The Developing World Needs GM Plants More Than It Needs Hippy Protesters

A bountiful crop of GM linseed. (Image via)

Martin Robbins is a writer and talker who blogs about weird and wonderful things for the Guardian and New Statesman. Here Be Dragons is a new column that explores denial, conflict and mystery at the wild fringes of science and human understanding. Find him on Twitter @mjrobbins, or email tips and feedback to martin@mjrobbins.net.

A year ago, I travelled to a field at the Rothamsted scientific research centre to watch a gaggle of anti-GM protestors bake bread and swap conspiracy theories. They were part of the "Take the Flour Back" movement and had come to destroy some aphid-resistant wheat nearby. Aphid-resistant wheat seems like a pretty good idea – a neat way to reduce pesticide usage and CO2 emissions from agriculture. But for a group of rent-a-hippies cheering a moron who believed that modern agriculture of any kind causes cancer, it was the devil’s crop. Acording to these people, if you don’t quite understand something, the safest thing to do is BURN IT, WITH FIRE.

This year, Take the Flour Back has been replaced by the Monsanto protests, which are still very much against all genetically modified food. Some concerns are legitimate – are patents anti-competitive, and should Monsanto be allowed to dominate the market in the way it does? Others are less valid: the slogan, "Real food for real people", makes basically no sense – nothing produced by any farm in the last few thousand years has been truly "natural".

And some are just completely confused: at Rothamsted I saw anti-GM protesters cheering a farmer who declared that he didn’t need GM crops because he had a wide selection of pesticides he could use – so much for giving a shit about the environment.

This guy doesn't get it. (Image via)

Of course, there are legitimate worries about the behaviour of large companies like Monsanto. Any corporation that big, with their history, deserves to get a lot of scrutiny. The problem comes when people confuse the corporations with the science, which isn’t helped by the extent of Monsanto’s monopoly on the commercial side of genetically modified organisms (GMOs). Big Pharma can behave badly, but that doesn’t mean vaccines are bad, or that we should stop life-saving inoculation programmes in the developing world.

And it’s worth pointing out that green activists have been just as devious and misleading at times. Greenpeace’s infamous "Arctic Ready" campaign involved creating a viral video claiming to show a screw up at a Shell VIP event. The "epic Shell PR fail" and "legal threats" that followed were reported everywhere, but it turned out to be a big, fat hoax. It showed a stunning amount of contempt for the public, and for writers who were intimidated by fake legal threats.

Some NGOs may have gone further still. I attended a training workshop last year for African science journalists to give a talk about the ways journalists can tackle junk science. In one session, the topic of "brown envelopes" came up. In countries like Nigeria and Uganda, newspapers often struggle to pay journalists, so they turn to other sources of income. In this alternative news economy, PR officers at press conferences often hand over bundles of cash in brown envelopes, effectively paying journalists to place their story in the newspaper. Journalists I spoke to accused two famous environmental NGOs of taking part in this practice.

Faced with a colossal amount of misinformation from all sides, the safest thing to do is stick with the science. The fact is, humans have been genetically modifying crops for millennia – the only difference now is that we do it in a targeted, scientific way. If you were to put the fruits and vegetables of today in front of the average stone-age chef, he wouldn't have the faintest idea what the fuck most of them were.

A video running down the idea of the "caveman" diet.

This is why the Paleolithic or "caveman" diet is so ridiculous. It tries to replicate what humans ate tens of thousands of years ago, assuming that this must be the diet our bodies were "designed" for. That sort of makes sense, until you realise that humans, animals and vegetables have all changed quite a lot in that time. For example, here’s a paleo-diet recipe for Brussels sprouts in Mens’ Fitness, which looks great – until you realise that Brussels sprouts didn’t exist until farmers created them several hundred years ago.

A lot of anti-GM rhetoric is nonsense for the same reason: compared with turning a wild cabbage into both broccoli and the Brussels sprout, or shaping a wolf into a Chihuahua, companies like Monsanto are amateurs. The Romans were prolific genetic engineers, albeit with far more primitive tools and a great deal more trial and error.

It shouldn’t be surprising then that genetically-modified food produced by scientists has proven to be [no more](http://www.aaas.org/news/releases/2012/1025gmstatement.shtml] [http://ec.europa.eu/research/biosociety/pdf/adecadeofeu-fundedgmoresearch.pdf) or less dangerous than the genetically-altered food we’ve been eating for the last several thousand years, and that no harmful effects have ever been shown in any of the countries where GM foods have been approved. The phrase "Frankenstein Food" is ironically appropriate, as director DC Turner pointed out last year – “Frankenstein's monster was unfairly demonised; hounded by an ignorant, torch-wielding mob."

As with any broad technology, not all uses of GM are going to be brilliant, and the sensible thing to do is see how well it works on a case-by-case basis. Claims of vested interests like Monsanto should be challenged rigorously; but to believe that somehow all GMOs are dangerous flies in the face of the science we have. Of course it’s possible, as some of those I heard at Rothamsted suggested, that there is a vast pro-GM conspiracy involving many of the world’s governments and scientific institutions. It’s also possible that George Bush Sr piloted the planes that flew into the Twin Towers, that tens of thousands of scientists are involved in a massive global warming hoax and that one day Brett Ratner will direct a movie that isn’t utterly shit. However, it’s still pretty unlikely.

The irony of the Monsanto protesters is that they’re attacking the very people they claim to want to protect. There’s a good reason that GMO technology is grown by millions of farmers across the world, and it’s not because they’re all hapless victims of clever Western marketers – they benefit from them. As Harvard’s Professor Calestous Juma has argued recently, Africa’s biotechnology boom could revolutionise life on the continent just as its telecommunications boom has in the last ten years. Scientists in countries like Nigeria and Uganda are making impressive progress on drought and pest-resistant crops. If Africa is going to feed its people in the 21st century – as well as making itself a global player in science and technology – it needs GMOs and researchers a hell of a lot more than it needs a bunch of misguided, berry-munching protesters.

Follow Martin on Twitter: @mjrobbins

Previously - Kenya's Slum Abortions Pit God Against Death