And it’s not just plants that these chemicals fertilize. Since their advent, the human population has nearly tripled. Without these chemicals, Smil writes, billions of people would never have been born. The dousing of our crops with fossil fuels, in other words, meant we could now make unprecedented amounts of food. But now we had to.
For the large chemical companies, the global demand for more food provided a huge new market opportunity, not only for fertilizers and pesticides but for novel seeds to grow the crops themselves. By the late 1980s and early 1990s, the explosion of biotechnology—and especially in the ability of scientists to genetically engineer plants—meant that companies once devoted to chemistry began frantically shifting their emphasis to molecular biology. Chemical giants like Monsanto, DuPont, Syngenta, and Bayer began a frenzy of mergers and acquisitions, racing each other to dominate the world’s seed industry. Monsanto’s CEO Robert Shapiro moved especially aggressively in the mid-1990s, spending billions of dollars buying up seed companies and instantly making Monsanto the world’s biggest ag-biotech company. The company bought Calgene, the maker of the Flavr Savr tomato, mainly because the smaller firm had ideas about GM cotton and canola.
Similar changes were under way at Dow and DuPont, which started out as makers of explosives like phenol and dynamite and are now two of the biggest GM seed companies in the world. In 1999, DuPont spent $7.7 billion to buy Pioneer Hi-Bred, which controlled 42 percent of the U.S. market for hybrid corn and 16 percent of the country’s soybeans. The deal gave DuPont control of the world’s biggest proprietary seed bank, as well as a global seed sales force.
The consolidation of the agrochemical giants has continued. In late 2015, DuPont and Dow Chemical announced a $130 billion merger, and Monsanto made a $45 billion offer to buy Syngenta. The deal fell through, but Syngenta was immediately targeted by China National Chemical Corp., and Monsanto turned its attention to acquiring the crop science divisions of German chemical giants BASF and Bayer. Bayer responded in the spring of 2016 by offering to buy Monsanto for $62 billion. Monsanto rejected the bid as too low, but the companies remain in negotiations.
As late as the 1990s, the United States had hundreds of different seed companies; now we have a half-dozen. The biotech industry owns at least 85 percent of the country’s corn seed, more than half of it owned by Monsanto alone. “This is an important moment in human history,” Monsanto’s CEO Robert Shapiro said in 1999. “The application of contemporary biological knowledge to issues like food and nutrition and human health has to occur. It has to occur for the same reason that things have occurred for the past ten millennia. People want to live better, and they will use the tools they have to do it. Biology is the best tool we have.”
This, then, was the monumental shift that gave us GMOs. In a few short years, companies that had long known the power of chemistry discovered the power of biology. And the way we eat has never been the same.
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GENETIC ENGINEERS are correct when they say that the fruits and vegetables we see in the supermarket look nothing like their wild forebears. The tomatoes we eat today—juicy and sweet, not bitter and toxic—are the result of thousands of years of human selection. So is the corn. The first cultivated carrots—typically yellow or purple—were grown in Afghanistan. It was only after traders carried them to Europe and the Mediterranean, where they were crossed with wild varieties, that their offspring gradually turned orange.
In the nineteenth century, the Austrian monk and scientist Gregor Mendel discovered how a plant passed its traits from parent to offspring. Taking anthers from one variety and dusting them with pollen from another, he crossed some 10,000 plants: round peas with wrinkled peas; peas from yellow pods with peas from green pods; peas from tall and short plants. Every trait a plant’s offspring exhibited—height, color, shape—depended on what Mendel called “factors” that were either dominant or recessive. So if a round pod was crossed with a wrinkly pod, three out of four times the offspring would be round, meaning that was the dominant trait. The last one could either be round or wrinkly. That’s because these factors apparently came in pairs, one from each parent, and were inherited as distinct characteristics.
DNA was known to be a cellular component by the late nineteenth century, but Mendel and other early geneticists did their work without understanding its role in heredity. By the late 1940s, most biologists believed one specific kind of molecule held the key to inheritance, and turned their focus to chromosomes, which were already known to carry genes. As agricultural research began moving from the field into the laboratory, scientists discovered a new way to mirror natural selection: by exposing plants to chemicals or radiation, they could alter the plant’s biochemical development. They could force it to mutate. By some estimates, radiation mutagenesis has introduced some 2,500 new varieties of plants into the world, including many that find their way onto our plates, like wheat, grapefruit, even lettuce.
With the flowering of genetic engineering in the 1970s and 1980s, scientists figured out how to go into an organism—a plant or an animal, a bacteria or a virus—remove one or more genes, and stitch them into the genetic sequence of another organism. This process became known as recombinant DNA technology.
The first commercially available product of genetic engineering was synthetic insulin. In humans, insulin is normally made by the pancreas and helps regulate blood glucose; produce too little insulin, and you can develop type 1 diabetes. Traditionally, increasing a diabetic’s insulin required collecting insulin from the pancreatic glands of pigs or cattle, a problem not only for the animals but also for people who became allergic to the insulin’s different chemical structure.
