The rest of the story: The anti-GE world exploded with outrage about transgenic genes “polluting and degrading one of Mexico’s major treasures” and the “Gene Giants . . . insulting the socio-cultural rights of Mexican farmers.” Greenpeace called for a ban on GE corn in Mexico.
Then Nature published two letters criticizing the methodology of the original Quist and Chapela paper along with an editorial discrediting the paper and regretting its publication. Four years later, in August 2005, Jorge Soberón was one of six authors (four in Mexico, two in the United States) of a paper in PNAS titled “Absence of Detectable Transgenes in Local Landraces in Oaxaca, Mexico (2003-2004).” The authors, “convinced we were going to verify Quist and Chapela’s results,” examined 153,746 seeds from 125 fields in the same region and found nothing. Despite the ongoing presence of GE corn in Mexico, there were no GE genes in the landrace corn crops. The authors speculated that if GE genes had been present in 2000, they had diluted to undetectable levels by 2003. (Science marches on: A researcher in 2008 reported finding traces of transgenes in 1 percent of 2,000 landrace samples.)
The whole episode was good for crop science because it set in motion important research into what is called “gene flow,” and corn is a fine subject for study because, unlike most crop plants, it is a promiscuous outcrosser. The maize landraces, it turns out, have been swapping genes with commercial crops for decades with no loss of diversity; GE genes are expected to be no different in that respect. Landrace farmers are well aware of the problem of “inbreeding depression” (as they say, the maize “gets tired”—se cansa), so they routinely blend in other varieties, and also vagrant genes on the pollen are always blowing from cornfield to cornfield. Israeli plant scientist Jonathan Gressel describes the customary situation in Genetic Glass Ceilings: Transgenics for Crop Biodiversity (2007):There has been gene flow from commercial varieties of crops to/from landraces growing nearby, only to the betterment, at times, of one party or the other. The farmer preserves the landrace, morphologically, tastewise, but actually (inadvertently) selects for individuals that have also picked up genes for disease or stress tolerance, or higher yields. This is especially apparent with the steadily improving maize landraces selected by Mexican farmers. The landraces of a century ago are not genetically identical with those two centuries ago or today, even if the farmers think they are.
Gressel deplores “politically laden terms such as preserving ‘genetic purity,’ which has the same connotation as preserving ‘racial purity.’ ” The real threat to landrace diversity everywhere in the world is urbanization—the young leave for better jobs in the city, and the local crops die out. Then the one remaining hope for abandoned landrace genomes is seed repositories like the famed International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center, near Mexico City.
Gene flow is the norm, in agriculture and in nature. Transgenes will flow, causing no more harm than any other commercial crop genes, and no less. There are three common solutions for the gene-flow problem, one easy, two tricky. One tricky technique involves making sure the implicated genes can’t flow because they’re engineered out of the pollen. Another approach involves surrounding the GE crops with “refugia” of non-GE plants, which isolates the transgenes. The easy fix simply makes sure that the GE plants are sterile, incapable of reproducing. Zero gene flow: complete solution. GE opponents hate that one. Read on.
TERMINATOR GENE FROM MONSANTO ENSLAVES FARMERS
The story: In 1998 a patent was awarded to the Delta & Pine Land Company for a technique they called GURT—genetic use restriction technology—which would engineer sterility into GE crop plants. The idea was to prevent farmers from cheating on their legal agreements with seed suppliers to always buy new seeds rather than keeping some for replanting. The agritech giant Monsanto, which owned a piece of Delta & Pine Land, indicated that it might buy the whole company to obtain a better stake in cotton seed supply. This raised fears that Monsanto might apply the GURT sterility technique to its GE crops.
