ALTERNATIVES TO GENETIC ENGINEERING

A key part of any benefits discussion involves alternatives. Are there better ways to do what is desired? Like benefits, discussions of alternatives can be complicated and elusive, and much depends on the goals envisioned. When the goals include reducing dependence on pesticides and herbicides, there are clearly alternatives to many biotechnology products. Many of these alternatives are not other products, but instead the systems and methods of sustainable agriculture.

A good example is crop rotation, which keeps pests under control elegantly by depriving them of the continuous food supply they need to build up large populations. Crop rotation has many advantages. It controls a broad variety of pests rather than just one or two. It does not select for resistance genes, as do chemical toxins or genetically engineered crops. And it does not result in ongoing pollution of air or water. As a pest-control strategy, crop rotation is far preferable to both chemical insecticides and genetically engineered crops. Unfortunately, because it involves processes and not products, there is no industrial constituency to develop and support crop rotation as there is for the products of biotechnology.

Conversion from industrial agriculture to sustainable systems that depend less on chemicals would eliminate the need for many of the currently projected products of biotechnology. This is not to say that there is no place for genetically engineered crops in sustainable systems; there may well be. But before such crops are introduced to sustainable agriculture systems, those systems must be more fully developed than they currently are. The specific products engineered for sustainable agriculture would be different from those that are being developed to fit into industrial agricultural systems and their development should probably await the wider adoption of such systems.

Agricultural biotechnology, as it is currently developing, is not particularly fruitful in the quest for a sustainable agriculture. Sustainable agriculture solves problems by understanding and adjusting the elements of the system to achieve its goals rather than by developing new products that must be purchased. Agricultural biotechnology, by contrast, is basically an input industry, developing products, often expensive products, priced to cover the costs of research and development. In sustainable agriculture, new products are less important than new knowledge and new ways of manipulating agricultural ecosystems.