPA) announced it is calling for national standard for GMO labelling of all foods. The NPA is the biggest association of its kind, representing 1,900 members from the retail, distribution, wholesale and manufacture sides of the natural products sector.

Earlier in the month, Whole Foods Market (WFM) announced that by 2018 all products in its North American and Canadian stores will be required to carry a label indicating if they contain GM ingredients.

Unsafe GM maize a trigger for food shortages?

October 2012 
 

The reaction of the pro-GM lobby to the long-term experiment which found evidence of harm from NK603 GM maize and its companion herbicide, had all the hallmarks of a full-scale panic (see UNSAFE GM MAIZE A TRIGGER FOR US LABELLING - October 2012).

The more savvy have identified the biotech industry itself as being behind the furore. Biotech finger-prints were all over the scientists who immediately jumped up and tore the study apart in their customary ungentlemanly and unscientific fashion. Not to mention the industry-funded Science Media Centre which rushed to feed all the correct 'science' to the media, most of whom dutifully repeated it. Add to these, who knows what lobbyists (including, it seems, members of the GM assessment panel itself) were primed to make sure the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) took the right pro-GM decisions. All this happened in record time as befits a pre-planned and orchestrated suppression of unwelcome news. Just what the biotech industry PR boys do best.

However, here's another interesting angle to the bigger picture. What are the chances the order to kill the offending science with all possible speed came directly from the Whitehouse? A hotline from the US administration to key parties in Europe?

If that sounds far-fetched, consider the position the USA has got itself into.

The 'Monsanto Tax'

August 2012

There's a certain satisfaction in seeing a bully being given a taste of his own medicine.

Monsanto has long dealt severe legal sanctions against farmers it claims have “pirated” its seed. However, farmers in Brazil have decided two can play at that game, and the courts have agreed...

User-friendly veg

September 2011

... and fruit...

Photo by /charlene on Flickr

Up until now, the biotech industry has been busy inventing GM crops attractive to farmers and the food-processing industries. The end-consumer was expected to eat whatever this trio chose to give them, and health be damned.

Interestingly, there's a sea-change in the offing.