The End of Doom

by Ronald Bailey

  This is why the US Food and Drug Administration has refused to require labels on foods made from biotech crops. As has been shown earlier, every independent scientific body that has considered the issue has determined that the current varieties of biotech crops are safe to eat. The FDA states that the agency “requires special labeling … in cases where the absence of such information may pose special health or environmental risks.” The FDA further notes that it “has no basis for concluding that bioengineered foods differ from other foods in any meaningful or uniform way, or that, as a class, foods developed by the new techniques present any different or greater safety concern than foods developed by traditional plant breeding.” Since foods using biotech ingredients do not pose special health or environmental risks, they need not be labeled. A statement issued in 2012 by the board of directors for the American Association for the Advancement of Science noted, “The FDA does not require labeling of a food based on the specific genetic modification procedure used in the development of its input crops. Legally mandating such a label can only serve to mislead and falsely alarm consumers.” Misleading and alarming is the goal of activists.

  In a March 14, 2013, editorial, “Why Label Genetically Engineered Foods?” The New York Times pointed out that there is no scientific reason for requiring such labels. The Times editorial made the sensible observation that if people wanted to avoid foods made with biotech ingredients, they could simply buy foods labeled organic.

  In 2013, the grocery chain Whole Foods Market announced that it will require its suppliers to either source non-GMO ingredients or to clearly label products with ingredients containing GMOs by 2018. Of course, private companies have a perfect right to make such contractual arrangements.

  In April 2014, Representative Mike Pompeo (R-KS) and Representative G. K. Butterfield (D-NC) introduced the Safe and Accurate Food Labeling Act. The act would require the FDA to promulgate rules with regard to voluntarily labeling foods as containing or not containing ingredients from bioengineered crops. The new FDA labels “may not suggest either expressly or by implication that foods developed without the use of bioengineering are safer than foods produced from, containing, or consisting of a bioengineered organism,” and vice versa. In addition, the act would preempt individual state biotech labeling mandates. Naturally, this preemption provision has riled anti-biotech activists. Given the vexed politics of the labeling fight, it is doubtful that this act will become law.

  University of California agronomist David Zilberman worries that compulsory labeling would stigmatize biotech products and reduce investment in new GM traits. “The net effect will be to slow the development of agricultural biotechnology, and this in turn may negatively affect health, the economy, and the environment,” he writes. “It is actually counterproductive to the many environmental and social goals that we cherish. Therefore, labeling of GMOs will be a step in the wrong direction.”

  Looking at the political trajectory of the battle over labels, it is probable that food companies will end up simply slapping a label on everything saying: “This product may contain ingredients from modern biotech crops.” The information should merely be included in the list of ingredients. One can hope that as the EU report suggests, for most consumers, including those shopping at Whole Foods, such information will pretty soon go in one eye and out the other with little effect on their purchasing decisions.

  Biotech Corporate Domination

  In developed countries, the production of biotech crop varieties is currently dominated by six seed companies. Anti-biotech activists make much of this corporate concentration, slyly suggesting that food security is somehow threatened by corporate control. It didn’t have to be this way. This corporate concentration is the predictable result of the restrictive regulatory system promoted by the activists themselves. Prior to the 1990s, there were scores of seed companies in the United States alone. As modern biotech crop seeds were being developed, environmentalists insisted that each new variety had to undergo separate approvals, even though seed companies were enhancing crops using essentially the same set of traits—that is to say, pest and herbicide resistance. This is wholly unnecessary since, if due care is observed, a trait that is safe in one crop or variety is safe in another.

  Environmentalists hoped that this onerous procedure of regulatory approval for each individual variety would make biotech crops uneconomic. Instead, it drove most of the small seed companies out of business. Today it costs about $136 million, in part because of regulatory requirements, to bring a new bioenhanced variety to market. Small companies and nonprofit researchers cannot afford this process. BASF Corporation, Bayer CropScience, Dow AgroSciences, DuPont/Pioneer Hi-Bred, Monsanto, and Syngenta have the financial and legal resources to navigate the regulatory maze. These companies have a great deal to thank environmentalists for, since the regulations the activists demanded have significantly enhanced their corporate bottom lines by blocking competition.

