Again with the False Equivalences on Science

With the measles scare and the question of vaccinations in the air, making false equivalences between the left on the right is again in vogue.

Fred Hiatt at the Washington Post has a column doing it with regard to science. This time his bugaboo is that in poll of scientists and the general populace, the right disagrees with scientists on most everything, while the left disagrees with scientists about vaccinations and eating genetically modified organisms (GMO foods).

First off, GMO foods are not about science. They're about corporate profits. More on this later.

Concern over GMOs isn't just about eating them. It's about the host of other problems the GMO-based agricultural-industrial complex engenders.

Second, the poll results don't represent what the pollsters say they do. When an average person answers a poll question they don't respond to the actual wording -- they're giving their overall reaction to the subject. A question like, "Are GMO foods safe to eat?" will be answered instead as if the poll asked "Do you think GMO foods are good?" The average person has heard a litany of reasons (monocultures, genetic contamination, toxic pesticides and herbicides, agribusiness crushing the family farm) about why they're bad, but can't enumerate them on a poll because polls don't allow for nuance. So they just vote GMO foods off the island.

A more specific example is climate change. Everyone over the age of 50 knows without a doubt that the climate is changing. So when conservatives say they don't believe in global warming, they're really saying A) I don't care because I'll be dead by the time it really starts to matter, B) I hate liberals and their stupid causes, C) Who gives a damn about polar bears?, D) It will cost too much to do anything about it, E) I don't want to give up my riding lawn mower and my Hummer for a bunch of tree huggers, and F) I'm afraid I'll lose my job when the Koch brothers pick up their ball and go home if they don't get what they want. Since they can't say all that on the poll, they just say they don't believe in climate change.

The scientists, however, will answer that GMO safety question honestly. Because, well, they're scientists. "Yeah, eating Bt corn is probably safe; i.e., it will probably not give you a heart attack tomorrow or a brain tumor next month."

Then the scientists would hasten to add (unless employed by Monsanto), "GMO crops like Bt and glyphosate-resistant corn engender a vast industrial-agricultural complex that creates many risks with the excessive use of pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers, all of which contribute to bee die-offs, mutated wildlife, algal blooms in lakes and streams, Parkinson's, autism, and the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. Oh, and I wouldn't be surprised if eating Bt corn contributed to the obesity epidemic or the alarming spread of food allergies. More unbiased research is needed to answer that."

That "But" will never get on a poll because polls aren't intended to give detailed results. They are, almost always, paid for by someone who wants a particular result to prove the point they want to prove.

The real question is whether the positive aspects of raising GMO crops outweigh the negative aspects.

The fact is, the science says that GMO foods have many negative aspects. These bad qualities are rooted in real science, not silly prejudice. The real question is whether the tradeoffs between the positive and negative aspects of GMO crops make them safe and sustainable on the whole. Monsanto doesn't care about the overall picture, they just care about their bottom line.

Most genetically modified crops are not engineered to make them more nutritious. They have genes inserted in them to make them poisonous to insects (Bt corn), or resistant to herbicides (Roundup Ready Corn).

In other words, the ag giants want to sell GMO crops so they can sell more Roundup and atrazine, as well as lock farmers into buying seed from them every year.

It took decades for scientists to realize that DDT was bad for humans. We haven't been eating Bt corn long enough to have enough data to know with absolute certainty that it's completely safe. The people doing the research on the safety of GMO foods are paid by the companies that produce them. Companies are known to cherry pick their data (mostly by burying studies that disagree with what they want). It's therefore not unreasonable to be scientifically skeptical about their findings.

Monsanto sells GMO corn so they can sell more Roundup and create a seed monopoly.

Furthermore, there are serious problems with industrialized agriculture, and GMO crops allow these bad practices to be used ever more widely.  In particular, the overuse of chemicals on crops.

The herbicides used on GMO crops are known to cause developmental problems in animals (atrazine is notorious for what it does to frogs) and human fetuses. The pesticides used in agriculture are toxic not only to insects, but also to humans, even in relatively small doses. They are neurotoxins known to cause diseases like Parkinson's.

Neonicotinoid pesticides are implicated as at least a partial cause of Colony Collapse Disorder, the condition that is killing bees across the world. Bees are essential to many types of agriculture, such as apples, apricots, almonds, all kinds of vegetables like cucumbers and watermelon, cotton, alfalfa, even okra. Is it wise to risk all those other crops so that some farmers can spray Imidacloprid indiscriminately?

When farmers buy GMO seeds from corporations like Monsanto, they are forbidden to use that crop as seed the next year. They must buy more seed from Monsanto. They can be sued even if they accidentally plant some seed they didn't pay for. This is a huge expense, and it means more money is being transferred from the pockets of farmers into the coffers of big business.

To exacerbate the problem, weeds frequently develop resistance to herbicides on their own. Even worse, the genes inserted into GMO crops are sometimes transferred to weeds, making them resistant to the herbicide and defeating the entire purpose of GMO crops.

Monoculture GMO crops represent a huge gamble that will likely result in a massive crop die-off one day.

Furthermore, when farmers across the country -- and the world -- all plant the exact same crop, we wind up with a genetically identical monoculture. When a disease or pest attacks the entire crop can be wiped out.

This is happening more and more frequently. Within the next few years most of the orange trees in Florida will be affected by citrus blight. The price of orange juice is projected to go way up. In the next few years chocolate prices will go up due to a combination of demand, drought (caused in part by higher temperatures due to global warming) and disease (witch's brew and frosty pod).

So, in the future, when some form of corn rust mutates and infects GMO crops, it will be carried by insects across the country. It will infect a huge fraction of the corn in the country, because there only a couple of companies selling seeds. Because the corn crop will be a monoculture, all from the same seed produced by one or two companies, all the plants will be infected.

This isn't idle speculation. It's something that will happen if we continue to plant a monoculture of corn. And because it can take years to develop new GMO crops, we could have famine that lasts for years because everyone foolishly planted the identical crop world-wide and there isn't enough genetic diversity in the seed banks to find a plant that is immune to the plague.

The problem with GMO crops isn't the science. The problem is with the corporations that use the science to make products without regard to the negative effects that product causes, which may extend far beyond the product itself (such as GMO crops that encourage overuse of fertilizers which winds up killing all the shrimp off the coast of Louisiana).

GMO crops are really an argument for letting the world's population grow without bounds.

In the end, Hiatt's defense of GMO crops doesn't rest on the science. It rests on the assumption that the world's population is going to continue to grow unabated, and unless we use GMO crops to increase yields we will have mass starvation.

Which is incredibly short-sighted. Clearly the population cannot grow unbounded. There are seven billion people in the world. GMO crops may be enough to support nine billion. But about 12? Or 15? Or 20?

Clearly the world survive just fine if there are only seven or five or three billion people on it. But at some point everything will collapse if we continue to increase the population, depending on a scientific infrastructure that requires monoculture crops and the massive use of toxic herbicides, pesticides and fertilizers that we know will fail at some point.