Schneier on Security

Roger • October 23, 2006 2:04 AM

Ah, the politics of fear. There’s nothing like a good old “food scare story”. The fact is, food scare stories are among the most poplar of urban myths, and nearly all of them are at least wildly exaggerated, if not complete bunkum. In reality our food supplies have never been safer, nor more rigorously surveilled for infractions against rigid safety standards.

This example is a great case in point. The worst food scare story from the US for the year 2006 was an outbreak of food poisoning in which 199 people (out of 1/3 billion USAians) became ill and three died. This is not being treated as a trifling matter; the FBI is already investigating the processor responsible to see if they faked their quality control tests. If so, someone is going to prison for this. But to put the incident in perspective, in the total of all incidents, the same food borne disease kills an average of 61 USAians per annum, while 73 are killed by lightning bolts. The “Vegetable-Industrial Complex” has made deaths from food borne illness EXTREMELY RARE.

It would take entire books to analyse some of the tales that float around, but one which can be shredded in seconds is the monoculture myth. It’s total bunk. Of the world’s major food crops, the only one for which it is even approximately true are bananas; the dessert banana export trade is dominated by one cultivar, the Cavendish. The reason for this vulnerability is that dessert bananas are propagated by cloning, the only major food crop for which this occurs. However dessert bananas are not a staple, and there are more than a dozen other banana & plantain species in local production as food staples.

Wheat has six species in commercial production; production is dominated by one species, Triticum aestivum (the other 5 only account for about 5% of world production), but T. aestivum has 5 subspecies and more than TWO HUNDRED commercial cultivars.

There are two species of true rice (both in commercial production) and 4 species of “wild rice” (two of them in large scale commerical production, one in small scale production, and one rare). Between these there are at least 40 cultivars in large scale commerical production, with hundreds of others known, (and the number being studied by the rice biodiversity project possibly reaching the thousands.) Even this does not tell the whole story; for example, the popular American cultivar “Calrose” (a cultivar of the japonica subspecies of Oryza sativa) has at least half a dozen known “strains”.

Maize has only one species in significant commercial production, Zea mays. This was formerly subdivided into 8 subspecies but the number of cultivars is so enormous that for this species a special genetic classification system has been devised, which goes 4 levels deep below “species”.

Sorghum is an entire genus with more than 30 distinct species in production; while millet is a grab bag term for at least nine different species which aren’t even in the same genus.

To cut a long story short (“too late!”, they cry), the idea that major food crops are monocultures is a nice frightening story but it is pure fiction.

Roger • October 24, 2006 2:45 AM

@J.

for example obesitas. A major problem in the US and rising….

Where did that come from? We were talking about crop security.

How many of those you name are GM?

Well under 1%.

How many of those are being sprayed with Monsanto’s round-up?

Of the crops I mentioned, the only one for which there even exists a Monsanto “roundup ready” strain is maize. So for wheat, rice, bananas, sorghum and millet (as well as barley, rye, oats, etc.) the answer is “none of them”.

About 9% of world maize production, by mass, was of GM strains; most of that in the USA.

The largest GM crop is soybeans, which are the single most important oilseed but a minor crop in comparison to cereals. About 80% of the worldwide commercial harvest, by mass, comes from GM varieties, largely because of a substantial increase in US consumption over the last decade — an increase fuelled by claims of health benefits which have since been thrown into serious doubt. Among other things, it has now been proven that excessive soybean consumption suppresses thyroid function, symptoms of which include chronic fatigue and obesity.

GM can cross-contaminate, and such is a true problem with Monsanto’s legal dept as well as non-GM crops themselves. Various documented cases on that.

You may be referring to the infamous Monsanto v. Schmeiser case, which has been grossly misrepresented by Schmeiser’s advocates (and anti-GM activists). Monsanto’s legal claims did originally claim against Schmeiser’s 1997 crop, which Schmeiser claimed had been accidentally contaminated with GM seed from neighbour’s farms. This excuse was unlikely to be true (the number of “contaminated” plants was far too large), but Monsanto withdrew all their claims against that crop anyway. The claim that Schmeiser lost was against his 1998 crop; there was never any suggestion that was accidental, rather there was clear evidence that he had his farmworkers deliberately collect “Roundup Ready” seeds and sow them exclusively over some 98% of his fields, without paying Monsanto’s royalty.

Do you have references of a society where all the people eat exactly the same food for more than say 200 years? I don’t.

Well first, yes; there are many examples. To pick a few at random, there are parts of Asia where the same strain of rice has been the dietary staple for more than a thousand years, while the “Three Sisters” formed the basis of much Native American agriculture for at least 1500 years (and possibly as much as 8,000 years). And on a similar, but orthogonal strand, the Inuit (and before them, the Thule people) consumed a diet of mainly marine mammal meat and blubber, a lesser amount of wildfowl and fish, and almost zero vegetable component, for at least 1300 years (and were very healthy with it, too!)

But in any case, who is talking about 200 years? Patents only last for 20 years. The Roundup patent has actually already expired, and the patent on “Roundup Ready” soybeans expires in 10 months time, in August 2007.

Then there is a by Monsanto patented GM crop which has a gene which self-terminates after a year. Think if that cross-contaminates with non-self-terminating crops.

The so-called “terminator gene” is not for agricultural crops; it is a safety mechanism to stop GM crops from escaping into the wild whilst still being tested. It also isn’t exactly one year, it is one generation. And it isn’t a gene, which can cross-contaminate, it is a chemical treatment. Monsanto does have several other “genetic termination” patents but none of them have even been proposed for field trials, never mind commercialised.

It is much like an Auswitz,…

Well, that’s really nailing your colours to the mast, isn’t it. Plonk.

Roger • October 25, 2006 7:25 PM

@Dan Greer:
Dan, some of what you have been told about this program is severely exaggerated for dramatic effect. I suggest you read the USDA’s response, to be found at:
http://animalid.aphis.usda.gov/nais/downloads/print/Guide_Smal_NonCommercial_6_2_06.pdf

In particular:
* It is not only voluntary, there are no enforcement provisions of any kind. That is because the NAIS is seen as a valuable service to farmers. If they don’t want it, too bad.
* It is simply not true that no animal may enter the food stream without a NAIS ID. NAIS is to assist in more accurately and rapidly establishing quarantine in a disease outbreak, it is not related to the food safety program.
* it covers all the important species raised for food or wool, but there are many species not covered, not just pet cats and dogs.
* There is NOT any requirement at all for microchipping. How participants identify an animal to USDA is their own concern, most will probably continue to use ear tags.
* There is not any GPS or real time tracking component. That is pure fiction issued from Rumour Central.