The Soil Grab
Remember that when we talk about agriculture and food production, we are talking about a complex and interrelated system and it is simply not possible to single out just one objective, like maximising production, without also ensuring that the system which delivers those increased yields meets society’s other needs.
—HRH the Prince of Wales, in his speech “The Future of Food” at Georgetown University, May, 4, 2011
We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us.
—Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, 1949
WHEN I FINALLY GET HOLD OF AMIE BANDY, she is in Columbia, Missouri, having just taken a picture of a cornfield that was, in her words, “completely dead.” “Here’s the deal,” she tells me. “Things are cooking.” It’s the second week of July, a couple of weeks into a brutal heat wave that has hit the midwestern states on top of an unusually dry spring and early summer. With every passing rainless day farmers have been revising their yield estimates downward while Wall Street has been watching the commodity price edge upward. The fate of the corn crop “dominates every conversation,” says Bandy, and as heat records fall only to bow to the next extreme, there’s talk of a new Dust Bowl. On July 11, 2012, the USDA declared one-thousand-plus counties in twenty-six states natural-disaster areas. The nation’s biggest crop, corn, fuels our economy—from packaged foods and sweeteners to animal feed to energy (biofuel) stock—so a price bump would likely ripple throughout the whole system.
“I honestly thought it would have rained by now,” says Bandy, a crop consultant based in eastern Iowa. “If I can use this to educate clients, if I can explain why their soil temperatures are 130 degrees, then it will be worth something. The only time we ever get to fix things is when they’re really broken. Now crops are dying in a different way from how they did before. This is because of our choices. I’m not sure they’re bad choices. I’m just saying there are choices. We’ve been doing things one way for so long, I think people are ready to consider something different.”
Corn-wise, the client she’s come to counsel will not be totally devastated, she says, though “a week ago they called me to see if they should bale it for silage [stored, fermented fodder for animals]. Now they understand: My first job is to get them to change. I want them to change bad enough that I’m willing to teach them. To cool the soil down. To find a way that under drought conditions the farm is resilient. We’ve got to get smarter than the dirt.”
She photographed a neighboring, or “across the fence,” cornfield so as to have a comparison. This corn, she says, is “all brown, cream-colored. Instead of being green it looks like standing straw.” Though she hasn’t talked to the farmer, she’s guessing he or she applied ammonia (a source of nitrogen) and maybe potassium chloride (potash), which she says would explain the excess heat.
“Outside right now it’s ninety-one degrees,” she says. “The soil temperature is 113 to 139 degrees. Inside the plant itself it’s 103 to 109 degrees, root zone to crown. The ear is where you get your seed. Anything over eighty-six to ninety-two degrees, it’s cooking in there. It’s getting too hot. Getting too much ammonia, at the expense of the crop.” Air temperature matters a great deal—if it exceeds ninety-five degrees during the small window of time when corn is pollinating, the kernels won’t grow well—but soil temperature is something farmers have more control over. One way to cool the soil, she says, is with a cover crop. Or with a different fertilizer so that rather than ammonia nitrate they would use ammonia sulfite, which would be more conducive to soil microorganisms. “Forgive the comparison, but microbes are like union workers: They don’t work if it’s colder than fifty-five or higher than eighty-five. What do you think my microbes are doing now? They went on vacation. Soil is a thermostat. If it’s at 135 degrees, it’s a broken thermostat.”
A big problem Bandy sees is that much of the agricultural community has “bought into the industry’s mind-set. People aren’t looking at the biochemistry. They’ve been doing what they’ve been told to do. We’ve always assumed that our university teachers could tell us what to do, that corporations knew the answers. Corporations offer one-size-fits-all solutions. Otherwise they wouldn’t be able to blanket-sell.” By uncritically buying in, she says, “farmers are accidentally creating their own problems. I’m helping them see what they’ve been doing on their farm.”
Bandy is not against commercially sold agricultural inputs per se. “I came out of this system,” she says. She grew up on a farm in Indiana. “My grandparents farmed. In those days if you were a boy you automatically worked on a farm. I left high school and I’m thinking: If I’d been a boy I could have been driving the tractor now.” But she wasn’t and so she went on to college, completing a BS in soil and crop science at Purdue University. Her consulting business is called “The Crop Advisor” and she regularly speaks at workshops and works with clients throughout the Midwest.
What concerns her is that the way inputs are applied may mean trouble in the soil—sometimes aggravating the very problems a farmer was trying to resolve. She explains: “Glyphosate chelates out [binds in a way that interferes with the nutrient being taken up by the plant] five different micronutrients. But it’s not just glyphosate, it’s all of them. Like LibertyLink [a genetic engineering product from Bayer CropScience designed to withstand Bayer herbicides]. You have to understand that you’re taking out a specific set of elements from the microbial community. You either replace those micronutrients or eventually you’re going to be deficient.”
