29 April 2013, 2.15pm ET

I think the controversy over GMOs represents one of the greatest science communications failures of the past half-century. Millions, possibly billions, of people have come to believe what is essentially a conspiracy theory, generating fear and misunderstanding about a whole class of technologies on an unprecedentedly global scale.

This matters enormously because these technologies – in particular the various uses of molecular biology to enhance plant breeding potential – are clearly some of our most important tools for addressing food security and future environmental change.

I am a historian, and history surely offers us, from witch trials to eugenics, numerous examples of how when public misunderstanding and superstition becomes widespread on an issue, irrational policymaking is the inevitable consequence, and great damage is done to peoples’ lives as a result.

This is what has happened with the GMOs food scare in Europe, Africa and many other parts of the world. Allowing anti-GMO activists to dictate policymaking on biotechnology is like putting homeopaths in charge of the health service, or asking anti-vaccine campaigners to take the lead in eradicating polio.

I believe the time has now come for everyone with a commitment to the primacy of the scientific method and evidence-based policy-making to decisively reject the anti-GMO conspiracy theory and to work together to begin to undo the damage that it has caused over the last decade and a half.

On a personal note, let me explain why I am standing here saying this. Believe me, I would much prefer to live a quieter life. However, following my apology for my former anti-GMO activism at my Oxford speech in January, I have been subject to a co-ordinated campaign of intimidation and hate, mostly via the internet.

Even when I was at school I didn’t give in to bullies, and at the ripe old age of 40 I am even less inclined to do so now. Moreover, I have been encouraged by emails and other support from globally-renowned scientists who are experts on this issue, and who all said basically the same thing to me: ‘You think you’ve got hatemail? Welcome to my world’.

I think these scientists are the unsung heroes of this saga. They carried on with their important work and tried year after year to fight against the rising tide of misinformation, while people like me were belittling and undermining them at every turn. I won’t mention names, but they know who they are. Some of them are here today, and I would like to give them my deepest thanks.

So for me also there is also a moral dimension to this. The fact that I helped promote unfounded scare stories in the early stages of the anti-GMO movement in the mid 1990s is the reason why I now feel compelled to speak out against them. I have a personal responsibility to help put these myths to rest because I was so complicit in initially promoting them.

My activism, which I wrongly thought of at the time as being ‘environmental’, has done real damage in the world. For me, apologising was therefore only the beginning. I am now convinced that many people have died unnecessarily because of mistakes that we in the environmental movement collectively made in promoting anti-GMO fear. With that on your conscience, saying sorry and then moving on is not enough. Some restitution is in order.

Following a decade and a half of scientific and field research, I think we can now say with very high confidence that the key tenets of the anti-GMO case were not just wrong in points of fact but in large parts the precise opposite of the truth.

This is why I use the term conspiracy theory. Populist ideas about conspiracies do not arise spontaneously in a political and historic vacuum. They result when powerful ideological narratives collide with major world events, rare occasions where even a tiny number of dedicated activists can create a lasting change in public consciousness.

In the 1960s the conspiracy theories about Kennedy’s assassination reflected the profound feeling that there were shadowy people high up in the CIA and government who were subverting democracy, and fighting the Cold War by devious and deadly means. More recently, conspiracy theories about 9-11 reflected the hatred many on the political Left had for the Bush Administration.

Successful conspiracy theories can do real damage. In Nigeria an outbreak of Muslim conspiracy theorising against the polio vaccination campaign there led to a renewed polio outbreak which then spread to 20 other countries just when the disease was on the brink of being entirely eradicated.

In South Africa during the presidency of Thabo Mbeki the HIV/AIDS denialist myth became official government policy, just as the anti-GMO denialist myth is official European Union policy today. The result in South Africa was that hundreds of thousands of people were denied life-saving anti-retroviral treatments and died unnecessarily.

The anti-GMO campaign has also undoubtedly led to unnecessary deaths. The best documented example, which is laid out in detail by Robert Paarlberg in his book ‘Starved for Science’, is the refusal of the Zambian government to allow its starving population to eat imported GMO corn during a severe famine in 2002.

Thousands died because the President of Zambia believed the lies of western environmental groups that genetically modified corn provided by the World Food Programme was somehow poisonous. I have yet to hear an apology from any of the responsible Western groups for their role in this humanitarian atrocity.

Friends of the Earth was one of those responsible, and I note that not only has no apology been forthcoming, but Friends of the Earth Europe is still actively promoting GMO denialism in the EU in a new campaign called Stop the Crop. Check out their Youtube video to see how they have learned nothing in ten years.

Another well-known example is that of Golden Rice, genetically modified to contain high levels of beta carotene in order to compensate for the vitamin A deficiency which kills hundreds of thousands of children around the world and blinds many more every year. One study on the prospects for Golden Rice in India found that the burden of vitamin A deficiency could be reduced by 60%, saving 1.4 million healthy life years.

Here the actions of Greenpeace in forestalling the use of golden rice to address micronutrient deficiencies in children makes them the moral and indeed practical equivalent of the Nigerian mullahs who preached against the polio vaccine – because they were stopping a lifesaving technology solely to flatter their own fanaticism.

I think this campaign is shameful and has brought the entire environmental movement into disrepute, with damaging consequences for the very beneficial work that many environmentalists do. Greenpeace’s campaign against vitamin A-enhanced Golden Rice should therefore be cancelled, and I call on everyone concerned about children’s health to lobby Greenpeace and demand that this happens immediately and without delay.

The anti-GMO campaign does not even have the benefit of intellectual coherence. If you truly think that herbicide-tolerant biotech crops are an evil plot by Monsanto to achieve a stranglehold on the entire world’s food supply, why would you also oppose all other non-patented and open-source applications of biotechnology, which have nothing to do with Monsanto, apparently without exception? This is like being against all computer software because you object to the dominant position of Microsoft Office.

On a logical basis only a case by case assessment makes sense for deciding how any technology might best be applied. So if you think that Bt corn is bad for US farmers, despite all the evidence to the contrary, it shouldn’t necessarily follow that you also have to ban virus-resistant papaya, or oppose a blight-resistant potato in Ireland.

This matters today more than ever because we are entering an age of increasingly threatening ecological scarcity. The planet is beginning to move outside the envelope of stable temperatures that we have enjoyed for 10,000 years, and into an age of instability and rapid change.

Within just a year from now, global CO2 concentrations will break through the crucial 400 parts per million boundary, marking a change is atmospheric chemistry that is unprecedented for at least 3 million years.

Moreover, we are now on a global emissions path which puts us on track for 4-5 degrees Celsius of warming by 2100, a transformation which will leave this planet barely recognisable and considerably more hostile to human and other life.

But what about all those who say that global warming is a hoax, a product of thousands of scientists conspiring with governments and the UN to falsify temperature data and usher in a new age of global socialism?

Well, I’ve spent more than a decade arguing with climate sceptics, and in the end I fall back on a single killer argument: that if an overwhelming majority of experts say something is true, then any sensible non-expert should assume that they are probably right.

To make the point, here is the consensus position of the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences on climate change:

“The scientific evidence is clear: global climate change caused by human activities is occurring now, and it is a growing threat to society. Accumulating data from across the globe reveal a wide array of effects: rapidly melting glaciers, destabilization of major ice sheets, increases in extreme weather, rising sea level, shifts in species ranges, and more. The pace of change and the evidence of harm have increased markedly over the last five years. The time to control greenhouse gas emissions is now.”

Oh, but wait – the AAAS has also released another statement of consensus science on another area concerning us today:

“The science is quite clear: crop improvement by the modern molecular techniques of biotechnology is safe… The World Health Organization, the American Medical Association, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the British Royal Society, and every other respected organization that has examined the evidence has come to the same conclusion: consuming foods containing ingredients derived from GM crops is no riskier than consuming the same foods containing ingredients from crop plants modified by conventional plant improvement techniques.”

So, my suggestion today is that a sensible baseline position for environmentalists and indeed everyone else is to accept the consensus science in both these areas. Instead, you have the unedifying spectacle of so-called green groups like the Union of Concerned Scientists stoutly defending consensus science in the area of climate change, while just as determinedly undermining it in the area of biotechnology.

Tellingly, the UCS utilises the exact same techniques as climate sceptics in its enduring and strikingly unscientific campaign against GMOs: it issues impressive reports based on strategic cherry-picking and only referencing its ideological allies in a kind of epistemological closed-loop, it pushes the perspective of a tiny minority of hand-picked pseudo-experts, and it tries to capture and control the public policy agenda to enforce its long-held prejudices.

Many of the most influential denialists like those at the Union of Concerned Scientists sound like experts; indeed they may even be experts. Richard Dawkins tells a story about a professor of geology, who lectured and published papers about stratigraphy in hundred-million year old rocks whilst at the same time being a ‘young-earth’ creationist who really believed the world was only 6,000 years old. His pre-existing religious conviction simply overpowered his scientific evidence-based training.

An even more striking example is Peter Duesberg, the leading light in the AIDS denialist movement, who is a professor of cell biology at the University of California in Berkeley.

Many anti-vaccine campaigners, like Andrew Wakefield, started out as qualified medical professionals. This is why scientific consensus matters – it is the last line of defence we have against the impressive credentials and sciency-sounding language of those who are really on the lunatic fringe.

Speaking of the lunatic fringe, someone else who claims scientific credentials is Vandana Shiva, probably the most prominent Indian anti-biotechnology activist, who incidentally draws much larger audiences than this one to her fiery speeches about the evils of Monsanto and all things new in agriculture. Shiva tweeted after my Oxford speech that me saying that farmers should be free to use GMO crops was like giving rapists the freedom to rape.

That is obscene and offensive, but actually is not the half of it. Let me give you my all-time favourite Vandana Shiva quote, regarding the so-called terminator technology, on which she launches constant blistering attacks without once acknowledging the salient fact that it was never actually developed.

“The danger that the terminator may spread to surrounding food crops or the natural environment is a serious one. The gradual spread of sterility in seeding plants would result in a global catastrophe that could eventually wipe out higher life forms, including humans, from the planet”.

Now, I’ve said and done some pretty stupid things in my time, but this one takes some beating. You don’t need the intelligence of a Richard Dawkins or indeed a Charles Darwin to understand that sterility is not a great selective advantage when it comes to reproduction, hence the regular observed failure of sterile couples to breed large numbers of children.

As Shiva’s case so clearly shows, if we reject data-driven empiricism and evidence as the basis for identifying and solving problems, we have nothing left but vacuous ideology and self-referential myth-making. Indeed in many related areas, like nuclear power, the environmental movement has already done great harm to the planet, even as it has rightly helped raise awareness in other areas such as deforestation, pollution and biodiversity loss.

Science tells us today that the coming age of ecological scarcity extends much further than just global warming. If we wish to preserve a semblance of current biodiversity on this planet, for example, we must urgently curtail agricultural land conversion in rainforest and other sensitive areas.

This is why organic agriculture is an ecological dead-end: it is dramatically less efficient in terms of land use, so likely leads to higher rates of biodiversity loss overall. Maybe organic producers should be legally mandated to specify on labels the overall land-use efficiency of their products. I’m all in favour of food labelling by the way when it comes to something important that the consumer should have the right to know.

Of course conventional agriculture has well-documented and major environmental failings, not least of which is the massive use of agricultural fertilisers which is destroying river and ocean biology around the world. But the flip side of this is that intensive agriculture’s extremely efficient use of land is conversely of great ecological benefit.