In 1978, scientists at the company Genentech used genetic coding to create a synthetic insulin known as humulin, which hit the market in 1982. Today, this GM insulin is produced around the clock in giant fermentation vats and is used every day by more than 4 million people. Similar technology has been used to produce vaccines that combat hepatitis B; human growth hormone, which combats dwarfism; and erythropoietin (EPO), which helps the body produce red blood cells (and has been, illegally, used to boost racing performance by riders in the Tour de France).
In the late 1980s, genetic engineers turned their sights on cheese. Just a few years before the release of the Flavr Savr tomato, the combination of a single gene from a cow was stitched into the genome of a bacterium (or a yeast) to create rennin, a critical enzyme in the production of hard cheeses. Once obtained as a by-product of the veal industry, rennin was traditionally collected from the lining of a cow’s fourth stomach. GM rennin is now used in some 90 percent of the cheese made in the United States.
But compared with what was to come, these early experiments were, well, small potatoes. The real money, agrochemical companies knew, would come through genetically engineering the crops Americans ate most. Not cheese, but corn and soybeans. Control those crops, and you could dominate a fundamental part of the global economy.
Monsanto’s most important push was to create seeds the company could sell alongside Roundup, already the bestselling farm chemical in the world. Creating (and patenting) Roundup-resistant seeds would secure the company’s global share in seeds and herbicides. The world’s farmers wouldn’t buy just one. They would buy both.
“It was like the Manhattan Project, the antithesis of how a scientist usually works,” said Henry Klee, a member of Monsanto’s Roundup research team. “A scientist does an experiment, evaluates it, makes a conclusion, and goes on to the next variable. With Roundup resistance, we were trying twenty variables at the same time: different mutants, different promoters, multiple plant species. We were trying everything at once.”
It took four years, and a bizarre eureka moment, for Roundup Ready seeds to be born. Frustrated in their lab work, company engineers decided to examine a garbage dump 450 miles south of Monsanto’s St. Louis headquarters. There, at the company’s Luling plant on the banks of t
he Mississippi, the engineers found plants that had somehow survived in soil and ponds near contamination pools, where the company treated millions of tons of glyphosate every year. The hardiest weeds were collected, their molecular structure examined, their genes replicated and inserted into potential food crops.
When Roundup Ready soybeans were finally launched, in 1996, they instantly became an essential part of a $15 billion soybean industry. Roundup Ready soybeans covered 1 million acres in the United States in 1996; 9 million acres in 1997; and 25 million in 1998. Today, 90 percent of the country’s 85 million acres of soybeans are glyphosate resistant.
The first insecticide-producing corn plant was approved in 1996, the same year Monsanto released its Roundup Ready soybean. Today, the overwhelming majority of the GM crops grown in the United States—some 170 million acres of them—are still grown to feed the industrial food system. In Iowa, GM corn is grown to feed the numberless cows and pigs that enter into the fast-food system. In Maryland, GM soybeans are grown to feed the hundreds of millions of chickens on the state’s Eastern Shore, which will enter the same system. In Nebraska, GM canola is grown to make the oil to fry the french fries served in the country’s galaxy of drive-through restaurants.
Why are the crops genetically engineered? For the same reason the highways were built: they make everything faster, more uniform, more efficient. In the United States, GM crops are grown mainly for two reasons: to increase yields and—especially—to allow farmers to spray their crops with chemicals that kill insects, diseases, or weeds. By developing crops that can withstand regular pesticide dousing (or, like Bt corn, that can provide their own insecticide), scientists have enabled farmers to eliminate everything but the crops whose numbers they are trying to maximize. Gone are the weeds. Gone are the insects. The whole system works—in the most literal sense—like a well-oiled machine.
Food and chemical companies—and the farmers who grow for them—say that GM crops allow them to deliver a lot of food to a lot of people for very little money, and this is true, as far as it goes. Americans have become very comfortable spending relatively little money for their food. According to the World Bank, Americans spend considerably less per capita on food than anyone else in the world. Food expenses are much higher in the UK (9 percent), France (14 percent), South Africa (20 percent), and Brazil (25 percent). And our food is cheap not just compared with other countries; it’s cheap compared with the food we used to eat, before all our small farms moved to the Midwest. In 1963, the year I was born, Americans were spending close to a third of their income on food. Now we spend about 6 percent.
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SO HERE WE ARE. Genetic engineering did not create any of the structures that hold up our current food system. It merely added a set of tools—very powerful tools—to keep the whole machine running. The fact that these tools arrived on the scene at the very moment that the American food economy was becoming so intensely industrialized has created both enormous profits for the companies and enormous health and environmental problems for the rest of us. Had genetic engineering come about at a different time—were we still a nation of small farmers, for example, and were biotech companies making seeds to help local farmers grow nutritious produce—things might have turned out entirely differently.
But that’s not what happened. When it comes to GMOs, it’s impossible to separate science from industry, or industry from politics. It’s all tangled up together, and we are eating all of it. The argument that genetic engineering is just another step in a tradition of plant breeding that goes back 10,000 years is absolutely true. But it is also true that biotechnology has developed at a time when its primary use has been to fuel a food system that is far bigger, more complex, and more destructive than anything the world has ever seen.
