Genetic Engineering

According to a study published on Tuesday (30 November), the cost of pesticides may far outweigh the economic benefits. The Bureau for the Appraisal of Social Impacts for Citizen Information (BASIC), a Paris-based NGO, found pesticide producers cost the EU €2.3bn in subsidies. At the same time, the sector makes about €900m in profits, and the study argues this is not an efficient way of spending agricultural funds.

In 2011, three top US government scientists penned an opinion piece in The Washington Post arguing why research modifying highly pathogenic avian influenza (H5N1) was a worthy undertaking. At the time, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) was facing blowback over having funded experiments that modified the virus to be transmissible among ferrets.

Philanthropist Bill Gates fed the retreat from science in his book How to Avoid a Climate Disaster earlier this year. "To me fertilizer is magical," he confesses, nitrogen fertilizer in particular. Under a photo of a beaming Gates in a Yara fertilizer distribution warehouse in Tanzania, he explains that "to grow crops, you want tons of nitrogen—way more than you would ever find in a natural setting [sic]…. But nitrogen makes climate change much worse."

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has determined that the endocrine-disrupting pesticide atrazine and cancer-linked pesticide glyphosate are each likely to harm more than 1,000 of the nation’s most endangered plants and animals.