For example, if we had tried to produce all of today’s yield using the technologies of 1960 – largely organically in other words – we would have had to cultivate an additional 3 billion hectares, the area of two South Americas.

We cannot afford the luxury of romanticised but inefficient agricultural systems like organic because the planet is already maxxed out in terms of both land and water. Our only option therefore is to learn to do more with less. This is known as sustainable intensification – it’s about improving the efficiency of our most ecologically scarce resources.

But remember, everything is changing. Food demand will inevitably skyrocket this half-century because of the twin pressures of population growth and economic development. We need to sustainably increase food production by at least 100% by 2050 to feed a larger and increasingly affluent global population.

This is where the eco-Malthusians tend to pop up, illustrating another uncomfortable aspect of the anti-GMO philosophy. Let me share with you a rather revealing quote I read just a couple of weeks ago on Yale 360, from the US environmental writer Paul Greenberg, where he is lamenting the supposed wrongs of genetically engineered salmon. But forget the fish – when it comes to humans he says the following:

“If we continue to bend the rules of nature so that we can provide more and more food for an open-ended expansion of humans on the planet, something eventually will have to give. Would you like to live in a world of 15 billion people? 20 billion? I would not. And while it’s possible you will label my response as New Age-ish, I feel that GE food distracts us from the real question of the carrying capacity of the planet.”

Well, I think that calling these sentiments New Age-ish is to give them far too much credit. I would actually call them misanthropic. What Greenberg seems to be suggesting here, as Paul Ehrlich did before him, is the denial of food to hungry people in order to prevent them breeding more children and contributing to overpopulation.

Luckily this modern-day Malthusianism is wrong in point of fact as well as by moral implication. Firstly, the human population is never going to reach 20 billion. Instead, it is forecast to peak at 9-10 billion and then slowly decline.

Secondly, although we are certainly heading for 9 billion people by mid-century, but that is not because people in poor countries are still having too many babies. The main reason is that children who are born today are much more likely to survive, and become parents themselves.

It is a little-known fact that the global average fertility rate is now down to about 2.4, not far above natural replacement of 2.1. So pretty much all the increased population growth to 2050 will come from more children surviving into adulthood.

And that is surely a good thing. I want to see child death rates in developing countries continue to plummet thanks to better healthcare, access to clean water and sanitation, and all the other benefits the modern world can and should bring to everyone.

No doubt like all of you, I also want to see an end to the scourge of hunger which today affects more people in an absolute sense than ever before in history. It is surely an abomination that in 2013 we can all go to bed each night knowing that 900 million other people are hungry.

This scourge affects children disproportionately – one third of child deaths are attributable to malnutrition. Among those who survive, nutrient deficiencies like iron, zinc and vitamin A can lead to cognitive impairment and other health problems, reducing a child’s life chances for his or her entire future.

It is a truism to say that people are hungry not because there is a global shortage of food in an absolute sense, but because they are too poor to afford to eat. But it is a dangerous fallacy to suggest therefore that because the world on average has enough food, we should therefore oppose efforts to improve agricultural productivity in food insecure countries.

In fact probably the best way to address rural poverty is to ensure that subsistence farmers the world over enjoy more reliable and increasingly productive harvests. This will enable them both to feed their own families and to generate a surplus to sell at a profit so their children can go to school.

Is genetic modification a silver bullet way to achieve this? Of course not. It cannot build better roads or chase away corrupt officials. But surely seeds which deliver higher levels of nutrition, which protect the resulting plant against pests without the need for expensive chemical inputs, and which have greater yield resilience in drought years are least worth a try?

And real-world evidence so far gives grounds for optimism. The use of Bt cotton in China has been shown to dramatically improve biodiversity, unlike broad-spectrum insecticides which kill everything, pests and predators alike. The Bt protein only affects the insects which bore into the crop, is entirely safe for us, and has led to insecticide reductions of 60% in China and 40% in India on cotton.

The introduction of Bt brinjal in India, a project which I know people here in Cornell were closely involved in leading, would have dramatically reduced insecticide poisonings associated with that crop too, had the anti-GMO activists in India not succeeded in preventing its use.

India today seems to be perched on a scientific knife-edge, with a vociferous lobby pushing dark-age traditionalism on the brink of permanently capturing the entire political and legal agenda. If they succeed, hundreds of millions of food-insecure Indians will be the losers.

In Africa too there are a multitude of western-funded NGOs who all claim to be mysteriously protecting biodiversity by keeping cultivated plant genetic improvements permanently out of the continent. In many African countries GMOs are subject to the same kind of de-facto ban as is the case in Europe, leaving poorer farmers at the mercy of a changing climate and exhausted soils.

However, a showdown is looming, because some of the most exciting biotechnology initiatives are now based in African countries. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is putting substantial funding into these efforts – such as improved maize for poorer African soils, a project which is looking to get yield increases of 50% even where fertiliser is not available or the farmer cannot afford to buy it.

There’s also the public-private partnership called Water Efficient Maize for Africa, using biotech to produce drought tolerant corn specifically for African smallholders facing the challenges of a changing climate. There’s C4 rice, aiming to improve the photosynthetic capacity of rice and thereby dramatically increase yields.

Another Gates-funded project is based at the John Innes Centre in the UK and aims by 2017 to have cereal crops which fix their own nitrogen available for farmers in sub-Saharan Africa. The list goes on: there’s biofortified cooking bananas in East Africa, and cassava fortified with iron, protein and vitamin A in Nigeria and elsewhere.

I haven’t finished! There’s resistance to cassava brown streak disease, which is currently spreading rapidly and threatens the staple crop for two out of every five people in sub-Saharan Africa.

And of course transgenic technology focused on conferring wheat rust resistance at the molecular level to head off the threat of a global pandemic which could otherwise threaten one of humanity’s most important staple foods.

But if the activists have their way, none of these improved seeds will ever leave the laboratory. And this brings me, by way of conclusion, to the essentially authoritarian nature of the anti-GMO project.

All these activists, strikingly few of whom are themselves smallholder farmers in Africa or India, claim to know exactly which seeds developing country farmers should be allowed to plant. Those which are not ideologically approved by self-appointed campaigners should be banned forever.

The irony here is that predominantly left-wing activists, who are supposedly so concerned about corporate power, are determined to deny the right to choose to the most powerless people in the world – subsistence farmers in developing countries. In fact, this is more than an irony – it is a cruelty. And it is a cruelty which must stop, and stop now.

HG Wells is often quoted as saying that civilization is a race between education and catastrophe. The New Yorker writer Michael Specter, who wrote a great book about anti-science movements called ‘Denialism’, updates this, writing that civilisation is a race between innovation and catastrophe.

This is surely no more true than today, when civilisation is genuinely threatened by the twin catastrophes of climate change and ecological scarcity colliding with vastly greater food demand from a larger and wealthier population.

The solution is the same one that it always was – innovation – the uniquely human capacity to produce new tools which has saved our species so many times before from apparently inevitable Malthusian collapses. Therefore if we reject innovation now of all times we make catastrophe not just likely but probably inevitable.

This was indeed the warning the great Norman Borlaug left us with before he died. To quote:

“If the naysayers do manage to stop agricultural biotechnology, they might actually precipitate the famines and the crisis of global biodiversity they have been predicting for nearly 40 years.”

In the final assessment only way that conspiracy theories die is because more and more people begin to wake up to reality and reject them. Then perhaps there comes a tipping point where what was once received wisdom becomes increasingly understood for the foolish nonsense that it always was.

I think – I hope – that we are close to this tipping point today. And now, with just a little extra push, we can all join in consigning anti-GMO denialism to the dustbin of history where it belongs.

To recap, the problem, as described by the World Health Organisation:

“Vitamin A deficiency (VAD) is the leading cause of preventable blindness in children and increases the risk of disease and death from severe infections. In pregnant women VAD causes night blindness and may increase the risk of maternal mortality.

An estimated 250 million preschool children are vitamin A deficient and it is likely that in vitamin A deficient areas a substantial proportion of pregnant women [are] vitamin A deficient. An estimated 250,000 to 500,000 vitamin A-deficient children become blind every year, half of them dying within 12 months of losing their sight.”

These numbers are striking, and show beyond doubt that tackling this problem urgently is surely one of our greatest moral challenges. With a quarter to half a million children going blind each year from vitamin A deficiency, and half of them dying within 12 months, this implies an annnual death toll of 125,000 to 250,000 children – a staggering mortality rate for this little-known affliction.

So what strategies might work?

WHO promotes an ‘arsenal’ of nutritional weapons, including “a combination of breastfeeding and vitamin A supplementation, coupled with enduring solutions, such as promotion of vitamin A-rich diets and food fortification”. Vitamin A supplements in the form of capsules to young children are highly effective but time-limited – their effects last only 4-6 months, so WHO says “they are only initial steps towards ensuring better overall nutrition and not long-term solutions”.

Instead, “food fortification takes over where supplementation leaves off. Food fortification, for example sugar in Guatemala, maintains vitamin A status, especially for high-risk groups and needy families.” Fortification means artificially mixing in vitamin A with foods which people buy and consume, and as the WHO suggests, it can play a major role. One example of a current initiative is the effort – supported by Helen Keller International – to add vitamin A to cooking oil in West Africa.

A complementary approach is ‘biofortification’, where the missing nutrients are  bred into staple crops either through conventional selective breeding or – if no genes are availble in related plants – through genetic engineering. As HKI puts it:

“Biofortification differs from large-scale food fortification because it focuses on growing more nutritious plant food, as opposed to adding micronutrients to foods as they are commercially processed.”

Biofortification is particularly useful for reaching the rural poor who grow the food they consume, and are therefore largely outside the reach of food fortification programmes, which work best in urban areas where most food is purchased in markets. Unlike supplements, biofortified vitamin A-enriched food and crops will continue to protect children from deficiencies in a sustainable way at little extra cost as they are harvested each year.

Although it has been a long time in development, vitamin A-enriched ‘golden rice’ could soon be a breakthrough intervention in south and east Asia, where the largest-scale deficiency problem persists. It has now been scientifically established that golden rice “is an effective source of vitamin A” (to quote from the title of Tang et al, 2009, Am. J. Clin. Nutr) and thereby potentially an effective intervention to save lives in areas where white rice is the staple food. (Technically golden rice, like other vitamin A-fortified foods, contains enhanced levels of beta-carotene, the precursor to vitamin A.)

Even so, continued opposition threatens to derail this progress. Much of this focuses around the idea that other approaches to vitamin A deficiency are more ‘appropriate’ than one involving GMOs and should be tried first. This seems to me to run counter to the WHO’s ‘arsenal’ approach – why not try everything you can in response to a crisis which takes the lives of up to a quarter of a million young children per year? A common variant is the ‘let them eat broccoli’ argument (with apologies to Marie Antoinette) – that promoting a more balanced diet is more appropriate than fortification of staple foods.

No-one disputes that a balanced and nutritionally-adequate diet is the best long-term soluton to vitamin A deficiency and malnutrition in general. But achieving this requires the elimination of poverty (which is why rich countries do not have this problem), something which will take time and decades of economic growth in the developing world. In the meantime, millions of preventable deaths will occur, and many of those children that survive will have their life prospects permanently harmed.

A useful analogy might be providing water and sanitation – another issue which can only be solved permanently by povery elimination. As far as I know, no-one argues that charities are wrong to provide clean water in African villages because it this is merely a short-term ‘fix’ for a long-term problem. (And dirty water is the biggest killer of all.) The challenge is to save lives of vulnerable people right here, right now, in any way that works.

