Fighting Mother Nature with Biotechnology - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 440

Nowhere is optimizing of food production more apparent than in plant breed-
ing. Humans have been genetically modifying plants to generate new improved
genetically novel varieties of various crops for thousands of years. Apart from
occasional or regional crop failures, famines, and civil unrest, the food supply has
been generally adequate to sustain the human population— that is, up until the
twentieth century.
Plant breeding includes not only traditional crossing (what most people think of
exclusively as “plant breeding”) but also a spectrum of other methods to alter the genetic
makeup of a plant to generate improved varieties (see discussion below).
These innovations in breeding and animal husbandry, combined with more powerful
fertilizers (especially those from Haber Bosch processes invented in the early twentieth
century to produce synthetic nitrogen-based fertilizers), extensive irrigation systems,
and food storage, preservation, and transportation methods led to dramatic increases in
food availability and security, both in quantity and in quality.
However, these advances were matched by dramatic increases in human demand for
food—both quantity and quality—from increased numbers of humans (the popula-
tion explosion of the twentieth century, burgeoning from 1.6 billion humans to the cur-
rent 6.8 billion), increased longevity of humans already present (average world human
lifespan doubling from about 30 in 1900 to over 64 years today) and expanding dietary
demand for more animal protein and less grain, driven by increases in economic afflu-
ence and social stability (Braun 2007).
Borlaug's Green revolution of the mid-twentieth-century illustrates the power
of judiciously adopting and adapting selected technologies. Combining modern
mutated wheat varieties with irrigation and careful farm management, previously
poor countries of Asia suddenly became better able to feed their populations of hun-
gry humans.
Advocates for a return to pre-industrial agriculture, when a third of the US popula-
tion was required to work on a farm to generate enough food for 76 million Americans,
will have to explain how the current 300 million Americans will be fed with farms
staffed by just 2 percent of the population, all in the absence of modern crop varieties,
fertilizers, pesticides, and machinery. In a very real and literal sense, stasis in agriculture
means starvation for humans.
Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan recognized this natural state of mankind, describ-
ing human life under “natural” conditions as “ . . . nasty, brutish and short.” Those who
advocate a return to Mother Nature's bosom will have a hard time garnering sufficient
political support once people realize what it actually entails. If this difficulty is not evi-
dent from a scientific perspective, consider the political angle: Human intervention is
required to control the population, and politically mandated human population control
is feasible only in totalitarian states. The same problem exists with resource manage-
ment: Capitalist democracies will have to agree to have a centrally controlled economy
to dole out dwindling global resources in what the central committee (or dictator)
determines to be a fair and equitable manner. In my opinion, long before that eventual-
ity, we'll see genetically engineered flying pigs.