In 1992, following a Rockefeller-funded meeting on the subject, Ingo Potrykus in Switzerland and Peter Beyer in Germany decided to collaborate on finding a way to fortify rice genetically to provide the missing vitamin A. It took them seven years. Potrykus was so harassed by anti-GE activists that the Swiss government had to build him a grenade-proof greenhouse. In 1999 the scientists sent their paper to Nature, describing how adding two genes to the rice from a daffodil (which also lent a yellow hue), along with one bacterial gene, did the trick, but Nature refused even to send the paper out for comment. Botanist Peter Raven got word of the situation and arranged for the paper to be published in Science, where it inspired instant acclaim as great science and a humanitarian breakthrough. In July 2000, Time magazine put Potrykus on the cover, with the headline, “This rice could save a million kids a year.” Golden rice was a hit.
The response from anti-GE organizations was savage. “Hoax.” “Fool’s gold.” “Trojan horse.” “Deliberate deception.” “Technical failure.” “Useless application.” “Threat to biodiversity.” “Rip-off of the public trust.” “Will clash with traditions associated with white rice.” “Could lead to permanent brain damage.” Even: “GE rice could, if introduced on a large scale, exacerbate malnutrition and undermine food security because it encourages a diet based on a single industrial staple food”—that one from Greenpeace in 2005. Egyptian scientist Ismail Serageldin spoke for many appalled scientists when he responded, “I ask opponents of biotechnology, do you want two to three million children a year to go blind and one million to die of vitamin A deficiency, just because you object to the way Golden Rice was created?” (Serageldin was then director of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research; currently he is head of the new Library of Alexandria.)
The rest of the story: The critics were right about one thing (and only one thing). Golden rice supplied enough beta-carotene to provide just a fifth of the recommended daily allowance of Vitamin A. Over Potrykus’s strong objection, the Swiss corporation Syngenta entered the fray. Scientists there replaced one of the daffodil genes with a maize gene and got a twentyfold increase of beta-carotene in “golden rice 2,” solving the vitamin A sufficiency problem. Then Adrian Dubock, a British scientist-diplomat at Syngenta, freed golden rice from its maze of patent violations involving other companies and arranged for the developing-world rights for golden rice 2 to be managed by the Humanitarian Golden Rice Network, chaired by Potrykus. Any farmer making less than $10,000 a year could get the seeds for free and own the right to breed and sow them year after year.
By 2007 field trials of golden rice were being conducted in the Philippines by the International Rice Research Institute, aided by a $20 million grant from the Gates Foundation, with the goal of freeing the GE rice for public use by 2011. The Gates Foundation also funded Peter Beyer to head the international ProVitaMinRice Consortium, which aims to “stack multiple micronutrient and bioavailability traits into Golden Rice.” The next-generation rice will have increased protein, vitamin E, iron, and zinc. A really ambitious project at the International Rice Research Institute is to convert rice from a C3 plant to a C4 plant—from the low-efficiency photosynthesis mode of wheat and potatoes to the more highly evolved, higher-efficiency mode of corn and sugarcane. C4 rice would need far less water and fertilizer yet would provide a 50 percent increase in yield. “That’s just the kind of long-term, high-payoff research that governments should be funding,” says Philip Pardey, an agricultural economist at the University of Minnesota.
Anti-GE environmentalists fought so viciously against Golden Rice because they knew it would be the first of a cornucopia of food plants biofortified for high nutrition that would be widely desirable. They were right about that part.
GE CORN REJECTED AS “POISON” IN STARVING ZAMBIA
The story: In 2001 and 2002, a severe drought in southern Africa threatened the lives of 15 million people in seven countries. A 15,000-ton aid shipment of U.S. corn (about one-third GE) from the UN World Food Programme was turned away by the government of Zimbabwe on the grounds that some GE corn kernels might be planted rather than eaten, and that would endanger the country’s exports to GE-averse Europe. The United States offered to grind the corn to meal so it could not be planted. Meanwhile, part of the shipment was diverted to Zambia, just to the north, where 3 million were facing famine. Zambia had accepted and eaten such shipments for six years, but this time it was rejected. “Simply because my people are hungry, that is no justification to give them poison, to give them food that is intrinsically dangerous to their health,” President Levy Mwanawasa declared. “We would rather starve than get something toxic.”
Outside a locked warehouse in Shimabala, Zambia, where the corn was stored for free distribution, the Los Angeles Times reported, an elderly blind man pleaded with officials to release the corn: “Please give us the food. We don’t care if it is poisonous because we are dying anyway.” In desperation, rural Zambians were eating “leaves, twigs and even poisonous berries and nuts,” said the Times. The World Health Organization estimated that 35,000 Zambians would starve to death in the coming months. Shipments of identical U.S. corn were accepted that year without incident in Lesotho, Malawi, and Swaziland; Zimbabwe and Mozambique accepted the corn in meal form.
