Sex, Bombs and Burgers (27 page)

W
orld peace must be based on world plenty.
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—NOBEL LAUREATE JOHN BOYD ORR

George W. Bush is not likely to be remembered as a friend of science. In his eight years as president, he held back work on two of the most important scientific issues of our time: stemcell research and global warming. In 2001, a month before the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center consumed American domestic and foreign policy, Bush took to the radio airwaves to tell Americans of his fears regarding the use of cloned cells from humans in conducting medical research. The whole idea rankled with his ethical and religious sensibilities. “Researchers are telling us the next step could be to clone human beings to create individual designer stem cells, essentially to grow another you, to be available in case you need another heart or lung or liver. I strongly oppose human cloning, as do most Americans,” he said in his address. “We recoil at the idea of growing human beings for spare body parts or creating life for our convenience ...

Even the most noble ends do not justify any means.”
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With that, the president shut down federal funding into new lines of stem-cell research and sent a chill through the molecular biology community. Many researchers working in the field, appalled at Bush’s misunderstanding and misrepresentation of
their science, left the country to continue their work in more liberal environments, such as the United Kingdom. Stem-cell research was not about cloning people, they felt, but about solving some of the most crippling ailments that afflict humankind. Other nations were happy to accommodate these scientists and consequently took the lead in stem-cell research. In 2005 when South Korean scientists announced they had cloned human embryos (which turned out to be a hoax), Bush compounded his opposition in another speech: “I worry about a world in which cloning becomes accepted.”
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Similarly, the president outraged scientists and environmentalists alike with his refusal to believe in global warming. While he paid lip service to fighting climate change in public, he also privately challenged the science behind it and refused to sign measures that would limit carbon emissions by American companies. Worse still, over the last few years of his presidency, details emerged of how scientists were silenced or forced to distort their findings by his administration. Researchers reported hundreds of instances of political interference in their work from 2002 to 2007, which they described as part of a concerted effort to confuse and obscure the global warming issue.
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Bush’s actions were summarized and roundly condemned by an editorial in the
New York Times
: “This administration long ago secured a special place in history for bending science to its political ends. One costly result is that this nation has lost seven years in a struggle in which time is not on anyone’s side.”
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What’s curious is that during his time in office, Bush took a distinctly different view on another controversial scientific issue: genetically modified organisms (GMOs). While the idea of meddling with human genetics deeply troubled the president,
rearranging the DNA of the things we ate was no problem. Indeed, Bush and the members of his administration were big supporters of GMOs and championed the cause around the world. In 2003 U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick accused the European Union, with its “Luddite” opposition to genetically modified foods, of killing children in Africa: “I find it immoral that people are not being supplied with food to live in Africa because people have invented dangers about biotechnology.”
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Bush reiterated the sentiment in a speech a few months later and urged Europe to drop its ban on GMOs:

We can greatly reduce the long-term problem of hunger in Africa by applying the latest developments of science. By widening the use of new high-yield bio-crops and unleashing the power of markets, we can dramatically increase agricultural productivity and feed more people across the continent. Yet our partners in Europe are impeding this effort. They have blocked all new bio-crops because of unfounded, unscientific fears. This has caused many African nations to avoid investing in biotechnologies, for fear their products will be shut out of European markets. European governments should join, not hinder, the great cause of ending hunger in Africa.
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Why the dramatically different attitude toward science as it pertained to genetically modified crops? Why was Bush’s opinion on the merits of GMO technology drastically different from his beliefs on stem-cell research and global warming science? Some of the explanation can certainly be found in his religious beliefs, as well as his duty to promote American economic interests.
Some members of his administration also had previous links to the companies making genetically modified foods.

Human cloning provokes a number of ethical and moral questions; even many of the scientists engaged in the research have drawn moral lines on their studies. It’s no surprise then, that Bush, a self-professed devout Christian, would find such research questionable at best. Global warming, however, is an issue with considerably fewer ethical dilemmas—everyone agrees it must be stopped and reversed, if possible. Many commentators have pegged Bush’s opposition to fighting climate change to simple economic interests: American companies are polluting, but limiting their ability to do so would put them at a disadvantage with competitors in other countries such as China, which seem to care less about the environmental damage they’re causing.

Pushing GMOs, on the other hand, also furthers the American economic agenda, but in a different way, because many of the technology’s biggest developers, including Monsanto, Cargill and DuPont, are U.S.-based multinationals. After all, the American government has a responsibility to promote American companies around the world. Considering that food is a truly global business, it’s understandable that Bush has been a big supporter of GMOs.

But there is another reason for the president’s selective belief in science. September 11, 2001, came to define his presidency— virtually every policy decision he made after the attacks in New York was tied to his crusade against terrorism. The “war on terror” consumed American domestic and foreign policy for pretty much the next seven years, from establishing the Department of Homeland Security to strengthening borders to dramatically boosting defence spending to invading Afghanistan and Iraq. Economic and scientific
policies could not escape this mass mobilization any more than they could during the Second World War. Just as science was marshalled to fight the Axis powers, so too would it be used to combat the new threat of al Qaeda and other terrorist groups around the world, a struggle that has no apparent end in sight. Scientists and engineers in every discipline have been called on to help. As we’ll see in later chapters, this has resulted in munitions experts creating new weapons, roboticists developing new forms of artificial intelligence and space exploration researchers coming up with new detection capabilities. As in every preceding American war, food scientists have had to do their part, too.

