Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

Like all advances, the Green Revolution came under attack as soon as it began. High-tech agriculture, the critics said, consumes fossil fuels and groundwater, uses herbicides and pesticides, disrupts traditional subsistence agriculture, is biologically unnatural, and generates profits for corporations. Given that it saved a billion lives and helped consign major famines to the dustbin of history, this seems to me like a reasonable price to pay. More important, the price need not be with us forever. The beauty of scientific progress is that it never locks us into a technology but can develop new ones with fewer problems than the old ones (a dynamic we will return to here).

Genetic engineering can now accomplish in days what traditional farmers accomplished in millennia and Borlaug accomplished in his years of “mind-warping tedium.” Transgenic crops are being developed with high yields, lifesaving vitamins, tolerance of drought and salinity, resistance to disease, pests, and spoilage, and reduced need for land, fertilizer, and plowing. Hundreds of studies, every major health and science organization, and more than a hundred Nobel laureates have testified to their safety (unsurprisingly, since there is no such thing as a genetically unmodified crop).²⁸ Yet traditional environmentalist groups, with what the ecology writer Stewart Brand has called their “customary indifference to starvation,” have prosecuted a fanatical crusade to keep transgenic crops from people—not just from whole-food gourmets in rich countries but from poor farmers in developing ones.²⁹ Their opposition begins with a commitment to the sacred yet meaningless value of “naturalness,” which leads them to decry “genetic pollution” and “playing with nature” and to promote “real food” based on “ecological agriculture.” From there they capitalize on primitive intuitions of essentialism and contamination among the scientifically illiterate public. Depressing studies have shown that about half of the populace believes that ordinary tomatoes don’t have genes but genetically modified ones do, that a gene inserted into a food might migrate into the genomes of people who eat it, and that a spinach gene inserted into an orange would make it taste like spinach. Eighty percent favored a law that would mandate labels on all foods “containing DNA.”³⁰ As Brand put it, “I daresay the environmental movement has done more harm with its opposition to genetic engineering than with any other thing we’ve been wrong about. We’ve starved people, hindered science, hurt the natural environment, and denied our own practitioners a crucial tool.”³¹

One reason for Brand’s harsh judgment is that opposition to transgenic crops has been perniciously effective in the part of the world that could most benefit from it. Sub-Saharan Africa has been cursed by nature with thin soil, capricious rainfall, and a paucity of harbors and navigable rivers, and it never developed an extensive network of roads, rails, or canals.³² Like all farmed land, its soils have been depleted, but unlike those in the rest of the world, Africa’s have not been replenished with synthetic fertilizer. Adoption of transgenic crops, both those already in use and ones customized for Africa, grown with other modern practices such as no-till farming and drip irrigation, could allow Africa to leapfrog the more invasive practices of the first Green Revolution and eliminate its remaining undernourishment.

For all the importance of agronomy, food security is not just about farming. Famines are caused not only when food is scarce but when people can’t afford it, when armies prevent them from getting it, or when their governments don’t care how much of it they have.³³ The pinnacles and valleys in figure 7-4 show that the conquest of famine was not a story of steady gains in agricultural efficiency. In the 19th century, famines were triggered by the usual droughts and blights, but they were exacerbated in colonial India and Africa by the callousness, bungling, and sometimes deliberate policies of administrators who had no benevolent interest in their subjects’ welfare.³⁴ By the early 20th century, colonial policies had become more responsive to food crises, and advances in agriculture had taken a bite out of hunger.³⁵ But then a horror show of political catastrophes triggered sporadic famines for the rest of the century.