GMOs,
pesticides, and the new scientific deadlock
By Tom Laskawy
What
a month it’s been for contentious science! The latest scrum is over a new study from
the University of Washington agricultural scientist Charles Benbrook, who
looked at the rate of pesticide use in the age of genetically engineered seeds,
or GMOs. Benbrook’s results undercut one of the main arguments in favor of the
seeds — the idea that they have significantly brought down pesticide use. In
fact, according to Benbrook’s analysis, since their introduction in the 1990s,
pesticide use for commodity crops like corn and soy has increased by
approximately 7 percent.
What’s
interesting is that the biotech industry’s claim about GMOs reducing pesticide
use was true when the first GMO seeds came on the
market. Those seeds, known as Bt corn and Bt soy cotton,
expressed their own pesticide. And when they were the only GMO game in town,
Benbrook confirms that pesticide use did drop.
But then
came Monsanto and its herbicide-resistant RoundUp Ready product line — seeds
engineered to withstand the pesticide RoundUp (whose active ingredient is
glyphosate). These seeds had the opposite effect, encouraging farmers to use a
single pesticide, ultimately to excess. Benbrook decided to figure out exactly
how much.
But the
U.S. Department of Agriculture had ended its pesticide use tracking program
years earlier, so Benbrook was forced to estimate the total use. He had to come
up with a model using incomplete data from the USDA combined with other
sources, like planting data and pesticide-use models. He arrived at this
estimation: Since GMO crops were introduced 1996, U.S. farmers have used 404
million more pounds of pesticide than they would have with just conventional
crops.
This
conclusion is (surprise, surprise) not without its detractors.Graham Brookes
of PG Economics, a U.K.
consulting group specializing in biotechnology that has conducted its own
industry-funded studies on the subject, told the Huffington Post that
Benbrook’s figure was “biased and inaccurate.” And Keith Kloor, who recently compared GMO
“skeptics” to climate deniers, has accused Benbrook
of being biased because he’s affiliated with the Organic Center, among other things.
Kloor
did not, however, mention that Benbrook is also, according to his bio,
former “Executive Director of the Subcommittee of the House Committee on
Agriculture with jurisdiction over pesticide regulation, research, trade and
foreign agricultural issues” and former executive director of the Board on
Agriculture of the prestigious National Academy of
Sciences. Sounds like a total radical, doesn’t he! I guess even
“realists” such as Kloor are not immune to selective editing.
But
the main reason that Benbrook’s work is open to these criticisms has nothing to
do with him. It’s the fact that, in 2008, the Bush USDA all but stopped tracking
pesticide use. It was supposedly for budgetary reasons — but it is
fishy that the last year of USDA data (2006) more or less coincides with
widespread adoption of Monsanto’s RoundUp Ready crops — the same ones that
encourage farmers to pour huge amounts of glyphosate on American lands.
Which
brings me to another main critique of the study: Some scientists claim that
while there’s lots more RoundUp used these days, RoundUp is much safer than the
alternatives. But how much safer is
it really?
We
have lots of evidence — some of it from USDA scientists —
that RoundUp isn’t the innocuous product it’s cracked up to be. And Benbrook
cited evidence of an increase in the amount of RoundUp residue present on
retail produce, a phenomenon that was once quite rare. He suggests this is due
to farmers using higher doses of RoundUp in fields in an early response to the
rise of pesticide-resistant weeds, or as we like to call them, “superweeds.”
The
RoundUp residue is a mere harbinger of things to come, however. As I’ve written about before,
many farmers are now turning to older, more toxic pesticides to control those
weeds. Take 2,4-D, a common replacement; it’s been linked to cancer,
neurotoxicity, kidney and liver problems, reproductive effects, and shows
endocrine disrupting potential.
Benbrook
sums up the implications like this:
A majority of American
soybean, maize, and cotton farmers are either on, or perilously close to a
costly herbicide and insecticide treadmill. Farmers lack options and may soon
be advised, out of necessity, to purchase [GMO seeds] resistant to multiple
active ingredients and to treat Bt corn with once-displaced corn insecticides.
