Biotechnology – magic bullet or smoke and mirrors?

A technology that boosts yields whilst using less energy and water, and simultaneously increases soil fertility? Sounds like a magic bullet in our climate changed world, doesn’t it? Some argue that this is what biotechnology offers, but is it that simple?

A few weeks ago I found myself sitting in the US Embassy listening to a series of presentations about the role biotechnology is already playing in the US and Brazil and its potential for delivering global food security. Some of the figures mentioned were gob-smacking!

Dr. Anderson Galvao from Celeres Agribusiness Intelligence in Brazil outlined that continued use of biotechnology and no-till agriculture in Brazil could save over 107 billion litres of water in the next ten years – enough to support 2.5 billion people. And what about savings of 898 million litres of diesel, 2.3 million tones of CO2 and $48 billion in cash all projected for the next ten years for soy, corn and cotton crops! On the other hand without biotechnology (for corn alone) we would have to plant an additional 40 million hectares on pasture and savannah, costing $108 billion.

Dr. Galvao was joined by Jack Bobo, Senior Advisor on Biotechnology for the US Department of State, and the recently cited ‘bad boy’ of the food system, Roger Beachy, Director of the US National Institute of Food and Agriculture. They all had a clear message – in our climate changed world we simply won’t be able to produce the yields we need under conventional agriculture. Biotechnology can solve that problem.

Having witnessed this display of logic and pragmatism I decided that I should probably get a flavor of why so many object so heatedly to the use of biotechnology. An evening out at a Soil Association lecture by Andrew Simms (policy Director of the New Economics Foundation) ought to do the trick!

And it did. Fifty minutes of pros from Simms on a food system that is suffering deeply from ‘diminishing returns’ as a result of the philosophy of growth and consolidation, left my brain creaking under the scale and complexity of the problems facing farming.  Naturally, biotechnology was the subject of some of his ire – a solution driven by corporate multinationals and laboratory scientists that couldn’t be more removed from the way food is produced. Agro-ecological farms that value diversity and complexity, not monopolies and monocultures is what will guide society out of the many deep holes it is digging itself into.

According to Simms, the climate change argument for biotechnology falls foul of the basic principles of science. Reducing a series of complex and poorly understood problems to one simple solution clearly transgresses the means by which science has so far successfully improved human well being. There is a whole order of systematic problems with our food system – speculative trading in commodity indexes, food sovereignty, excessive power and price competitiveness of large retailers, land reform – the list goes on. Biotechnology is a distraction from these issues.

So, the choice seems to be – choose a technology, or choose system change. An easy choice on the face of it – efficiency gains are much easier to act on than ideas for structural reform (as we are likely to find out tomorrow in the Spending Review!). This explains why biotechnology currently seems to be the darling of mainstream agricultural science and R&D.

But is this also, perhaps, the sort of short term logic that we need to be wary of? Climate change means greater uncertainty in markets, weather, finance and a range of other variables. Trying to stifle this uncertainty through the widespread application of one technology seems risky at best and foolhardy at worst. What do you think?

Will Frazer is research and information officer at Farming Futures. You can contact him on w.frazer@forumforthefuture.org