Thursday, March 22, 2018

Avoiding GMOs isn’t just anti-science. It’s immoral.

It’s not that the legitimate scientific community doesn’t understand the seriousness of the problem or the distortions of the naysayers. But too many keep what they know to themselves or, when they engage, observe the Marquis of Queensbury rules in what is essentially a street brawl. One can understand their reticence, facing an aggressive, often self-interested anti-GMO lobby that is indifferent to the facts and quick with ad hominem attacks.
If you’re an academic, you can tell yourself that, sooner or later, the science will prevail. If you’re from the world of commerce, you justify your silence (or complicity) by saying that you aren’t in business to argue with customers. If you’re a regulatory bureaucrat, you worry that you will be drawn and quartered for any mistake, whereas no one is ever held accountable for the miracle that never makes it to the marketplace.
By Mitch Daniels

December 27, 2017

Of the several claims of “anti-science” that clutter our national debates these days, none can be more flagrantly clear than the campaign against modern agricultural technology, most specifically the use of molecular techniques to create genetically modified organisms (GMOs). Here, there are no credibly conflicting studies, no arguments about the validity of computer models, no disruption of an ecosystem nor any adverse human health or even digestive problems, after 5 billion acres have been cultivated cumulatively and trillions of meals consumed.

And yet a concerted, deep-pockets campaign, as relentless as it is baseless, has persuaded a high percentage of Americans and Europeans to avoid GMO products, and to pay premium prices for “non-GMO” or “organic” foods that may in some cases be less safe and less nutritious. Thank goodness the toothpaste makers of the past weren’t cowed so easily; the tubes would have said “No fluoride inside!” and we’d all have many more cavities.

This is the kind of foolishness that rich societies can afford to indulge.
But when they attempt to inflict their superstitions on the poor and hungry peoples of the planet, the cost shifts from affordable to dangerous and the debate from scientific to moral.

From campus to Congress, it’s common these days to speak in terms of “grand challenges.” No challenge is grander than feeding the 9 billion or more people with whom we will share the Earth in a few decades.

Of course, those people weren’t supposed to exist. Just a few decades back, “experts” were winning “genius” prizes for pontificating that “the battle to feed all of humanity is over” and forecasting that hundreds of millions were going to die and that there was nothing anyone could do about it. (Q: If that’s genius, what does ignorance look like? Aren’t the prize givers entitled to a refund?)

Instead of mass starvation and depopulation, the intervening years saw the most explosive improvements in living standards, food security, poverty reduction and life expectancy in human history. Credit Deng Xiaoping’s unshackling of the capitalist spirit in China for much of the gain, but it was the likes of the plant pathologist Norman Borlaug and wheat breeder Orville Vogel, whose Green Revolution, powered by modern plant science, saved the most lives and set the stage for the next grand challenge.

Today, their scientific successors are giving birth to a new set of miracles in plant production and animal husbandry that cannot only feed the world’s growing billions but do so in far more sustainable, environmentally friendly ways. And though the new technologies are awe-inspiring, they are just refinements of cruder techniques that have been used for centuries.

Given the emphatic or, as some like to say, “settled” nature of the science, one would expect a united effort to spread these life-saving, planet-sparing technologies as fast as possible to the poorer nations who will need them so urgently. Instead, we hear demands that developing countries forgo the products that offer them the best hope of joining the well-fed, affluent world. In the words of a gullible former Zambian president, “We would rather starve than get something toxic.” Marie Antoinette couldn’t have said it better.

It’s not that the legitimate scientific community doesn’t understand the seriousness of the problem or the distortions of the naysayers. But too many keep what they know to themselves or, when they engage, observe the Marquis of Queensbury rules in what is essentially a street brawl. One can understand their reticence, facing an aggressive, often self-interested anti-GMO lobby that is indifferent to the facts and quick with ad hominem attacks.

If you’re an academic, you can tell yourself that, sooner or later, the science will prevail. If you’re from the world of commerce, you justify your silence (or complicity) by saying that you aren’t in business to argue with customers. If you’re a regulatory bureaucrat, you worry that you will be drawn and quartered for any mistake, whereas no one is ever held accountable for the miracle that never makes it to the marketplace.

It’s time to move the argument to a new plane. For the rich and well-fed to deny Africans, Asians or South Americans the benefits of modern technology is not merely anti-scientific. It’s cruel, it’s heartless, it’s inhumane — and it ought to be confronted on moral grounds that ordinary citizens, including those who have been conned into preferring non-GMO Cheerios, can understand.