A cry went up worldwide from GE opponents. “The ultimate goal of genetic seed sterility is neither biosafety nor agronomic benefits, but bioserfdom,” declared Pat Mooney, coining a term that stuck—terminator technology. (Mooney was then head of Rural Advancement Foundation International, later renamed ETC Group.) “This is an immoral technique that robs farming communities of their age-old right to save seed and their role as plant breeders,” said a Chilean official. “This is the neutron bomb of agriculture.” The roar grew for a year, especially in Europe and the developing world. Eventually Monsanto announced that it would not pursue the technology. (Sir Gordon Conway at the Rockefeller Foundation and Florence Wambugu in Kenya were among those who urged Monsanto to back off.) As of 2009, there were no sterilized GE crops anywhere in the world, handy as they would be for stopping unwelcome gene flow.
The rest of the story: Score one for impoverished environmentalists outmarketing rich corporations with great scare language like “terminator” and “suicide gene.” (More accurate would have been “maiden aunt technology,” but good luck selling that one.) There was some overreach though, such as this remarkable sentence: “The gradual spread of sterility in seeding plants would result in a global catastrophe that could eventually wipe out higher life forms, including humans, from the planet.” When I read that line somewhere, quoting Vandana Shiva, the antiglobalization activist in India, I figured it must be a misquote, so I looked it up in her book, Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply (2000). There it was; check it yourself. On page 83, you’ll find her warning of humanity’s doom from heritable sterility—a biological impossibility. Shiva usually describes herself as having been one of India’s leading physicists.
(By the way, the line is not originally hers. It was borrowed verbatim and unattributed from a 1998 essay privately published by Geri Guidetti, who runs the Ark Institute, a survivalist seed supply service in Oregon. According to one online description, Guidetti “has taught the biological and biochemical sciences at universities across the US for 20 years. She has authored hundreds of science and research articles.” Maybe so, but all I could find online by her were interviews and essays about the dangers of Y2K, bird flu, terrorists, and terminator technology.)
The fear that GE sterility technology would require the annual purchase of seeds is less novel and less alarming when viewed in the context of standard agricultural practice. Most farmers buy vigorous new hybrid seeds every year and have for decades. Hybrid seeds don’t “breed true”: the next generation is a chaotic mix. “From the seed company’s point of view,” explains Raoul Adamchak,this is great, for each year the hybrid seeds have to be created anew by the seed company. They are expensive, but most organic growers buy them, because the hybrid vigor, uniformity, disease resistance, yield, and sometimes taste, are deemed to be worth the extra cost. And, most farmers are unwilling to create their own inbred lines by cross-pollination each year. Few have the time to be both a breeder and a farmer.
Following the development of hybrid corn in the 1920s, by 1970 some 96 percent of U.S. corn crops were hybrid, and yield went up from 20 bushels an acre to 160 bushels an acre. In China, hybrid rice is taking over, reaching 65 percent of the crops in 2007. Quite apart from GE crops, buying new seed every year is the norm in the developed world and is becoming so in the developing world.
As for the “age-old right to save seed,” Jonathan Gressel has a sharp reply:Many of the [GE] detractors justify their antibiotech tirades by reasoning that farmers will have to buy seed and have turned “farmer-saved seed” into a holy mantra. Almost all those well experienced in agriculture know that there is nothing worse for farming than farmer-saved seed. Yields steadily decrease because of the loss of vigor, an increase in disease, and an often massive contamination with weed seeds. Only the very best growers are chosen to grow certified seed, and even they are heavily monitored by the seed companies, who are further regulated by governmental authorities.
• The Monsanto issue
is a distraction. Yes indeed, the company, under CEO Robert Shapiro in the 1980s, moved too fast, thoroughly botched the introduction of GE crops in Europe, and was secretive when it should have been transparent. Some blame it for focusing on benefits for farmers instead of consumers—yield and efficiency rather than nutrition and variety—but the customers of a seed and herbicide company are the growers, not the eaters. As for complaints that Monsanto and the other “gene giant” companies are forcing dependency on farmers, apparently there is some unclarity on the concept of “customer.” The moment Monsanto’s customers are unhappy with its service, they can switch to something else. Most farmers buy their seeds from a wide range of suppliers and brokers. If they want GE seeds, Monsanto is getting competition from Syngenta, Dow, and Dupont-Pioneer.