  The Farmer Suicide Myth

  There is apparently no evil of which crop biotechnology cannot be accused by anti-biotech campaigners, up to and including “genocide.” One of the more egregious examples of outright falsehoods being peddled by activists is that the introduction of modern pest-resistant cotton in India provoked hundreds of thousands of farmer suicides. In 2002, a local Indian seed company made available bioenhanced cotton seeds using Monsanto’s Bt insect resistance trait. Farmers flocked to it.

  Activist-charlatan Vandana Shiva has been a particularly enthusiastic hawker of the “suicide seeds” accusation. In 2006, her institute issued a report that asserted that Bt cotton had failed, driving poor farmers into debt and despair, from which tens of thousands sought escape by killing themselves. “Genetic engineering is killing Indian farmers,” starkly concludes the report. As recently as 2013, Shiva has insisted, “Two hundred and seventy thousand Indian farmers have committed suicide since Monsanto entered the Indian seed market. That’s more than a quarter-million. It’s a genocide.” Shiva’s charges have been the subject of numerous credulous articles and documentaries. They are completely false.

  In a comprehensive analysis, “The GMO-Suicide Myth,” published in 2014 in Issues in Science and Technology, science journalist Keith Kloor eviscerates Shiva’s stories, revealing her as the liar that she is. First, since 2002, Indian farmers have eagerly embraced Bt cotton. Ninety percent of India’s cotton farmers now grow Bt cotton. As a consequence, farmers use much less pesticide and yields have soared. Kloor reports that India’s agricultural minister said in 2012 that the country “has harvested an average of 5.1 million tons of cotton per year, which is well above the highest production of 3 million tons before the introduction of Bt cotton.”

  And more than that, Bt cotton has dramatically improved farmers’ incomes and consequently boosted their food security. In 2013, two German university researchers reported that “the adoption of GM cotton has significantly improved calorie consumption and dietary quality, resulting from increased family incomes. This technology has reduced food insecurity by 15–20% among cotton-producing households.” Farmers are not stupid. They plant only crops that they think will benefit them.

  It is true that far too many Indian farmers have committed suicide. So what is really going on? Recent research by University of Syracuse political scientist Anoop Sadanandan finds that many Indian farmers commit suicide largely as the result of changes to banking made by the Indian government that have had the side effect of throwing them onto the mercies of local loan sharks. “There is, however, no evidence to suggest that the cultivation of a particular crop was related to suicides in India,” reports Sadanandan. “For instance, I did not find a systematic relation between cotton cultivation, which is often linked to farmer suicides in the country, and farm suicide rates.” A recent preliminary analysis by University of Manchester social statistician Ian Plewis concludes that “the available evidence does not support the view that farmer suicides have increased following the introduction of Bt cotto
n.” Plewis adds, “Taking all [Indian] states together, there is evidence to support the hypothesis that the reverse is true: male farmer suicide rates have actually declined after 2005 having been increasing before then.” He also notes that the farmer suicide rate in India is similar to the rates among farmers in Scotland and France.

  “Blaming farmer suicides on Bt cotton thus seems to be not only incorrect but also a distraction from the real causes of a tragic problem,” concludes Kloor. “One is left wondering what problem Vandana Shiva and other like-minded activists are actually interested in solving, since it does not seem to be the livelihoods of Indian farmers.” Indeed.

  Future Biotech Developments

  The benefits of biotechnological progress are so overwhelming that it is unlikely that environmentalist opposition can entirely stop it. So let’s take a brief look at what biotech researchers are currently trying to bring to consumers.

