In 2012, two British environmental scientists reviewed the past fifteen years of published literature on the agronomic and environmental effects of biotech crops and found that such crops increase yields and produce impacts that are largely “positive in both developed and developing world contexts.” They add, “The often claimed negative impacts of GM crops have yet to materialize on large scales in the field.”
Indeed they have not.
Anti-Biotech Activists Kill and Blind Poor Children
Many leading environmental groups are against Golden Rice, a crop that could prevent blindness in half a million to 3 million poor children a year and alleviate vitamin A deficiency in some 250 million people in the developing world. By inserting three genes, two from daffodils and one from a bacterium, scientists at the nonprofit Swiss Federal Institute of Technology created a variety of rice that produces the nutrient beta-carotene, the precursor to vitamin A.
Agronomists at the nonprofit International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines have been crossbreeding the variety, called Golden Rice because of the color produced by the beta-carotene, with well-adapted local varieties and want to distribute the resulting plants to farmers all over the developing world who eat it as a staple food. In 2013, some Filipino “farmers” rampaged through the fields where the IRRI was growing the Golden Rice variety. The “farmers” were later identified as anti-biotech activists who have worked with Greenpeace in the past to block other biotech crop varieties.
Frankly, the scientific community has been far too passive for way too long in confronting the disinformation campaigns of anti-biotech groups such as Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, and the Union of Concerned Scientists. But the Golden Rice atrocity finally aroused researchers. In August of 2013, Science magazine published a strong editorial, “Standing Up for GMOs,” condemning activists for their anti-scientific attacks on crop biotechnology.
From the editorial: “If ever there was a clear-cut cause for outrage, it is the concerted campaign by Greenpeace and other nongovernmental organizations, as well as by individuals, against Golden Rice.” The scientists pointed out that vitamin A deficiency causes blindness and compromises the body’s immune system. The result is blindness for half a million children and 1.9 to 2.8 million preventable deaths annually, mostly of children under five years old and women. The statement notes that environmentalist campaigns are responsible for stalling the release of Golden Rice to farmers for more than a decade.
“Introduced into commercial production over 17 years ago, GM crops have had an exemplary safety record,” reads the statement. It adds, “And precisely because they benefit farmers, the environment, and consumers, GM crops have been adopted faster than any other agricultural advance in the history of humanity.”
Despite this clear record of safety, the statement continues, “The anti-GMO fever still burns brightly, fanned by electronic gossip and well-organized fear-mongering that profits some individuals and organizations.” Hooray! It’s great that thousands of researchers have finally called out Greenpeace and other anti-biotech activist groups for peddling and profiting from their disinformation.
In 2014, researchers in Germany and California published another study that calculated that the delay in getting Golden Rice into the fields of poor farmers in India has resulted in the loss of 1.4 million life-years in India that would otherwise have been saved. As the study noted, Golden Rice is “a cost efficient solution that can substantially reduce health costs.” Continued environmentalist opposition to this technology is just plain evil.
Biotech Crops and Superpests
Always willing to push its campaign against biotech crops, the Union of Concerned Scientists darkly advises that “genetically engineered crops can potentially cause environmental problems that result directly from the engineered traits.” The UCS adds that “the most damaging impact of GE in agriculture so far is the phenomenon of pesticide resistance.” The UCS goes on to warn that some insect and plant pests are already becoming resistant to biotech crop protection technologies.
What the UCS and other environmental lobbying groups must know is that researchers have documented for decades the evolution of pests resistant to conventional and organic insecticides and herbicides. It’s almost as though the environmentalists had never heard of DDT. This is basic natural selection at work.
Consider, for example, the 1984 article “History, Evolution, and Consequences of Insecticide Resistance,” in the journal Pesticide Biochemistry and Physiology. Note that the first commercial biotech corn was planted in 1996—that is, twelve years after this article appeared. From the abstract:
The first inkling of what the future held with respect to pesticide resistance of arthropods may be found in 1897 writings concerning the difficulties of controlling San Jose scale (Quadraspidiotus perniciosus (Comstock)) and codling moth (Laspeyresia pomonella (L.)). Eighty-three years later, the ever-growing list of resistant species involved 14 orders and 83 families, and numbered 428 different insects and acarines (e.g., ticks), of which 61 percent are of agricultural importance and the remainder of medical/veterinary concern.
So what to do to address the emerging pesticide resistance problem? Hit them twice or thrice. Researchers well before the advent of the biotech crop era had devised strategies for slowing down the evolution of pesticide resistance in insects. For example, a 1989 article entitled “The Evolution of Insecticide Resistance: Have the Insects Won?” in the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution noted: “A mixture of insecticides … can delay the evolution of resistance by several orders of magnitude compared with a rotation. Mixtures work because insects that receive a lethal dose of one insecticide are simultaneously dosed with the other insecticide as well. Only extremely rare individual pests, which have resistance mechanisms against both chemicals, will survive.” Those few that do survive will have difficulty passing along their double resistance because they will typically breed with untreated nonresistant mates.