Travel to Africa with any of Purdue University’s three recent World Food Prize winners, and you won’t find the conversation dominated by anti-GMO protesters. There, where more than half of the coming population increase will occur, consumers and farmers alike are eager to share in the life-saving and life-enhancing advances that modern science alone can bring. Efforts to persuade them otherwise, or simply block their access to the next round of breakthroughs, are worse than anti-scientific. They’re immoral.


[Other Articles on the subject.]


Science that is hard to swallow
The anti-GM movement seems to be fueled by a combination of anti-corporate suspicion, small-farm nostalgia and anxiety about unfamiliar technologies. It raises questions of environmental safety and corporate control as well as food safety. Some would argue that, unlike climate-change denialism or vaccine resistance, it’s harmless even if baseless — who cares if Manischewitz now feels compelled to offer a line of GM-free kosher foods?

Unfortunately, this form of denialism also has victims, and they’re not the folks who may choose to pay a few cents more for GM-free matzo. As the WRI paper points out, farmers need to close a 69 percent gap between the crops they produced in 2006 and the food the world will need, given population growth, by 2050.

By Fred Hiatt
Editorial Page Editor 

February 8, 2015

Sophisticated readers know a science denier when they see one: the libertarian irresponsibly attacking vaccine safety, the oil-state senator mocking climate theory, the southern Bible-thumper denying the fossil in front of his nose.

But the biggest gap between public opinion and scientific consensus in the United States is not in the realm of vaccines, global warming or evolution but regarding the safety of genetically modified (GM) foods. And the science deniers on this topic are more likely to be Democratic than Republican, with college-educated Americans almost evenly split.

According to a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center in association with the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 88 percent of scientists believe GM foods are safe to eat, compared with only 37 percent of the public — a gap of 51 percentage points.

An equally overwhelming majority of scientists (87 percent) believe that climate change is mostly caused by human activity, and 50 percent of the public agrees — a gap of 37 percentage points. Fully 98 percent of scientists believe that humans have evolved over time, and 65 percent of the public agrees — a gap of 33 points.

The Pew/AAAS report does not attempt to explain why so many Americans reject the scientific consensus on GM foods. It notes that educated Americans are less skeptical of the science than the public at large, but not by that much: 49 percent of people with college degrees believe eating GM foods is safe, while 47 percent believe it isn’t.

The report also doesn’t delve into political differences on these issues, but Lee Rainie, Pew’s director of Internet, science, and technology, shared some background. On climate change, the political breakdown is what you might expect: Republicans believe by 53 to 43 percent that the evidence is real, whereas Democrats are convinced 87 to 10 percent.

On vaccine policy, there was no difference between parties when Pew asked in 2009: 68 percent thought vaccination should be mandatory, while 30 percent thought parents should decide. Since then, Rainie said, the share of Republicans favoring parental choice rose by eight points, while the share of Democrats favoring parental choice declined by five.

And on genetically modified foods?

“Declared Republicans were more likely than declared Democrats to say GM foods are generally safe – 44% vs. 34%,” Rainie said in an e-mail. “But when you add those leaning towards each party to the mix, the differences between them become statistically insignificant. There are no differences on this issue among people who describe themselves as conservative, moderate, or liberal.”

Could it be that in this one case the public is right and the scientists are wrong? I’d say, only if you believe Gregor Mendel was risking our health when he began playing around with pea shoots in the 1850s. A more sober analysis, from the World Resources Institute last June, granted that “genetic modifications using genes from diverse species pose a greater risk of producing unexpected effects than conventional crossbreeding,” which “justifies mandatory safety studies.”

But WRI concluded that “there is no evidence that GM crops have actually harmed human health” and that “food safety does not justify rejecting genetic modification outright.”

The anti-GM movement seems to be fueled by a combination of anti-corporate suspicion, small-farm nostalgia and anxiety about unfamiliar technologies. It raises questions of environmental safety and corporate control as well as food safety. Some would argue that, unlike climate-change denialism or vaccine resistance, it’s harmless even if baseless — who cares if Manischewitz now feels compelled to offer a line of GM-free kosher foods?

Unfortunately, this form of denialism also has victims, and they’re not the folks who may choose to pay a few cents more for GM-free matzo. As the WRI paper points out, farmers need to close a 69 percent gap between the crops they produced in 2006 and the food the world will need, given population growth, by 2050.

Though far from the only solution to this challenge, genetic modification can provide seeds that are more resistant to pests, drought or disease and that produce greater yields with less water or in poorer soil. They could be, in other words, one significant component to avoiding mass hunger over the next generation. Unfortunately, resistance in rich, consuming nations discourages innovation and makes it more difficult for farmers in poor countries to adopt useful new technologies.

It’s no less an affront than ever that the U.S. Senate has installed as chairman of its environment committee a man who believes that global warming is “the greatest hoax,” or that a senator who is also a medical doctor would stoke unwarranted fears about vaccine safety. But the Pew survey suggests we might want to check our Whole Foods grocery carts before dialing up the outrage too high.
 