That biofortification of staple foods can help achieve this is already being demonstrated in the real world in east Africa, where the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has supported a global effort called HarvestPlus to distribute orange-fleshed sweet potato (OFSP – not unlike the sweet potatoes eaten in the US) to tens of thousands of households in rural Mozambique and Uganda as an initial proof of concept.

The background is that the traditional varieties of sweet potato (a key staple food) eaten in these two countries are white or yellow fleshed and deliver little or no vitamin A – the main reason, together with poverty and a lack of dietary diversity, why a quarter of pre-school age children are deficient in this vital nutrient. The new orange-fleshed sweet potato is also high-yielding and drought tolerant, and in Mozambique and Uganda was quickly snapped up by a large majority of rural households to whom it was offered for growing on a trial basis.

According to HarvestPlus:

“The project resulted in 61% of households adopting the vitamin A-rich OFSP to grow on their farms. They were also willing to substitute more than one-third of their traditional white and yellow sweet potato consumption with OFSP. This level of substitution was enough to push large numbers of children and women over the threshold, ensuring that their daily requirements for vitamin A were met.

Vitamin A intake increased by two-thirds for older children and nearly doubled for younger children and women by project end. For children 6–35 months, who are especially vulnerable, OFSP contributed more than 50% of their total vitamin A intake.”

The results of the scientific study to evaluate the impacts of the project have recently been published in the Journal of Nutrition (Hotz et al, 2012). A second trial rollout in Mozambique has been equally successful, with two-thirds of the 10,000 households targeted in Zambezia province adopting the new variety, with dramatic increases reported in childrens’ vitamin-A consumption as a result (Hotz et al, 2012, British Journal of Nutrition).

HarvestPlus is also just beginning to deploy vitamin A cassava in Nigeria and vitamin A maize in Zambia, as test countries.  Iron beans have been released in Rwanda and iron pearl millet in India.  Zinc rice and wheat will follow soon in South Asia. (For more on all these initiatives see the HarvestPlus website.)

Because orange-fleshed sweet potato and the other crops developed by HarvestPlus are produced with conventional breeding, they have not been subject to anti-GM opposition or unfounded fears about food safety. Golden rice, because it uses a transgenic approach to biofortification, still faces opposition – despite the clear scientific consensus that GM is not a food safety issue, and, as the recent AAAS statement put it, “crop improvement by the modern molecular techniques of biotechnology is safe”.

I am hopeful however that opposition has now begun to ebb, and that the successes recently demonstrated in Africa will convince doubters to come round to the potential of biofortification. As the Philippine Rice Research Institute has reported, field trials of golden rice in the Philippines to date have been successful. Over the next couple of years,  the new locally-adapted varieties will be put through the national regulatory process, and if deemed safe, continue through actual community, consumer and grower trials toward full deployment to those who could benefit most. (See here for a detailed FAQ about golden rice and vitamin A deficiency.)

Public acceptability will be crucial in any roll-out of golden rice, given the intense public concerns focused over many years on the GMO issue. In the couple of years that are left before golden rice goes on offer to consumers and growers in the Philippines, I hope the good news from Africa will help give a much-needed boost to public understanding of the life-saving potential of biofortification in food crops.

Questions (by Mark Lynas):

1. You have read my speech to the Oxford Farming Conference. While it has attracted a lot of worldwide attention and support, it has also been attacked by some who make great play of their scientific credentials but who do not seem to actually be active in the plant science/molecular biology field. Since you are highly distinguished in this area, and indeed one of the pioneers of the field of transgenics, is there anything you think I got wrong which should be highlighted?

Professor Fedoroff:

“But what about mixing genes between unrelated species? The fish and the tomato? Turns out viruses do that all the time, as do plants and insects and even us – it’s called gene flow.” (Mark Lynas speech to Oxford Farming Conference)

This is a bit of an exaggeration. There is more mixing between species through horizontal transfer (viruses and such) than we used to think happens, but it isn’t all that common. The real answer to the question is that genes are simply instructions for making a protein and they aren’t either “fishy” or “tomatoey.” The rules for making proteins are the same in all organisms, so if you express a gene in another species, it will do the same thing it did in the first place. So the fish gene for a protein that inhibits ice crystal formation would make the tomato a little more resistant to below-freezing temperature, but it won’t make the tomato fishy.

This is a relatively minor point. On balance, you got most of the most important issues and you got them right. I particularly enjoyed your assessment of the organic movement – a huge commercial hoax.

2. As 2012 President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and current Chair of the Board of Directors, you are in a good position to help laypeople understand what the real scientific consensus is on GMOs. For instance, the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS – an environmental lobby group) attacked the AAAS board statement on GMO safety and yesterday in a tweet claimed that the AAAS statement was “in opposition” to the National Academy of Sciences, the NRC “etc”.

@mark_lynas On climate AAAS board is in consensus w/ other science groups, on GM they’re in opposition to NAS, NRC, etc ow.ly/hiGgm

— Concerned Scientists (@UCSUSA) January 31, 2013

What is the consensus, and what is your take on the UCS critique?

Professor Fedoroff:

The board statement is pretty careful. It says, as the UCS attack quotes: “Indeed, the science is quite clear: crop improvement by the modern molecular techniques of biotechnology is safe.” You’ll notice that the AAAS Board statement DOESN’T say that “all plants genetically modified by modern molecular techniques are safe,” nor did it say what he [Doug Gurian-Sherman from UCS] claims it does: “a blanket statement that GE crops are “safe” is misleading.”

There is no evidence that modifying plants by molecular techniques causes problems to the plants, people, or nature. In fact, everything we’ve learned says that plant genomes are much less disturbed and altered when genes are introduced by molecular techniques than when changes are made by genetic crosses, or mutations are made by chemicals or radiation or by putting plant tissues into culture, then regenerating the plants.

Whether a human crop plant causes problems depends on the plant, how it is used and in what context and it matters not at all whether if was modified by modern techniques, old techniques or not modified at all. We have created problems everywhere in the world not just by our agriculture, but by moving plants, animals and insects around. Gypsy moths got out of someone’s back yard. Kudzu was introduced into the US from Asia to control soil erosion (which it did).

However, it is important to keep in mind that agricultural crops are much less likely to cause problems simply because they’ve already been modified over millennia to make them reproduce the way we want them to, make big fruits (sometimes seedless and therefore sterile) and grains that stick to the plants. The problems of agriculture are many: from an ecological perspective, there just isn’t anything as destructive as agriculture. But none of them have to do with the techniques used to modify the plants.

Next the writer of the UCS attack says: “We already have one clear example of a harmful engineered gene (though not commercialized).” Well, my guess is he’s referring to the story about the storage protein from Brazil nuts that was going to be transferred to a crop plant. That was caught in precisely the kind of modern testing, using modern knowledge, that we use now. The gene was expressed and the protein tested for allergenicity because it was a likely candidate and sure enough, it was a good allergen. That stopped the experiments, but the urban myth lives on.

Anyway, you get the picture. He insinuates allergenicity isn’t ever addressed and implies that the AAAS statement says it can’t cause problems. In fact, allergenicity is probably the biggest concern. But we actually know a fair amount about allergenicity and a developer of a transgenic crop has to express the protein or proteins he/she wishes to clone in the genes for and show the FDA that that they are not allergenic. There’s a whole complicated protocol for assessing this (I’m sure it could be improved) and crops have gotten a bad rap for naught because a protein failed one of the crudest tests for allergenicity (remember the Starlink fiasco?), even though it didn’t prove allergenic in subsequent testing. And while he’s technically correct that the FDA doesn’t mandate testing, companies cover themselves prospectively by making sure that they do everything the FDA (and the other agencies) require them to do.

And then there’s the proof of the pudding… there is no evidence that any of the proteins that have been introduced in the most widely grown GM crops have caused allergies.

And yet, there are some major allergens in foods, among the best-known are the wheat glutens and the peanut storage proteins. These are “natural.” GM techniques could be used to eliminate these allergens — and would be — if people weren’t so busy obsessing about some future unspecified danger… and creating regulatory blockades that cost tens of millions of dollars to penetrate on the way to market. Peanut allergies kill!

3. In your AAAS Plenary Lecture, you mentioned GM vitamin A-enriched ‘golden rice’ and the fact that it has been held up by unnecessary regulation. What do you think the effect of anti-GMO activism has been on the deployment of ‘golden rice’ (as opposed to, say, issues with technical development) and what effect if any has this had on people in poorer countries who suffer from Vit A deficiency?

Professor Fedoroff:

The simple answer to this is that the continued GM activism against “golden rice,” especially the recent efforts to discredit the trials that were being carried in China, is a humanitarian abomination. As everyone knows by now, vitamin A deficiency is a major problem for people who subsist largely on rice, as it contains none of it. In the early days of its development, Greenpeace ridiculed it because they believed that alleviating the vitamin deficiency would require the consumption of unrealistically large amounts of it. As the beta carotene content was improved over the years, they found other reasons to demonize it. Today one reads that it’s a sinister plot of big biotech companies…

But the truth is that it was developed by individuals who were driven by the desire to help the poorest people of the world, not by the profit motive. The intellectual property issues have all been resolved and the “golden rice” is to be made available to farmers free of charge. So frankly, this will be one of the real success stories for development, if it ever makes it out of regulatory purgatory and becomes acceptable (which itself will take some marketing itself in view of the decades of GM demonization).

4. You also mentioned in the lecture the need to massively increase food production in response to population growth and other factors. What is your response to the often-heard objection that we already have enough food, and all the problems are in distribution and wastage or other social and economic factors?

Professor Fedoroff:

The answer is that it isn’t either/or, it’s all of the above. Yes, today there is enough food if we could just reduce waste and spoilage …. and oh, by the way, solve the poverty problem, so that everyone could buy the food that is available. But it still won’t change the fact that the number of people will continue to grow for some decades and, paradoxically, reducing poverty creates more demand for food of higher nutritional value. As people climb out of poverty, they seek more food and particularly to add more animal protein to their food. This creates an even greater demand for the grain crops we largely feed animals – and which are now increasingly used for producing fuel. The central issue with animal protein is that it simply takes a lot more grain and water – and I mean like 10 times more — to make a pound of hamburger than it takes to make a pound of you if you’re eating the grain yourself.

Much food spoilage is attributable not to people discarding good food, but to insect, fungal and bacterial contaminants, as well as the inability to preserve food long enough to get it to a market, in some places hampered simply by the lack of roads. GM approaches can contribute to the amelioration of the spoilage problem – if the regulatory costs burden could be reduced. Reducing other aspects of spoilage in many less developed nations is about building roads, refrigerated storage facilities, and food processing plants. And finally, changing peoples’ food habits to get them to consume less is a social and sociological problem of significant proportions – we haven’t been especially successful in getting people to eat less of the salt, fat and sugar that gives them heart disease, hypertension and diabetes – but its important to continue and increase these efforts.

5. What developments in plant biotechnology do you think are most promising in terms of improving the sustainability of agriculture in future, particularly given the challenge of climate change?

Professor Fedoroff:

There are all kinds of things that are either in the pipeline or in development that could improve sustainability – and many, many more that could be if we could dismantle the regulatory thicket that is choking it off. Among the most important are modifications that will increase nitrogen use efficiency and the ability to recover phosphorus. There’s just a plethora of modifications that will reduce loss to pest and pathogens, both during field growth and after harvest and during storage. But the real breakthroughs, if they ever come, will be in the efficiency of photosynthesis, which is not terribly efficient. That’s a very tough nut to crack and there aren’t many scientists directly working on it.

