From Robert Ziegler, Director of the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), a nonprofit organization founded by the Ford and Rockefeller foundations in 1960, and a self-described “old lefty.”
When I was starting out in the ’60s, a lot of us got into genetic engineering because we thought we could do a lot of good for the world. We thought, These tools are fantastic!
We do feel a bit betrayed by the environmental movement, I can tell you that. If you want to have a conversation about what the role of large corporations should be in our food supply, we can have that conversation—it’s really important. But it’s not the same conversation about whether we should use these tools of genetics to improve our crops. They’re both important, but let’s not confound them.
When I was in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, I saw a cassava famine. That’s what made me become a plant pathologist.
Many of the same people who have scared African nations into banning genetically modified crops (only 3 nations in Africa allow them) castigate anyone who questions the so-called settled conclusion of anthropogenic global warning as anti-science. Every organism, plant, and animal on the planet, every living thing that anyone eats, has been genetically modified—it’s called evolution. The science of genetic modification opens the door to significant increases in crop yields, by making plants more productive, increasing their resistance to disease, or, in the case of rice, allowing rice plants to live for up to two weeks underwater. Global warming, if in fact it is occurring, raises water levels and increases rice-plant-killing floods. (Every year floods destroy about 50 million acres of rice in Asia.) The IRRI’s flood-tolerant rice, Swarna-Sub1, has increased yields by more than 25 percent, mostly on land that Director Ziegler says is farmed by “the poorest of the poor.” In the name of a trendy anti-science fad, the poorest of the poor around the globe (especially in Africa, which doesn’t have enough problems) are being protected from the “threat” posed by genetically modified crops…and are starving to death. Maybe if they could shop at their local Whole Foods market.
