Genetic engineering can produce drought-resistant plants. But activists still don’t like it.
Last year was the driest on record in California, and 2014 could well set another record. Most of the state is experiencing “extreme” drought — the second-most severe category. Reservoir levels are dropping, the snowpack is almost nonexistent, and some communities have already imposed restrictions on water usage. But it is the state’s premier industry — farming — that will be affected most drastically. In an average year, farmers use 80 percent of the water consumed by people and businesses in California, according to the Department of Water Resources.
It seems logical, then, that conservation measures should be focused on agriculture, but not everyone has figured that out. From their perch in a parallel universe, the New York Times’s editorial board saw fit to weigh in last week: “California is in the third year of its worst drought in decades. But you wouldn’t know it by looking at how much water the state’s residents and businesses are using.” You wouldn’t know it, either, by looking at the years of rants that the Times has published in opposition to a proven technology that could go a long way toward reducing the usage of water and the impact of the drought.
The technology is genetic engineering, sometimes called genetic modification (GM), which enables plant breeders to make old crop plants do new things, including conserve water. Even with research and development hampered by resistance from activists and discouraged by government overregulation, genetically engineered crop varieties are emerging from the development pipeline in many parts of the world. Cumulatively, during the past two decades, more than 3.7 billion acres of them have been cultivated by more than 17 million farmers in 30 countries — without disrupting a single ecosystem or causing so much as a tummy ache. Worldwide, these new varieties have provided “very significant net economic benefits at the farm level amounting to $18.8 billion in 2012 and $116.6 billion for the 17-year period” from 1996 to 2012, according to an authoritative report published by Landes Bioscience earlier this year.
Genetically engineered herbicide-resistant plants make possible the use of no-till farming techniques, in which the soil is not plowed, meaning that there is less soil erosion, less runoff of agricultural chemicals, and lower fuel consumption and carbon emissions by mechanized farm equipment. From 1996 to 2010, the shift to genetically engineered crops reduced carbon emissions by 19.4 billion kilograms, the equivalent of removing 8.6 million cars from the road for a year.
The planting of genetically engineered crops has also obviated the need to cultivate vast additional amounts of arable land. Between 1996 and 2011, genetically engineered crops were responsible for the production of an additional 110 million tons of soybeans, 195 million tons of corn, 15.8 million tons of cotton lint, and 6.6 million tons of canola. If modern genetic-engineering technology had not been available, to maintain worldwide production levels farmers would have had to “find” and cultivate tens of millions of additional acres of arable land.