6. So I’ve admitted I was wrong to oppose GMOs. What do you think other current and former anti-GM activists should do under today’s circumstances? What lessons should they learn from the past two decades’ of scientific research?

Professor Fedoroff:

Well, obviously I think they should do what you did: stop and learn what the science is about, what we’ve learned over the past almost 4 decades of working with molecular techniques in plants and what this can do to make it possible to grow more food for more people on less land with less water and energy. I would ask that they did what I did when I wrote my book “Mendel in the Kitchen: A Scientist’s View of Genetically Modified Foods.” What I did was to learn as much as I could about, for example, how organic farming developed, whether it’s better for people or the land than what we now call conventionally grown food, about what’s behind and under all of the prevalent scare stories about GM foods, just keep learning and evaluating.

I would also ask that they begin to understand that science is not a set of facts to be harvested from knowledge trees, but a very human process of testing, trying, repeating and only then coming to conclusions. At the heart is a hugely important concept of the “weight” of the evidence. What this means is that any given study can come to very wrong conclusions for a large variety of reasons, including such things that it wasn’t designed well and that the investigator is out to prove something he or she already believes, rather than testing an hypothesis. But if the pile grows and there are 10 studies that come to one conclusion, compared to 1 that comes to the opposite conclusion, and that ratio then grows to 15 to 1 or 50 to 1, then the balance is tipping toward the conclusion come to by the many and not the one.

In the GM field, there have been reports for example, that GM feed makes sickly animal pups, that it poisons rats, or gives them tumors. If you look a bit closer, you often find that these results were leaked to the press (and sometimes never published) or were eventually retracted by the journal in which they were published. But the most important point is, are there 10 or 30 publications that come to similar conclusions, or is the study standing alone against the 10 or 30 that have come to the opposite conclusion? If it keeps on standing alone, then it probably isn’t right…

The latest figures for electricity production have just been published by the Federal Association of Energy and Water Industries. Here they are, at a glance:

The relevant supporting documents are on the BDEW website in German, here and here (PDF).

Here are the main takeaways for me.

Solar PV

Solar continued its enormous growth rate between 2011 and 2012. Production rose from 19.3TWh (terawatt-hours) in 2011 to 27.6TWh in 2012, representing an impressive increase of 47.7%. In terms of total electricity generation, solar’s percentage rose from 3.2% in 2011 to 4.6% in 2012. This is an extraordinary achievement by any standard.

Wind power

Wind production actually fell slightly from 2011 to 2012, by 7.9%. Wind generation was 48.8TWh in 2011, and fell to 46TWh in 2012. Looking at the graph in the full report, it seems that December 2011 was particularly windy, whilst December 2012 was much calmer. In total, wind represents 7.3% of German electricity production.

Other renewables

With all the fuss about solar (and to a lesser extent wind) it is easy to forget that biomass and hydro are also important. Biomass combustion for electricity generation is 5.8% of the total, while hydro is 3.3%, and has flatlined for years. With 1% municipal waste this brings the total renewables production up to 21.9%.

Nuclear

Despite the furore of the dramatic policy reversal post-Fukushima, nuclear still provides more electricity in Germany than wind and solar put together, adding up to 16% in total (down from 17.7% in 2011). Nuclear generated 108TWh in 2011, and this fell to 99TWh in 2012. It will fall further in years to come, and nuclear is due to be phased out completely by 2022.

Coal

Germany still uses large amounts of the dirtiest coal, lignite, and its use is rising. Both hard coal and lignite are being burned in larger amounts in Germany, despite its climate emissions targets. In 2011 lignite accounted for 24.6 of German electricity, and this rose to 25.6 in 2012. Hard coal rose from 18.5% to 19.1%. Thus coal accounted for a higher proportion of generation, and CO2 emissions likely have risen as a result.

Gas

Because gas prices remain high in Europe relative to coal, gas is being forced out of the electricity market – and with widespread opposition to fracking, there is little prospect of cheapear gas (as in the US) for the forseeable future. It is important to acknowledge that this is not a problem confined to Germany, and is the case in the UK as well, where the proportion of coal in the generation mix has also risen over the last year. The collapse in the carbon price on the ETS has also not helped matters, as it is not nearly enough to make up the difference.

So it is not necessarily fair to blame the increase in German coal burning on the nuclear shutdown – had the relative prices of the competing fossil fuels been different, the lost nuclear generation might instead have been balanced out by gas. Other factors are also at play here, because electricity production varies with the economic situation, the weather and the export-import balance to at least the same extent as the marginal changes in nuclear, coal and gas over the last year. In terms of a nuclear shut-down leading to higher CO2 emissions, Japan is much more of a story than Germany.

The Energiewende and the climate

My conclusion so far is that unfortunately Germany’s ‘renewables revolution’ is at best making no difference to the country’s carbon emissions, and at worst pushing them marginally upwards. Thus, tens (or even hundreds, depending on who you believe) of billions of euros are being spent on expensive solar PV and wind installations for no climatic benefit whatsoever.

Although I have been unable to find clear figures for the changing CO2 intensity of German electricity (if anyone has them, please post in the comments below), nuclear’s fall of 1.7% almost exactly equals the rise in renewables of 1.6% between 2011 and 2012. This means that the dramatic and admirable increase in renewable generation in Germany is simply a story of low-carbon baseload from nuclear being replaced by low-carbon intermittent supply from wind and solar (which, incidentally, also raises system costs by making the grid harder to manage due to intermittency).

Thus Germany is squandering its opportunity to meet its climate targets more quickly, easily and reliably because of an irrational public aversion to nuclear power. I have tried to engage Energiewende true believers in a debate about this, but have so far been unable to get any acknowledgement that coal is worse on every score than nuclear – not just in terms of CO2 emissions (obviously) but because coal kills hundreds of Germans every year from straightforward air pollution.

The Energiewende, it is probably fair to say, is not really about the climate at all. It is about getting rid of nuclear power, a singular obsession of the German Greens since their birth in the European anti-nuclear movement 1970s. With Germany the only Western European nation still intent on building a large amount of additional coal generation capacity (10GW according to some reports), this marks a remarkable policy failure for European environmentalism.

Thanks to Gustaf Rosell for the prompt to write this and the German-language links.

This piece confirms my long-held opinion that the Union of Concerned Scientists is in dire need of a name change. I hold the UCS responsible for a significant proportion of modern-day global warming, thanks to its fiercely-held anti-nuclear ideology, which it has promoted via a dramatically unscientific campaign of fear for the last three decades, and which helped turn the US and other countries back towards coal dependency from the 1970s onwards.

Any scientists working for the UCS leave their credentials at the door. It is one of the most ideological of all the green groups, and the fact that the author of this piece takes issue with none other than the AAAS over the safety and efficacy of GMOs shows that it has no respect for scientific consensus in areas where real scientists conflict with its biases. The rest of the piece consists of personal attacks on me and a highly-skewed and selective scattering of references of the sort that any ‘climate denier’ would be proud of.

The fact that UCS moans about Andy Revkin and the media in general shows that they know they are losing the argument in wider society. They have given up arguing that GMOs are dangerous and scary, and instead nit-pick a couple of minor issues with my speech. They also insist that GM is unnecessary because conventional breeding is perfectly adequate, which betrays a complete disconnection with the scientific field of plant breeding and is a bit like saying that we don’t need forks because spoons are good enough for the job.

As I have said elsewhere, I feel strongly that NGOs like UCS taking anti-scientific positions on issues like nuclear and GMOs seriously undermines the credibility of their advocacy work on other environmental issues like climate change, where they do agree with the mainstream scientific position. They thereby undermine the wider effort against climate change in general, and probably serve to harm the environment overall. It is time for the UCS to confront the glaring inconsistency between supporting science in one area and opposing it in another.

I look forward to their opening up an honest and self-critical debate on this, rather than attacking others like myself who challenge green orthodoxy where it likely harms society and the environment.

This was the story that the scientists “tried to bury”; yet more evidence that global warming is at a standstill — or so it seemed to climate sceptics.

The reality about the Met Office’s new decadal forecast is more prosaic, and also more complicated: it has indeed issued some predictions for how global temperatures might change between now and 2017, but these are not like long-range weather forecasts. They are experimental projections assessing the probabilities of different temperature outcomes averaged out over the whole globe.

Nor is it true that these show a downgrading of global warming. Although five years is a short time period for assessing a changing climate, it is still likely that the planet will continue to warm and that new temperature records will be set. The Met Office also make clear that warming is driven by increasing levels of atmospheric greenhouse gases, not natural fluctuations.

This is not to say that it will definitely be warmer in 2017 than it is in 2013, but that global warming certainly makes it more likely to be so. Probabilistic forecasts emphasise that we are loading the climate dice in a warming direction — you can still get a cool year, but they become less and less likely as time passes. The danger for all of us is that we see a spell of cold weather as evidence against global warming: no one actually experiences “average weather”.

The global warming debate has become a cover for a fight between left v right world views. Many greens see evil corporations gambling the future of the planet and call for drastic statist measures, while many sceptics allow themselves to be blinded to scientific truths about atmospheric physics that are now as well-established as Darwinian evolution.

As a result of all this hyperbole, the voices of scientists get lost in the noise. The scientific consensus, echoed by every major academic institution in the world, is that increased greenhouse gases are warming our planet, and we reject this knowledge at our absolute peril. Global warming happens on a slower timeline than politics, but its physical reality is undeniable. Over the next century we are now more likely than not to see temperatures rise higher than they have been on Earth for more than 50 million years. I find that prospect terrifying.

Scientific dissent absolutely has a place, but we must not end up being derailed from the primary mission, which has to be to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and preserve a relatively habitable climate for our children.

NEW! Chinese translation… Italian translation… German translation… Spanish translation… French translation… Vietnamese translation (shortened)… Italian version (also shortened) Thai version.

07 Mark Lynas from Oxford Farming Conference on Vimeo.

I want to start with some apologies. For the record, here and upfront, I apologise for having spent several years ripping up GM crops. I am also sorry that I helped to start the anti-GM movement back in the mid 1990s, and that I thereby assisted in demonising an important technological option which can be used to benefit the environment.

As an environmentalist, and someone who believes that everyone in this world has a right to a healthy and nutritious diet of their choosing, I could not have chosen a more counter-productive path. I now regret it completely.

So I guess you’ll be wondering – what happened between 1995 and now that made me not only change my mind but come here and admit it? Well, the answer is fairly simple: I discovered science, and in the process I hope I became a better environmentalist.

When I first heard about Monsanto’s GM soya I knew exactly what I thought. Here was a big American corporation with a nasty track record, putting something new and experimental into our food without telling us. Mixing genes between species seemed to be about as unnatural as you can get – here was humankind acquiring too much technological power; something was bound to go horribly wrong. These genes would spread like some kind of living pollution. It was the stuff of nightmares.

These fears spread like wildfire, and within a few years GM was essentially banned in Europe, and our worries were exported by NGOs like Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth to Africa, India and the rest of Asia, where GM is still banned today. This was the most successful campaign I have ever been involved with.

This was also explicitly an anti-science movement. We employed a lot of imagery about scientists in their labs cackling demonically as they tinkered with the very building blocks of life. Hence the Frankenstein food tag – this absolutely was about deep-seated fears of scientific powers being used secretly for unnatural ends. What we didn’t realise at the time was that the real Frankenstein’s monster was not GM technology, but our reaction against it.