The lethal change of policy in Zambia was the result of a concerted effort by Europe-based environmental organizations to frighten African nations about GE crops. South Africa had already adopted GE cotton, soybeans, and white maize—a favorite food locally—but other nations were susceptible to pressure. The leaders of the Africa campaign were Greenpeace International and Friends of the Earth International, both based in Amsterdam. Greenpeace, with chapters in forty countries, had a thousand full-time staff members, and Friends of the Earth had chapters in sixty-eight countries and 1,200 full-time staff. You can find thorough documentation of the players, techniques, and effectiveness of the campaign in Robert Paarlberg’s book, Starved for Science. Decision makers in Zambia and elsewhere were convinced that GE crops would cause allergies, would infect their digestive tracts, would spread HIV/AIDS, would contain pig genes, and would deny them any possibility of selling their crops to European markets.
Starvation was treated as a measure of commitment to the cause. In the service of what was thought to be a higher good, the environmental movement went sociopathic in Africa. In a panel discussion in Johannesburg, Bill Moyers asked the Indian antiglobalist Vandana Shiva about the situation in Zambia. She said:When the same situation happened in India, with the cyclone—30,000 people dead and many hungry—when we tested the food and found it to be GM, and we just gave the information to the people who were victims, who were hungry, they led a protest to the aid agencies and they said just because we are poor, just because we are in emergency, doesn’t mean you can force us to eat what we don’t want to eat. Emergency cannot be used as a market opportunity.
I propose that anyone who encourages other people to starve on principle should do some of the starving themselves. I can attest that starving just a little bit, just for a week, concentrates the mind wonderfully. Bertolt Brecht stated the operative rule: “Grub first, then ethics.”
Just as it’s worth knowing and remembering who was CEO of Exxon Mobil when it spent millions trying to discredit climate change (Lee Raymond), it’s worth knowing and remembering who was leading Greenpeace International (Thilo Bode, then Gerd Leipold) and Friends of the Earth International (Ricardo Navarro) when those two organizations went to great lengths to persuade Africans that, in the service of ideology, starvation was good for them. On their watch and among their many other beneficial campaigns, their organizations—and the European nations and humanitarian NGOs they influenced—screwed up royally in Africa.
The Kenyan plant pathologist Florence Wambugu said as much in testimony to the U.S. Congress in 2003: “The primary accomplishment of the mainly European antibiotech lobby, through gross misinformation and political maneuvering, was only to ke
ep safe and nutritious food out of the hands of starving people. . . . The antibiotech lobby asserts that the continent needs to be protected from big multinational biotech companies. This often Eurocentric view is founded on two premises: that Africa has no expertise to make an informed decision and that the continent should focus on organic farming.” Dr. Wambugu went on to spell out how corporations, as well as NGOs, need to respect African autonomy:Consumers need to be informed of the pros and cons of various agricultural biotechnology packages, the dangers of using unsuitable foreign germplasm, and how to avoid the loss of local germplasm and to maintain local diversity. Other checks and balances are required to avoid patenting local germplasm and innovations by multinationals; to ensure policies on intellectual property rights and to avoid unfair competition; to prevent the monopoly buying of local seed companies; and to prevent the exploitation of local consumers and companies by foreign multinationals. Field trials need to be done locally, in Africa, to establish environmental safety under tropical conditions.
• The rest of the story: Africa has a multitude of agricultural problems to solve; only some can be helped by transgenic technology. The core problems are malnutrition and undernutrition, both still on the increase. According to one 2008 report, “Deficiencies in macronutrients, protein, and energy, as well as micronutrients, iron, vitamin A, zinc, and iodine [are] the underlying cause of half of all child mortality.” GE can help with that one—more food and better food. African small farms are rain fed (5 percent of agriculture in Africa has irrigation, versus 60 percent in Asia) and so are utterly dependent on the weather. Whole crops are lost and whole regions starve when the rains don’t come. Though drought-tolerant GE crops will help somewhat, the main needs are for irrigation systems, wells, electricity to run them, and roads for transporting farm equipment and produce heading to market.
African soil is seriously degraded, in part because crop residues are used for fuel and building materials rather than returned to the soil, in part because synthetic fertilizers often aren’t available. GE is no help here. Soil enrichment methods are well established. They include (to quote a Gates-funded National Research Council report):controlled grazing, mulching with organic matter, applying manure and biosolids, use of cover crops in the rotation cycle, agroforestry, contour farming, hedgerows, terracing, plastic mulch for erosion control, no-till or conservation tillage, retention of crop residue, appropriate use of water and irrigation, and the use of integrated nutrient management, including the judicious use of chemical fertilizers. Land-use planning and land-tenure reform are policy tools to accompany those techniques.
Africa has particularly horrendous pests. Tsetse flies torture the livestock, parasitic weeds such as Striga (witchweed) attack everything that grows, a new version of wheat rust from Uganda now threatens wheat crops worldwide, and flocks of millions of the red-billed quelea devour entire harvests of sorghum, keeping generations of children out of school to chase the birds from the fields. GE can help every one of these.
The point is this: Agriculture in Africa south of the Sahara is mostly tropical. Farm practices and germplasms and corporations and political stances developed in the temperate north don’t much apply. “The tropics are sun rich and water poor, while temperate zones are water rich and sun poor,” says plant biologist Deborah Delmer. “Most agriculture is developed for the temperate zones. Most people are in the tropics. Tropical pests aren’t killed by winter. Farms in the tropics have many more crops than temperate farms. Each region in the tropics should have its own research infrastructure.”
