Fighting Mother Nature with Biotechnology Page 1 of 16 PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). (c) Oxford University Press, 2014. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy ). Subscriber: Oxford Online OUP-USA; date: 11 August 2014 Subject: Political Science, Comparative Politics, Political Theory Online Publication Date: Aug 2014 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195397772.013.32 Fighting Mother Nature with Biotechnology Alan McHughen The Oxford Handbook of Food, Politics, and Society (Forthcoming) Edited by Ronald J. Herring Oxford Handbooks Online Abstract and Keywords This chapter is from the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Food, Politics, and Society edited by Ronald Herring. This article examines how biotechnology can be used to ensure a sustainable human future by address global problems such as human population growth, pollution, climate change, and limited access to clean water and other basic food production resources. It first considers the argument that rejects human technologies and industrial agriculture in favor of an approach that promotes a return to Mother Nature, along with the consequences of this perspective. It then turns to a discussion of popular misconceptions about the existence of a natural “species barrier” that prevents genes from moving from one species to another. It also provides a historical overview of agriculture before concluding with an evaluation of modern technologies that can sustain humans, particularly genetic engineering and biotechnology and their potential to address hunger and poverty. Keywords: biotechnology, population growth, pollution, agriculture, Mother Nature, species barrier, genes, genetic engineering, hunger, poverty, naturalistic fallacy. Recently, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN (FAO 2009) reported the world will need to increase food production by 50 percent in the next twenty years and by 70 percent in the next forty years. But these figures may be optimistic, even rosy. The challenges include, but are not limited to, a human population growing from the current 6.8 billion to more than 9 billion, with diminishing farmland, increased pollution, impacts of climate change, and increasingly limited access to clean water and other basic food production resources. What role, if any, will biotechnology play in assuring a sustainable human future? Some claim biotechnology is antithetical to sustainability, as it represents the undesirable epitome of human interference in natural (and presumptive “sustainable”) ecosystems, while others tout biotechnology as a “silver bullet” panacea to overcome each and every obstacle to a flourishing human future. In reality, biotechnology will certainly be used as one tool among many in the agricultural scientists’ toolbox. It cannot and will not overcome every threat; however, the formidable challenges to human survival cannot be met without judicious use of this powerful tool. And yes, it may be a tool designed by humans to thwart Mother Nature’s constraints on overgrowth by any one species. But so was agriculture itself, a tool adopted by our Homo sapiens ancestors some 10,000 years ago to divert shared natural resources to instead benefit just one species. How do we proceed now? Introduction Some two hundred years ago, Thomas Malthus (1766–1834), in thinking about the growth of the global human population and the various restraints on such population growth, predicted that humans would sooner or later run out of food and other resources and then suffer a catastrophic population crash (Malthus 1798). He may have predicted “sooner” due to ravages of disease, pestilence, and war, but humanity’s creative capacity for innovation