For me this anti-science environmentalism became increasingly inconsistent with my pro-science environmentalism with regard to climate change. I published my first book on global warming in 2004, and I was determined to make it scientifically credible rather than just a collection of anecdotes.

So I had to back up the story of my trip to Alaska with satellite data on sea ice, and I had to justify my pictures of disappearing glaciers in the Andes with long-term records of mass balance of mountain glaciers. That meant I had to learn how to read scientific papers, understand basic statistics and become literate in very different fields from oceanography to paleoclimate, none of which my degree in politics and modern history helped me with a great deal.

I found myself arguing constantly with people who I considered to be incorrigibly anti-science, because they wouldn’t listen to the climatologists and denied the scientific reality of climate change. So I lectured them about the value of peer-review, about the importance of scientific consensus and how the only facts that mattered were the ones published in the most distinguished scholarly journals.

My second climate book, Six Degrees, was so sciency that it even won the Royal Society science books prize, and climate scientists I had become friendly with would joke that I knew more about the subject than them. And yet, incredibly, at this time in 2008 I was still penning screeds in the Guardian attacking the science of GM – even though I had done no academic research on the topic, and had a pretty limited personal understanding. I don’t think I’d ever read a peer-reviewed paper on biotechnology or plant science even at this late stage.

Obviously this contradiction was untenable. What really threw me were some of the comments underneath my final anti-GM Guardian article. In particular one critic said to me: so you’re opposed to GM on the basis that it is marketed by big corporations. Are you also opposed to the wheel because because it is marketed by the big auto companies?

So I did some reading. And I discovered that one by one my cherished beliefs about GM turned out to be little more than green urban myths.

I’d assumed that it would increase the use of chemicals. It turned out that pest-resistant cotton and maize needed less insecticide.

I’d assumed that GM benefited only the big companies. It turned out that billions of dollars of benefits were accruing to farmers needing fewer inputs.

I’d assumed that Terminator Technology was robbing farmers of the right to save seed. It turned out that hybrids did that long ago, and that Terminator never happened.

I’d assumed that no-one wanted GM. Actually what happened was that Bt cotton was pirated into India and roundup ready soya into Brazil because farmers were so eager to use them.

I’d assumed that GM was dangerous. It turned out that it was safer and more precise than conventional breeding using mutagenesis for example; GM just moves a couple of genes, whereas conventional breeding mucks about with the entire genome in a trial and error way.

But what about mixing genes between unrelated species? The fish and the tomato? Turns out viruses do that all the time, as do plants and insects and even us – it’s called gene flow.

But this was still only the beginning. So in my third book The God Species I junked all the environmentalist orthodoxy at the outset and tried to look at the bigger picture on a planetary scale.

And this is the challenge that faces us today: we are going to have to feed 9.5 billion hopefully much less poor people by 2050 on about the same land area as we use today, using limited fertiliser, water and pesticides and in the context of a rapidly-changing climate.

Let’s unpack this a bit. I know in a previous year’s lecture in this conference there was the topic of population growth. This area too is beset by myths. People think that high rates of fertility in the developing world are the big issue – in other words, poor people are having too many children, and we therefore need either family planning or even something drastic like mass one-child policies.

The reality is that global average fertility is down to about 2.5 – and if you consider that natural replacement is 2.2, this figure is not much above that. So where is the massive population growth coming from? It is coming because of declining infant mortality – more of today’s youngsters are growing up to have their own children rather than dying of preventable diseases in early childhood.

The rapid decline in infant mortality rates is one of the best news stories of our decade and the heartland of this great success story is sub-Saharan Africa. It’s not that there are legions more children being born – in fact, in the words of Hans Rosling, we are already at ‘peak child’. That is, about 2 billion children are alive today, and there will never be more than that because of declining fertility.

But so many more of these 2 billion children will survive into adulthood today to have their own children. They are the parents of the young adults of 2050. That’s the source of the 9.5 billion population projection for 2050. You don’t have to have lost a child, God forbid, or even be a parent, to know that declining infant mortality is a good thing.

So how much food will all these people need? According to the latest projections, published last year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, we are looking at a global demand increase of well over 100% by mid-century. This is almost entirely down to GDP growth, especially in developing countries.

In other words, we need to produce more food not just to keep up with population but because poverty is gradually being eradicated, along with the widespread malnutrition that still today means close to 800 million people go to bed hungry each night. And I would challenge anyone in a rich country to say that this GDP growth in poor countries is a bad thing.

But as a result of this growth we have very serious environmental challenges to tackle. Land conversion is a large source of greenhouse gases, and perhaps the greatest source of biodiversity loss. This is another reason why intensification is essential – we have to grow more on limited land in order to save the rainforests and remaining natural habitats from the plough.

We also have to deal with limited water – not just depleting aquifers but also droughts that are expected to strike with increasing intensity in the agricultural heartlands of continents thanks to climate change. If we take more water from rivers we accelerate biodiversity loss in these fragile habitats.

We also need to better manage nitrogen use: artificial fertiliser is essential to feed humanity, but its inefficient use means dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico and many coastal areas around the world, as well as eutrophication in fresh water ecosystems.

It is not enough to sit back and hope that technological innovation will solve our problems. We have to be much more activist and strategic than that. We have to ensure that technological innovation moves much more rapidly, and in the right direction for those who most need it.

In a sense we’ve been here before. When Paul Ehrlich published the Population Bomb in 1968, he wrote: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now.” The advice was explicit – in basket-case countries like India, people might as well starve sooner rather than later, and therefore food aid to them should be eliminated to reduce population growth.

It was not pre-ordained that Ehrlich would be wrong. In fact, if everyone had heeded his advice hundreds of millions of people might well have died needlessly. But in the event, malnutrition was cut dramatically, and India became food self-sufficient, thanks to Norman Borlaug and his Green Revolution.

It is important to recall that Borlaug was equally as worried about population growth as Ehrlich. He just thought it was worth trying to do something about it. He was a pragmatist because he believed in doing what was possible, but he was also an idealist because he believed that people everywhere deserved to have enough to eat.

So what did Norman Borlaug do? He turned to science and technology. Humans are a tool-making species – from clothes to ploughs, technology is primarily what distinguishes us from other apes. And much of this work was focused on the genome of major domesticated crops – if wheat, for example, could be shorter and put more effort into seed-making rather than stalks, then yields would improve and grain loss due to lodging would be minimised.

Before Borlaug died in 2009 he spent many years campaigning against those who for political and ideological reasons oppose modern innovation in agriculture. To quote: “If the naysayers do manage to stop agricultural biotechnology, they might actually precipitate the famines and the crisis of global biodiversity they have been predicting for nearly 40 years.”

And, thanks to supposedly environmental campaigns spread from affluent countries, we are perilously close to this position now. Biotechnology has not been stopped, but it has been made prohibitively expensive to all but the very biggest corporations.

It now costs tens of millions to get a crop through the regulatory systems in different countries. In fact the latest figures I’ve just seen from CropLife suggest it costs $139 million to move from discovering a new crop trait to full commercialisation, so open-source or public sector biotech really does not stand a chance.

There is a depressing irony here that the anti-biotech campaigners complain about GM crops only being marketed by big corporations when this is a situation they have done more than anyone to help bring about.

In the EU the system is at a standstill, and many GM crops have been waiting a decade or more for approval but are permanently held up by the twisted domestic politics of anti-biotech countries like France and Austria. Around the whole world the regulatory delay has increased to more than 5 and a half years now, from 3.7 years back in 2002. The bureaucratic burden is getting worse.

France, remember, long refused to accept the potato because it was an American import. As one commentator put it recently, Europe is on the verge of becoming a food museum. We well-fed consumers are blinded by romantic nostalgia for the traditional farming of the past. Because we have enough to eat, we can afford to indulge our aesthetic illusions.

But at the same time the growth of yields worldwide has stagnated for many major food crops, as research published only last month by Jonathan Foley and others in the journal Nature Communications showed. If we don’t get yield growth back on track we are indeed going to have trouble keeping up with population growth and resulting demand, and prices will rise as well as more land being converted from nature to agriculture.

To quote Norman Borlaug again: “I now say that the world has the technology — either available or well advanced in the research pipeline — to feed on a sustainable basis a population of 10 billion people. The more pertinent question today is whether farmers and ranchers will be permitted to use this new technology? While the affluent nations can certainly afford to adopt ultra low-risk positions, and pay more for food produced by the so-called ‘organic’ methods, the one billion chronically undernourished people of the low income, food-deficit nations cannot.”

As Borlaug was saying, perhaps the most pernicious myth of all is that organic production is better, either for people or the environment. The idea that it is healthier has been repeatedly disproved in the scientific literature. We also know from many studies that organic is much less productive, with up to 40-50% lower yields in terms of land area. The Soil Association went to great lengths in a recent report on feeding the world with organic not to mention this productivity gap.

Nor did it mention that overall, if you take into account land displacement effects, organic is also likely worse for biodiversity. Instead they talk about an ideal world where people in the west eat less meat and fewer calories overall so that people in developing countries can have more. This is simplistic nonsense.

If you think about it, the organic movement is at its heart a rejectionist one. It doesn’t accept many modern technologies on principle. Like the Amish in Pennsylvania, who froze their technology with the horse and cart in 1850, the organic movement essentially freezes its technology in somewhere around 1950, and for no better reason.

It doesn’t even apply this idea consistently however. I was reading in a recent Soil Association magazine that it is OK to blast weeds with flamethrowers or fry them with electric currents, but benign herbicides like glyphosate are still a no-no because they are ‘artificial chemicals’.

In reality there is no reason at all why avoiding chemicals should be better for the environment – quite the opposite in fact. Recent research by Jesse Ausubel and colleagues at Rockefeller University looked at how much extra farmland Indian farmers would have had to cultivate today using the technologies of 1961 to get today’s overall yield. The answer is 65 million hectares, an area the size of France.

In China, maize farmers spared 120 million hectares, an area twice the size of France, thanks to modern technologies getting higher yields. On a global scale, between 1961 and 2010 the area farmed grew by only 12%, whilst kilocalories per person rose from 2200 to 2800. So even with three billion more people, everyone still had more to eat thanks to a production increase of 300% in the same period.

So how much land worldwide was spared in the process thanks to these dramatic yield improvements, for which chemical inputs played a crucial role? The answer is 3 billion hectares, or the equivalent of two South Americas. There would have been no Amazon rainforest left today without this improvement in yields. Nor would there be any tigers in India or orang utans in Indonesia. That is why I don’t know why so many of those opposing the use of technology in agriculture call themselves environmentalists.

So where does this opposition come from? There seems to be a widespread assumption that modern technology equals more risk. Actually there are many very natural and organic ways to face illness and early death, as the debacle with Germany’s organic beansprouts proved in 2011. This was a public health catastrophe, with the same number of deaths and injuries as were caused by Chernobyl, because E.-coli probably from animal manure infected organic beansprout seeds imported from Egypt.

In total 53 people died and 3,500 suffered serious kidney failure. And why were these consumers choosing organic? Because they thought it was safer and healthier, and they were more scared of entirely trivial risks from highly-regulated chemical pesticides and fertilisers.

If you look at the situation without prejudice, much of the debate, both in terms of anti-biotech and organic, is simply based on the naturalistic fallacy – the belief that natural is good, and artificial is bad. This is a fallacy because there are plenty of entirely natural poisons and ways to die, as the relatives of those who died from E.-coli poisoning would tell you.

For organic, the naturalistic fallacy is elevated into the central guiding principle for an entire movement. This is irrational and we owe it to the Earth and to our children to do better.