• No thanks to decades of European interference, Africa is making up its own mind about the uses of biotech for its unique agricultural situation. At the 2001 World Economic Forum meeting at Davos, Switzerland, physicist-essayist Freeman Dyson watched a panel debating GE crops. His report:It was a debate between Europe and Africa. The Europeans oppose GM food with religious zeal. They say it is destroying the balance of nature, with unacceptable risks to human health and natural ecology. They talked a great deal about a rule called the Precautionary Principle. The Precautionary Principle says that if some course of action carries even a remote chance of irreparable damage to the ecology, then you shouldn’t do it, no matter how great the possible advantages of the action may be. You are not allowed to balance costs against benefits when deciding what to do. The Precautionary Principle gives the Europeans a firm philosophical basis for saying no to GM food.
In response, the Africans pointed out that the Precautionary Principle can just as well be used as a philosophical basis for saying yes. The growing population and general impoverishment of Africa are already causing irreparable damage to the ecology, and saying no to GM food will only make the irreparable damage worse. The European pretense of allowing no risk of irreparable damage makes no sense in the real world. In the real world there are risks of irreparable damage no matter what you do. There is no escape from balancing one risk against another. The Africans need GM crops in order to survive. In most of Africa, soils are poor, droughts are devastating, and many crops are lost to disease and pests. GM crops can make the difference between starving and surviving for subsistence farmers, between prosperity and ruin for cash farmers. Africans need to sell products to Europe. The European ban on GM food protects European farmers and hurts the Africans. As the Africans see it, the European ban on GM food is motivated more by economic advantage than by philosophical purity.
Theories abound on why Europe rejected genetic engineering while America accepted it. Many blame the late-1990s outbreak in Europe of mad cow disease (which has nothing to do with GE), with the resultant horror of dangers that might be hidden in food, along with distrust of government officials overeager to assuage fears that turned out to be legitimate. Americans read about that melodrama from afar. Robert Paarlberg thinks it’s the differing legal and political frameworks: “The American legal system tends to use civil litigation after the fact rather than preemptive regulation before the fact to ensure consumer and environmental safety. And . . . America’s two-party political system gives less space for Green Party candidates to gain election and then join governing coalitions to advocate against GMOs.”
Genetic engineering has entered that special domain, long occupied by animal-rights activists and antiabortion activists, where violence is deemed justifiable. Vandalism of GE research crops and facilities, along with intimidation of researchers, is even more common in Europe than in the United States, where the FBI estimates that just one group, the Earth Liberation Front, made six hundred attacks causing $43 million in damage between 1996 and 2004. In his book The March of Unreason (2006), Dick Taverne examines how tortuous the rationales sometimes become: “In Germany . . . extreme [GE] opponents fire-bombed one of the Max Planck Institutes because it was conducting genetic research on petunias. They argued that as genetic modification was bound to lead to eugenics, and as this had been practised by the Nazis, such research was bound to lead to Nazism.”
At the other end of the conceptual-stretch spectrum, Switzerland has a gene technology law, passed in 2004, which enforces protection of “the dignity of plants.” All biotech research applications must have a paragraph spelling out how the dignity question will be dealt with. Scientists who asked for specifics were told by the ethics committee that, for example, genetic engineering must not cause the plants to “lose their independence,” by which the committee meant their ability to reproduce. The geneticists inquired: Did that mean no seedless fruits and no male-sterile hybrids, both common in agriculture?
• I think the main element that distinguishes Europe from America and other parts of the world in regard to GE crops is the seriousness with which Europeans take what is called the precautionary principle. It was invoked in the Davos debate; it was invoked in the Zambia debacle; and it has had regulatory force in the European Union since 1992 and in the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety, governing international movement of GE organisms, since 2000. As Robert Paarlberg points out, “Europe’s
precautionary principle had honorable origins. It first emerged in the context of a serious and well-documented environmental harm in Germany known as forest death. The German government responded with a 1974 clean air act that allowed action to be taken against potentially damaging chemicals even in the absence of scientific certainty regarding their contribution to the harm. In 1984 this same principle was then embraced for managing ocean pollution in the North Sea, another documented harm.” But as time went by, evidence of harm disappeared as a precautionary principle trigger, and science was explicitly devalued.
There are a number of versions of the precautionary principle. The clearest and most often cited came out of a meeting of environmentalists in Wisconsin in 1998. Called the Wingspread Statement, it goes:When an activity raises threats of harm to human health or the environment, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically. In this context the proponent of an activity, rather than the public, should bear the burden of proof.
They had me at “precautionary,” worried me at “some cause and effect,” and lost me at “fully established scientifically.” That is an illusory, unattainable goal. Nothing is fully established scientifically, ever—not gravity, not Darwinian evolution, not the safety of peanut-butter-&-jelly sandwiches. Science is a perpetual argument. More useful wording would be something like “precautionary measures should be taken during early stages while the preponderance and trend of relevant scientific evidence becomes established, and then the measures should respond to that evidence.”
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