As a computer programmer, I'm very familiar with the trade-offs between optimization for a narrow range of circumstances, and robustness across a wide range of circumstances. That is, you can make your program very efficient on one type of hardware with one pattern of input, or you can make your program not crash (but probably run more slowly) in a wide range of situations. I suspect that agriculture, like many other problem areas, has the same sort of tradeoffs. You can make crops very efficient, but fragile, or you can make them more robust, but a little more expensive for a given amount harvested.

The story of agriculture in Argentina is the same as the story where the the US exported the "Green Revolution".

The resistance problem is one that is well-known to plant breeders. It works in chemical companies' favor to have weeds become more resistant, because farmers must buy more and newer, most expensive herbicides.

This happens in seed production too, where the companies breed seed with single-gene resistance to a disease or pest. They do this because in 3-5 years it fails, and farmers have to buy new seed stock with a different single-gene resistance. Potatoes are currently in trouble because of this.

Gengineered crops aren't going to help. Increased in-field diversity instead of monocultures, and multi-variety planting and less herbicides are a more likely solution.

Edited by author 04-30-2003 10:44 AM
I'm a molecular biologist. My research area is Chagas' disease. I work in Argentina so I deal a lot with rural poverty, and have been travelling across the country quite a lot.

I'm a member of the "Grupo de Reflexion Rural" (Rural Reflection Group, which has been dealing with the causes of the economical catastrophe in Argentina.

I think everybody has heard of Argentine beef as being the best in the world. Argentina’s dairy production, as well as honing production was of the best kind. Herbicides and fertilisers were not used until not so long ago. Argentina produced food enough for the people in the country and for export too. I was brought up in the belief that Argentina's soil was of the kind where any seed you planted could grow. And it was true until some years ago, when the biotech corporations took over Argentina’s agronomic politics. During the 90' Argentina has gone over to GMO production and over 14000000 hectares of the land are now gone to RRsoja. Open field GMO experiments can be found all over, performed legally or illegally by the biotech companies.

Peasants and thousands and thousands of smaller producers have been expelled from their land to engross the marginal city populations, with the consequences that the whole world has been able to see in TV this last months. People starving to death in a country where huge land extensions are a desert of RRsoja.

Bushes and native forests are being devastated in order to grow Monsanto's RRsoya. Argentina has lost the phytogenetic patrimony which has been given to the biotech companies. Peasants and people in the rural areas are constantly denouncing abortion and death in animals, as well as human intoxication, due to the use of herbicides that has increased many times (gliphosate, 2,4D, etc). This increase in herbicide use is due to the emergent resistance in weed. This resistance should have been foreseen by evolutionary biologists, when thinking of adding the RR gene. Studying a bit about directional selection should have been of help to prevent these logical effects of RRsoy and Bt maize. I understand that Wall Street employees defend GMOs. It is logical from their point of view and their ignorance of biological facts. But biologists should be cleverer. It is about a bit knowledge and common sense. Even if Argentina wants to go back to their own production of food variety, People don’t have the seeds anymore. And the animals that have been selected for Argentina’s people economical reality, have now become almost extinct due to the biotech and tech hysteria that has governed our agronomy and animal production during the past decade. Producers have contracted so many debts due to a pro-biotech agronomic model which does not correlate to people’s economy. They have either lost their land or they are about to loose it, if they do not go over to RRsoy production, forced by an economical system that decides for them what they have to grow in their land.

Argentina has started to import milk, since over 15000 dairy production units have been forced to close and go to RRsoy. Argentina is importing lentils from Canada, since it is not producing it anymore, though it has been part of the average argentine daily cost.

Is it to be a luddit, wanting to eat what you like and what you were grown up with? Is it to be a luddit wanting to defend your own culture and independence?

I’m sorry, but I'm very angry. I love this country and I love the people. It breaks my heart when I travel around the countryside and see how the landscape has been devastated and impoverished. Only soy everywhere can be seen. No more huts with people in them. No more gauchos and smaller towns. Only an agriculture without agriculturers.

Is that what is so good about GMOs? GMOs is simple a tool for some few transnational companies to rein the agricultural politics in their own benefit, of course with the internal support of corrupted politicians and scientists. Scientists who instead of doing research for the benefit of increasing human knowledge, they research in how to add genes to commercial plants in order to make more profit for the companies that support financially their research.