In a 1999 letter to Science condemning genetic engineering, Amory Lovins asked, “Is redesigning evolution to work not at its biological pace but at that of quarterly earnings reports—and to align not with biological fitness but with economic profitability (survival not of the fittest but of the fattest)—really a good idea?” Apart from his romantic notions about biological fitness and pace in agriculture, Lovins here seems to abandon the economic analysis he applies to nuclear power. He says the absence of private capital and market rewards is an argument against nuclear, but the presence of private capital and market rewards is supposed to be an argument against GE.
Being generically against corporations is no more useful than being generically against nations. There are good ones and bad ones, and sometimes good ones do bad things, and vice versa. In the case of GE opposition, the anticorporate bias is oddly selective, because GE agriculture companies are condemned, but massive multinational GE drug companies are not. The reason for that, Robert Paarlberg suggests, is that “multinational drug companies . . . deliver products with benefits widely valued in rich countries, whereas multinational seed companies do not.”
Why was water fluoridation rejected by the political right and Frankenfood by the political left? The answer, I suspect, is that fluoridation came from government and genetically engineered crops from corporations. If the origins had been reversed—as they could have been—the positions would be reversed too.
There is indeed a problem with the companies that currently dominate agricultural biotech, but it’s not one that environmentalists complain about, though I hope they will do so. Only a few big corporate players have survived a period of consolidation, caused partly by excessive anti-GE regulation that drove out small companies. The winners are Monsanto, Dow AgroSciences, DuPont-Pioneer, Syngenta in Switzerland, and Bayer CropScience and BASF Plant Science in Germany. This oligopoly was formed, geneticist Pamela Ronald points out, partly to aggregate and control the intellectual property of patented genes and techniques that are the engine of agribiotech. “What this means,” she writes,is that the private companies now have even more control over who uses the technology of genetic engineering. If a particular aspect of the technology is key to the entire process—say for example, the means to introduce a gene into a plant—denial of access to a single technological component is essentially equivalent to denial of access to the entire process. This “exclusive licensing” by universities of key aspects of GE technology to private corporations greatly restricts the ability of the public research sector to develop new crops using GE.
Alternatives are emerging, fortunately. Developing countries are building their own noncorporate GE programs suited to their unique agricultural needs, often with funding and scientific assistance from the Rockefeller Foundation, the McKnight Foundation, or the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and often in open-source mode, in which the new techniques are freely shared. Richard Jefferson in Australia runs a nonprofit called Cambria that develops unrestricted GE tools. With backing from Rockefeller, his group has devised two techniques that engineer around the patent-controlled GE methodologies and free them up, particularly for use in Southeast Asia.
Pamela Ronald, at the University of California-Davis, isolated a gene that gives rice resistance to a major disease. True to her inclination, the university gave Monsanto and Pioneer the option to license the gene in certain crops grown widely in the developed world, but denied licensing rights for rice in poor countries. Furthermore, the gene was widely and freely distributed throughout the world to anyone who wanted it. Chinese scientists have now developed a GE hybrid rice carrying this gene, and the disease-resistant rice seed may soon be distributed freely to growers.
With public support, GE projects for local crops are proliferating in the developing world. A roster as of 2005, according to Joel Cohen and Jennifer Thomson, includes the following:In Africa, four countries (Egypt, Kenya, South Africa and Zimbabwe) are developing GM apples, cassava, cotton, cowpea, cucumber, grapes, lupin, maize, melons, pearl millet, potatoes, sorghum, soybeans, squash, strawberries, sugar cane, sweet potatoes, tomatoes, watermelons and wheat. The traits included agronomic properties, bacterial resistance, fungal resistance, herbicide tolerance, insect resistance, product quality and virus resistance.
Similarly in Asia, seven countries (China, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan, Philippines and Thailand) are developing GM crops including bananas and plantains, cabbage, cacao, cassava, cauliflower, chickpeas, chilli, citrus, coffee, cotton, eggplant, groundnuts, maize, mangoes, melons, mung beans, mustard/rapeseed, palms, papayas, potatoes, rice, shallots, soybeans, sugar cane, sweet potatoes and tomatoes.