This is not to say that organic farming has nothing to offer – there are many good techniques which have been developed, such as intercropping and companion planting, which can be environmentally very effective, even it they do tend to be highly labour-intensive. Principles of agro-ecology such as recyling nutrients and promoting on-farm diversity should also be taken more seriously everywhere.

But organic is in the way of progress when it refuses to allow innovation. Again using GM as the most obvious example, many third-generation GM crops allow us not to use environmentally-damaging chemicals because the genome of the crop in question has been altered so the plant can protect itself from pests. Why is that not organic?

Organic is also in the way when it is used to take away choice from others. One of the commonest arguments against GM is that organic farmers will be ‘contaminated’ with GM pollen, and therefore no-one should be allowed to use it. So the rights of a well-heeled minority, which come down ultimately to a consumer preference based on aesthetics, trump the rights of everyone else to use improved crops which would benefit the environment.

I am all for a world of diversity, but that means one farming system cannot claim to have a monopoly of virtue and aim at excluding all other options. Why can’t we have peaceful co-existence? This is particularly the case when it shackles us to old technologies which have higher inherent risks than the new.

It seems like almost everyone has to pay homage to ‘organic’ and to question this orthodoxy is unthinkable. Well I am here to question it today.

The biggest risk of all is that we do not take advantage of all sorts of opportunities for innovation because of what is in reality little more than blind prejudice. Let me give you two examples, both regrettably involving Greenpeace.

Last year Greenpeace destroyed a GM wheat crop in Australia, for all the traditional reasons, which I am very familiar with having done it myself. This was publicly funded research carried out by the Commonwealth Scientific Research institute, but no matter. They were against it because it was GM and unnatural.

What few people have since heard is that one of the other trials being undertaken, which Greenpeace activists with their strimmers luckily did not manage to destroy, accidentally found a wheat yield increase of an extraordinary 30%. Just think. This knowledge might never have been produced at all, if Greenpeace had succeeded in destroying this innovation. As the president of the NFU Peter Kendall recently suggeseted, this is analogous to burning books in a library before anyone has been able to read them.

The second example comes from China, where Greenpeace managed to trigger a national media panic by claiming that two dozen children had been used as human guinea pigs in a trial of GM golden rice. They gave no consideration to the fact that this rice is healthier, and could save thousands of children from vitamin A deficiency-related blindness and death each year.

What happened was that the three Chinese scientists named in the Greenpeace press release were publicly hounded and have since lost their jobs, and in an autocratic country like China they are at serious personal risk. Internationally because of over-regulation golden rice has already been on the shelf for over a decade, and thanks to the activities of groups like Greenpeace it may never become available to vitamin-deficient poor people.

This to my mind is immoral and inhumane, depriving the needy of something that would help them and their children because of the aesthetic preferences of rich people far away who are in no danger from Vitamin A shortage. Greenpeace is a $100-million a year multinational, and as such it has moral responsibilities just like any other large company.

The fact that golden rice was developed in the public sector and for public benefit cuts no ice with the antis. Take Rothamsted Research, whose director Maurice Moloney is speaking tomorrow. Last year Rothamsted began a trial of an aphid-resistant GM wheat which would need no pesticides to combat this serious pest.

Because it is GM the antis were determined to destroy it. They failed because of the courage of Professor John Pickett and his team, who took to YouTube and the media to tell the important story of why their research mattered and why it should not be trashed. They gathered thousands of signatures on a petition when the antis could only manage a couple of hundred, and the attempted destruction was a damp squib.

One intruder did manage to scale the fence, however, who turned out to be the perfect stereotypical anti-GM protestor – an old Etonian aristocrat whose colourful past makes our Oxford local Marquess of Blandford look like the model of responsible citizenry.

This high-born activist scattered organic wheat seeds around the trial site in what was presumably a symbolic statement of naturalness. Professor Pickett’s team tell me they had a very low-tech solution to getting rid of it – they went round with a cordless portable hoover to clear it up.

This year, as well as repeating the wheat trial, Rothamsted is working on an omega 3 oilseed that could replace wild fish in food for farmed salmon. So this could help reduce overfishing by allowing land-based feedstocks to be used in aquaculture. Yes it’s GM, so expect the antis to oppose this one too, despite the obvious potential environmental benefits in terms of marine biodiversity.

I don’t know about you, but I’ve had enough. So my conclusion here today is very clear: the GM debate is over. It is finished. We no longer need to discuss whether or not it is safe – over a decade and a half with three trillion GM meals eaten there has never been a single substantiated case of harm. You are more likely to get hit by an asteroid than to get hurt by GM food. More to the point, people have died from choosing organic, but no-one has died from eating GM.

Just as I did 10 years ago, Greenpeace and the Soil Association claim to be guided by consensus science, as on climate change. Yet on GM there is a rock-solid scientific consensus, backed by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Royal Society, health institutes and national science academies around the world. Yet this inconvenient truth is ignored because it conflicts with their ideology.

One final example is the sad story of the GM blight-resistant potato. This was being developed by both the Sainsbury Lab and Teagasc, a publicly-funded institute in Ireland – but the Irish Green Party, whose leader often attends this very conference, was so opposed that they even took out a court case against it.

This is despite the fact that the blight-resistant potato would save farmers from doing 15 fungicide sprays per season, that pollen transfer is not an issue because potatoes are clonally propagated and that the offending gene came from a wild relative of the potato.

There would have been a nice historical resonance to having a blight-resistant potato developed in Ireland, given the million or more who died due to the potato famine in the mid 19^th century. It would have been a wonderful thing for Ireland to be the country that defeated blight. But thanks to the Irish Green Party, this is not to be.

And unfortunately the antis now have the bureaucrats on their side. Wales and Scotland are officially GM free, taking medieval superstition as a strategic imperative for devolved governments supposedly guided by science.

It is unfortunately much the same in much of Africa and Asia. India has rejected Bt brinjal, even though it would reduce insecticide applications in the field, and residues on the fruit. The government in India is increasingly in thrall to backward-looking ideologues like Vandana Shiva, who idealise pre-industrial village agriculture despite the historical fact that it was an age of repeated famines and structural insecurity.

In Africa, ‘no GM’ is still the motto for many governments. Kenya for example has actually banned GM foods because of the supposed “health risks” despite the fact that they could help reduce the malnutrition that is still rampant in the country – and malnutrition is by the way a proven health risk, with no further evidence needed. In Kenya if you develop a GM crop which has better nutrition or a higher yield to help poorer farmers then you will go to jail for 10 years.

Thus desperately-needed agricultural innovation is being strangled by a suffocating avalanche of regulations which are not based on any rational scientific assessment of risk. The risk today is not that anyone will be harmed by GM food, but that millions will be harmed by not having enough food, because a vocal minority of people in rich countries want their meals to be what they consider natural.

I hope now things are changing. The wonderful Bill and Melinda Gates foundation recently gave $10 million to the John Innes Centre to begin efforts to integrate nitrogen fixing capabilities into major food crops, starting with maize. Yes, Greenpeace, this will be GM. Get over it. If we are going to reduce the global-scale problem of nitrogen pollution then having major crop plants fixing their own nitrogen is a worthy goal.

I know it is politically incorrect to say all this, but we need a a major dose of both international myth-busting and de-regulation. The plant scientists I know hold their heads in their hands when I talk about this with them because governments and so many people have got their sense of risk so utterly wrong, and are foreclosing a vitally necessary technology.

Norman Borlaug is dead now, but I think we honour his memory and his vision when we refuse to give in to politically correct orthodoxies when we know they are incorrect. The stakes are high. If we continue to get this wrong, the life prospects of billions of people will be harmed.

So I challenge all of you today to question your beliefs in this area and to see whether they stand up to rational examination. Always ask for evidence, as the campaigning group Sense About Science advises, and make sure you go beyond the self-referential reports of campaigning NGOs.

But most important of all, farmers should be free to choose what kind of technologies they want to adopt. If you think the old ways are the best, that’s fine. You have that right.

What you don’t have the right to do is to stand in the way of others who hope and strive for ways of doing things differently, and hopefully better. Farmers who understand the pressures of a growing population and a warming world. Who understand that yields per hectare are the most important environmental metric. And who understand that technology never stops developing, and that even the fridge and the humble potato were new and scary once.

So my message to the anti-GM lobby, from the ranks of the British aristocrats and celebrity chefs to the US foodies to the peasant groups of India is this. You are entitled to your views. But you must know by now that they are not supported by science. We are coming to a crunch point, and for the sake of both people and the planet, now is the time for you to get out of the way and let the rest of us get on with feeding the world sustainably.

Thankyou.

The impacts of land based wind turbines on birds and bats are well-known, and often mentioned by those who oppose wind power – though I suspect wildlife concerns are almost never the principal reason for such opposition. Nevertheless, bird collisions do happen, and poorly-sited onshore wind farms in the US, Norway and Tasmania have been shown to hit populations of raptors such as eagles, vultures and hawks.

It is less clear whether any significant harm is done to birds by onshore wind in the UK – but even so, with the wind industry moving increasingly offshore because of the swelling tide of nimby opposition in the shires, it is crucial to get a handle at an early stage on whether there might be serious harm to marine biodiversity as we embark on building multi-gigawatt offshore wind farms and other energy infrastructure in the sea. Friends of the Earth commissioned Martin Attrill, a marine ecologist who is director of the Plymouth University Marine Institute, to do an expert literature review with this end in mind.

(c) Kim Hansen

As the report begins by pointing out, achieving the 2030 electricity decarbonisation target recommended by the Committee on Climate Change – of 50g/KWh – will require at least a tenfold expansion of marine renewables, even if accompanied by a simultaneous new-build programme for nuclear or carbon capture and storage. Personally I would support a target of the UK securing at least 40% of its electricity from offshore wind, and substantial additional contributions from other marine renewables as rapidly as they can be scaled up.

What is most striking in the report is just how benign offshore wind and other renewables currently appear to be to marine biodiversity. There is very little evidence of any harmful impact on birds: some species of duck have been shown to take minor migratory detours to avoid wind farms, but many other seabirds tend to skim along the water surface well below the spinning turbine blades. Underwater the impact may even be positive, as the subsea concrete structures provide new reef-style habitat for shellfish and seaweed. Scientists studying wind farms in the sea off Belgium discovered “large aggregations” of pouting and cod, while the additional fish numbers seemed to attract porpoise and birds elsewhere.

Part of this benefit may lie in reducing fishing activity – the seabed of the North Sea in particular has been utterly devastated by decades of trawling: as late as the early twentieth century large areas were covered by oyster beds, these filter feeders making the waters crystal clear. Today’s muddy, turgid North Sea and soft, largely lifeless sea bed is an unnatural phenomenon, a product of the fact that by the 1970s the oyster beds and various rocky reefs had been completely destroyed by trawlers ploughing up the bottom. As Martin Attrill suggests, if offshore developments can be accompanied by no-fishing marine protected areas, these can help preserve fish stocks and provide a refuge for species which have been driven to the brink of extinction elsewhere.

Marine mammals are an additional concern – but here too the news seems to be cautiously  good. Although the driving of piles into the seabed during construction can drive away cetaceans, this is a temporary phenomenon. Badly-placed underwater tidal turbines might be expected to injure dolphins, migrating fish or diving birds, but there is so far no evidence of this. Indeed, the 1-MW tidal turbine in Northern Ireland’s Strangford Lough is near a grey seal colony and has been carefully monitored for several years – so far it seems that the seals simply avoid the underwater blades without a problem.

