http://www.lifesciencesnetwork.com/informationservices-detail.asp?ID=2691

Nattering Nabob of Nonsense: A Review of a Review by Thomas R. DeGregori*

In a review of Cultivating Biodiversity: Understanding, Analyzing, and
Using Agricultural Diversity (Edited by Harold Brookfield, Christine
Padoch, Helen Parsons, Michael Stocking, Published by Intermediate
Technology Development Group) in TerraGreen, Issue 34, 15 April 2003,
Aakanksha Kumar asks the rhetorical question - How green is the Green
Revolution? Need we have read further in the review to find the reviewer's
answer or have we read enough of these rhetorical rants to recognize the
"answer" in advance?

First a comment on the publisher, Intermediate Technology Development
Group, of this meaty tome. In the 1970s they were the rage promoting
"appropriate" or "intermediate" technology. "Appropriate" to what other
than to a pre-existing ideology, was never really explained.
"Intermediate" technology was the term of E. F. Schumacher in Small is
Beautiful in which intermediate was neither the modern stuff nor was it
the technology that mired people in poverty. Schumacher himself admitted
that it did not yet exist but like Lewis Carroll's snarks, he knew that it
was out there someplace or at least could be invented. He also knew what
its characteristics were such as using local materials and "gentle" in its
use of resources.

By the 1980s, the "intermediate" technology craze had largely run its
course because it simply did not deliver development while other
technology strategies were delivering rapid transformation to many parts
of the globe particularly, East and Southeast Asia. To some of us it
seemed strange that just as peoples in developing countries were
demonstrating a mastery of modern science and technology and effectively
using it to compete with the once dominant "Western" enterprises, along
comes a group of activists to say that it was not for them. Could this
have been some sneaky Western capitalist conspiracy to suppress
competition? They have now been trumped by the post-modernists who
essentially revive 19th century imperialist ideas about science and
technology being an exclusively Western, white male testosterone loaded
endeavor. This was and remains, Old Wine in Old Bottles, but now with a
new label as we are informed that logophallocentric science and technology
are destroying the earth with one author, Sandra Harding, arguing that we
could as well call Newton's Mechanics, "a rape manual."

Old activist ideological organizations never die, they just re-tool to the
latest cause of the moment. In this case, it is biodiversity loss
resulting from "an overemphasis on high-yielding plant varieties." The
book is based on "11 case studies from South America, Africa, and Asia,
where farmers have `literally cultivated biodiversity'." These were the
"expert farmers" who "had the sense not to be swayed by the generally
`dismissive view of traditional agriculture'."

While it is true that in the very earliest phases of the introduction of a
new regimen of cultivation, farmers sometimes have had to be "swayed" and
persuaded about its benefits. This "persuasion" involves a combination of
methods, demo plots followed by having a selected number of locally
respected farmers try the new seed or technique (often guaranteeing the
crop) and training sessions, and extension and credit provided by
agriculturalists who live and work in the region and who have an intimate
knowledge of local farming practices and their history. What ultimately
persuaded farmers about the Green Revolution technology was the
significant increases in yields and the ability to protect them from
insects and disease.

A common cliche of environmental activists is that farmers have to be
"weaned" away from pesticides as if they were babies in need of parental
guidance from urban elitist activists with no other experience except
activism. However, other than the condescending tone, there is an element
of truth to this claim. Forty years of the successes of the Green
Revolution have made so-called "traditional farmers" not only open to
change but most often actively seeking it. Knowing the agricultural
history of their area better than the activist outsiders, they know and
often have personal memories of crops lost to insects and the human
tragedies that followed before the introduction of various forms of
chemical crop protection. Therefore many farmers otherwise open to change
are resistant to reduction in pesticide use even though it would reduce
their input cost and increase their net return.

When visiting an IPM project in central Java, I asked a farmer what he
would say if I told him that another farmer across the valley was
harvesting the same yield of cabbages as he was but only spraying about
one third as often. His response was straight-forward and to the point -
"I wouldn't believe you!" But through time, programs like the one that I
observed do work and farmers see for themselves the benefits realized by
their neighbors and learn to spray responding to pest infestation and not
the calendar just as farmers today are responding to the transgenic
varieties which require even less spraying and produce a higher net yield.

The Green Revolution was and remains, an ongoing process of improvement
and anyone who has worked with farmers around the world, knows that having
experienced the benefits of change, farmers are now actively seeking new
solutions and new technologies of which there has been a constant stream
and which it is now recognized that biotechnology is a vital element in
continuing this process.

Contrary to mythology about "an overemphasis on high-yielding plant
varieties," from the first research in Mexico on wheat in 1943 - witness
the almost complete absence of outbreaks of rust and smut -disease
resistance has been right up there with increased yields in Green
Revolution research. The famous IR 36, the most widely grown variety in
the late 1970s and 1980s, was the result of crossing of 15 different
varieties from 11 countries that had enhanced ability to handle 11
different forms of stress. The current convoluted arguments - harvesting a
much larger crop is not really an increase in yield because it largely
resulted from a decline in the loss from insect damage - against the
growing of insect resistant transgenic cotton in India makes it likely
that we will be hearing less about the dangers that mono-cultures pose for
crop protection since it will be a marvelous argument for transgenic
crops.

