Madeline Ostrander :
(From previous issue)
But even if such technologies prove useful in mitigating the impacts of climate change, Monsanto’s tarnished history, heavy-handed dealings with the public, lawsuits, and sheer size and might have made it a favorite villain. To a certain segment of the public, everything that Monsanto does is suspect, and genetic engineering looks like a strategy for pushing the company’s brand of herbicides and manipulating the food economy-not a way to a feed a world in crisis.
It can be easy to forget that genetic engineering has an existence and a history beyond Big Ag. Monsanto’s website credits Robert Fraley, then a researcher for the company, with producing the first GM plant in 1982, but there were at least three other institutions working simultaneously-two universities in the United States and one in Belgium-to grow the first plants with spliced genes that year. In the decades since, scores of university researchers, small research and development ventures and even a few nonprofits have used genetic engineering to try to stop diseases from decimating citrus plants, create mustard plants that can clean up toxins from mining and industrial sites, and grow food that can better survive in heat, drought, flooding, freezing and other extreme weather conditions that may get worse in the next several decades.
But almost none of these plants have ever made it beyond a field-testing stage. As of 2010, though 260 genetically engineered traits have been tested in seventy-seven different “specialty crops” (foods that are less profitable and produced on a smaller scale than field corn, cotton, soy, wheat and rice), just four varieties-including insecticide-resistant sweet corn, disease-resistant papaya and squash, and an ornamental purple carnation-are on the market, according to a review by Jamie Miller and Kent Bradford, researchers with the Seed Biotechnology Center at UC Davis. That’s nothing near the scope of innovation one would need to confront a problem as vast as climate change or famine.
When I spoke with Bradford, he blamed anti-GMO activists, in part, for making R&D difficult: “Those groups have driven all of the biotechnology work into the companies they hate,” he said. “They’ve made it impossible for anybody else by raising a stink. Even if the regulatory bars don’t seem so high, [activist groups] will sue.” Only big companies like Monsanto can afford the legal and regulatory costs to test GM varieties and bring them to market, Bradford argues.
Neither biotech researchers nor GMO opponents think the current regulatory process is working well. Anti-GMO groups insist that the Food and Drug Administration’s approval process is too opaque and leaves GMO testing in the hands of food companies. Biotech researchers counter that, in practice, the FDA insists on exhaustive and expensive testing far beyond what has been required for any other kind of food crop, even though years of research suggest that the technology of genetic engineering is safe. The American Association for the Advancement of Science, for example, has announced that “foods containing ingredients from [GM] crops pose no greater risk than the same foods made from crops modified by conventional plant breeding.” Bradford and others insist that it doesn’t make scientific sense to single out GM crops for special testing when other, far less precise methods of crop development-including blasting plants with radiation-aren’t subject to such rigorous scrutiny.
The high cost of GMO field-testing may explain why the only genetically modified crops that have made it to market are, in the words of environmental scientist Jonathan Foley, “very disappointing” and “come with some big problems.”
“GMO efforts may have started off with good intentions to improve food security,” Foley wrote in a column in the science magazine Ensia in February, “but they ended up in crops that were better at improving profits.”
Whether Blumwald’s plants-or the hundreds of other GM crops designed to be disease- or climate-change-resistant or otherwise useful in feeding the world-ever make it to farm fields may depend a lot on whether food activists, the public and policy-makers can be persuaded that the technology is able to produce worthwhile results.
The heart of one GMO battle is roughly fifty miles west of Blumwald’s lab, in Sonoma County-a land of wineries, towering redwood groves poised at the edge of rocky coastal cliffs, and some of the most innovative organic agriculture in the country.
Much of the opposition to GMOs here has come from organic farmers, partly out of fear that their crops will be tainted by cross-pollination by GM varieties. Under organic certification rules, farmers aren’t allowed to grow GMOs, and their customers often refuse to eat GM food. In March 2004, Mendocino County, just north of Sonoma, became the first jurisdiction in the nation to pass a law regulating GM plants, making it illegal to “propagate, cultivate, raise, or grow” them, in order to stop what it called “genetic pollution”; Marin County, to the south, passed a similar ordinance the following November. A grassroots group in Sonoma County is now actively pushing for a countywide ban on GMOs.
Here, on a plot of forest in the tiny unincorporated town of Occidental, several longtime environmental activists run a center for sustainable agriculture research in a cluster of yurts and wood cabins that form an intentional community called the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center (OAEC). Its leader, Dave Henson, co-founded Californians for GE-Free Agriculture, a coalition that ran campaigns against GMOs between 2002 and 2008. But when I asked him how he felt about genetic engineering, his answer surprised me. “If this is public research at a university, I think we will see some really interesting potential solutions with recombinant DNA that could show all kinds of benefits in health and agriculture and other things,” he said. “So baby and bathwater are separate.” Henson added that he’s even guest-lectured to classrooms of biotechnology graduate students at UC Berkeley.
When I described Blumwald’s research, however, Henson was skeptical. “The biotech solution is to change out one variety of one crop with another single variety that’s somehow more adapted by genetic engineering,” he said, while the approach to climate change, drought and other related issues “should be about the whole farm system.”
(Concluded)