The seed-pesticide industry is enjoying record sales and profits, and the
spread of resistant weeds and insects opens up new profit opportunities in the
context of the seed industry’s current business model.
It’s a
situation only a biotech company could love. It’s also worth noting that
Benbrook calls not for a ban on GMOs, as his detractors intimate, but instead
declares that “profound weed management system changes will be necessary in the
three major GE crops to first stabilize, and then hopefully reduce herbicide
use, the costs of weed management, and herbicide-related impacts on human
health and the environment.”
It’s a
sad day when a statement like that is seen as controversial. But it’s not
surprising either, considering the way the science and media communities have
been arguing about genetic engineering lately.
Take
the recent, contentious “lifetime feeding study” [PDF] of rats
and genetically modified corn that found health risks and high tumor rates,
which I wrote about here.
While there were issues with the study,
especially surrounding the terms over which reporters could get access to the
work in advance, the response from both media and other scientists was resoundingly aggressive (not
to mention effective. Google the study and the first page of results contains
only critical articles). The conventional wisdom quickly became that the safety
of GMOs is “settled science.”
But how
often is it made clear that this conclusion is based on the safety data
provided by … the industry that developed and sells genetically modified seeds?
Even
The New York Times hasn’t entirely ignored the lack
of independent research on GMOs. A 2009 article documented
a protest to the EPA by scientists who have been unable to get access to
biotech companies’ seeds in order to do full analyses of their safety:
Biotechnology
companies are keeping university scientists from fully researching the
effectiveness and environmental impact of the industry’s genetically modified
crops, according to an unusual complaint issued by a group of those scientists.
“No
truly independent research can be legally conducted on many critical
questions,” the scientists wrote in a statementsubmitted
to the Environmental Protection Agency.
… [W]hile university
scientists can freely buy pesticides or conventional seeds for their research,
they cannot do that with genetically engineered seeds. Instead, they must seek
permission from the seed companies. And sometimes that permission is denied or
the company insists on reviewing any findings before they can be published,
they say.
You
cannot claim to understand or defend the science behind GMO safety without
grappling with this reality. And Gilles-Eric Seralini, the scientist behind the
rat study, is by no means the first scientist who has raised questions about
GMO safety only to come under fire from industry (and in turn media).
A
group of scientists recently penned a letter,
which was cosigned by dozens of researchers, claiming a pattern of harassment
of skeptical scientists by biotech companies and governments. The list
includes:
Ignacio Chapela, a then
untenured Assistant Professor at Berkeley, whose paper on GM contamination of
maize in Mexico sparked an intensive internet-based campaign to discredit him.
This campaign was reportedly masterminded by the Bivings Group, a public
relations firm specializing in viral marketing — and frequently hired by
Monsanto
And
Arpad Pusztai, whose career as a biochemist “came to an effective end when he
attempted to report his contradictory findings on GM potatoes.” The letter goes
on to describe his experience this way:
Everything from a gag
order, forced retirement, seizure of data, and harassment by the British Royal
Society were used to forestall his continued research. Even threats of physical
violence have been used, most recently against Andres Carrasco, Professor of
Molecular Embryology at the University of Buenos Aires, whose research
identified health risks from glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup.
It’s not
easy for scientists to write letters like this — most prefer to produce
research, not protests. It’s when they feel that their work is being suppressed
or blocked that they get angry.
Of
course, it’s easy to look at all this controversy as proof that all anti-GMO
research is bunk — which is certainly a common opinion among traditional
scientists. But we do live in a world where deep-pocketed industries can up and
decide to “create their own reality,” as the Bushies liked to say.
Fossil fuels, tobacco, and more recently, BPA and flame retardants have all
benefited from a vigorous (and secretive)“product defense”
industry to protect their interests (and bottom lines). Are we
to believe GMOs are any different? The essence of product defense is —
with apologies to Thomas Dolby –
to blind with science. It hasn’t come to that point just yet; but it’s
certainly getting hard to see through the fog.
Tom
Laskawy is a founder and executive director of the Food & Environment Reporting Network and a contributing
writer at Grist covering food and agricultural policy. His writing has also
appeared in The American Prospect, Slate, The New York Times,
and The New Republic. Follow him on Twitter.
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