Different cover crops pull up different minerals, making them available in the soil and stimulating a given set of microorganisms. For example, oats pulls copper, and wheat draws up silica. “Say you put on a cover crop and still use herbicide—there’s not a good way of evaluating the result,” she says. “If I want to pull copper up and I use herbicides that destroy copper-promoting plants, am I ahead?”
Her concern was sparked by a combination of problems she was encountering in the field and research that revealed unintended impacts of herbicides, in particular the work of Don Huber, her former professor at Purdue. “I began to understand that what herbicides do in the plant tissue, they’re doing the same in the soil tissue,” she says. She says she’s also started looking at research outside the United States, such as in New Zealand and Poland, that calls into question the assumption that herbicides are benign in the soil.
“First you’ve got to change the ideology,” she says. “Until you can show people that they’re losing profits, you can’t get them to change.” This current crisis may prove the ultimate teachable moment. “I see people getting smarter with some of their inputs.”
The drought and heat wave have Bandy crisscrossing the Midwest right now as farmers try to salvage this crop season. “We will have a very challenging year when it comes to corn,” she says. “You may think that with high prices these farmers have got it made. But $8 to $10 for a bushel of corn does not keep a farmer farming. They’ve also got to feed their animals.” On the road she’s encountering some pretty unhappy farmers. “They don’t like it when they look at corn that’s dying.”
Bandy was measured in her comments about agribusiness inputs and I understand that. I also understand that plant–soil interaction is exceedingly complex; it’s difficult to make generalizations. And yet much depends on living relationships in the soil—the biochemical choreography of animal, vegetable, and mineral—certainly to the degree that it’s worth being vigilant to make sure that we don’t mess it up.
From our conversations, two things Bandy said got my journalistic antennae twitching. First, this comment: I began to understand that what herbicides do in the plant tissue, they’re doing the same in the soil tissue. Second, that it was primarily research outside the United States that presents evidence of deleterious effects commonly used chemicals have on the soil. Why aren’t such papers available here? I thought of Gene Goven, who’d looked online for a New Zealand article that reported a longer-than-claimed half-life for glyphosate in the soil, only to find it had vanished. Of the Monsanto executive calling the EPA official within twenty minutes of Goven’s expressing concern over an herbicide’s toxicity to wildlife and the official who fielded this complaint losing his job soon after. Of a trade journalist I’d heard of who was told in no uncertain terms by higher-ups that he was not to investigate the environmental consequences of agrochemicals. Of research grants being pulled when it became clear results would point to untoward side effects of chemical treatments, thus effectively dead-ending those studies; with only, say, three years of data, these wouldn’t get a look from peer-reviewed journals, as five years is considered the minimum standard. But who would fund such research, especially given that much university research (or at the very least the buildings in which it takes place or the professors who lend their name to it) is bankrolled by corporations with a stake in keeping untoward conclusions out of the public eye?
The use of chemical fertilizers and other treatments has increased worldwide as large tracts of agricultural land are turned over to commodity mono-crops. And yet the science addressing the potential impact of these chemicals on the future viability of the land has been locked in secrecy. Here in the United States, we’re even kept in the dark as to whether the food we buy contains genetically modified substances, which would necessarily have been treated with herbicides. (The message to those of us who’d like to know what we’re eating and feeding our kids is, “Don’t worry your pretty little heads over it.”)
The rise of biotech in agriculture has led to a sweeping disenfranchisement of citizens and farmers regarding self-determination over what they eat and grow. Consider that farmers are sued when genetically manipulated seeds they don’t even want sprout on their soil. (The pretext: This is “patent infringement” and thus the company is owed royalties. No matter that the designer seeds have contaminated the crop.) Or the draconian contracts in which farmers must promise not to save seeds, which has been a fundamental right of growers since the advent of agriculture. Or that tucked into the 2012 Farm Bill was a clause indemnifying Monsanto if the use of their products happens to mess up someone’s land. Or corporations pressing their biotech wares on farmers in developing countries, trapping them in dependence and debt. India, pursued as a pilot market for many products (notably Monsanto Bt cotton), has seen an estimated 250,000 farmer suicides over the last fifteen years. Or that large chemical companies like Monsanto, DuPont, Bayer, and Dow, committed to promoting GMOs and synthetic treatments, now control more than half of the global seed market.
To put this as plainly as possible, what we’re dealing with is a corporate appropriation of the world’s soils. Which is occurring on two levels: the known and potential effects that chemical/biotech products have on the soil, and the question of who owns the land and therefore controls the soil and what it yields. This in the context of diminishing resources, including projected widespread food and water shortages, when all we’ve got is a capitalist system through which to allocate them. Something that in itself is problematic, since free-market capitalism as currently construed promotes the goals of the corporations (market domination and profit) even when it violates the wishes of ordinary people and their desire for sovereignty over the food they eat and the crops they cultivate and feed to livestock.
These are pretty broad statements, so let’s loop back and zero in on one example of how the use of a product plays out in the soil. With that in mind, I now introduce . . . Roundup.
