food and starvation

The BBC asks the question, is it time to reconsider GM foods? Like hybrid cars, GM or genetically modified foods are the big technology breakthrough that is going to save us from extinction. But whereas hybrid cars are largely a gimmick, GM foods do have some merit. Inserting genes to make plants more resistant to pests, or make it so they can tolerate herbicides seems to make sense. After all, it is what evolutionary forces have been doing all along. That is what "evolution" is all about: change to deal with your environment. You might argue plants would never become tolerant to RoundUp, the Monsanto herbicide, but that is just wrong. Given that there is a genetic solution to RoundUp tolerance, it seems likely that sooner or later plants would have acquired this trait. That is, if there were enough RoundUp available to make RoundUp resistance a distinct advantage.

GM foods are likely to work for a while. They will make it so farmers use less chemicals and hence, less oil, but I doubt it will make much difference, or for very long. It may make Monsanto stockholders wealthy though, but that is another matter. Ultimately, pesticides and herbicides will fare no better than antibiotics: resistant strains will appear and the gains will be nullified. For antibiotics, it took a mere fifty years for that to happen. Give it another 50 years and we will be back to pre-antibiotic times. For pesticides and herbicides it may take a bit longer, since multi-cellular organisms cannot adapt that quickly. But ultimately, these chemicals will become part of the "normal" scenery and of limited value to agriculture.

The trouble is that giving the way we live now, with all the waste, and excess, there are simply too many people on the planet. Oil is what keeps them there and oil is a limited resource. Once we run out, or are getting close to run out, the party will be over. That means the people will have to disappear, one way or another. If we changed our life-style perhaps we could accommodate more but six billion is a lot. As for changing life-styles, fat chance that that will happen. So we are looking at mass starvation, massive die-offs as a result of disease and other enormously unpleasant events.

The sooner we deal with it the better off we will all be.