GMOs, Malthus and Haber

While at a local cafe there was a conversation a couple of tables over. The peoples at that table where talking about filming a documentary movie about genetically modifies organisms.  The owner of the cafe knew I had some experience in film production so he introduced us to each other.  

The woman who was the leader of the group was an ardent supporter of organic farming. Like all idealists she had a lot more enthusiasm and rhetoric than solid facts. It is not easy thing for people who disagree with each other to maintain a civil conversation. The internet is nice because you can back up facts but people still see what they want see.

I am not for the wide spread use of genetically modified organisms without careful scrutiny, testing and cautious regulations. But GMOs are only a logical extension of modern farming. I had to agree with the other party that today's farming techniques are not sustainable but I had to totally disagree that the answer is small scale organic farming. It is kind of scary if you think about the future where both alternatives are possible catastrophes.

Farming even with all the equipment is still labor intensive.  Take away that fossil fuel driven tractor and replace it with a team of horses and you'll find that plowing 50 acres is about the most a family farm can handle -and the maintenance and care for a team of horses is a lot more than the tractor that can replace them. The economics of farming changes real fast if you can only plow 50 acres a season. Those economics also change for the whole society as well as for the farm family. Any civilization is only able to develop in proportion to its supply of surplus food.      

It not uncommon to have a romantic image of farming partly because so few of us ever worked on a farm. The people who are making their movie about GMOs tried to segregate out "natural" from "unnatural" farming.  It's probably more accurate to separate very intensive farming from less intensive farming because the whole idea of farming itself is unnatural.  

When small tribes of hunter gathers became farmers they had to carve up the land, plant segregate fields of single plants, kill pests and selectively breed plants and animals for human needs -making most these plants and animals unable to return to the wild. Once people started to farm they had a chance at a regular supply and surplus of food. Once you had a surplus of food to trade other people could devote their whole day at crafts like weaving and pottery, that diversified talents and made civilization possible.

In the Middle East and around the Mediterranean Sea here are a number of ancient ruins. Many are cities that were abandoned when the farmland around them stopped being productive. Sometimes the soil was exhausted, sometimes there was salt intrusion from continuous irrigation, sometimes the local climate changed -but once the crop yields began to decline the city also declined.

Europe was once on the verge of mass famine. In the late 1700's a British scholar named Thomas Malthus pointed out how the population of Europe was growing much faster that the continent's ability to grow food. He predicted a population crash and his writings started a very pessimistic and conservative school of thought known as Malthusian Theory. What Malthus didn't see was the first wave of the Green Revolution that came out of the Industrial Revolution.      

   

New farm machines made farmers more productive. Steam ships not only ferried away millions of peasant farmers to new lands but also brought back food from all around the world. The Irish Potato famine was a terrible cautionary tale of depending on a monoculture crop but other varieties of potatoes in central Europe didn't succumb to the blight and feed many millions more than wheat or barely could have.  The introduction of the potato in northern Europe actually ended the seasonal re-occurrence of scurvy every late winter - early spring.

Even with all the improvements in farming, where farmers could more intensely exploit the land like never before, it was not enough. The production of food in Europe in the 1800's was only marginally out pacing the growth in population.  By the end of the century there was a renewed interest in Malthus. The problem was the fertility of the land is based on the amount of nitrogen in the soil. Most food and cash crops take nitrogen out of the soil.  Returning nitrogen back to the soil by crop rotation and spreading manure on the land both had limits.  And that's when we get to Fritz Haber, maybe one of the saddest figures in modern history.

Fritz Haber was chemist and a fervent German patriot. In 1918 he won the Noble Prize for synthesizing ammonia. This made ammonia nitrate fertilizer possible. With ammonia nitrate fertilizer the land could be cheaply over dosed with nitrogen. Crop yields jumped and less land had to be left fallow, so there could be more land in continuous production.  Again Europe was saved from famine by technology.

But there was a dark side to this seemingly happy ending. Ammonia-nitrate compounds are the basis of high explosives.  Prior to Fritz Haber the only way to make high explosives was to use naturally occurring nitrates that were mostly mined in northern Chile. Germany and the Austrian-Hungarian Empire  had no access to the world's nitrate deposits and would not have be able to fight a long war unless they could synthetically produce them at home.

 

This was only half of the story of Fritz Haber. He not only developed the fertilizer that made farmers more productive he also develop several very effective pesticides.  These pesticides were seen as miracles of progress.  

When World War 1 started Fritz Haber used his knowledge of pesticides to prefect poison gas as a weapon of warfare. The man who save Europe was also instrumental in tearing it apart and became known as the father of chemical warfare. To this day his mathematical equation between the concentration of the poison and the exposure time is still known as the Haber Rule.

 

The Kaiser awarded Fritz Haber with the rank of Captain. Haber was proud of his work and defended it. He felt poison gas was no more inhuman that all the other ways troops were killed in battle, that death was death by whatever means it was inflicted.

Fritz Haber was born into a Jewish family. As an adult he converted to Lutheranism. When the Nazi party rose to power Fritz Haber was shocked to find out that he was no longer seen as a German patriot, that he was no longer even a German citizen.

In 1934 Fritz Haber left Germany to escape the persecution. He prepared to start a new life in Palestine, what is today Israel. He died of heart attack and maybe even a broken heart in Basel Switzerland.

Of all of the bitter ironies history still had one more left. Most of Fritz Haber's family was unable to escape from Nazi Germany. In the 1920's, after World War 1, Haber kept on working as a scientist, particularly with insecticides. One of the insecticides he created was the cyanide formulation of Zyklon A  and that was the precursor to Zyklon B  -the gas used in the death camps.

Somehow, somewhere, I think this Faustian Bargain parallels the story of GMOs. That progress has benefits but there's always a price to pay later -and the price isn't always obviously linked to the product.