One of the most distinguished scientists in the public policy sphere is warning that “the increasing vilification of genetically modified foods as a marketing tool by the organic food industry” may be “the most counterproductive development” in the effort to increase food production to meet the needs of a population projected to approach 10 billion in 35 years.
In “Food in a future of 10 billion” in the journal Agriculture and Food Security available here, Nina V. Fedoroff, the Evan Pugh professor emerita at Penn State and a former president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), describes “an acute need to intensify agricultural productivity” with less land, water, energy and chemicals.
“Transitioning to more sustainable agricultural practices while doubling the food and feed supply, even as we must increasingly cope with the negative effects on agricultural productivity of a warming climate, is likely to be the greatest challenge of the twenty-first century,” Fedoroff said
Modern science, including biotechnology, is capable of realizing the kind of sustainable intensification of agriculture needed to meet such a challenge but Fedoroff laments that the “political, cultural, and economic barriers to their widespread use in crop improvement.”
Among impediments to adoption of higher-yielding and more efficient crops, she says, are non-governmental organizations, “most vocally Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth” who have carried out “vigorous campaigns of misinformation about GMOs first in Europe, then around the world,” and of “a number of organic food industry marketers [who] have systematically used false and misleading claims about the health benefits and relative safety of organic foods compared with what are now called ‘conventionally grown’ foods.”
Fedoroff is troubled that “such organic marketers represent conventionally grown foods as swimming in pesticide residues, GM foods as dangerous, and the biotechnology companies that produce GM seeds as evil, while portraying organically grown foods as both safer and more healthful” against USDA’s assertion that the organic seal is a marketing tool that makes no claims about food safety or nutritional quality. She also criticized recent “labeling” campaigns which “have the objective of promoting the organic food industry by conveying the message to consumers that food containing GM ingredients is dangerous.”
Fedoroff, currently senior science adviser to the OFW Law firm in Washington and once the science adviser to former Secretaries of State Hillary Clinton and Condoleezza Rice, is not pessimistic about the potential to overcome the future food challenge. In the two centuries since Thomas Malthus warned that population growth would always outstrip our ability to produce food, she writes, there has been “more than sevenfold expansion of the human population as a result of rapid scientific and technical developments in agriculture and a decline in the number of chronically hungry from half of humanity to about a sixth.”
“The very fact that we are largely urban dwellers and have access to food through a global food system that supplies our food retailers with abundant produce blinds us to the basics of agriculture and makes us vulnerable to the increasingly strident opponents of modern agriculture who use fear to promote their economic interests,” Fedoroff said.
