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Beware geeks bearing gifts.

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The best publishers’ freebie online these days is last month’s special issue of Science devoted to food security. But the gratis offering raises more questions than gratitude.

It’s an indicator of the potential of the food movement to transform the way the Big Questions of life, power and purpose are debated that a mag with the stature of Science would enter the fray with a free read.

What’s being served up here, however, is Big Science as world saviour, not the sharing of scientific methods among lay folk like farmers, food activists, health practitioners, nutritionists and anti-poverty activists.

Several writers in the special issue admit that food was neglected by mainstream science for half a century. Then came the 2008 crisis brought on by rising food costs, and the subsequent consensus that an increasing world population is heading toward a cliff of rapidly declining land, water and fertility for abundant and low-cost food.

Thus, the theme of the issue: looming scarcity can only be headed off with the methods promoted by Big Science – precision irrigation, fertilization, seeds (aka genetic engineering) and machines. Surprisingly, the issue provides no evidence of scientific debate, normally the companion of scientific discussion.

Hold onto your hats. This is the hard-sell language, style and mood-setting of the Axis of Scarcity.

“We have little time to waste,” says the lead editorial. There are “perhaps 40 years to… work out how to grow more food without exacerbating environmental problems.” The time scale is urgent, and the scale of Big Changes goes beyond slow and steady adaptations because “the number of undernourished people already exceeds 1 billion.”

Though the issue mainly “focuses on how to increase the supply of basic staples,” there are articles promoting less meat-intensive diets and a variety of meat alternatives, such as insects. “Science can help to make the choices less unpalatable,” the editorial concludes.

Several articles amount to full-on promos for next-generation genetic engineering. The Green Revolution of the 1950s featured rice and wheat plants that required more water and fertilizer, neither of which is still plentiful, says the lead article. Present-day GE focuses on a small number of traits such as the ability to withstand heavy doses of a particular pesticide or the ability to fend off a particular pest.

In the future, we will need multiple combinations of desirable traits, not only in plants but also in cloned animals.

Recognizing that opposition to GE is widespread, the authors “accept the need for this technology to gain greater public acceptance and trust” and recommend that minds be kept open. Not that any of theirs are. There’s no proposal, for example, for seed development strategies free of corporate control or the species-boundary-busting technologies involved in mixing and matching genes.

The articles also favour aquaculture, the raising of fish in captivity, which requires Big Bucks for both pure and applied research as well as tech development. That, of course, is the vested interest of Big Science, which has a hard time identifying low-cost, humble, modest improvements that rely on the low-cost and humble efforts of modest people.

I hate to be the one to tell the editors of Science, but fixing the food system is not rocket science. Indeed, rocket science is the problem. The unexamined reality is that the world is rich in opportunities that can’t be identified or “exploited” from a Big Science perspective.

The lead article notes that meat-centred diets hoard a third of high-quality grains and oilseeds, but there is no hint that livestock could well be better raised on a science-free ration of what primitive herders and their modern imitators refer to as grass.

The scarcity problem, centrepiece of the special issue, is a problem fabricated by our limited scientific imagination. The special issue of Science alerts us to the need for a fresh look at a broader horizon, but my hunch is that the science of Science is not the answer.

news@nowtoronto.com

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