The Real Scoop April 2009 Archives
April 30, 2009
More Response to Criticism of Failure to Yield
I wrote in my last post about why Failure To Yield didn’t include studies on the performance of genetically engineered crops in the developing world. Here are my responses to two other critiques.
Critique: You should have included GE cotton in your analysis
Failure to Yield was motivated in large part by the “global food crisis” of the past few years. So we wanted to examine the ability of GE to address the challenges for food production given a growing global population, changing consumption patterns, and climate change impacts. For this reason, we decided to look at major GE food or feed crops in the United States, and this means soybeans and corn. We didn’t include canola, an oilseed crop, because the acreage devoted to canola, about a million acres, is only 0.6 percent of the acreage devoted to corn and soybeans in 2008.
Cotton was excluded because it is primarily a fiber crop. Cotton seed meal may also be used as animal feed, and the plant itself as fodder in some places, but these uses are secondary to fiber production. In other words, we did not look at GE cotton because the report is intended to inform the solution of the global food crisis, not a global clothing crisis.
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April 29, 2009
Failure to Yield Turns on Biotech Spin Machines
On April 14, Union of Concerned Scientists released a new report, Failure to Yield, which analyses the contribution of genetically engineered traits to increased food and feed crop yields in the United States. The report was motivated by questions raised by the recent food crisis about the ability of the human population to produce enough food, and by ongoing claims that genetic engineering has increased yields and will be vitally important for doing so in coming years.
Since the launch of Failure to Yield, several comments complained that the report does not include studies from the developing world. In essence, they claim that the report misses important parts of the picture.
I think these comments are off the mark. By criticizing what is not in the report, they divert attention from its core finding that a solid body of research shows that despite decades of trying, genetically engineered (GE) traits in the United States contribute only marginally to increased yields, while at the same time, other means of agricultural innovation have shown great success at increasing crop yields.
Nevertheless the comments raise important issues that are worth additional discussion.
Critique #1: Failure to Yield does not include yield data from GE crops in developing countries
This is an important point, because although the report is about the impact of GE on the yield of food and feed crops in the United States, the context of the report is the coming global food crisis, and several recommendations concern agriculture policy toward developing counties.
There are several reasons why we focus on data from the United States, why these data have relevance for other parts of the world, and why data about GE crops in developing countries have some important limitations and therefore may not be as useful as would first appear.
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