In the world of today’s agricultural inputs—the stuff that douses our cropland—Roundup rules. Developed and introduced by Monsanto in the 1970s, Roundup is the trade name for glyphosate, an extremely effective broad-spectrum herbicide, meaning that it kills pretty much any green, growing thing unless it’s specifically resistant to it, either by design (“Roundup Ready” or other genetically modified crops) or by happenstance (newly evolving “superweeds” that have managed to outsmart the herbicide by developing resistance). The product was quickly embraced by the agricultural industry because of its wide range of applicability and ease of use. It was also touted as being “environmentally friendly” in that its scope and potency meant that other weed killers could be omitted, resulting in less overall herbicide applied to land; and in that it allowed farmers to minimize tillage, thus diminishing the risk of soil erosion. The active ingredient, glyphosate, was reported to have low toxicity to humans and wildlife and to break down rapidly in soil so that its ecological effects were negligible. The EPA continues to classify Roundup as low-toxicity, despite numerous studies that have linked glyphosate itself or inert ingredients in Roundup to health problems, including birth defects.
As we’ll see, claims that Roundup is benign to soil life are debatable as well.
Roundup quickly became the world’s best-selling herbicide around the globe and a huge cash machine for Monsanto. This proved pivotal for the company’s shift in orientation away from industrial chemicals and toward agricultural biotech. Between Monsanto’s dumping of mercury and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and use of the disfiguring Vietnam War defoliant Agent Orange, the chemical sector was generating damning and costly lawsuits over environmental contamination and human harm. Plus, the chemical industry had matured; market growth was elsewhere. Through various corporate merging and shedding and amassing of divisions with different names and hair-splittingly distinct legal statuses, the Monsanto that brought us saccharin (its first product, introduced in 1901 and subsequently associated with numerous health side effects) and dioxins (a hugely toxic by-product of commercial chemical production) has morphed into the new Monsanto—which focuses on agriculture.
This fresh branding as a “life sciences” company allows for crisp photos and video clips of cornstalks bending to the breeze, smiling farmers posing with their children, picturesque sunsets and sunrises. The copy on the corporate website’s homepage reads: Producing More. Conserving More. Improving Lives. That’s sustainable agriculture. And that’s what Monsanto is all about. It’s all very sleek and reassuring and high-minded. Like Roundup, the company’s glyphosate-based and other herbicides all have Wild West names like Maverick, Lasso, Lariat, Buccaneer, and Ramrod—a list that, to me, seems could just as well double for a line of condoms or, say, a cult series of S-and-M flicks. The theme, I suppose, is all upbeat, can-do, don’t-mess-with-me.
Monsanto’s exclusive patent for glyphosate expired in 2000, which brought many companies, including price-slashing Chinese manufacturers, to the game. Which presented a business dilemma: namely, how to keep Monsanto’s one-stop herbicide gravy train chugging along. Global demand for glyphosate kept growing (more than 20 percent a year through most of the decade that started in 2000, now exceeding $5 billion in annual sales), but by 2008 China had become the world’s leading manufacturer. What was a helpless major US corporation to do?
Let’s travel back to before the patent expiration to see how the company chose to maintain its market advantage. Here’s a clip from a 1997 Mother Jones article by Mark Arax and Jeanne Brokaw detailing how Monsanto staked its fortunes on the Roundup brand:
Monsanto’s U.S. patent on Roundup runs out in three years, and if the company is to keep its dominant market position beyond the year 2000, it needs a new spin. Enter Roundup Ready soybeans and Roundup Ready cotton, seeds genetically manipulated so that they can survive direct applications of Roundup. Farmers who once confined their use of the weed killer to the borders of their planting area can now douse entire fields with Roundup instead of using an expensive array of sprays that each target just one or two weeds. “It expands the Roundup market,” says Gary Barton, a Monsanto spokesman.
The “catch,” the authors continue, is that “farmers using Roundup Ready seeds can only use Roundup, because any other broad-spectrum herbicide will kill their crops. So, with every Roundup Ready seed sale, Monsanto sells a season’s worth of its weed killer as well.” Then there’s the “service” aspect of the Roundup Ready package, which features those contracts barring farmers from selling or even saving seeds for future seasons.
Around 2010 Monsanto “repositioned” its Roundup herbicide business in response to “fundamental structural changes in the marketplace.” This included lowering the price (so as to better compete with Chinese generics), emphasizing a “simplified brand strategy” (bundling the herbicide with seeds genetically modified to withstand it), and offering new solutions to “address the need for a simple weed resistance package . . . [with] complementary chemicals” (in other words: Sure, some weeds may flourish despite our poison—but don’t worry, we’ve got stronger stuff for you.) The Roundup crop system also launched Monsanto on a seed-company-buying spree, so that it is now the world’s dominant vendor of agricultural seed. As North Dakota farmer Gene Goven put it, after decades of inputs, more and more the fallback response among farmers is, “‘Have a problem? Easy—I call the chemical companies to ask what I can do.’” This works very well . . . for the chemical companies.
Meanwhile, around the globe farming operations are being consolidated and switched to commodity monocultures, and management is falling to a generation groomed to use chemical inputs as traditional know-how fades into the past.
