As is the goodness of many things. I was reading about the controversy of GM (Genetically Modified, and, by implication, artificially genetically modified) foods as depicted in Michael Le Page’s “There’s a new kind of superfood – and it’s not what you think.” Seeing as it’s in NewScientist (26 May 2018, paywall), it’s not surprising that there’s a negative strain to it when they discuss opposition to GM foods. I ran across this bit …
Take the efforts to enrich rice to prevent vitamin A deficiency, which causes blindness and even death. Golden Rice, as the vitamin-enriched GM version is called, promises to improve the lives of millions of children, yet anti-GM organisations have fervently opposed it.
There are two facets to GM foods. First, there’s the matter of nutrition, as exemplified by the comparison of natural rice and Golden Rice – the latter is far more nutritious in terms of Vitamin A.
The second facet is implicit in Le Page’s next paragraph:
The stakes are high. GM crops could help us produce better foods in a more environmentally friendly way, which will be ever more important as the population grows and the planet warms. For instance, Napier is developing crops rich in beneficial omega-3 oils. As these oils typically come from wild fish caught to feed farmed fish, this could make fish farming more sustainable as well as having health benefits.
By being more environmental and more nutritious, this permits the support of more people.
In a ridiculously overcrowded world.
Being the Let’s have a dig at the assumptions type, I decided to wonder if the anti-GM forces might be right in action, if not in reason (which tend toward the metaphysical). Now, there’s a common argument often made that by using techniques which result in more nutritious food being grown, both in content and in volume, we preserving the environment more so than if we didn’t.
But this is an improper argument.
Researchers often talk of independent and dependent variables. In the former, changing one parameter of an experiment is a safe thing to do because the value of that parameter is not thought to influence the behavior of other parameters.
Dependent variables, on the other hand, are influenced by the values of other parameters, sometimes in unpredictable ways, making the modification of a parameter more of an adventure. Without a good understanding one parameter’s influence on others, changing that value and the result of the experiment may be difficult to understand, or, contrariwise, the change may illuminate the nature of the influence.
My contention here is that there’s an assumption of parameter independence which is not true. My precise (ok, that’s a lie, but let’s get on with it) suggestion is that such factors as availability, price, and nutrition values of food are signals to the entire species of the viability of large, small, or non-existent (beyond the adult pairing). Naturally, there are other factors, such as infant mortality and that sort of thing, but my point is this:
If we adjust the food signals to suggest to the human organism that food is nutritious and easy to come by, then any reduction in agricultural land use gained through the use of GM foods will be erased by the additional land used by those offspring “validated” by the signals generated by the GM foods. After all, agricultural land isn’t the only land used by humans; there’s housing, transportation, recreation, and some of it requires far more land per capita than others.
If this whole “signaling” seems ludicrous to you, consider this post, referencing serious scientific research into the landscape of fear, wherein deer are inhibited from feeding in certain zones because they know predators hunt in that area. While these are grosser signals than what I’m proposing, they fall into the same class.
In the end, a non-partisan analysis of these factors may find that the anti-GM forces have a point, if inadvertently, in the context of the overpopulation of this planet, and – crucially – finding a non-violent manner to reduce the overall population. Feeding more people more efficiently ignores the other uses of land those people will engender, and thus endanger the supporting environments even moreso than is already true.