In Latin America, four countries (Argentina, Brazil, Costa Rica and Mexico) are developing GM lucerne, bananas and plantains, beans, citrus, maize, papayas, potatoes, rice, soybeans, strawberries, sunflowers and wheat.
So much for the leftist dread of centralized corporate control of global food production through genetic engineering. GE instead is proving to be a tool of regional empowerment, enhanced cultural variety in foods, and the ability of farmers to sell to global markets without being controlled by them.
Genetic-engineering enthusiasts have their own favorite stories that appear repeatedly in books with titles like Seeds for the Future, Mendel in the Kitchen, Liberation Biology, Genetically Modified Planet, and Tomorrow’s Table. Here’s one they all tell you that you never see in the anti-GE articles and books.
EVERYONE LOVES GE PAPAYAS IN HAWAII
The story: In the 1960s, an outbreak of papaya ringspot virus wiped out the industry on Oahu, so the growers moved to the Puna area on the Big Island, where the virus hadn’t yet invaded. Then in 1992, just when the annual papaya crop reached 53 million pounds, the ringspot virus was detected in Puna. Fortuitously, that same year, field trials showed that a transgenic line of papayas incorporating a gene from the virus worked like a vaccination against the disease. The race was on. As they watched their papaya trees go barren with the virus, the growers collaborated with state officials and the developer of the GE papayas, Hawaiian virologist Dennis Gonsalves, to get regulatory approval for the resistant line. They got it through the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 1996, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Food and Drug Administration in 1997. (Conventionally bred plants, remember, face no such gauntlet.) In 1998 the new seeds were distributed free to growers. By 2001 the papaya crop was heading back to full strength. The two GE varieties, SunUp and Rainbow, were delicious, delighting consumers throughout the United States, Canada, and eventually Japan. Probably you’ve eaten some, because 90 percent of all Hawaiian papayas are transgenic now.
The rest of the story: European importers of gourmet foods wanted the Hawaiian GE papayas but were not allowed to bring them in. Organic papaya growers in Hawaii cleverly plant their non-GE papaya trees in the middle of GE orchards and thus are protected from the virus.
Greenpeace activists in Thailand, defying the interests of poor farmers, persuaded the government to ban field tests of GE virus-resistant papayas, but the technology is being pursued actively in China, and many expect that once China adopts GE papayas, all of Asia will. (In 2008 China inaugurated a $3.5 billion program
to accelerate a “transgenic green revolution” and advance “from high-input and extensive cultivation to high-tech and intensive cultivation.”)
The Hawaiian papaya story may exemplify how GE crops can best be introduced in much of the developing world. Papayas are considered a minor crop (though they are far from minor to Hawaiians and to poor people throughout the tropics), so multinational corporations had no role in the drama in Hawaii, and neither did multinational environmental organizations. The process of getting the GE papaya lines deregulated was run mainly by the growers themselves, which made the whole campaign transparent, fast, and inexpensive. Important assistance came from the public sector: Agricultural programs at the University of Hawaii and Cornell University collaborated in the effort, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture helped out with $60,000. Once the new crops went on sale, local consumers instantly relished the GE papayas, and that attitude spread to export markets overseas. It’s a success story with no shadows, unlike the next one.
GOLDEN RICE SAVES LIVES, PREVENTS BLINDNESS IN MILLIONS
The story: Rice feeds half of the world’s population, but it lacks important micronutrients such as beta-carotene, the precursor for vitamin A; and vitamin A deficiency is a major affliction of the world’s poor. According to the World Health Organization, “An estimated 250,000 to 500,000 vitamin A-deficient children become blind every year, half of them dying within 12 months of losing their sight.” The UN Children’s Fund reported in 2004, “Vitamin A deficiency is compromising the immune systems of approximately 40 percent of the developing world’s under-fives and leading to the early deaths of an estimated one million young children each year.”
Whole Earth Discipline Page 18