I haven’t even mentioned “terminator” technology: seeds engineered so that the plant produces sterile seeds or no seeds at all. Farmers are then forced to purchase new seeds every year. It’s thought that pollen from plants with the terminator trait could infect neighboring crop fields, rendering those plants infertile. Globally, more than a billion people depend on small, often marginal farm holdings for their food. What could possibly go wrong here?
So basically we’re in the midst of a dubious biotech experiment with huge consequences for the world’s soil and all the plant and animal life that depends on it (read: life on earth), and what drives this highly risky enterprise is . . . market share. Meaning employees in a window-less conference room, armed with flip-boards and graphs, discussing strategic opportunity in the scarily aseptic language of corporate marketing. If that’s not the ultimate twisted commentary on capitalism, I don’t know what is. Yet this is what happens when corporations bear responsibility to their shareholders and essentially to no one else (and the regulators blink).
Forgive me. I tend to get worked up about a company that’s got its tentacles in much of the world’s food chain and is only angling for more, to the point where by the mere fact of eating every person alive becomes a wholly owned subsidiary of the company [cue trademark sign]. Which to some extent we already are: One German study of city residents found significant concentrations of glyphosate—five to twenty times the limit for drinking water—in every urine sample. And Germany, mind you, is a country that has banned GMOs, so there’s got to be less residual glyphosate in the food system than in a country like, well, ours.
All right, time for me to stop hyperventilating and instead sit back and bring in some cooler heads. My task is to describe how commonly used biotech tools affect the soil, not to enumerate every questionable act that Monsanto and its cousins have ever carried out. (Of course on that score I’ve hardly begun. Fortunately, plenty of very sharp people are already on the case. See, for example, The World According to Monsanto; gmwatch.org; Organic Consumers Association; Food Democracy Now!; and many others.)
Let’s now bring in Robert Kremer, PhD, a microbiologist with the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service and an adjunct professor of soil science at the University of Missouri’s School of Natural Resources. For the last two decades Kremer’s primary research area has been “the relationship among soil properties, plant growth, and soil microorganisms as influenced by land management practices,” which led to investigations of commonly used agricultural chemicals, chiefly glyphosate. His findings suggest that the use of glyphosate—currently applied to hundreds of millions of acres of the world’s crop-growing land—has multiple harmful effects related to plant nutrient uptake and soil microbial life.
With glyphosate and other synthetic chemicals and pest-management controls typical of modern, conventional agriculture “several things can happen,” Kremer says. “The assumption has been that they will disperse, that the chemicals will be degraded by the microbial communities that are in the soil. After several years of looking at this we’re seeing what we like to call ‘non-targeted effects,’ we’re finding that some of these chemicals will shift different species in the soil. Some may be suppressed and others will be enhanced. Often the beneficials are suppressed and the less desirable ones benefit. While the unfavorable organisms are always in the environment, they are usually kept in control through relationships with other organisms.”
This creates imbalances in the soil community, which can then alter other soil-based processes, he says. He notes, for example, microorganisms that produce mycotoxins—naturally occurring chemical substances exuded by certain mold fungi—might come to dominate.
One problematic form of mycotoxin is aflatoxin, a substance that if ingested is known to cause illnesses, including cancer, in animals and humans. (Aflatoxin contamination was the cause of frequent pet food recalls in recent years.) Crops such as corn are susceptible to aflatoxin contamination, particularly in hot, dry years (like this one). Disturbed soil communities can also lead to plant root diseases, says Kremer: “It’s just a matter of something that is causing the pathogens to be dominant. This disrupts some of the functional activities of the microbial life in the soil, such as decomposition, which is very important for carbon and nitrogen cycling and the nutrient cycle.”
He mentions research from Ohio demonstrating that a single application of one pound of active ingredient per acre can provoke an increase in fusarium (a group of fungi in the soil, several of which are toxic and cause crop blight) in just one year. “No one knows how many years it will take after the use of this chemical has stopped for soil to be restored to its original microbial diversity,” he says.
While a company’s internal product testing may look at one or a limited number of chemical applications, research such as Kremer’s offers a picture of what could happen over a period of years. Not only is glyphosate widely used, he says, but it’s often applied annually on the same fields, which means it can build up in the soil. “Years ago when we used to use chemicals at several pounds per acre we’d do so to control a pest that was foreseen to be a problem at sixty days, but we did it before planting,” says Kremer. Under these circumstances, the herbicide was degrading before it even met the pest, a phenomenon known as “enhanced degradation,” in which microorganisms develop the ability to degrade a chemical they’ve encountered and use it as a food source. “Now we have chemicals that are more resistant to degradation, and are staying in the soil longer. Even though glyphosate is used at a low rate, there are reports that residual chemical can be detected in the soil a year later. It’s beginning to build up in the soil, [even if] not necessarily at high levels.” He adds that some researchers are finding glyphosate being transported via surface water from adjacent fields. “We don’t know what those effects are yet.”
