Instead of examining North America alone, he chose to measure it against Western Europe. agriculture resilient or is it highly susceptible to variations in weather, pests or other stressors? And when examining sustainability, he means it in a very literal sense: can this system be sustained over time? Is U.S. Given the stakes, Heinemann decided to look at the productivity and sustainability of the U.S. corn crop fails, the entire world feels the pain. is the biggest producer and exporter of corn.” That's just from an annual variation due to weather… The U.S. How many food calories were lost because of it? In kilocalories, it’s 89 trillion just from the drought. So there was no competition for those food calories… Fast-forward to the drought of 2012. “Now that was in a day where biofuels were not being made from corn. The only thing that saved the corn crop was that the weather changed in 1971 and that weather change wasn't as favorable to the pathogen, so it gave farmers and breeders and extra year to swap over the corn germplasm to a variety that wasn't as vulnerable.”Īll told, the epidemic cost an estimated five trillion kilocalories in lost food energy, making it “many times larger than the Irish potato famine,” said Heinemann. “The US is the world's biggest producer of corn and both geographically and in quantity, so when you cover that much land with a crop of such a low genetic diversity, you're simply asking for it to fail… In 1970 a previously unknown pathogen hit the US corn crop and the US almost lost the entire crop. “Really what happened by 1970 was that upwards of 85 percent of the corn grown in the US was almost genetically identical,” explains Heinemann. He continued poking around for data and stumbled upon what he calls “the textbook example of the problems that come from a low genetic diversity in agriculture” – the 1970 Southern corn leaf blight epidemic. Heinemann attempted to ask Collier for the source of his facts through the conference’s Internet-mediated audience Q&A system, but he never got an answer. So his assertion that lack of GMOs was causing Europe to fall behind didn't seem true.” And over the short term, from 1995 to 2010, the US and Western Europe were neck and neck, there was no difference at all. So while he was talking, I went to the FAO database and I had a look at yields for corn. Both Heinemann and Collier, an Oxford economics professor and author of the bestselling book The Bottom Billion, were speaking at a conference in Zurich.Ĭollier “made the offhand remark during his talk that because Europe has shunned GMOs, it's lost productivity compared to the US,” Heinemann recalls. Heinemann, a professor of molecular biology at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand and director of the Center for Integrated Research in Biosafety, says he first began looking into the matter after he heard a remark made by Paul Collier in 2010. is a major exporter of many staple crops. food supply, and therefore for the world food supply since the U.S. The study’s findings are important for the future of the U.S. The study compared major crop yields and pesticide use in North America, which relies heavily on GE crops, and Western Europe, which grows conventionally bred non-GE crops. But there is a different between being a genetic engineer and selling a product that is genetically engineered,” he states. The study’s lead author, Jack Heinemann, is not an anti-biotechnology activist, as Monsanto might want you to believe. Additionally, GM crops, also known as genetically engineered (GE) crops, can’t even take credit for reductions in pesticide use. A new peer-reviewed study published in the International Journal of Agricultural Sustainability examined those claims and found that conventional plant breeding, not genetic engineering, is responsible for yield increases in major U.S. Some have claimed that GM crops actually have lower yields than non-GM crops… GM crops generally have higher yields due to both breeding and biotechnology.”īut that’s not actually the case. Monsanto makes the same case on its website, saying, “Since the advent of biotechnology, there have been a number of claims from anti-biotechnology activists that genetically modified (GM) crops don’t increase yields. (Perhaps not coincidentally, Monsanto and Syngenta are major sponsors of the World Food Prize, along with a third biotech giant, Dupont Pioneer.) They just awarded the World Food Prize to three scientists, including one from Syngenta and one from Monsanto, who invented genetic engineering because, they say, the technology increases crop yields and decreases pesticide use. The World Food Prize committee’s got a bit of egg on its face-genetically engineered egg. This article originally appeared on AlterNet.
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