None of this means that development should simply go ahead without any concern. As Attrill writes in his conclusion:

However, although rapid deployment of MRE [marine renewable energy] at scale is necessary, this is not a reason to avoid deploying MRE sensitively and with care. Developers and regulators should work closely with marine ecologists and conservation groups at an early stage to identify suitable locations for the MRE and associated cabling. The Habitats Directive should be clearly complied with, in both spirit and letter. Developers should strive to enhance marine biodiversity and productivity.

I agree wholeheartedly with this. As deployment scales up in a big way, we need to keep gathering evidence of environmental impact. But there is nothing to suggest currently that biodiversity is a reason to hold up deployment – as Friends of the Earth’s Mike Childs told me on the phone yesterday: “We need to get building!”

I would also encourage marine conservation groups like wildlife trusts and dolphin conservation charities, as well as the RSPB, to be closely involved with this effort. They have many decades-worth of experience in this area, and positive engagement will be crucial. Although I haven’t studied their energy policies in detail, I don’t doubt that all of them will appreciate the urgent challenge posed by climate change – not least to the marine environment, along with ocean acidification – and would agree that we should deploy the maximum amount of clean energy with the utmost speed. Their experience can help us choose what goes where, and help guide how to minimise negative impacts and maximise positive benefits on the marine wildlife which we all value so highly.

I will say upfront that I think the study is worse than useless. Jacobson (Hoeve is a former PhD student of his) is a long-time anti-nuclear and pro-renewables advocate, and (as I show below) clearly has an agenda to raise further fears about the health impacts of Fukushima and nuclear power in general. However, in this deeply flawed paper he succeeds only in illustrating some of the absurdities in current radiological protection models, and that one thing we know for sure – even if those absurdities are ignored – is that the evacuation killed more people than the accident.

The Hoeve and Jacobson (H&J) paper uses an atmospheric transport model (which is not really intended for this purpose) to attempt to quantify the worldwide movement of radionuclides released by Fukushima. Here they all are in the image below, circulating around the entire Northern Hemisphere and looking appropriately scary. (Note however that even the strong colours indicate infinitesimal amounts of additional radiation, far below normal background everywhere outside Japan.)

H&J then plug the deposition of these radionuclides into a grid-model of populations and apply a risk coefficient taken from the EPA. This is where things get really hairy. The risk coefficient depends on the assumption of LNT (linear no-threshold), which hypothesises that the linear dose-response relationship demonstrated at high levels of radiation exposure (the higher the dose, the greater the health impact) can also be assumed to exist at much lower levels. This is problematic for all sorts of reasons, not least that there is no convincing evidence for it, and much more to contradict it.

Hardly anyone I meet in the nuclear community these days still believes in LNT. Indeed, the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP) in its Publication 103 (2007) specifically states:

The collective effective dose quantity is an instrument for optimisation, for comparing radiological technologies and protection procedures, predominantly in the context of occupational exposure. Collective effective dose is not intended as a tool for epidemiological risk assessment, and it is inappropriate to use it in risk projections. The aggregation of very low individual doses over extended time periods is inappropriate, and in particular, the calculation of the number of cancer deaths based on collective effective doses from trivial individual doses should be avoided.

H&J avoid the need to heed this instruction by cherry-picking an older ICRP reference from 2005, and using the EPA approach which is no longer the world standard. As the Health Physics Society explains in non-scientific language anyone can understand:

…the concept of collective dose has come under attack for some misuses. The biggest example of this is in calculating the numbers of expected health effects from exposing large numbers of people to very small radiation doses. For example, you might predict that, based on the numbers given above, the population of the United States would have about 40,000 fatal cancers from background radiation alone. However, this is unlikely to be true for a number of reasons. Recently, the International Council on Radiation Protection issued a position statement saying that the use of collective dose for prediction of health effects at low exposure levels is not appropriate. The reason for this is that if the most highly exposed person receives a trivial dose, then everyone’s dose will be trivial and we can’t expect anyone to get cancer. [my emphasis]

The HPS illustrates this commonsensical statement with the following analogy:

Another way to look at it is that if I throw a 1-gram rock at everyone in the United States then, using the collective dose model, we could expect 270 people to be crushed to death because throwing a one-ton rock at someone will surely kill them. However, we know this is not the case because nobody will die from a 1-gram rock. The Health Physics Society also recommends not making risk estimates based on low exposure levels.

Unfortunately the entire supposed value of the H&J paper involves taking precisely this invalid approach, assessing below-trivial doses to very large populations in order to come up with an outcome where some people die of cancer. Even so, the number is not very big, no doubt to Jacobson’s intense disappointment. All told, H&J can only come up with 130 “worldwide excess mortalities”, mostly in Japan, although between 0 and 6 fatalities are supposed to happen in the US also – despite the infinitesimal extent of Fukushima-derived radiaoactive contamination there. This is about as inappropriate a use of the LNT model – which was designed only as a precautionary approach to occupational exposures – as it is possible to have.

Even though I think these figures are junk science, it is worth putting them in context. Let’s suppose that we were to accept H&J’s calculations at face value. How bad will Fukushima then have been? There are 130 deaths every 7 hours currently due to outdoor particulate air pollution (3.7 million annually, according to UNEP), many from coal-burning power stations which are the main alternative to nuclear for baseload electricity production in most of the world. That’s more than three Fukushimas every day. An additional two million die every year due to indoor air pollution, mostly because they don’t have access to electricity.

The H&J paper rather strangely then goes on to extrapolate deaths from a hypothetical Fukushima-equivalent accident at Diablo Canyon nuclear power station in California. Clearly this case is picked to try to scare North Americans, and Jacobson is hoping to get a higher expected death toll because the radioactive release from Diablo Canyon would likely drift towards Los Angeles rather than being swept out to sea as happened after the accident in Japan. (Plus, Diablo Canyon is in a tectonically-active area, so more potentially scary.) Even so, the death toll is still disappointingly low, at 156 (11-1570, lowest to highest probabilities). Cue a few concluding sentences about how 1.5% of reactors ever built have blown up, that “the risk of a meltdown is not small” therefore:

The risks and consequences of a meltdown must be considered along with other impacts, risks, costs, and benefits of nuclear power, discussed elsewhere, in comparison with other electric power sources in deciding the future direction of worldwide energy policy.

In conclusion, I don’t like to go in for ad hominem stuff, but the background of Mark Jacobson must be noted here. Jacobson is perhaps best known for a fantastical paper (PDF) published in Scientific American which proposed that all the world’s energy should be generated from wind, water and sun by 2030. This has been critiqued in too many places for me to link to here (although Barry Brook over at BNC perhaps did it best), but suffice to say that it depends on a build-out of 4 million large wind turbines and 90,000 massive solar plants, and is, well, impractical to say the least. An earlier paper claimed that nuclear power must be carbon intensive because of all the burning buildings that would result from the inevitably-ensuing large-scale nuclear war.

This is not the perspective of an objective energy scientist, but of an anti-nuclear campaigner pursuing an ideological agenda. If there is still any lingering doubt about Jacobson’s lack of objectivity, check out his TED debate with Stewart Brand under the heading ‘Does the world need nuclear energy?’

But I want to end on a different note, with a look at how real people actually did suffer and die as a direct result of the Fukushima accident – not because of the radiation itself, but because the fear of radiation led to a hurried evacuation of vulnerable people from hospitals and care homes. A paper in The Lancet describes the sorry mess that resulted:

Medical personnel did not accompany the patients during transportation. Bed-ridden patients were laid down on the seats, wrapped in protective gowns. During transportation, some patients suffered trauma by falling from the seats of the vehicles.

Evacuation continues late into the night

Evacuation continued late into the night. As the situation at the damaged plant became more volatile, the evacuation became more rushed and patients were transported by police vehicles as well. The vehicles were packed full, not only with patients but also with residents who had missed the chance to evacuate on their own. Late at night on March 14, patients were required to leave the buses because admitting hospitals or facilities could not be found and the vehicles were required elsewhere. Eventually, the patients were temporarily housed at a meeting room of the Soso Health Care office in Minamisoma city, with no heaters or medical supplies. Many had to wait for more than 24 h before reaching admitting facilities.

27 patients with severe medical problems such as end-stage renal failure or stroke were transported more than 100 km to Iwaki city. At least 12 of them were confirmed dead at 0300 h on March 15, ten of whom seemed to have died in the vehicles during transportation. Later, it was reported that more than 50 patients died either during or soon after evacuation, probably owing to hypothermia, dehydration, and deterioration of underlying medical problems.

And the next sentence is the key:

In the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant accident, there were no deaths related to radiation or the explosion of the reactors. However, the evacuation of these patients was accompanied by loss of life.

As Chernobyl showed, fear of radiation is a far greater risk than radiation itself in the low doses experienced by the affected populations after both accidents. Unfortunately work by Jacobson and other anti-nuclear campaigners (in academia, environmental groups and elsewhere) will make this fear worse, and harm people’s health accordingly. I hope they are aware of this.

These beliefs are remarkably persistent, despite strong scientific evidence which refutes them. That natural necessarily equals more safe than artificial is a fallacy. In 2009 a major study for the UK Food Standards Agency found that there was no nutritional or health benefits to organic. Indeed there is strong counter-evidence, as relatives of those who died from eating organic bean sprouts in Germany last year can attest – as I understand it, the bean sprouts likely harboured toxic e-coli bacteria passed on via animal manure added to the parent plant. This use of manure rather than synthetic fertilisers is celebrated by organic proponents, but likely caused dozens of deaths and thousands of injuries in this instance. (Imagine if the sprouts had been GMO!)

I got into an argument on Twitter about this at the end of last week, because I retweeted a document discovered by David Tribe (a.k.a. GMO Pundit) revealing the funding sources behind the proposition for mandatory labelling of GMO foods in California – Big Organic and Big Quacka (‘natural health’ types) have poured $100,000s into the campaign, far outspending the biotech and grocers campaigns who oppose the proposition. The idea that consumers have a ‘right to choose’ and therefore GMOs should all be labelled irritates me – so I tweeted that organic should be labelled with an environmental warning due to its relative land-use inefficiency. This was picked up by Simon Singh, whose tweet was called “pathetic” by the Soil Association’s president Monty Don. (Simon has now blogged about this, posing two important questions for Monty Don to answer – no response as of yet.)

Lots of organic enthusiasts tweeted back at me that I had my facts wrong, or was not considering wider issues. I asked for references, and one proponent sent me the link to a piece in Nature by Verena Seufert, Navin Ramankutty and Jonathan Foley (Nature 485, 229-232, 10 May 2012, doi:10.1038/nature11069) – which I had just tweeted myself as support for my own proposal. The paper is entitled ‘Comparing the yields of conventional and organic agriculture’ and is a meta-study looking at the relevant published literature on yield comparisons world-wide (typically evidence is cited from a single farm). Here is the major conclusion:

The average organic-to-conventional yield ratio from our meta-analysis is 0.75 (with a 95% confidence interval of 0.71 to 0.79); that is, overall, organic yields are 25% lower than conventional

This is just the overall average, however: as the figure below shows, there is considerable variability amongst different crops.

Figure 1: Influence of different crop types, plant types and species on organic-to-conventional yield ratios

As Seufert et al write,

The performance of organic systems varies substantially across crop types and species. For example, yields of organic fruits and oilseed crops show a small (−3% and −11% respectively), but not statistically significant, difference to conventional crops, whereas organic cereals and vegetables have significantly lower yields than conventional crops (−26% and −33% respectively)

This largely seems to be because organic perennial systems do better than annuals, perhaps because of nutrient shortages in systems with a higher turnover – indeed, the authors conclude the nitrogen limitation in organic systems is probably the key factor. The study also shows great variability amongst soil types and water management strategies – for the latter organic yield is -35% compared to conventional for irrigated systems, but only -17% under rainfed conditions.