This multiple-treatment regimen is precisely the strategy that plant breeders use when they “stack” several traits as a way to thwart pest resistance. Stacking traits is how researchers at Monsanto have created the Genuity SmartStax crop varieties. The new Monsanto Genuity corn variety incorporates six different genes aimed at controlling insect pests plus two for herbicide resistance. In addition, the company is developing Genuity varieties that are drought resistant and use less fertilizer.
What about “superweeds”? Again, the evolution of resistance by weeds to herbicides is nothing new and is certainly not a problem specifically related to genetically enhanced crops. As of April 2014, the International Survey of Herbicide Resistant Weeds reports that there are currently 429 uniquely evolved cases of herbicide-resistant weeds globally involving 234 different species. Weeds have evolved resistance to 22 of the 25 known herbicide sites of action and to 154 different herbicides. Herbicide-resistant weeds have been reported in 81 crops in sixty-five countries.
A preliminary analysis by University of Wyoming weed scientist Andrew Kniss parses the data on herbicide resistance from 1986 to 2012. He finds no increase in the rate at which weeds become resistant to herbicides after biotech crops were introduced in 1996. Since Roundup (glyphosate) is the most popular herbicide used with biotech crops, have the number of weed species resistant to Roundup increased? Kniss finds that the development of Roundup-resistant weeds has occurred more frequently among non-biotech crops. “Glyphosate-resistant weeds evolved due to glyphosate use, not directly due to GM crops,” he points out. “Herbicide resistant weed development is not a GMO problem, it is a herbicide problem.”
Biotech Crops and “Contamination”
Another environmentalist attack on biotech crops is the assertion that GMO pollen “contaminates” organic crops and thus economically harms organic farmers. Not so, says University of Oklahoma law professor Drew Kershen. First, Kershen points out that organic standards are process standards, not product standards. Organic crops receive c
ertification because of the way they are produced: no chemical fertilizers, no synthetic pesticides, and so forth. Saying a product is organic does not mean it is totally free of chemical fertilizers and synthetic pesticides. Organic farmers already experience accidental pesticide drift and the admixture of conventional seeds. They can still obtain organic certification, provided they conscientiously follow all the rules specified by the federal government’s National Organic Program. The same standard could easily apply to organic farmers whose crops have experienced minor interbreeding with transgenic crops.
Second, Kershen notes that US law generally does not allow those with special sensitivity to an activity to declare that they have been harmed by it. It is their responsibility to protect themselves from the activities they dislike. “You do not have a claim based on your assertion of increased sensitivity,” Kershen explains. “If you don’t like to hear rock music, you can’t prohibit your neighbors from playing it at reasonable levels. You have to protect yourself. Stay away from concerts. Soundproof your home.” Similarly, organic farmers could perhaps grow borders that would insulate their crops from their neighbors’ pollen flow.
But won’t consumers of organic products reject a farmer’s crops if they think it is “contaminated” with genes from genetically enhanced crops? Kershen says that argument won’t wash either. He offers an example in which a tattoo parlor legally opens between a florist and a Christian bookstore and advertises a special on satanic tattoos. Customers offended by the tattoo shop begin avoiding the florist and bookstore. Under American common law, the florist and the bookstore do not have a cause of action, because “economic expectation is not recoverable.” Similarly, an organic farmer who expected to sell his crop at a premium would nevertheless be able to sell it at market rates as a conventional crop; he loses only the premium he expected to gain.
Kershen makes the further point that those who have created a niche market should be the ones responsible for protecting it. “After all, they are the ones trying to differentiate their products in order to obtain higher profits,” he notes. “Therefore, the rest of us who don’t care shouldn’t be saddled with the costs of defending their self-imposed standards and labeling.” That would be akin to forcing conventional meat packers to carry “nonkosher” labels on all their meats for the benefit of kosher meat producers.
One method of dealing with the question of pollen flow is for organic farmers to set reasonable tolerances. Many activists and organic farmers advocate “zero tolerance” standards that would in effect outlaw genetically enhanced crops. Since every independent scientific body that has ever looked into the safety of biotech crops has found them to be safe, this would be an absurd requirement.
Crops have exchanged pollen for millennia, and they will continue to do so. Seed breeders have decades of experience in setting tolerances for seed purity. As Mark Condon, vice president for international marketing at the American Seed Trade Association, has explained, “seed purity certification standards were commonly set at 98 percent to 99 percent varietal purity levels or a standard of 1 percent to 2 percent adventitious genetic impurity.” It should be possible to maintain similar standards for organic crops. Since organic farmers set their own standards, they could easily adopt these tolerances and save themselves and conventional farmers a lot of trouble.
Another possibility is that biotechnology itself may come to the aid of organic farmers. Already researchers have developed a way to make genetically enhanced crops sterile, which would limit the spread of transgenes. It might turn out that such technical fixes will make biotech farmers the low cost avoiders and thus shift the balance in favor of organic farmers’ claims. You’d think organic farmers and environmentalists would be clamoring for these gene-sequestering technologies, but instead they strenuously oppose them. Why?