Kremer grew up on a farm in mid-Missouri and has been involved in agriculture all his life. He has worked in the US Department of Agriculture for several decades, and speaking out on the problematic effects of a widely used chemical that’s been officially or unofficially sanctioned by the agency he serves is not something he’d be prone to do lightly. He recalls: “When all this biotechnology came about, we all assumed that these chemicals were effective for weed management and there were no other effects. The soil wasn’t really considered. Other than the belief that they would be adsorbed completely and thus immobilized. [Adsorb means for components of a liquid or gas to adhere to a surface.] That’s what everybody just took for granted. So nobody was really looking at the soil. I got interested [in glyphosate], seeing such widespread use and as a microbiologist said, ‘Let’s see what’s happening.’ The chemical is applied to foliage. Its effect is systemic—it’s translocated through the plant and eventually to the root zone, where it attacks the biology. When it was originally released for nonselective killing of vegetation, we knew that when the plant dies [the residual chemical] would stimulate some [soil microbial] species. But nobody thought about that with transgenic crops. We’ve found that glyphosate stimulates these pathogens, even if the plant is resistant to the chemical.” Of, for example, herbicide-resistant soybeans, he says: “They’re stimulating potential pathogens the whole time they’re growing in the field.”
Kremer observes that glyphosate’s effect on soil communities has received little attention. “Roundup-resistant weeds: that’s taking all the attention,” he says. Perhaps, as I said to him, Here Come the Superweeds makes for a catchier headline than Soil Microbes Run Amok Underground. In any event, the industry answer for superweeds is more agrochemicals: mixtures of weed killers called “herbicide cocktails.” One recommended treatment is 2,4-D, an active ingredient in Agent Orange. Dow AgroSciences is moving ahead with 2,4-D-resistant corn and soybeans that will also withstand glyphosate—crops, then, that can be drenched with two chemicals. Kremer says, “We used to have to mix two or three herbicides. Originally, Roundup Ready crops were supposed to make it so easy since you used just one chemical. Now we’re coming full circle, where we have to use as many if not more.”
Next I talked to plant pathologist Don Huber, professor emeritus at Purdue University (where Amie Bandy was his student) and a retired colonel, who for more than forty years has done research on biological pathogens, both natural and man-made (germ warfare compounds, say). In spring 2011 he unintentionally sparked a stir when a letter he’d written privately to Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack was leaked. This communication was to alert Vilsack that scientists had come upon a new pathogen associated with plant diseases and reproductive problems (infertility, miscarriages, stillbirths) in cattle, pigs, chickens, and horses and which was found in crops genetically modified to tolerate glyphosate. In an interview with Food Democracy Now!, Huber said this previously unidentified organism can kill a fertilized egg in twenty-four to forty-eight hours. Through his letter, Huber urged Vilsack to pursue more research before GMO alfalfa, the country’s main forage crop, is approved and enters the food supply. Numerous scientists, including Purdue colleagues, refuted Huber’s statements and claimed he had jumped the gun by, well, calling for caution. Meanwhile, the USDA approved GMO alfalfa, which is now sold under Monsanto’s Genuity “trait master brand.”
I recently spoke with Huber, whose understated, methodical manner contrasted with the hysterical fear-mongerer image that some, including Monsanto’s PR minions, would use to portray him.
“Let’s start by going back to the very basics,” he says. “We need to recognize that farming is a management program for a system. In that management process, sometimes we forget that there are four major components: the plant, the physical environment of the soil, the very dynamic component of soil microorganisms, and your pests. When we think we have a silver bullet, we forget the interaction[s] among those four components that are so critical to success—to whether we have a successful crop, a nutritious crop, disease or no disease. Any time we make changes in agriculture we change the interaction of those four components. In the same way, one gene operates with all the components. We can’t just look at one gene and say it’s only doing one thing. We don’t have enough genes for all the processes that take place.”
Glyphosate, Huber says, affects all four sectors. The chemical works by inhibiting the plant enzyme EPSPS, which is essential to the building of protein. The idea is that the targeted weed basically languishes for lack of protein and stops growing. However, he says, the notion that EPSPS is all that glyphosate interacts with is “a tremendous fallacy.” He refers to Kremer’s research on glyphosate and soil biology. Inhibiting that enzyme “predispose[s] the plant to soil-borne fungi that then kill the plant,” he says. “You can’t kill a plant with glyphosate—not at an herbicidal rate—in sterile soil. It only stumps the plant until it recovers the nutrients that had been tied up. If disease organisms are present, the plant is killed because it has no defenses.” Michael McNeill, an agronomist and crop consultant based in Iowa, has said that spraying glyphosate on a plant is “like giving it AIDS.”
While glyphosate’s big selling point has been ease of use—that farmers would no longer need a variety of weed killers, since glyphosate hit everything—Huber says this has been more than outweighed by an increased need for fungicides. “The mode of action meant that plants would be more sensitive to fungi and other diseases, even the Roundup Ready plants. We have epidemics of fungal and bacterial diseases destroying a lot of plants.”