Equally,

when only the most comparable conventional and organic systems are considered the yield difference is as high as 34%

Even then, I was concerned that this might be understating the case. In conventional systems nitrogen is captured from the air via synthetic fertilisers, whilst in organic systems additional nitrogen must either be grown in situ with leguminous crops – thereby forgoing a fruit or cereals harvest on the land for part of the time in rotation – or imported from elsewhere via animal manures. Were these indirect land footprint issues considered?

The question did not seem to be answered by the Nature paper, so I emailed Jonathan Foley (who I know; Jon then shared with his co-authors) to ask directly. His reply, and that of lead author Verena Seufert, is worth quoting in detail:

Jon Foley (Institute on the Environment, University of Minnesota, USA):

- The original study in Nature did not consider the *land* requirement for growing organic and conventional crops.  Only the yield differences on the two different kinds of farming systems.

- Farms also have a “shadow” amount of land use, which is associated with the inputs they use — whether it’s the land used to generate nutrient inputs, biocidies, energy, etc.  Just think of the footprint of land needed to make the stuff you use on the farm.

- As you already figured out, the organic systems probably have a fairly large amount of “shadow” land, particularly if they use manure from other fields as an input on their own fields.  That is extremely hard to quantify right now, as we often do not know (at larger scales, especially) where the organic nutrients are coming from.  Further, the organic nutrients might be a mix of cover crops (legumes), compost (from on farm wastes — but this is a mostly closed material cycle), and manure from another field or farm.

- You can imagine that, for manure based systems, that the amount of shadow land is quite large indeed.  Perhaps even larger than the organic farm field itself.  But for other organic nitrogen sources, it could be far smaller.

- Compared to industrial nitrogen, organic nitrogen sources are probably much more land intensive — although of course they are less energy intensive, probably better for the environment in other ways, etc.

So it is fair to say that organic systems use more land than their conventional counterparts:  some of this has been quantified (the *direct* land use difference, which is roughly 20-30%, but varies by crop) and some of this has not (the *indirect* land use effects, counting where the nutrients ultimately came from).

We have been thinking about this, and hope to address this in a future paper.

Verena Seufert, Department of Geography and Global Environmental and Climate Change Center, McGill University, Montreal, Canada:

We did indeed so far only look at the direct land use, i.e. the productivity per unit area, not accounting for indirect land use to produce nutrient inputs (e.g. animal manure) for organic or conventional systems. What we did account for (at least to some degree) is the influence of non-food crop rotations in organic systems (e.g. a rotation of alfalfa in between cash crops to provide nutrients and to incorporate as green manure). Our study showed that organic systems that had a longer period of non-food crops in their rotation compared to their conventional counterparts (e.g. when an organic corn-soybean-alfalfa rotation was compared to a conventional corn-soy rotation) had a similar yield difference to conventional systems (i.e. yield ratio) as those organic systems that had a similar length of non-food crops as the conventional system (e.g. when an organic wheat-sunflower rotation was compared to a conventional wheat-sunflower rotation).

We conclude from this result that the yield of organic systems does not depend on whether they use longer non-food crop rotations than conventional systems or not. It thus appears possible to design productive organic systems without needing longer periods of non-food crops.Of course if organic systems do not implement a non-food crop rotation they need to get their nutrients from other sources, e.g. cover crops (which have no additional land costs), animal manure (which has additional land cost for growing animal feed) or compost (which could come from on-farm recycling or from municipal waste and does not necessarily require additional land).

The question how much land organic or conventional agriculture would require is an interesting question and a natural next step to the yield analysis. So far a couple of studies have discussed the issue, e.g. Badgley et al. tried to quantify the nutrient availability from leguminous cover crops, arguing that these could provide sufficient nutrient inputs; or David Connor, who criticized the Badgley analysis in a 2008 paper in Field Crops Research 106, 187-190, arguing that the main cost of organic agriculture is the additional land it requires to grow organic N inputs. But both of these papers have I think not yet given a satisfying answer to the question of organic land requirements.

But as Jon pointed out, any comparison of total organic and conventional land use also needs to take into account the land needed to produce conventional inputs. If we discuss indirect land use we need to be fair and assess this for both systems we are comparing.

So I think my case is made. Organic agriculture is significantly less efficient in land-use terms than conventional. (And the picture could be even worse than -34% in comparative terms, given that indirect land use was not taken into account in the Nature study.) On the other hand, there is no compelling scientific evidence that GM crops are in any way more dangerous than their conventional alternatives, and therefore they do not require labelling.

Having said that, starting a fight between organic enthusiasts and those who care about land use is not the point – we need to avoid zero-sum, black-and-white thinking, and take the best from both systems. Moreover, we need to bear in mind trade-offs in all the ‘planetary boundary’ areas – including water, greenhouse gases (emitted by artificial nitrogen production), eutrophication of water ecosystems due to chemical fertiliser overuse and so on. Verena Seufert puts is very well at the end of her email reply:

In any case, I think that the question of total land required to feed the world conventionally or organically also somehow risks leading into a polarized either-or debate. While in fact I don’t think there will be a one-size-fits-all solution. We try to argue in our paper that instead of looking for a ‘winner’ in the organic vs. conventional debate, we should learn from the successes and failures of both systems. Thats why we try to emphasize the results of our categorical analysis rather than the overall yield difference in our paper. It’s much more interesting to learn that organic systems have a relative yield advantage in rainfed systems or that they are often nitrogen limited than to know that overall the yield difference between organic and conventional is around 25%.

This allows us to learn that organic management and increased soil organic matter can be beneficial under rainfed conditions or that we need to improve organic nutrient management to increase organic productivity. By learning from these successes and failures of the different farming systems we can improve organic and conventional management or we can create hybrid systems that can potentially balance the benefits of organic & conventional management.

 
Update: 17 July 2012

The third co-author of the Nature paper discussed above, Navin Ramankutty – Canada Research Chair in Land Use and Global Environmental Change at McGill University in Canada – has also sent me an email response, reproduced below. I am very grateful that all three co-authors have contributed to this post, and also to those who have posted comments below the line.

Navin Ramankutty writes:

Here’s my 2 cents on your question, to add to what Jon & Verena have already said. As they said (and as Monty Don did in his tweet), our paper only looked at a small piece of the puzzle on the role of organic. To perform a rigorous study, using 100s of data points, we could only focus on a narrow question for which data had been painstakingly collected by various studies. But it is certainly not enough, we need to compile more data/information on a variety of other factors.

One way to think about it is that we have an agricultural production system which receives a lot of inputs such as land, water, nutrients, energy, labor, etc. It produces stuff we consume (yields per unit area), but also modifies the environment (biodiversity, water quality, carbon emissions, etc.), contributes to the economy, provides livelihoods, etc. In comparing different types of farming systems (organic, conventional, GM,..), we eventually need to look at all of these various factors, and their efficiencies. You have picked up on the indirect land use effect. But we also need to consider water-use efficiency, labor efficiency, the environmental impacts, the influence on price, livelihood impacts, health, etc.

We have really only scratched the surface so far, there’s a lot more work to be done. Our meta-analysis benefited from the various scientists around the world who spent years designing and conducting field experiments. We don’t have many such experiments yet for most of the other questions.

Update, 14 August 2012: I have received a response from Peter Melchett, policy director of the Soil Association – the primary organic certifier/lobby group in the UK. Here it is, in full with no editing:

Dear Mark Lynas,

You say your family and friends believe that ‘organic agriculture is better for the planet’ and that, like them, everyone assumes ‘that organic is healthier due to the absence of synthetic pesticides and fertilisers’. However, you know better because you know the scientific evidence, and you cite a 2009 study that found ‘there was no nutritional or health benefits to organic’. In fact your friends and family’s view is supported by more recent science, so maybe you could learn a thing or two from them.

In a major review paper published in 2011, Brandt et al (Brandt, K. C. Leifert, R. Sanderson and C. J. Seal. 2011. Agroecosystem Management and Nutritional Quality of Plant Foods: The Case of Organic Fruits and Vegetables, Critical Reviews in Plant Sciences, 30:1–2, 177–197) concluded that ‘A meta-analysis of the published comparisons of the content of secondary metabolites and vitamins in organically and conventionally produced fruits and vegetables showed that in organic produce the content of secondary metabolites is 12% higher than in corresponding conventional samples’ (a statistically significant difference). The argument had been over whether differences between organic and non-organic (conventional) food are significant – the fact that there are differences, and the scientific explanation for these differences, are well known. As Brandt et al state: ‘Organic and conventional crop management systems differ in terms of the fertilisers and plant protection methods used. Ecological and agronomic research on the effect of fertilization on plant composition shows that increasing availability of plant available nitrogen reduces the accumulation of defense-related secondary metabolites and vitamin C, while the contents of secondary metabolites such as carotenes that are not involved in defense against diseases and pests may increase. In relation to human health, increased intake of fruits and vegetables is linked to reduced risk of cancer and cardiovascular disease. This benefit may be primarily due to their content of defense-related secondary metabolites, since most other constituents of fruits and vegetables either are not unique to these foods or have been shown to not provide health benefits when the intake is increased’.

Your discussion of the land needed by organic farming is confused by two false assumptions. First, you seem to assume that the land on organic farms growing legumes to fix Nitrogen for subsequent crops (using the sun’s energy rather than fossil fuels to manufacture Nitrogen) is only fixing Nitrogen, Wrong. Fields of alfalfa (Lucerne) or red clover fix Nitrogen and feed livestock, fields of peas and beans fix Nitrogen and provide human or animal food. Second, you assume that organic systems must produce exactly the same quantity and type of food (and crucially animal feed) as non-organic systems. Wrong again. Intensive and industrial chicken, pig, beef and dairy systems are not permitted under organic standards, nor possible under organic systems, as they generally depend on widespread, prophylactic use of antibiotics, and on systems that have lower animal welfare and higher incidence of disease than is acceptable in organic farming. These animal systems consume huge quantities of grains and protein, otherwise consumable by people, and convert it very inefficiently into meat or dairy products. Half or more of our wheat crop in the UK goes for animal, not human consumption, so even with a 30% lower yield, more not less grains could be available for people to eat. True, our diets would change, to a far healthier balance of more fruit and vegetables, and less but better quality meat and dairy products. Your family and friends may be ahead of you here too, if they think that meat and milk from all or mainly grass fed beef, sheep and dairy cows (as is the case with organic systems) is healthier. A report just published by Compassion in World Farming says just that (http://www.ciwf.org.uk/yourfood/nutrition.aspx). They conclude ‘The industrial farming model is unsustainable and relentless in its exploitation of animals, land, energy and water. An urgent move from intensive to higher welfare farming is required to improve animal welfare, as well as to reduce environmental pollution and waste. Higher welfare farming produces healthier meat, eggs and milk than similar products from factory farms. Switching from factory farmed animal products to higher welfare meats, eggs and milk could contribute to improved consumer health, especially if consumed in moderation within a balanced diet, rich in fruit and vegetables.’

The ‘truth universally acknowledged’ that you dismissed is, I am happy to say, generally true after all. This is for publication, and I hope you will add my comments to the others you have been sent

Yours sincerely,

Peter Melchett
Policy Director
Soil Association