Evolving notes, images and sounds by Luis Apiolaza

Category: genetically modified (Page 1 of 2)

Comment on Sustainability and innovation in staple crop production in the US Midwest

After writing a blog post about the paper “Sustainability and innovation in staple crop production in the US Midwest” I decided to submit a formal comment to the International Journal of Agricultural Sustainability in July 2013, which was published today. As far as I know, Heinemann et al. provided a rebuttal to my comments, which I have not seen but that should be published soon. This post is an example on how we can use open data (in this case from the USDA and FAO) and free software (R) to participate in scientific discussion (see supplementary material below).

The text below the *** represents my author’s version provided as part of my Green Access rights. The article published in the International Journal of Agricultural Sustainability [copyright Taylor & Francis]; is freely available online at http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14735903.2014.939842).
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The Precautionary Principle/Critique of GMOs

Nassim Nicolas Taleb and colleagues present an (almost?) tautological view of the effect of GMO (PDF): the large areas of establishment, human consumption and some unspecified risk mechanism (which does not seem to affect non-GMO crops, see next paragraph) may cause ruin to humanity, because, hey, they say so. I could come up with a similar scenario in which we should stop working on any new computing development, because there is a non-zero probability in which we may end-up with non-bottom-up tinkering causing the rise of the machines (a Black Swan event) that has ruinous consequences for humanity (with apologies to the Terminator). For some reason that escapes me, I do not find it compelling.

In making their case Taleb and colleagues also display a very naive view of non-GMO agriculture. Selective-breeding accelerated tremendously since the formalization of quantitative (statistical) genetics theory around the 1930s. Moreover, since the green revolution, the speed of creation of new cultivars, their geographical spread and the reduction of the number of genotypes commercially planted has accelerated. This all happened before the introduction of GMO as part of agricultural breeding programs. Using Taleb et al.’s terminology, crop breeding mostly abandoned ‘bottom-up modifications’ more than half a century ago. Therefore, the comparison between GMO and non-GMO crops is not one of ‘between tinkering with the selective breeding of genetic components of organisms that have previously undergone extensive histories of selection and the top-down engineering of taking a gene from a fish and putting it into a tomato’ but between high-speed, fast-deployment breeding programs and the same program with a few extra plant genes (sorry, no fish for you), sometimes even from organisms that could conventionally breed with each other (cisgenesis).
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A couple of thoughts on biotech and food security

“What has {insert biotech here} done for food security?” This question starts at the wrong end of the problem, because food security is much larger than any biotechnology. I would suggest that governance, property rights and education are the fundamental issues for food security, followed by biotechnological options. For example, the best biotechnology is useless if one is trying to do agriculture in a war-ravaged country.

Once we have a relatively stable government and educated people can rely on property rights, the effects of different biotechnologies will be magnified and it will be possible to better assess them. I would say that matching the most appropriate technologies to the local environmental, economic and cultural conditions is a good sign of sustainable agriculture. I would also say that the broader the portfolio of biotechnology and agronomic practices the more likely a good match will be. That is, I would not a priori exclude any biotechnology from the table based on generic considerations.
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My take on the USA versus Western Europe comparison of GM corn

A few days ago I came across Jack Heinemann and collaborators’ article (Sustainability and innovation in staple crop production in the US Midwest, Open Access) comparing the agricultural sectors of USA and Western Europe. While the article is titled around the word sustainability, the main comparison stems from the use of Genetically Modified crops in USA versus the absence of them in Western Europe.

I was curious about part of the results and discussion which, in a nutshell, suggest that “GM cropping systems have not contributed to yield gains, are not necessary for yield gains, and appear to be eroding yields compared to the equally modern agroecosystem of Western Europe”. The authors relied on several crops for the comparison (Maize/corn, rapeseed/canolasee P.S.6, soybean and cotton); however, I am going to focus on a single one (corn) for two reasons: 1. I can’t afford a lot of time for blog posts when I should be preparing lectures and 2. I like eating corn. Continue reading

GM-fed pigs, chance and how research works

Following my post on GM-fed pigs I received several comments, mostly through Twitter. Some people liked having access to an alternative analysis, while others replied with typical anti-GM slogans, completely ignoring that I was posting about the technical side of the paper. This post is not for the slogan crowd (who clearly are not interested in understanding), but for people that would like to know more about how one would evaluate claims from a scientific article. While I refer to the pig paper, most issues apply to any paper that uses statistics.

In general, researchers want to isolate the effect of the treatments under study (diets in this case) from any other extraneous influence. We want control over the experimental conditions, so we can separate the effects of interest from all other issues that could create differences between our experimental units (pigs in this case). What could create ‘noise’ in our results? Animals could have different genetic backgrounds (for example with different parents), they could be exposed to different environmental conditions, they could be treated differently (more kindly or harshly), etc.

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