Why have growers and food manufacturers rushed into the Roundup program? One reason, says Huber, is simplicity: “We always look for silver bullets.” Then there’s business. “Glyphosate is the first billion-dollar pesticide,” he says. “We’ve never had a pesticide that’s brought in so much money to a corporate entity.” The chemicals have become so intrinsic to our food production that it can be hard to disentangle causes and effects. “We have to realize that what we’re seeing today in our own health, animal health and crop production is not normal. It’s just that we’ve been seeing it long enough that we think it is normal. Young scientists think all these diseases and pests are just things we have to live with. That’s not true.”
He suggests connections among plant disease, animal morbidity, and human health problems: “Look at what’s happening with autism. With chronic disease and infertility. All of those have always existed but there’s been a 600-fold increase within the last fifteen years. That’s not normal.” This raises the question of what has changed over this time period, he says. And one change has been the increased use of agro-chemicals and the appearance of GM crops (genetically modified food entered the marketplace in 1996). “Glyphosate is so excessively used and abused that it impacts every aspect” of our food chain, he says. “It’s even patented as an antibiotic to kill off digestive microorganisms. I don’t find it surprising that there are allergy responses and intestinal concerns. It’s a very intense biocide for those beneficial organisms.”
A crop bred for glyphosate resistance gets plenty of the chemical. As a result, glyphosate is ingested by whatever animal eats it. Chemical on the plant also moves down through the roots and into the soil. The more is used, the more it builds up in the soil system, and the stronger the effects. “In plant nutrition the direct effect is the chelation,” says Huber, referring to the binding of nutrients to other elements in the soil so that they’re inaccessible to plants. Huber’s research found that levels of manganese, crucial for plant growth and integral to multiple enzymatic processes, were significantly lower in glyphosate-tolerant corn and soybeans. “The indirect effect is through microorganisms in the soil. The bacteria are out of balance”—a situation that, he says, “does stimulate our disease-causing organisms. You wouldn’t have a pesticide if it didn’t do that. That’s what makes it such a good weed-killer.”
From the standpoint of soil, the genetic modification part of the glyphosate commercial program presents new risks and unknowns. There’s been frighteningly little non-industry-funded research looking at what happens to us when the food we eat has been genetically modified. It’s widely acknowledged that those who do conduct such research risk being run out of town. An example is Hungarian protein scientist Arpad Pusztai, who in 1998 publicly stated that genetically modified potatoes had caused slowed growth and lowered immunity in rats. Soon after he was suspended from the Rowett Research Institute in Aberdeen, Scotland. However, there’s been even less—or at least less public discussion—about what GM crops do in the soil. One potential threat is “horizontal gene transfer,” whereby spliced-in genes leap to other species. Once present in the environment, the fabricated DNA sequences can move around among soil organisms, forming new viruses and retroviruses, the consequences of which are unknown.
Mae-Wan Ho, a geneticist originally from Hong Kong and director and co-founder of the London-based Institute of Science in Society (ISIS), has raised a red flag about this phenomenon that rarely takes place in nature. In a 2011 report for ISIS she wrote: “Genetic modification and release of GMOs into the environment is nothing if not greatly facilitated horizontal gene transfer and recombination. It has created highways for gene trafficking in place of narrow by-ways and occasional footpaths that previously existed.” She has called the introduction of transgenic organisms into the environment “much worse than nuclear weapons as a means of mass destruction—as genes can replicate indefinitely, spread and recombine.”
Frightening words. Do we even know how worried to be? (I mean, there are just so darned many things to worry about.) Regarding such risks and permutations Huber says, “Our knowledge is so primitive. We’re just stabbing in the dark.”
On glyphosate, however, he’s more clear: “We’re starting to see a decline in productivity because of the effects of residual glyphosate in soil.” Part of the problem with determining the chemical’s persistence, he says, is that “the compound is so readily absorbed into the soil structure. Also, its degradation products may be just as toxic to some of the organisms.” Then there’s the disconnect between what happens in controlled laboratory conditions and in the field. “Most people don’t recognize what glyphosate toxicity looks like,” he says. “It looks like nutrient deficiency. Deficiencies of manganese, magnesium, copper, zinc—all those symptoms are also symptoms of glyphosate injury, because that’s what glyphosate does.”
I brought up the controversy over his letter to Secretary Vilsack. At the time, Huber explained, he chaired the American Phytopathological Society working group charged with managing a USDA plant disease recovery program. “I felt I had an obligation as a scientist and in my role” to alert the secretary “so we could do the research to maintain food safety and security. I intended it to be a very private letter.” The attempts to damage his reputation didn’t come as a surprise, he says. “When the letter was leaked and the problems that are common in the system were pointed out, it meant there was a lot of money and funding in jeopardy. A lot of people must have thought: we can’t let this guy continue. That’s not unusual when you look at the power structure we have. I would have been totally irresponsible if I’d neglected information readily available from other scientists—some of whom have been a lot more courageous, having lost jobs or been severely penalized. Science has never succeeded by burying the manifestations of unintended consequences. It has succeeded when we recognize them and deal with those issues. That’s hard to do when you have a belief system that becomes a religion. In the minds of many, genetic engineering is a religion that saves the world, rather than something that threatens our sustainability.”
