\t\t\t\tReading Time: 3 minutes<\/p>\n
By Dr William Rolleston CNZM. Rolleston is chair of the Life Sciences Network<\/p>\n
Gene technology will deliver what organic proponents have dreamed of but gene technologies will achieve more and get there faster.
Four days in a winter alpine hut with an organic, non-GM-eating Swiss vegetarian where our lives depended on mutual trust gave plenty of time to explore each other\u2019s philosophies over a bottle of organic milk, and it turns out we are not so different.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
We both want to play our part in the reduction of hunger, producing healthier food in a more sustainable way with minimal impact on the environment.
But how we get there has some differences.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Organics takes a philosophical approach.\u00a0Rules are dictated from the top down. A cabal of fundamentalist decision-makers decide what is in and what is out.<\/p>\n
Glyphosate (Roundup) is out but fungicides like copper sulphate are in. Genetically modified Bt corn is out but Bt spray is in.\u00a0 Gene editing is out but radiation and chemical mutagenesis is fine.
Gene technologies take a more scientific approach.\u00a0It is not the method but the outcome that is important.\u00a0Safe, sustainable, healthy food produced efficiently and backed up by evidence is the philosophy of modern science.
Organics often has a lower local environmental footprint simply because it produces less.\u00a0 However, in a world that has population pressures, less produced locally means more produced somewhere else.\u00a0 That somewhere else is often rain forest and other natural habitats, which must give way to agriculture because we are not being as productive as we could be on the land we already use.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Accounting for greenhouse gas emissions because we are squandering our production potential would destroy the carbon claims of many organic farms.<\/p>\n
Organics follows the evidence when it suits but ignores it when it doesn\u2019t.\u00a0\u00a0 The LD50 (a measure of acute toxicity) ratio of copper sulphate, salt and glyphosate is 20:6:1.\u00a0 That is, glyphosate is over three times less toxic than table salt. Organic copper sulphate is at the nasty end, being 20 times more toxic than glyphosate.\u00a0 It is well known that grazing sheep in organic orchards can pose risks due to the potential of chronic copper sulphate poisoning.\u00a0 Glyphosate, on the other hand, is biodegradable.
Nitrogen is lost from any agricultural system but gene technologies provide the opportunity to put nitrogen fixation in the leaves of plants, making it immediately available to the plant without the current perilous journey from fertilizer or legume, through the soil and to its target.
We have heard from the organics industry that coexistence between organics and gene technologies is not possible.\u00a0 But those claims fly in the face of the evidence.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Organics are thriving in Australia and the United States where GM is also used.\u00a0 Preliminary data from modelling of ryegrass and clover shows that non-GM farms can thrive in a GM world.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Over a 20-year period, cross-pollination of ryegrass and clover in a pastoral system hovers somewhere below the level of detection and well below tolerance levels.
But the biggest threat to organics is not coexistence, it is being proven that there is a better system that will achieve their goals.\u00a0 Organics\u2019 other big threats are price and losing the supply of improved seed from conventional developers.
For the past 80 years, conventional and organic seed has been improved using mutagenesis\u00a0\u2013 dousing plants in radiation or toxic chemicals to induce random mutations.\u00a0 However, plant developers are rapidly moving to gene editing, which is more accurate, predictable and efficient but is banned by the organic fundamentalists and so the organic industry will no longer be able to hang off the coat tails of conventional science.\u00a0 Their rate of seed improvement will slow to a near standstill.
The use of genetic modification over the past 30 years has shown that gene technologies are rapidly accelerating efficiency, sustainability and improved nutrition while reducing price.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Just like the Green Revolution, GM has made food more abundant and more affordable \u2013 claims the organics industry cannot make.\u00a0 The organics industry response is to lobby for unnecessary coexistence regulation, which will push up the price of food, putting organics self-interest in the same bad boy category as the supermarkets.\u00a0<\/p>\n
GM is popular with farmers, increasing their profitability and reducing food costs while saving more than 174 million hectares of natural landscape from going under the plough for the same output.\u00a0 No wonder more than 16 million farmers in 30 countries are growing 200 million ha of GM crops annually.
As organics struggles against the threat it will become irrelevant and sidelined. Perhaps its leaders will open their minds to new technologies and embrace a future that is more sustainable, healthier and science driven. \u00a0<\/p>\n
Conventional agriculture in turn could learn from organics\u2019 strong focus on soil health.
There is a place and a market for organics and maybe my Swiss mountain friend will make their next food purchase with a more open mind.\u00a0 We were both enriched by a frank and congenial conversation where each was open to the other\u2019s ideas.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The mutual trust we needed to survive the mountains remained intact. A model perhaps for two industries that consider themselves poles apart but are not really that different.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Reading Time: 3 minutes By Dr William Rolleston CNZM. Rolleston is chair of the Life Sciences Network Gene…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":396274,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3846],"tags":[267,70,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-396273","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-genetics","8":"tag-genetics","9":"tag-science","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115144030183028183","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/396273","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=396273"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/396273\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/396274"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=396273"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=396273"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=396273"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}