  Researchers are using biotechnology to endow trees with useful qualities. For example, ArborGen has created a fast-growing freeze-tolerant eucalyptus tree that can flourish on tree plantations in the southern United States. Eucalyptus grows very fast, and its wood is used to produce pulp and paper. It produces about seventeen tons of wood per acre per year and is harvested after seven years. Natural hardwood forests produce about two tons of wood per year and are harvested after forty years of growth. In addition, the biotech eucalyptus is engineered to produce no pollen or seeds so that it cannot escape into the wild.

  Consider, too, that choosing to plant a conventional poplar or, say, a poplar genetically modified to produce less lignin will have far fewer ecological effects than choosing between planting a poplar, modified or not, and a conifer species. “The specific changes in wood chemistry imparted by GM [genetic modification] will be orders of magnitude less than the vast number of new chemicals that distinguish a pine from an aspen,” notes a 2001 Oregon State University study. In other words, planting pine trees would have much greater effects on soil, pests, water retention, and biodiversity than the comparatively minor effects entailed by choosing to plant either conventional poplars or modified ones. Not bad effects, just different ones.

  Anti-biotech activists unaccountably miss the crucial point that improving the productivity of trees grown on plantations reduces the pressure to cut down trees in wild forests. Resources for the Future analyst Roger Sedjo estimates that most of the world’s wood products could be derived from tree plantations occupying about 7 percent of the world’s currently forested area. Improving the productivity of tree plantations by means of biotechnology would shrink that area even further. Cultivating trees on plantations spares land for natural forests to grow, and the more productive the trees, the more the land that can be spared for nature.

  Biotechnology could also restore the majestic American chestnut to its home in the forests of the eastern United States. In the early twentieth century, chestnut blight fungus introduced from overseas devastated American chestnuts—the then-dominant trees in eastern forests stretching from Maine to Mississippi. Researchers at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry (SUNY), working with the American Chestnut Research and Restoration Project, used genetic engineering techniques to introduce a gene from wheat that confers strong blight resistance into American chestnut trees. They recently ceremonially planted some of the new blight-resistant chestnuts at the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx, where the blight was first identified. Nevertheless, some activists have denounced these trees as “wheat-gene tweaked freaks.”

  Currently crops typically use only 30 to 50 percent of the nitrogen fertilizer they receive. Nitrogen fertilizer runoff contributes to water pollution and is the primary source of anthropogenic nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas that is 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide. Agriculture contributes up 12 percent of man-made global warming emissions. So one would think that environmentalists would welcome Arcadia Biosciences’s new biotech variety of rice that needs 50 to 60 percent less nitrogen fertilizer than conventional varieties, but they haven’t. The really good news is that research into transferring this same set of fertilizer-thrifty genes into other crops is moving rapidly forward. For example, Arcadia has created a biotech canola that uses two-thirds less nitrogen fertilizer but yields the same as conventional varieties. This application of biotechnology to increase the efficiency of nitrogen use not only protects the environment but also reduces the amount that farmers have to pay for fertilizer.

  Even more remarkably, Arcadia Biosciences announced in 2014 successful field trials of a biotech rice variety that combines salt tolerance, drought tolerance, and nitrogen use efficiency. The salt tolerance is derived from thale cress, the drought tolerance from a common soil bacterium, and the nitrogen use efficiency from barley. To state the obvious, there is no way that conventional breeding could have produced this type of rice. This “super-rice” will be particularly advantageous to farmers in developing countries, who must cope with poor soils, spotty rains and no irrigation, and high fertilizer prices.

  Another promising area of research being done at the nonprofit International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines involves using genetic engineering to transfer the C4 photosynthetic pathway into rice, which uses the less efficient C3 pathway now. This could boost rice yields tremendously, perhaps as much as 50 percent, while reducing water use. In addition to salt and drought tolerance, researchers are pursuing all manner of other ways to boost crop production, including heat tolerance, along with viral, fungal, and bacterial disease resistance.

