Climate Change: We need more than GMO crops
The iconic green cornfields of the American Midwest are about to shrink — not in acreage, but in stature. A new genetically modified (GMO) corn varietal stands on fatter stalks and grows less than 7 feet tall, about a third shorter than the height of conventional corn. Dubbed “Smart Corn” by its developer, the German pharmaceutical company Bayer, this well-timed mutant has been designed to withstand the increasingly costly pressures of climate change.
The implications are as harrowing as they are inspiring — and not because stubbier corn is genetically modified. I’ve argued before that GMO crop breeding, which inserts bits of DNA from one species of plant into the genome of another, can be judiciously applied in ways that benefit human health and the environment.
Short-stature corn is harrowing because it’s yet another recent example of an ingenious adaptation that’s making it easier for policymakers, investors and voters to avoid solving the far bigger challenge at hand: climate change. The most promising new methods of acclimating to the climate crisis are worth celebrating, but they should also be considered a clarion call to solve the problem at its root.
Bayer’s Smart Corn was recently determined by the Department of Agriculture to be safe for farmers to grow in the US. It still requires sign-off from the Environmental Protection Agency, pending reviews of the crop’s ecological effects. Approval is likely, in part because many other GMO crops have already been deemed environmentally benign. Moreover, Smart Corn is one of the first crops designed for the very purpose of addressing environmental factors.
Damage to corn and soy crops is becoming more costly as high-wind storms intensify in the climate change era. In the US these phenomena, known as derechos, have been devastating farms throughout the Midwest with 100-mph winds that caused billions of dollars of damage across millions of acres of crops in 2020 alone. Last month brought storms nearly as severe.
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