I'm sorry that Richard Dawkins supports these way of doing science. I really have enjoyed reading the “Selfish Gene”, “The blind watchmaker”, “The extended phenotype” and other of his books. I fear that the way molecular biology fundamentalism has taken over science around the world, the kind of basic research that let Richard Dawkins get information about different survival strategies in nature, will be lost with time. I fear this will happen, since it seems like there only will be money to support the kind of science that is in the big biotech companies interest. And GMO research is, for sure, the place where these companies put all their effort, doesn’t matter how bad the effects on ,f.ex., Argentina has proved to be.

Argentina should be an example of how bad it can go with the GMO politics. I know about Argentina's corruptive capacity. But who pays the bribes that support corruption in our country, so that this country can be used as a huge experimental in vivo lab. Argentina's experiment has proved to be a failure. Anyway, scientists go on discussing if GMOs are good or bad in itself.

Please, be serious and care a bit about the people who cannot defend themselves. Agriculture is not only about making money and paying external debt in under developed countries. It is about culture and peoples right to the land and about food sovereignty and security. And GMOs work strongly against these fundamental human rights.

This is about human rights. Please, understand this. It is very important for this country to recover its dignity and right to produce food for their people. The food that is in peace with their own cultural heritage.

This is not about being a luddit, please. I am a molecular biologist and I think of transforming DNA as a powerful and useful tool in the lab, when it works. I enjoy using it also in the lab, under very controlled conditions, when it does not complicate my experimental work. But any molecular biologist knows that in too many cases, DNA modifications are not controllable and DNA associates with other molecular chums and does what it wants. I love DNA for that. But people have rights, and GMOs are working against their right to make their own food.

Argentina needs to recover the land from the biotech companies allies. (From Monsanto, Cargill, Dupont, Aventis, Novartis, INTA’s fundamentalist scientists, etc, etc). Argentinean people need to recover their production for their own benefit.

And Argentina’s scientists should be supported to perform the research that benefits their own peoples interests, not Monsanto’s and Cargill’s and other transnational companies, that today can use Argentina’s land for huge field trials, for tomorrow go away and leave a sterile deserted country. People in the future might ask, what has happened to this once so rich land. Well, evolution has gone by. But a sort of evolution that has been manipulated by business minded scientists. Maybe they will survive, but selective pressure is working very hardly on the poorest of this country.

Biotech scientists might be the extended phenotype to help glyphosate resistance and Bt genes survive through evolution. I think Dr. Dawkins could support this idea and enrich it quite a lot with his wits and lovely way of telling evolution to people. I’m only sorry that he does not understand the facts behind GMO politics. Biotech scientists are only humans and they might not know what they do to their own kind. Do they really believe they are helping human kind? I truly doubt it, since the consequences are so obvious by now in Argentina, that I can't understand some scientists blindness.

Sorry, but try to understand. This is about life and death of people and we should all care.

Lilian Joensen PhD.
Grupo de Reflexión Rural
Argentina

Sorry to return late to this debate, but the problem of there not being enough genes to code for human complexity is well known in the literature.

Steven Venter of Celera is the chief proponent, google has plenty of links.

e.g. http://www.math.gatech.edu/~lacey/courses/3012/genome.html to pick a random example

Maybe proteins have something to do with it, maybe it IS aliens, but genes are not the whole story.

Another random thought - you could probably replace the tenth chapter of "The Blind Watchmaker" with the same chapter from the large print edition, and what you have is ostensibly a perfectly usable copy of the book, unless you happen to one day need to use the index to look up something in chapter ten, then you're screwed because the page numbers are all different.

Edited by author 02-14-2003 01:19 PM
In the second half of the article Dawkins seems to compare transgenic engineering to DNA typing. That's very much like saying a liver transplant is just as safe as a doctor's exam. Smells like FUD to me.

I say that if Dawkins has so much faith in the biotech food industry, why not put him on a diet of GM foods for a couple of years and see what happens? Remember Monty Burns and Blinky the Three Eyed Fish:

Don't take my word for it. Let's ask an actor portraying Charles Darwin what he thinks.

"Genes work just like computer software, says this writer - which is why the luddites don't get it, but their children probably will."

I thought Dawkins would be capable of producing reasonable arguments but this argument is a very silly one. The kind of remark that a biotechnology PR firm would spit out. Is Dawkins understanding of software so ingenuous?

On another point, if GM foods are wantonly produced and consumed on a wide scale and uncontrolled basis, I have no doubt whatsoever our children will get 'it', whether they like 'it' or not.