GM Crops and the Jevons Paradox: Induced Innovation, Systemic Effects and Net Pesticide Increases From Pesticide-Decreasing Crops

Abstract

The Jevons paradox describes how increased efficiency in the use of a resource can paradoxically increase rather than reduce its overall consumption. In agricultural systems, efficiency is confounded by a broad range of economic, ecological, social and evolutionary factors. Agriculture is a particularly elastic kind of production: Efficiencies in one input can lead to an increased consumption of other inputs as well as changes to system outputs. Furthermore, policy, market forces and farmer decisions shape the cultural notion of efficiency across the agricultural landscape. This paper expands the Jevons paradox to consider not just how increased efficiencies induce greater resource consumption in other parts of agrarian systems but also how that consumption entrenches capitalist monoculture. Genetically modified (GM) crops are a technology with the theoretical potential to make agriculture more efficient as a function of yield per input (e.g., water, fuel, fertilizer and pesticide) or unit of land. Like other technological efficiencies, however, the increased use of GM crops over the past 30 years has not contributed to input reductions nor to land reclamations, but to the expansion of agricultural land and increased use of the very pesticides these technologies are purported to curtail. Here, we present a global analysis of Herbicide Tolerant crops and an empirical case study from Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) cotton in India. In lowering the costs for pesticide applications at the farm level, GM crops not only induce greater overall consumption of those pesticides but also help to sustain this larger system of chemical-intensive monoculture.