I was able to speak with a scientist at Monsanto, David Carson, a twenty-five-year company veteran who works in environmental risk assessment. Monsanto’s mission of sustainability, he said, is “all about yield. When you have enhanced yield you can feed more people. With more food per acre, less land needs to be committed to agriculture.” He was not convinced by Kremer and Huber’s findings on glyphosate. While there might be “subtle and transient effects on soil microbial life,” he said, “within the next few weeks the herbicide will be degraded by soil microorganisms into natural components. Trait, soil, plant and herbicide interaction is very complex. We’ve done the field trials to separate those variables. The product’s been around for more than 35 years. It’s one of the most extensively studied and safest chemicals available as an herbicide.”
Knowing what we know now about Roundup and Roundup Ready, or at least with a sense of what we should be trying to figure out, let’s look at the global picture.
I’m not much of an intrepid third-world traveler, but my husband is South African so I’ve been to Africa a handful of times. On our last visit about five years ago we traveled to Mozambique. It was about the most enjoyable trip I’ve ever taken, mostly because the tone was set on our first stop, the Guludo Beach Lodge, an ecological, fair-trade resort. The lodge overlooks the northern edge of the country’s magical Indian Ocean coast, graced by leggy palms and wooden dhows, the traditional sailing vessels that form airy triangles in the sea.
I remember two things from that trip germane to this discussion. While driving between destinations we often saw trucks hauling impressively vast hardwood trees along the dusty rural roads. Our driver told us these were Chinese traders: Timber buyers illegally pay locals to cut down the trees, which are shipped directly to Asia, threatening Mozambique’s forests and providing no real benefit to the community.
Later, at our hotel in Ilha de Mozambique, a surreal, fortified enclave that was the earliest European settlement in East Africa, I saw a prosperous-looking Northern European man in earnest conversation with a series of various business types, loudly sharing photos of local properties from his laptop, from sparkling beaches and lush green slopes to once-grand stone houses on the island, making little attempt to keep his dealings private. Until this moment the world of commerce—or really the familiar world in any form—had seemed far away. When I mentioned this scene to the hotel proprietor he confirmed that real estate wheeling and dealing was beginning to stir, as were other business sectors. This was dominated, he said, by the Chinese. “The US and much of Europe sees its involvement with Africa as charity,” he said. “The Chinese sees Africa as a market.” And, I thought, recalling the trucks filled with logs, a source of natural assets.
With a growing world population, land, notably farmable land, is a finite resource. That visit to Mozambique gave me an inkling of where trends were going: Compared with the developed world, in Africa land and raw materials like virgin hardwood were a steal—and, so it seemed, there for the taking. And so we’ve entered an era of land grabs, an enormous shift of land wealth from common use or smallholdings to large corporate or governmental/NGO entities.
To offer a sense of scale: According to the International Land Coalition database landportal.info, since 2000 about 70 million hectares (173 million acres) of agricultural land in Africa—the equivalent of 5 percent of the continent—has been sold or leased to Western investors. Mostly large buyers: Of the 924 global land deals the organization has documented, 10 percent of investors account for 68 percent of all transactions.
The implications are huge. Sometimes land that has provided food crops to the local population is turned over to agrofuel plantations. One example is the introduction of jatropha in capital-starved countries like Mozambique, Ghana, Tanzania, and Namibia. In Mozambique it’s been planted on nearly one-seventh of the country’s arable land. The shrub, whose seeds produce an oil used for fuel, was said to grow well on marginal land and to need little water—beliefs that have since proven untrue.
The food crisis of 2008, with its rapid leap in grain prices and multiple food riots, sent many countries scrambling for backup sources. Cash-rich/crop-poor or high-population nations (China, India, and Japan in Asia; Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates in the Middle East) have been buying land for commodity crops (corn, wheat, soybeans, palm oil) as a hedge against food shortages and price hikes. Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute calls this “The New Geopolitics of Food Scarcity.”
I talked to Devlin Kuyek of GRAIN, an international nonprofit that in 2011 was recognized with a Right Livelihood Award (often referred to as the Alternative Nobel Prize). He said that many countries are finding it more economical to buy cheap land abroad—in a place like Mozambique land can be had for $1 a hectare—than depending on agriculture at home. “You can get more land in, say, Ethiopia, along with cheap water and export it back,” he says. “It’s the modern version of colonialism: it comes with investment agreements.” A GRAIN report from June 2012 called “Squeezing Africa Dry” argues that the quest to secure water supplies is a subtext to agricultural land grabs in Africa, where already one in three people lack access to sufficient water supplies.