Genetically modified foods are another significant but subtle weapon in the war on terror. While missiles, tanks and guns aim to kill or incapacitate terrorists, GMOs are expected to work on a different level. They are supposed to ameliorate the circumstances that create terrorists and war in the first place. By creating and then farming crops that are resistant to drought, flooding, pests and other environmental threats, scientists can increase the amount of food available in poor countries. If those farmers can then use such crops to alleviate their food shortages, they can first feed themselves and then start on the road toward exporting, which holds the ultimate promise of economic prosperity. This idea, of using food to lift developing countries out of poverty, dispelling the hopelessness that leads people to take to war and terrorism, is our greatest hope for world peace. Or so GMO proponents like Bush want people to believe.

Better Green Than Red

The idea of food as a weapon is not a new one. For centuries, the strangling of food supplies has played an integral role in siege
warfare, where a stronghold like a fortress or a city was encircled and starved into submission. While the idea is generally associated with medieval warfare, it finds itself alive and well into the twenty-first century—the decades-long American embargo of Cuba is just one example. (Cuba is also an example of a siege that simply has not worked.) For the most part, however, the use of food as a weapon has morphed into a subtler form over the past century.

As we’ve already seen, the Cold War manifested itself in several ways: the stockpiling of ever-more powerful nuclear weapons; proxy armed fights in places such as Angola, Chile and Vietnam; and indirect battle through the space race. The United States and the Soviet Union also competed fiercely to win over other, less powerful countries to their way of thinking. Besides steamrolling its way through Eastern Europe at the end of the Second World War, the Soviet Union fomented communist movements around the world in the fifties, from Africa to South America to Asia. The United States countered by financially and militarily propping up developing countries targeted by the Soviets. For the most part, the strategy worked in Latin America and Western Europe. In a few cases, however, the American government tried a better solution, one that involved providing developing countries with the means to become economically and militarily self-sustaining. Mexico was the first such experiment.

In 1940, when Manuel Ávila Camacho was elected president of Mexico, the country was facing food shortages and importing more than half the wheat it needed. Camacho, who hailed from a middle-class family and had some farming experience, was a proponent of industrialization and developing closer ties to the United States. Toward the end of the Second World War,
he worked out a deal with the wealthy Rockefeller family to deploy new farming methods in Mexico. Both parties had a significant interest in keeping the population fed and happy. Camacho wanted to protect the country’s fragile democracy while the Rockefellers had businesses, including oil operations, in Mexico that would have been jeopardized if the country fell to communism.

Norman Borlaug, a microbiologist from Iowa who had developed a host of chemicals for DuPont during the Second World War—including a disinfectant for canteens and a glue that held in salt water— was sent south in 1944 to work on the wheat problem. His solution, which took nearly ten years to put together, was a short, stocky hybrid plant, created through the cross-breeding of different kinds of wheat seeds. The new plant was resistant to the stem-rust disease common in Mexico, and with heavy watering and chemical fertilizers, produced significantly more grain than wheat grown from traditional seeds. The results were astonishing. Yields ballooned to the point where Mexico was a self-sufficient producer by the midfifties and a net exporter of wheat, shipping out half a million tons annually, by the mid-sixties.
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The securing of the food supply became one of the main pillars of the “Mexican Miracle,” which along with investments in education and infrastructure allowed the country to post strong economic growth until the seventies. As one food historian put it, “a model for solving the stubborn dilemma of food insecurity seemed to have been hit upon, combining conventional genetics with the miracles of chemistry: Just add water and mix.”
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The “Miracle,” which made Mexico a player in world markets and kept the majority of the population fed,
helped fend off any thoughts of turning to communism as a solution for poverty.

With the Mexican success in hand, the American government exported Borlaug’s farming technology to other countries. Next up were India and Pakistan, who in the midsixties were fighting famines caused by years of agricultural mismanagement. Borlaug’s hybrid wheat seeds produced the same results as in Mexico. In India, wheat production increased nearly 80 percent in the first year of planting and just about doubled again in the second, with Pakistan seeing similar gains. By the mid-seventies, both countries were self-sufficient in wheat production.
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The idea of using genetically cross-bred seeds in conjunction with irrigation and chemical fertilizers was then applied to rice. A new hybrid seed, called IR8, was developed and planted in the Philippines. As with previous experiences, production doubled and promptly turned the country into a net exporter of rice. Borlaug was credited with saving millions of lives and awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for the trend he had started, dubbed the “Green Revolution” because of the fields of green crops it produced. While a host of other factors, particularly financial and military support, helped Mexico, India, Pakistan and the Philippines fend off the seduction of Soviet communism, experts agreed that improved crop yields and the resultant economic self-sustainability played a large role. Borlaug himself alluded to how food mitigated conflict when accepting his award. “When the Nobel Peace Prize committee designated me the recipient of the 1970 award for my contribution to the ‘Green Revolution,’ they were in effect, I believe, selecting an individual to symbolize the vital role of
agriculture and food production in a world that is hungry, both for bread and for peace.”
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