The centerpiece of the review is the usual litany of numbers on the
decline in genetic diversity resulting from modern agronomy - "75% of the
genetic diversity of the agricultural crops has been lost in the last 100
years." The first question that we have to ask, is how are we suppose to
know this as a fact as opposed to a myth? Whose counting, how are they
counting and why? In the pantheon of anti-technology "factoids," there
almost seems to be an inverse relationship between how often a number is
repeated and its accuracy. From agriculture's early beginnings, there was
the diffusion of crops from one region to another, more often than not,
displacing a local crop or greatly reducing its cultivation. At the same
time, there was a slight counter trend, as cultivation of a crop through
time led to the creation of local varieties adapted to regional
characteristics. What else are farmers supposed to do but plant the crops
that best allow them to provide for their families? Quite possibly this
decline in "genetic diversity" reflects the fact that farmers around the
world have been voluntarily adopting various elements of the modern
agronomy and the "Green Revolution." Has it occurred to Aakanksha Kumar
and the authors of the study that hundreds of millions of farmers around
the world may know something about what best meets their needs that their
self-anointed saviors don't?

This period of the "loss" of genetic diversity has seen the growth of
regional, national and international seed banks with hundreds of thousands
of accessions. In effect, the much maligned modern agronomy has reversed
the long term loss in genetic diversity as the accessions not only
included cultivated crops from around the world but also wild varieties.
This has been very much a part of the Green Revolution as these seed banks
are regularly drawn upon to develop new varieties and to respond to needs
of farmers growing the crop who may be facing an emerging disease or
insect problem. Historically, the only genetic diversity that had any
meaning to a farmer was that which was in his or her immediate vicinity at
the time they needed it. Now through the integrated research and
distribution systems of the CGIAR institutions, the entire computerized
data bank and the seeds that it represents are available to address
emerging problems.

There have been some persuasive arguments on AgBioView suggesting that
seed banks have served their purpose and that biotechnology essentially
renders them unnecessary. However cogent these arguments may be, it is
likely that we will have "seed banks" around for awhile longer. I, for
one, want to put ever more eggs in the biotechnology basket but I also
consider it wise to leave a few in the seed bank basket for the
foreseeable future. It is also clear that biotechnology opens vast new
realms of genetic diversity that will benefit farmers and all of humankind
if only its critics will stop impeding its progress.

Aakanksha Kumar's short review is so replete with misconceptions that one
is almost afraid to read the entire work less one be overwhelmed by them.
There is the standard refrain about "water-hungry varieties" which I have
dealt with in my Shiva the Destroyer? (Butterflies and Wheels: Fighting
Fashionable Nonsense, 16 April, 2003 and reposted on AgBioView.
http://www.butterfliesandwheels.com/articleprint.php?num=17) in which I
use the latest FAO data to show that the food that we eat today took about
half as much water as the same food did 40 years ago before the Green
Revolution. Also in the Shiva piece, is data, well known to AgBioView
participants, on the importance of the yield increases of the Green
Revolution for preserving overall biodiversity by allowing habitats to
remain uncultivated and the biodiversity preserved in agricultural fields
in modern no-tillage agriculture.

I try to read a reasonable sampling of these activists tomes even though
one rarely if ever finds any evidence in them of their being even remotely
familiar with the serious scientific literature on the subject nor does
one often find them written by authors with any experience in global
agriculture. But I am tempted to read this one to see where the farmers
are who abandoned "the so-called miracle varieties." Given the hundreds of
millions of farmers in the world, there might be a few in relatively
unique circumstances but many of us who have been out in the field have
yet to encounter them.

Finally the claim is made that our "expert farmers"- those who have not
succumbed to the siren song of modern agronomy - "have a higher standard
of living than others in the area." These "expert farmers" are a "small"
and ever diminishing minority of agriculturalists. One wonders how it is
that their agronomic achievements "are seldom recognized by fellow
villagers or outsiders" or why other farmers have not noticed the relative
affluence of "expert farmers" and reverted to the more traditional forms
of agriculture? Come-on get serious, if there is one thing that villagers
around the world recognize, it is the relative wealth of its members and
any change in relative economic status.

I have encountered many of these "expert farmers" in Africa and elsewhere
who had to make do with very limited inputs not because they wanted to do
so but because the inputs that they needed weren't available. My respect
for their hardscrabble ingenuity does not make me want to keep them in
that condition but to give them the opportunity to transform their lives
as farmers elsewhere have done. If the authors of the study, the NGO that
sponsored it and the reviewer have really found a way to raise farmers
income by abandoning modern agronomy, why do they not submit it to a
quality journal for peer review rather than self-publishing it in a
promotional tract. Until they submit their data for peer review, the rest
of us have more than enough reason to remain skeptical. Or to put it
bluntly, if it looks and smells like bullshit, be careful and don't step
in it.

*Professor of Economics
University of Houston
(author of forthcoming book, Origin of the Organic Agriculture Debate
Iowa
State Press: A Blackwell Publishing Compamy, in press, January 2004.
http://store.yahoo.com/isupress/0813805139.html, trdegreg@uh.edu and
www.uh.edu/~trdegreg)