Then there’s takeover of third-world farmland in the name of philanthropy. For example, aid and development organizations are seeding “biofortified” crops in Africa and Asia where people suffer from poverty and “hidden hunger” (nutrient deficiencies despite adequate supplies of food calorie-wise). The goal is to breed desirable nutrients such as zinc, vitamin A, and iron into staple crops like rice, cassava, and millet as a way of addressing persistent health problems like childhood blindness and anemia. These programs are being deployed rapidly and on a vast scale, one recent effort being the introduction of iron-rich beans in Rwanda. Biofortification receives significant funding from the Rockefeller Foundation and Gates Foundation, the latter of which has financial and personal connections with Monsanto and Cargill, another agricultural giant. Donors to the biofortification nonprofit Harvest Plus include USAID, the World Bank, Syngenta Foundation (associated with the Swiss chemical firm), and the International Fertilizer Group.
The introduction of biofortified crops has not gone smoothly. Syngenta’s Golden Rice, genetically engineered to produce beta-carotene, a precursor to vitamin A, is now in field trials after several years of delay because of multiple patent disputes. A BBC report noted that malnourished people may not absorb the beta-carotene from the rice without a balanced diet that includes the type of traditional foods that commodity crops like hybrid or GM rice put in jeopardy. It’s also been found that to get the benefit from fortified rice, young children would have to consume six pounds of it a day. When it comes to malnutrition, addressing wealth disparities and improving access to a wide range of foods seems a more direct way than fiddling with genes and traits. As Hans Herren of the Millennium Institute told the BBC, “We already know today that most of the problems that are to be addressed via Golden Rice and other GMOs can be resolved now with existing and tested means, with the right political will.”
There’s also the thorny problem that people may prefer traditional produce to, say, bright orange sweet potatoes or rice that has an unfamiliar texture. Thus, a large proportion of effort and funding goes into marketing these products and educating “target populations” as to their merits. Citizen groups and regional organizations such as the African Centre for Biosafety have sounded the alarm that biotech “solutions” to hunger threaten food sovereignty and leave people vulnerable to the pricing and products of multinational corporations. Populations resist—Zambia and Angola have outright rejected GM food aid—but there’s great pressure (the word bullied is often used) to accept commercial biotech. Biofortified crops and the many other agricultural development projects in the global south, such as the US government’s Feed the Future initiative, are also inevitably based on mono-cropping and biochemical inputs.
Agricultural land grabs can be seen, to borrow author Naomi Klein’s apt phrase, as a kind of “disaster capitalism,” exploiting calamities like droughts and hunger to intensify biotechnology in the third world and therefore perpetuate economic dependence. Local residents are promised jobs, food security, and community investments such as schools and hospitals. However, the more likely results are people displaced from their land and livelihoods, communities broken, increased vulnerability to food shortages, and conditions ripe for political unrest. These forays are couched in terms of “integrated value chains,” “priority commodities,” and “catalytic philanthropy.” But ultimately the quality of food produced depends on the integrity of the soil, something not noted in tallies of yields and profits or in lofty developmental missions.
Land grabs are happening all over the world, including Eastern Europe and Australia, says Hans Herren. “People with money realize that people will need to eat no matter what. Only three percent of the world’s land is arable land. With growing demand for food, fiber and feed, the value will go up. The idea is to invest now, even in land that isn’t currently productive. Corrupt politicians who may grant long-term leases to equally corrupt banks or corporations are responsible for many of these deals that in the end affect the poor. They come in and kick the people off the land because there is no place on earth where there isn’t somebody at least part of the time, such as grasslands where pastoralists graze with their animals once or twice a year. The corporations behind the deal eventually bring in their own people, machines, fertilizers and seeds. Soil fertility will go down as under this type of industrial production they’re not using organic agricultural principles, or crop rotation practices with legume crops that regenerate the soil. When you invest money in such land grab schemes, you want to break even in five or so years.” There are exceptions, he says, but usually “there’s no intention of making sure that this is for the long haul.”
Herren, who has won several awards for work in ecological science that promotes living standards, particularly in Africa, says he opposes GMOs and biofortification as ways to bolster nutrition. “If you look at crops from before the green revolution, they were nutritious,” he says. “Breeding has raised the starch and water content. With high-yielding varieties we have increased crop yield but lowered the nutrition.”
He expresses concern about narrowing the genetic base, as farmers are “forced to give up diversity for a few varieties and simplified systems. This increases vulnerability to insects, diseases, climate variations such as too much water or not enough water. We have the [GMO] technology, so it’s as if the technology is looking for a problem to solve. With it, as earlier with pesticides and herbicides, we treat the symptoms rather than tackling the underlying causes. For example: what causes nutrient deficiencies, and pest, disease or weed outbreaks? Following this path, we eventually end up on a treadmill of pesticides, fungicides, herbicides, synthetic fertilizers, GMO seeds without solving the problems permanently.”
These words apply to Iowa cornfields as well as the Limpopo Valley in southern Africa, to the cultivation of fancy mesclun for urban bistros as well as starchy cassava in African villages. Chemical inputs and bio-technologies can mask poor soil quality for a period of time. But they also set up a treacherous course of imbalance and dependence.