  For example, Danforth Center is working on a biotech cassava that can resist the viral cassava mosaic disease that destroys a third of Africa’s cassava crop annually. One of the first great successes of crop biotechnology was engineering resistance to ringspot virus into Hawaiian papayas back in the 1990s. Recently anti-biotech activists in Hawaii have taken to hacking down papayas in the middle of the night. Researchers created a biotech wheat that reduced losses from powdery mildew fungus by as much as 30 percent. The nonprofit Swiss research was halted when anti-biotech activists vandalized the test fields. British researchers endowed a variety of potato to resist infection by a relative of the same pest that caused the Irish potato famine. The new bioenhanced potato cut losses by between 50 and 75 percent. If these biotech techniques pan out, they could improve crop productivity and thus reduce agriculture’s call on land, water, and air resources.

  Exciting biotech research is not confined just to plants. Instead of turning a third of the American corn crop into biofuels, biotech researchers are working to generate algae that can suck carbon dioxide out of the air and secrete fuels. Canadian researchers at the University of Guelph have created the “enviropig.” Combining genes from a common bacterium with those from mice, the researchers have endowed the enviropigs with the ability to digest phosphorus from plants. Ordinary pigs cannot digest about 75 percent of the plant phosphorus in their feed. The new biotech trait boosts their growth and reduces the amount of phosphorus in their manure.

  AquaBounty Technologies, which is based in Waltham, Massachusetts, has developed a fast-growing biotech salmon. AquaBounty’s salmon eat 10 to 25 percent less feed than do conventional Atlantic salmon. AquaBounty salmon grow twice as fast as wild Atlantic salmon as the result of the installation of two genes, a promoter gene derived from the eel-like ocean pout and a growth hormone gene from Chinook salmon. People have long eaten both species. The fish would be raised onshore in physically contained facilities so that there is no chance they could escape.

  The company has been seeking FDA approval since 1995. Finally, in 2012, the agency’s Veterinary Medicine Advisory Committee found no biologically relevant differences between conventional and biotech salmon on nutrition and allergenicity. Consequently, the committee concluded, “With respect to food safety, FDA has concluded that food from AquAdvantage Salmon is as safe as food from conventional Atlantic salmon.” Naturally, environmental organizations oppose thi
s technology even though most of the world’s wild fisheries are woefully overexploited. And adding insult to injury, members of Congress from states with fishers of wild salmon who fear competition introduced legislation to ban the biotech salmon.

  Biotechnologists are also developing resource-thrifty ways to produce foods and ingredients through fermentation using genetically modified yeasts and bacteria. For example, the California start-up Muufri (pronounced “moo free”) is engineering yeast to produce the components of cow’s milk. The company hopes to bring its animal-free milk to market by 2017. In conventional dairy production, it takes about a thousand liters of water to produce one liter of milk, and the waste generated by one cow equals that of twenty to forty people. In addition, vast amounts of land are devoted to growing pasture, alfalfa, and corn as feed for cows. On a global basis, dairy cattle emit 17 percent of the greenhouse gases produced by livestock. If Muufri milk finds favor with consumers, the environmental benefits are potentially enormous.

  The Biotech Farmer and the Organic Environmentalists Should Be Friends

  “The farmer and the cowman should be friends,” sing the folks in the 1943 Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Oklahoma! So why shouldn’t biotech and organic growers be friends, too? After all, both want to make decent livings as they produce nutritious food for a hungry world while enhancing soil fertility; fending off diseases, pests, and weeds; reducing costly and environmentally damaging inputs; preventing erosion and fertilizer runoff; conserving water; and protecting biodiversity. Some environmentalists are arguing that the world should “freeze” the amount of cropland at current levels and produce food for the 9 billion people living in 2050 only from the acres already being cultivated. Since organic agriculture as currently practiced produces on average about 75 percent of the yields of conventional farming, a global switch to organic farming would make it impossible to freeze cropland for today’s population, much less for 9 billion in four decades.