Because this system has become so profitable, companies have gone to great lengths to cement their control over it in all three branches of the federal government. Through the White House, they push their own people to the top of federal regulatory agencies. In Congress, they use lobbyists and political muscle to influence policy, and to keep federal farm subsidies flowing. In the courts, beginning in 1980, they have repeatedly convinced judges that they deserve patents (to quote a famous court decision) on “anything under the sun that is made by man.” To date, tens of thousands of gene patents have been awarded to biotech companies, and tens of thousands more wait in the wings. This means, in the most fundamental way, that our food supply is owned and controlled by a very small handful of companies.
This is nowhere more evident than in the hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars that move through federal regulatory agencies into the hands of companies these same agencies are supposed to regulate. Between 1995 and 2010, large agricultural companies received $262 billion in federal subsidies, a great percentage of it going to companies developing GM food products.
It is also evident in the way federal agencies view their relationship with the companies they are charged with overseeing. Since the 1980s, regulation of GMOs has been handled through a complex web of three vast federal agencies. A genetic engineer has to get a permit from the USDA to field-test a GM crop. Then—after several years of trials—the engineer must petition for the deregulation of the crop. If the crop has been designed to be pest-resistant, the EPA will regulate it as pesticide and demand more data. Finally, the FDA evaluates the plant to make sure it is safe for consumption by people or animals.
But in reality, safety testing of GMOs in the United States is left to the companies that make them. This is very much in line with much of American regulatory policy and is dramatically different from the approach taken in Europe, where regulators require that the introduction of GM foods should be delayed until the long-term ecological and health consequences of the plants are better understood. In the United States, industry and government have decided that GMOs are “substantially equivalent” to traditional foods, and therefore should not be subjected to new federal oversight.
U.S. policy “tends to minimize the existence of any risks associated with GM products, and directs the agencies to refrain from hypothesizing about or affirmatively searching for safety or environmental concerns,” legal scholar Emily Marden writes.
Federal Government: Watchdog or Cheerleader?
The shift in federal policy from “regulating” GMO foods to “promoting” them was subtle, and to most of the country, entirely invisible. Back at the beginning, in 1974, Paul Berg, often called the father of genetic engineering, persuaded other molecular biologists to be cautious in the pioneering work they were doing in their laboratories. “There is serious concern that some of these artificial recombinant DNA molecules could prove biologically hazardous,” Berg wrote at the time. To address these questions, Berg and his colleagues at the National Academy of Sciences urged caution in the development of genetic engineering technology until scientists could form standards for biological and environmental safety. Addressing the technology itself, rather than its application to food production, the now famous “Berg Letter” acknowledged that such a cautious approach was based on “potential rather than demonstrated risk,” and might well mean the “postponement or possible abandonment” of some ongoing experiments.
“Our concern for the possible unfortunate consequences of indiscriminate application of these techniques,” Berg wrote, “motivates us to urge all scientists working in this area to join us in agreeing not to initiate experiments until attempts have been made to evaluate the hazards and some resolution of the outstanding questions has been achieved.”
After Berg’s letter was published, a group of scientists organized a closed-door conference at Asilomar, California, in February 1975 to formulate research guidelines that would prevent health or ecological trouble from rippling out from this new technology. But the letter also made it very clear that scientists themselves, and not the government, would be in charge of keeping an eye on things. No new legislation was needed, the letter
noted. Scientists could “govern themselves.”
James Watson, one of the discoverers of the double helix structure of DNA and an attendee at the Asilomar conference, made it clear that scientists were not interested in ethical guidance from outside the profession. Although some “fringe” groups might consider genetic engineering a matter for public debate, the molecular biology establishment never intended to ask for guidance. “We did not want our experiments to be blocked by over-confident lawyers, much less by self-appointed bioethicists with no inherent knowledge of, or interest in, our work,” Watson wrote. “Their decisions could only be arbitrary.”
Watson had nothing but contempt for those who would stand in the way of scientific research; he once referred to critics of genetic engineering as “kooks, shits, and incompetents.” The risks from this technology, he wrote, were about the same as “being licked by a dog.”
The National Institutes of Health quickly adopted the Asilomar conclusions and turned them into a national research standard: biotechnology research would be largely self-regulated and should be encouraged, not hampered, by federal oversight.
At first, most of the research being done in biotechnology had to do with medical research, not food production, and given the lack of public debate on the issue, few health or environmental groups paid much attention to genetically engineered food. But within a few years, the potential applications—and the potential profits—in agriculture became obvious. The question was, what would happen once this technology escaped the laboratory and was scaled up to reach all our dinner tables?
“In the 1970s, we were all trying to keep the genie in the bottle,” said Arnold Foudin, the deputy director of biotechnology permits at the USDA. “Then in the 1980s, there was a switch to wanting to let the genie out. And everybody was wondering, ‘Will it be an evil genie?’”
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