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By Salvatore Ceccarelli
In recent times, the public—and especially farmers—have been bombarded with the message that agriculture needs science to face future challenges, including climate change and feeding a continually growing world population.
It’s legitimate to ask: what kind of science are we really talking about?
Ecology teaches us that greater diversity means greater productivity (thus: feeding the world) and greater resilience (the ability to recover from events linked to climate change) [i].
The importance of diversity is also highlighted by medicine, which emphasizes the necessity of dietary diversity for a healthy gut microbiome. Our physical health (immune defenses) and mental health (anxiety, depression, youth and adolescent mental discomfort, and eating disorders) depend on this [ii].
Yet this medical guidance is difficult to put into practice, since the food system behind what we eat is based on uniformity.
This is the result of a deep contradiction within the scientific world about biodiversity: a contradiction between the science that supports the importance of biodiversity for food security (and thus health and resilience) and the science of plant breeding, which over the last hundred years has almost exclusively trended towards uniformity.
From this perspective—and regardless of technical differences—GMOs and products of New Genomic Techniques (NGTs) represent the most modern expression of uniformity as the goal of plant breeding.
Thus, the recent debate over whether NGT products are GMOs or not, while legally significant, has distracted attention from the biological reality that both suffer from the same fundamental weakness: they are evolutionarily losing strategies and as such, make farmers—especially organic farmers—more vulnerable.
The main weakness of GMOs and NGT products is that they disregard a fundamental biological law: the Fundamental Theorem of Natural Selection.
This principle, formulated almost a century ago, asserts that when the environment around living organisms changes (let’s remember that insects, plant disease fungi, and weeds are living organisms), those organisms, if diverse enough, evolve; only those able to adapt to new conditions survive and reproduce.
Chemical treatments or cultivating a GMO or NGT-resistant variety changes the environment for insects, fungi, and weeds—just as antibiotics change the environment for bacteria that cause disease in humans. The bacteria then develop resistance, posing a major global challenge. It’s important to clarify: it’s not the chemical treatment, GMO, NGT product, or—in the case of bacteria—the antibiotic that creates resistance. The resistance is already present as part of the diversity in those organisms; they exploit that diversity, evolving as needed.
Pathology and entomology (other sciences) have long told us that any mechanism for crop pest protection—whether genetic or chemical—can be either stable or unstable. GMOs and NGTs belong to the category of unstable solutions for crop protection. For this reason, they contribute to increasing, rather than decreasing, the uncertainty facing farmers, whose future is already undermined by climate change.
The scientific literature is full of articles documenting the evolution of resistance in the very organisms that GMOs and NGTs target. The most recent, published in February this year by researchers from 12 universities (10 of them American), describes the loss of resistance in a GM maize to an insect pest across 10 states in the US Corn Belt [iii].
In conclusion, GMOs and NGTs are temporary solutions that encourage the emergence of resistant weeds, insects, and fungi, making agriculture even more vulnerable and undermining seed sovereignty, and, consequently, food sovereignty. By contrast, use of biodiversity—recommended by much of the scientific community [iv] and applied through crop diversity, intercropping, and the cultivation of mixtures and populations (an approach nearly a century old)—offers farmers a lasting solution, because it prevents the development of resistant weeds, insects, and fungi, and most importantly, it is a solution that cannot be patented.
Despite the scientific evidence, the dominant narrative about the supposed advantages of NGTs is very compelling for a public that largely ignores the complexity of the relationship between DNA and the expression of crucial traits like drought resistance, the ability to withstand climate-related events, and resistance to diseases, insects, and weeds—a relationship in which the environment always plays a critical role, often even more important than that of DNA.
It is therefore urgent to spread as widely as possible what ecology, medicine, and even molecular genetics teach us about the importance of agrobiodiversity—not only as the most cost-effective and efficient tool to combat climate change, but also for fostering a virtuous relationship between agriculture, food, and health, not just for ourselves but for the planet as a whole.
It is also vital to make it known that behind the appealing narrative of what can supposedly be achieved by manipulating DNA, there are many untold truths—truths withheld even from policymakers, who should be among those hearing the message that “this is not the science agriculture needs.”
This article is excerpted from Navdanya International’s report:
Seeds of Resistance: GMO Deregulation and Grassroots Mobilization
References:
[i] Renard, D, Tilman D. 2019. National food production stabilized by crop diversity. Nature 571: 257-260. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-1316-y
[ii] Heiman, ML, Greenway FL. 2016. A healthy gastrointestinal microbiome is dependent on dietary diversity. Mol Metab. 5 (5): 317-320
[iii] Ye Z, DiFonzo C, Hennessy DA, Zhao J, Wu F, Conley SP, Gassmann AJ, Hodgson EW, Jensen B, Knodel JJ, McManus B, Meinke LJ, Michel A, Potter B, Seiter NJ, Smith JL, Spencer JL, Tilmon KJ, Wright RJ, Krupke CH. 2025
Too much of a good thing: Lessons from compromised rootworm Bt maize in the US Corn Belt. Science, 387 (6737): 984-989. doi: 10.1126/science.adm7634. Epub 2025 Feb 27
[iv] Ceccarelli S, Grando S, 2022. Return to agrobiodiversity: participatory plant breeding. Diversity 14:126 https://doi.org/10.3390/d14020126
Salvatore Ceccarelli was associate professor of Genetic Resources and later full professor of Applied Genetics at the University of Perugia until 1987. From 1980 to 2011, he worked at ICARDA in Syria, pioneering participatory plant breeding to boost yields, biodiversity, and climate resilience in countries such as Syria, Jordan, Algeria, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Yemen, and Iran. More recently, he has promoted evolutionary plant breeding to return seed control to farmers. He currently contributes to several selection projects across Italy. He is also a member of the Navdanya International board, serving since its founding.