The Problem of Monoculture

In his exploration of plant domestication, The Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan chooses four different plants that match up with the four different human desires that brought about their domestication: sweetness for apples, beauty for tulips, intoxication for marijuana, and control for potatoes. While the first three are more or less straight forward, Pollan takes a bit of a leap with potatoes as a representation of control. Although he does deal with their role in providing the irish with control over their food supply, he mainly uses potatoes as the example crop for control as expressed through genetic modification.
Genetically modified organisms, or GMOs, have spread throughout the world since they were first planted in U.S. soil in 1996. There are currently nineteen genetically modified crops approved by the USDA, eight of which are produced in the U.S. Sometimes dubbed “frankenfoods”, gmos have managed to engender fear and distrust from their inception. They have been accused of causing autism, cancer, and diabetes. While scientific research continues to illegitamize the majority of these human health worries, GMOs still face steep opposition, and that opposition is not totally unfounded. The ways that genes interact with each other is still not completely understood, and neither are the ways that new plants might affect their surrounding ecosystems. However, the potential problem with GMOs lies not with the artificiality and unknown risks of gene transfer, but with the artificiality and known risks of monoculture.

What it all comes down to is the concept of biodiversity: the earth contains a large variety of species, ecosystems, combinations of genes, and ecosystem services, like filtering water or taking in carbon dioxide. An ecosystem with less biodiversity is more vulnerable to severe injury from a single disease or natural disaster. In agriculture, greater biodiversity means that there will be varieties of crops to match a variety of climates and to combat a variety of pests and diseases. Growing different crop species together is one example of how biodiversity can be applied to agriculture. This is called polyculture and can help combat pests, as well as prevent the soil from being depleted of nutrients. In the 50 years since the Green Revolution, the norm has become high-input monoculture: using large amounts of inorganic fertilizers and pesticides to grow one crop at a time. Monoculture is efficient, but fragile as well as unsustainable. On average in the U.S. it takes ten units of fossil fuel energy to put one unit of food energy on the table.

GMOs have the potential to become the pinnacle of monoculture, both from an agricultural and a societal viewpoint. Monsanto, a chemical company, creates many different types of GMOs; 93% of the soybeans in America come from Monsanto. This is an example of a successful monopoly of both the soybean industry, and the soybean genes. If soybeans dwindle down to just a few varieties, the American food supply will be vulnerable to a single parasite or disease. Even the public debate over GMOs has the ring of a monoculture. When millions of bees die in Canada beside a freshly planted field of GMO corn, the genetic modification itself was blamed rather than the pesticide.

I know I start to trail off a bit at the end, but here is a word vomit-esque idea of where I want to go with my essay.