A scientist once offered a useful rule of thumb: “If it squirms, it’s biology; if it stinks, it’s chemistry; if it doesn’t work, it’s physics; and if you can’t understand it, it’s mathematics.”
I’d like to propose an addendum: If it’s scale neutral, then it’s agricultural biotechnology.
I realize that saying won’t earn me a hallowed place among history’s notable quotables. At least it’s true--even though it contradicts what some people fervently believe.
They think that size matters. And maybe it does matter - when we’re talking about power forwards in basketball or cargo space in pick-up trucks. But when we’re discussing biotechnology down on the farm, I prefer something Ralph Waldo Emerson said a century and a half ago: “I think no virtue goes with size.”
I hosted a session at the recent BIO 2004 convention in San Francisco, and our panel of foreign farmers drove this point home. Something like 70 percent of the world’s poor are farmers. Most of them are just trying to scrape by, feeding their families and improving the quality of their lives. They have learned that biotechnology can help them do it--and they were happy to share their stories with our audience.
Edwin Paraluman, a 46-year-old corn grower from the Philippines, gave an inspirational address that seemed more suited to a revival meeting than a conference of biotechnologists. “You know for me, it’s really amazing,” he said. “This is the first time in my life that I can actually get ahead and provide a better life for my family.”
The Asian corn borer used to cost him between 30 and 70 percent of his corn crop each year. “If you have this much damage, it is better not to plant corn,” he said. Now that’s a depressing thing to hear: A corn grower saying that he’s better off not growing corn at all.
Fortunately, Bt corn has boosted Paraluman’s income by 50 percent. His three-generation family has lived in the same tiny house for many, many years - and now the extra money has allowed him to expand it.
Another one of our panelists was MS Shankarikoppa, a 74-year-old cotton farmer from India. He said that he used to lose half of his crop to bollworms every year--and that was during a good year. Sometimes these pests destroyed 80 percent of his harvest, even though he sprayed his crop as many as twenty times in one season.
“Bt cotton came as a big relief,” he said. With losses like that, how could it not? He’s doing much better nowadays--his generates two or three times as much income as he once did. “If you hear activists who do not support GM,” he said, “they are not farmers.”
Isn’t that peculiar? The biggest enemies of biotechnology aren’t farmers--they’re people who know next to nothing about farmers. They certainly haven’t met the likes of Paraluman and Shankarikoppa. If they did, a few of them--the honest and humane ones--might even change their views.
Yet their understanding of agriculture is so poor, they seem to think that size is a virtue--and that only faceless corporations and factory farms benefit from biotechnology. Needless to say, Paraluman and Shankarikoppa aren’t corporate employees, and they probably don’t even know what a “factory farm” is.
I know from firsthand experience that small farmers can benefit from biotechnology. I am one: For many years, I farmed 350 acres in Northern Iowa. That’s puny by Iowa standards. Yet biotech enhanced crops work for me and my family because they lower my production costs and boost my yields.
The anti-biotech activists are always talking about “Frankenfood,” in reference to Mary Shelley’s classic novel. I’d like to propose another literary reference: the Lilliputians, the miniature people of Gulliver’s Travels, by Jonathan Swift. That’s because biotechnology is so good at helping the little guy. Call it the food from Lilliput.
The bottom line is that biotechnology helps everyone, even outside the made-up world of literature. A stalk of Bt corn doesn’t care whether it’s being grown on a plot of two acres, two hundred acres, or two thousand acres. It also doesn’t care whether it’s being grown in the rich soil of Iowa amid all the amenities of modern agriculture, or in the developing world among people desperate to improve their lot.
Like the rising tide that lifts all boats, biotechnology works its magic everywhere, for everyone. That’s the essence of scale neutrality.
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A scientist once offered a useful rule of thumb: “If it squirms, it’s biology; if it stinks, it’s chemistry; if it doesn’t work, it’s physics; and if you can’t understand it, it’s mathematics.”
