Artificial Foods and Corporate Crops: Can We Escape the 'Frankenstate'?

By Claire Hope Cummings, Beacon Press. Posted May 2, 2008.

The following excerpt is reprinted from Uncertain Peril: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Seeds by Claire Hope Cummings. Copyright © 2008 by Claire Hope Cummings. By permission of Beacon Press.

On a frozen island near the North Pole, a huge hole has been blasted out of the side of an Arctic mountain, and a tunnel has been drilled deep into the rock. When the facility under construction here is completed, it will be lined with one-meter-thick concrete, fitted with two high-security blast-proof airlock doors, and built to withstand nuclear war, global warming, terrorism, and the collapse of the earth's energy supplies.

It's known as the "Doomsday Vault," and in it will be stored millions of seeds and mankind's hope for the future of the world's food supply. The idea is that in the event of massive ecological destruction, those seeds could be used to reconstruct the planet's agricultural systems. Exactly who might remain to begin replanting the earth after such a catastrophe is only one of the questions this astounding project raises. The more immediate question is, are seeds in peril?

The answer is yes, especially the seeds that provide us with food, fiber, and fuel. Both the diversity and the integrity of seeds are threatened, in the wild and on our farms. They are being put at risk by agricultural technologies, patents and corporate ownership, and the overall degradation of the environment. The plight of seeds is one of the most important environmental stories of our time. Until now, however, this critical issue has not received the attention it deserves.

Seeds are as critical to our survival as air, water, and soil. And yet despite the everyday miracles that they perform, we tend to take them for granted. Seeds sustain the beauty and vitality of the earth. Seeds are essential to the regenerative capacity of the planet. We will need their natural resilience and adaptability even more as temperatures rise.

Biologically, each seed has a unique way of fulfilling its promise. Taken together, the world's seeds maintain the plant systems that keep the planet breathing. Every breath we take has been exhaled by a plant which turned it into oxygen for us. Seeds have always been our silent partners in maintaining life on earth.

People and plants coevolved through the ages, and that relationship has been mutually beneficial. Seed plants dependably meet our needs, producing the corn and rice we eat, the flax and cotton we weave, and the oak and pine we use for shelter. Eighty percent of the people in the world still rely on plants as their primary source of medicine. The remains of long-dead plants provide all of us with our fossil fuels. As metaphors, seeds are a rich source of inspiration in art, literature, and religion. We cannot afford to lose any more of this generosity, this beauty, this abundance.

We find ourselves at a dramatic turning point for life on earth. Population and consumption are rapidly expanding. Industrial food production is exhausting the planet's basic biological support systems, making them even more vulnerable to the effects of global warming. The natural world is experiencing catastrophic losses of biodiversity, fresh water, and fertile soil. All of these trends are threatening seeds and forcing us to take a careful look at how we will feed ourselves in the future. It comes down to this: Whoever controls the future of seeds controls the future of life on earth.

Is industrial agriculture, with its focus on chemical and genetic technologies, the best choice for ensuring a healthy future? Genetic engineering is a commercial technology controlled by private corporations, who use it to dominate agricultural production from seed to stomach and to profit from every bite. Given the enormous environmental stress the planet is under right now and increasing demands on our natural resources from all forms of human activity, can this one technology provide for our food and environmental security? The answer is, unequivocally, no.

There are five solid reasons that genetic engineering is not right for agriculture. One: It's bad science. It was developed on the basis of flawed assumptions which have since been discredited by the scientific community.

Two: It's bad biology. It was deployed without regard for its potential for genetic contamination and its risks to human health.

Three: It's bad social policy. It puts control over seeds and the fundamentals of our food and farms into the hands of a few corporations who have their own, not our, best interests in mind.

Four: It's bad economics. After billions of dollars and thirty years, only a few products have been commercialized, and they offer nothing new. No one asked for genetically modified organisms (GMOs), and given a choice, consumers would reject them.

Five: It's bad farming. GMOs don't address the real issues plaguing agriculture; they're designed to substitute for or increase the use of proprietary weed and pest control chemicals. Patented and genetically altered seeds perpetuate the very worst problems of the industrial food system, and they are undermining the autonomy of the farmers who use them.

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Claire Hope Cummings is an environmental journalist specializing in stories about the environmental, health, and political implications of how we eat. She was an environmental lawyer for 20 years, including four years with the United States Department of Agriculture, then practiced environmental and cultural preservation public interest law.

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