One amusing and particularly telling argument for opposition to this technology comes from Vandana Shiva. “The possibility that [biotech sterility] may spread to surrounding food crops or to the natural environment is a serious one,” Shiva gloomily posits in her book Stolen Harvest. “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.” Really? This dire scenario is not just implausible but biologically impossible: The gene technology causes sterility; that means, by definition, that the sterility can’t spread.
Biotech Seed Companies Do Not Sue Farmers for Accidental Pollination
Why are there patents in the first place? As Abraham Lincoln (himself a patent holder) explained in 1858, patents add “the fuel of interest to the fire of genius, in the discovery and production of new and useful things.” Patents are also a disclosure mechanism in which inventors are awarded exclusive use of their inventions for twenty years in exchange for clearly revealing to the rest of us how they are made, thus avoiding a world encumbered by trade secrets.
Activists have vigorously pushed the notion that biotech seed companies regularly and aggressively sue farmers who accidentally acquire patented genetically engineered germplasm via pollen drifting onto their farms from neighboring biotech crops. Their chief villain in this anti-biotech morality tale is nearly always the biotech seed company Monsanto. Such a situation would obviously be unfair and wrong. Fortunately, it has never happened.
Take the notorious case of Saskatchewan canola farmer Percy Schmeiser. Activists made a hero out of Schmeiser, who was sued by Monsanto for sowing its variety of herbicide-resistant canola without paying for it. Schmeiser claimed that the canola seed had somehow blown across his fence line. That is not a problem for Monsanto; accidents happen. How did Schmeiser find out that this had supposedly happened? He sprayed three acres of canola underneath some power lines with some Roundup and the plants didn’t die. Later testing showed that they were in fact a Monsanto herbicide-resistant variety.
In its decision, the Supreme Court of Canada outlined what then happened. “Mr. Schmeiser complained that the original plants came onto his land without his intervention. However, he did not at all explain why he sprayed Roundup to isolate the Roundup Ready plants he found on his land; why he then harvested the plants and segregated the seeds, saved them, and kept them for seed; why he next planted them; and why, through this husbandry, he ended up with 1,030 acres of Roundup Ready Canola which would otherwise have cost him $15,000,” wrote the court. Given these circumstances, it is not surprising that the court decided against Schmeiser.
In a more recent case, Indiana soybean farmer Vernon Hugh Bowman admitted that he had saved Monsanto soybeans and replanted them. He claimed that once he bought the seeds, what he did with them afterward, including saving and replanting, did not violate Monsanto’s patents. Bowman had the option of planting conventional soybeans whose seeds he could legally save for replanting each year. It’s clear that he chose not to do this because he specifically wanted the weed-control convenience Roundup Ready seeds afforded him; he just didn’t want to pay for them.
The case of Bowman v. Monsanto Co. made it to the US Supreme Court in 2013. During oral argument, Chief Justice John Roberts got right to the heart of the matter by asking: “Why in the world would anybody spend any money to try to improve the seed if as soon as they sold the first one anybody could grow more and have as many of those seeds as they want?” The court ruled unanimously against Bowman.
Given the hullabaloo spread by activists, one might be forgiven for thinking that big biotech companies are suing farmers all of the time. That’s not so. In fact, the vast majority of farmers in the United States keep their promise not to save seeds from crop varieties they purchase from biotech companies. Consider Monsanto’s record. The company sells its seeds to about 250,000 American farmers every year. Between 1997 and 2012, Monsanto filed only 145 lawsuits over seed patents, of which only 9 actually went to trial. Monsanto won each case at trial. An additional 700 or so cases have been settled out of court.
GMO Labeling?
Don’t
consumers have the right to know that they are eating foods made with ingredients from biotech crops? Concerned consumers should already know that in the United States, somewhere around 80 percent of all prepared foods in grocery stores contain ingredients from biotech crops. What sort of ingredients? Mostly soybean oil and corn syrup, in which biotech proteins and DNA are very nearly undetectable.
If consumers don’t know this, perhaps it means that they are not all that concerned. Nevertheless, polls regularly find that large majorities favor labeling biotech foods. There are good reasons to suspect that this may be because, after all, what self-respecting person ever would tell a pollster that he or she didn’t want to know something about an apparently important issue? A 2010 European Commission report, however, maintains that polls may not be a good way to evaluate actual consumer attitudes toward foods made with biotech crops. The researchers report that despite strongly negative polls, when it came to looking at actual buying behavior, “most people do not actively avoid GM food, suggesting that they are not greatly concerned with the GM issue.”
Under the specious banner of consumer rights, an unholy alliance of donation-hungry fear-mongering environmental groups and profit-hungry organic foods companies in the United States is campaigning for mandatory labeling of food made using ingredients from biotech crops. In several states, ballot initiatives have come up for a vote, and in others, legislatures are considering such a mandate. So why not label the foods and be done with it? Because the opponents of biotech farming are not actually interested in trying to give consumers information. Instead, their fond hope is that consumers will mistake such labels as warning labels and then shy away from buying foods made from biotech crops. In other words, they aim to spread disinformation, not provide real information.
The End of Doom Page 18