From: The Tale of the Three Little Pigments

The green dilemma

Chlorophyll stands at the centre of some of the great global challenges of the age. Take the example of sorghum. It’s difficult to dispute the view that increasing sorghum productivity – by keeping the crop greener, for example – helps to improve the circumstances of the most disadvantaged people in some of the most difficult environments, and will contribute towards achieving United Nations Development Goals. But the strategy is burdened with socio-political complexities, centred on the need for a Doubly Green Revolution, to use the title of the influential book by Conway, and concerns about protecting the rights, knowledge and germplasm of indigenous peoples against biopiracy and agribusiness exploitation. Across the world we find the ideals of Green Revolution and Green Environmentalism in collision, a strange state of affairs when the two movements might be expected to be on the same side.

The history of the influx of physicists to the field of genetics in the middle of the last century and their influence on the birth of the molecular biology revolution is well documented. Rather less familiar is the story of the decades following the 1939-45 World War in which a generation of scientists (physicists, mathematicians and engineers, as well as biologists) chose to devote their skills to agriculture (these days they go into finance). A powerful influence was the exposure of ordinary people in the developed world, for the first time, to images of mass starvation on the television screen in the corner of the room. Paul Ehrlich’s apocalyptic best-seller The Population Bomb caught, and intensified, the mood of the age. Radical political movements in the West at that time also contributed to the motivations of the new agriculturalists. Above all, most of those who took this path thought they were doing something honourable and philanthropic. Surely devoting one’s professional life to defeating famine was the right thing to do.

From the perspective of the next century, this attitude looks at best naive and, when it comes up against the anti-technological politics of contemporary popular Green movements, positively shameful. Many of the original idealistic feed-the-world scientists are still in business but having to contend with sometimes bewildering and frustrating hostility from groups that ought to share their ideals. Among the serious consequences are stagnation of financial and societal support for open public-good crop research, driving more and more of this work into the private corporate sector. It is difficult to see how this will benefit the poor and disadvantaged. These developments are all the more vexing now that at last we are acquiring the tools to do the job. That these tools are technological (particularly biotechnological) is, to a large measure, the problem. To get them accepted by those who should benefit from agricultural progress needs trust. Lack of nuance and sensitivity on the part of agribusiness and governments, and a general failure of communication by a scientific community driven by the best intentions, can land the average green-sympathetic jobbing crop scientist with a crisis of conscience. Is she doing good or harm?