Corporate irresponsibility over GMOs 
“The trouble starts,when this communication environment fills up with toxic partisan meanings — ones that effectively announce that ‘if you are one of us, believe this; otherwise, we’ll know you are one of them.’ ” This use of scientific opinion as a cultural signifier is evident in the vaccination debate. A certain kind of trendy parent believes that everything natural is preferable, forgetting that natural levels of mortality from childhood diseases are high. It is the same ideological impulse — the belief that nature is pure and artifice is unwholesome — that causes corporate leaders to spout pseudoscientific nonsense about GMOs, while employing the issue as a cultural marker.
By Michael Gerson
Opinion writer  
May 14, 2015

Pass any Chipotle these days — and it is my gastronomic preference to pass rather than enter — and you will see signs claiming credit for removing ingredients that contain GMOs (genetically modified organisms) from the menu. It is the first big chain to do so, and probably not the last. The business press has pronounced it “a savvy move to impress millennials” and a “bet on the younger generations in America.”

This milestone in the history of fast-food scruples (and of advertising) is also a noteworthy cultural development: the systematic incorporation of anti-scientific attitudes into corporate branding strategies. There is no credible evidence that ingesting a plant that has been swiftly genetically modified in a lab has a different health outcome than ingesting a plant that has been slowly genetically modified through selective breeding. The National Academy of Sciences, the American Medical Association, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the World Health Organization have concluded that GMOs are safe to eat. This scientific consensus is at least as strong as the one on human-caused climate change.

Yet Whole Foods promises “full GMO transparency” by 2018. Its Web site emphasizes “your right to know.” But you will search the site in vain for any explanation of how or why GMOs are harmful, because an actual assertion would not withstand scrutiny. Evidently your right to know does not include serious scientific arguments. Chipotle co-chief executive Steve Ells set out his rationale this way: “They say these ingredients are safe, but I think we all know we’d rather have food that doesn’t contain them.”

“They” say. “We” know. It brought to mind an argument made by Dan Kahan of Yale in the journal Nature concerning global warming. If you are, say, a Republican in the Deep South, your capacity to confront global climate disruption directly is vanishingly small (assuming that you think it is a problem). And the cost of bucking your neighbors on the issue may be considerable. They are likely to view you as an oddity or a turncoat, and to question your judgment on other matters. So the decision to conform to the views of your cultural group or team, while not heroic, is not irrational. (The same argument could be made about the team composed of enlightened corporate chief executives.)

“The trouble starts,” says Kahan, “when this communication environment fills up with toxic partisan meanings — ones that effectively announce that ‘if you are one of us, believe this; otherwise, we’ll know you are one of them.’ ” This use of scientific opinion as a cultural signifier is evident in the vaccination debate. A certain kind of trendy parent believes that everything natural is preferable, forgetting that natural levels of mortality from childhood diseases are high. It is the same ideological impulse — the belief that nature is pure and artifice is unwholesome — that causes corporate leaders to spout pseudoscientific nonsense about GMOs, while employing the issue as a cultural marker.

Although it may be rational for people to conform to the views of their team, the problem comes when those individual decisions are tallied up. As opinions on climate have become a cultural identifier, the prospects of legislative action on the issue have faded. When it comes to vaccines, herd ideology can disrupt herd immunity, leaving kids with dangerous and preventable diseases.

What is being lost as GMOs become a trendy identifier? Directly, probably not much. Genetically altered plants — which resist drought and disease, control pests without the spraying and runoff of chemicals, allow no-till farming, prevent soil erosion and limit greenhouse gas emissions — are too wildly popular with farmers to be stigmatized out of existence. About 90 percent of the corn and soybeans grown in the United States are GMOs.

But Chipotle, Whole Foods and those who follow their examples are doing real social harm. They are polluting public discourse on scientific matters. They are legitimizing an approach to science that elevates Internet medical diagnosis, social media technological consensus and discredited studies in obscure journals. They are contributing to a political atmosphere in which people pick their scientific views to fit their ideologies, predispositions and obsessions. And they are undermining public trust in legitimate scientific authority, which undermines the possibility of rational public policy on a range of issues.

Whatever the intention of those involved, embracing pseudoscience as the centerpiece of an advertising and branding effort is an act of corporate irresponsibility.
 
Oher links:
The Post’s View: Chipotle’s GMO gimmick is hard to swallow

The Post’s View: Genetically modified crops could help improve the lives of millions

Joel Achenbach: Why science is so hard to believe

The Post’s View: We don’t need labels on genetically modified foods
 
 
 


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