Could Greenpeace be greener?
Civitas, 27 September 2010
From 24 – 26 September the British newspaper The Independent jointly hosted a forum on ‘The Sustainable Planet’, writes Stephen Clarke. One of the newsworthy results of this forum was reported by The Independent on Sunday on 26 September under the headline ‘Public opinion stopped GM, says campaigner’. The paper was referring to a statement by Lord Melchett, a former director of Greenpeace who now believes that GM crops are a ‘redundant technology’.
Lord Melchett is now the director of the Soil Association, an organic farming and food campaign lobby but in 1999, while director of Greenpeace, he and 27 associates were arrested for uprooting a field of GM crops that were part of an evaluation of GM technologies being sponsored by the Government. The 28 Greenpeace protesters were acquitted of charges of criminal damages in what was a highly contentious decision and one questioned by the Labour Government of the time.
Lord Melchett’s recent proclamation on GM crops brings the issue back into the spotlight and exposes some strange inconsistencies in Greenpeace’s position on GM crops and organic produce. Greenpeace has long been a vocal opponent of GM crops and a similarly vocal proponent of organic produce. However, there seems to be a certain inconsistency in its two positions, particularly when examined in light of Greenpeace’s wider goal of mitigating the effects of climate change and preserving the planet’s natural diversity. This inconsistency is evident in research highlighted by Matt Ridley in his book The Rational Optimist, How Prosperity Evolves.
Ridley points out a seemingly inevitable failing of organic farming; that it is low-yield. Organic farming exhausts mineral nutrients in the soil because it eschews the use of all synthetic fertilizers. To overcome this problem, organic farmers add crushed rock or squashed fish to the soil (in effect replacing synthetic fertilizers with natural ones). However, the soil still suffers from nitrogen deficiency, and so organic farmers – in an appropriately natural fashion – grow legumes which absorb nitrogen from the air. These legumes are then ploughed into the soil or applied as manure (after they have been eaten by animals). With such natural substitutions, organic yields can match non-organic yields.
However, as is no-doubt evident from the description above, a problem remains; organic yields are only able to match non-organic yields by using more land and natural resources (through the planting of legumes and the use of another natural resource, fish). Herein lies a problem with organic food. Organic farming reduces the amount of land and resources which Greenpeace tries so hard to protect. If organic farming was adopted on a large scale, far more of the earth’s surface would have to be given up for arable land, and this would result in there being fewer forests to capture carbon dioxide and smaller habitats for many of the world’s most endangered species.
Strangely, notes Ridley, GM crops seem to provide a route out of this impasse, but Greenpeace is unswervingly determined to resist it. Organic GM crops would make organic crops more efficient because genetically modifying crops enable scientists to incorporate into plants many of the benefits which are currently externally provided by synthetic or biological chemicals. A case study can illustrate this point: since the 1930s, many organic farmers have used an insect killing bacterium called Bacillus thuringiensis or ‘bt’ which was sprayed onto crops to control pests. Bt was approved by organic farmers because the spray was biological not chemical. In the 1980s scientists took the bt toxin and incorporated it through genetic modification into a cotton plant renamed ‘bt cotton’. This new strain of cotton had all the resistant benefits of the bt spray but provided these benefits genetically, thus eliminating the need for the spray and some of its harmful side effects (such as killing innocent insects that were not eating the plant). Organic farmers however rejected this new strain of cotton on the grounds that it was ‘genetically modified’, and bt cotton was only adopted following pressure from farmers (it has now replaced 1/3 of all cotton produced globally).
This case study demonstrates one way that GM crops can harness modern scientific advances to reduce the need for synthetic chemicals in farming, while still producing yields comparable to that of non-organic farming. Surely this is should be an attractive prospect for Greenpeace? Undoubtedly the organisation is correct that GM crops should be properly tested (though Lord Melchett and his associates’ actions in 1999 suggest that Greenpeace sometimes violently prevents such tests) but if crops pass the stringent safety tests then why should Greenpeace automatically reject them, as they currently seem to do? Why should advances in technology that could help solve some of the problems surrounding food production, especially in countries in Africa where agricultural small holders have little access to chemical pesticides, continue to be rejected because of what is in essence an ideological position?
Greenpeace’s position on GM foods is more perplexing when one examines the organisation’s stance on biofuels. Greenpeace rejects the extension of biofuels because their increased cultivation in countries like Brazil would increase the amount of arable land and so cause a further decrease in forests that support biological diversity and help to capture carbon dioxide. Surely a similar concern should prompt the organisation into rejecting non-GM organic farming that by its very nature would require more arable land, which will have to increase as the world’s population grows. It is hard to see how Greenpeace can be pro-organic without being pro-GM (provided the GM crops are safe) if it wants to continue to warn against the problems that increased arable land may pose to the planet.
Greenpeace has done an immeasurable amount of good in keeping environmental issues on the political agenda for nearly 40 years. However, for it to continue to have an important impact it must reassess some of its positions, especially its seemingly unthinking rejection of technological solutions to many of the planet’s most pressing issues. Safe GM crops are one such solution, safe nuclear power is arguably another, neither is perfect at present but Greenpeace would do well to support attempts to make such technologies safe and viable, rather than pursuing antiquated and unviable ideas such as non-GM organic farming.