Fighting Mother Nature with Biotechnology - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 442

chromosomes, etc. The latter are almost invariably lethal, as the plant cannot survive
such gross genetic disruptions. Of the crop cultivars developed using mutation meth-
ods, none are characterized at a genetic level, apart from the new trait, so we have no
idea what additional mutations may have occurred.
Like all other non-GMO forms of plant breeding, not only are the features of new
mutated cultivars not investigated or described at a molecular level but also they
undergo no safety testing. Instead, new cultivars need be described only as D istinctive
from other cultivars, U niform, meaning a field full of plants of the new cultivar must
appear similar, and S table, meaning the genetic features must pass from one genera-
tion to subsequent generations. This “DUS” system is a worldwide requirement of all
new plant cultivars under the International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of
Plants (UPOV), including genetically modified cultivars. In the USA, new crop cultivars
are administered by the USDA under the Plant Variety Protection Act (PVPA); details
are available online at http://ams.usda.gov/science/PVPO/PVPO_Act/PVPA2005.pdf.
Perhaps surprisingly, in most jurisdictions—including the USA—the new crop cultivars
undergo no food or environmental safety assessments prior to commercial release; only
the GM cultivars additionally undergo food and environmental safety assessments.
The question of when “traditional” agriculture gave way to “industrial” agriculture
is thus not a simple or trivial one, as the historical agricultural enterprise is a temporal
sequence of innovation upon innovation; there is no obvious starting point for “mod-
ern” farming. Most of our fruits and veggies were not known to our ancestors. What
we know today as corn was developed by early plant breeders from the grass-like teo-
sinte several thousand years ago. Broccoli and cauliflower were derived from cabbage
(itself only about 2,000 years old) in the fifteenth and sixteenth Centuries, with Brussels
sprouts coming in the 1700s. Carrots were developed around the same time, with the
now familiar ubiquitous orange color bred, according to legend, by human plant breed-
ers in Holland in honor of the reigning House of Orange, although the veracity of this
latter colorful story is now being challenged ( http://www.carrotmuseum.co.uk/history.
html) . Kiwifruit, hybrid plants, and seedless fruits were all developed in the twentieth
century. Plant breeding, enhancing plants by changing their genetic makeup, is an unin-
terrupted stream of innovations that dates back 10,000 years, so no clear temporal point
exists to serve as a division between “traditional” and “industrial” agriculture, at least
not using breeding as the sole criterion.
However, the transition is often arbitrarily pegged with the development of synthetic
fertilizer, the Haber Bosch process of 1909, that made nitrogen fertilizer available on
a large scale at affordable prices (Smil 2004). Subsequent innovations accelerated after
this development, especially in farm mechanization, breeding, and agronomy (includ-
ing soil and farm management).
In the last one hundred years, we've dramatically improved the production of
crops and domesticated animals to provide more food—more nutritious and safer
food—than that supplied by Mother Nature alone. In spite of some popular miscon-
ceptions that modern agriculture produces food that is inferior, less safe, or devoid
of nutrients (see, e.g., Pawlick 2006) food produced using modern technologies is