The four barriers to the genetically modified-food revolution-and why no
one is talking about them
By Paul Roberts Slate, August 8 2008
http://www.slate.com/id/2196772/pagenum/all/#page_start
Could this be the turning point for genetically modified food? As food
prices have soared around the world, agro-industry companies like
Monsanto and Syngenta, along with their allies in Washington, have been
carefully positioning GM technology as our last, best hope against a
global food catastrophe. Since traditional crop-breeding methods aren't
keeping up with soaring food demand, they argue, we have no choice but
to re-engineer our crops at the molecular level to give bigger yields.
Appealing as this argument sounds, it misses the real obstacles facing
GM. Yes, traditional crop science is struggling. And yes, rising food
prices might help consumers and lawmakers overcome their fears about
GM's safety (especially as some of those concerns are overblown). But
neither change will alter the fact that GM crop technology itself isn't
ready to save the world. Despite GM's potential, the technology faces
substantial technical and economic barriers before it will spark a
second green revolution-barriers that aren't being discussed in the
newly energized debate over genetically modified food.
For starters, for all the talk of saving the world from hunger, the GM
industry isn't focusing on crops that are truly relevant to global food
security. Today, most GM research targets big Western cash crops: Two of
the best-selling GM products are corn and soybeans engineered to
tolerate the popular herbicide Roundup. But these high-tech seeds are
designed for large-scale, mechanized farmers in North and South America
and are of no use to the billions of developing-world farmers who make
up three-quarters of the global-farming work force-but without whom
lasting global food security can't be achieved.
By contrast, relatively little GM investment is going into the crops
that do matter to poor farmers-cassava, sorghum, millet, pigeon pea,
chickpea, and groundnut. These crops are more nutritionally balanced
than corn or soybeans and are far better suited to the local soils and
often-tough climates of poor nations. Yet, because poor farmers can't
afford high-tech seeds, GM companies have little incentive to invest
research dollars to improve "marginal" crops. Instead, they focus on the
money makers: According to the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization,
just four commercial crops-corn, soybeans, canola, and cotton-account
for 85 percent of all GM crops planted worldwide.
GM companies also aren't being honest about what this technology can
do-and what it can't. In the rush to exploit the current crisis, the
industry routinely promises to re-engineer crops to give massive
yields-Monsanto has vowed to double grain yields by 2030-or to grow with
less water or to thrive in degraded soils. But delivering on such
promises will be much harder than is currently acknowledged. Whereas
making corn tolerate Roundup required the manipulation of just one gene,
boosting yield is vastly more complex, says Kendall Lamkey, a
crop-breeding expert who chairs Iowa State University's Department of
Agronomy. Yield is the expression of a plant's reproductive success, and
reproduction takes nearly all of a plant's survival "skills," from its
capacity to cope with temperature changes to its resistance to bugs. In
other words, says Lamkey, to boost yields through genetic modification,
GM companies must manipulate thousands of genes-and so far, they've had
limited succes s.
In fact, many breeding experts believe that the fastest way to boost
yields isn't by engineering new seeds but by exploiting the untapped
potential of existing seeds. As Lamkey points out, the yields for corn
and soybeans on America's top-performing farms are more than double the
national average for those same crops. (In 2007, the top soybean farmer
produced 154 bushels per acre, compared with the national average of
around 41 bushels.) That means there is considerable room for
improvement before these seeds are maxed out. These "top producers"
aren't using different seeds; instead, they're benefiting from better
soils, using better farming practices, and applying lots of water,
fertilizer, and other chemicals-factors that GM technology won't
influence anyway.
To be fair, GM technologists may eventually master the complexity of
yield-but not without spending lots of money and lots of time; Monsanto
says it will need at least two decades for its big yield boosts. That
means the world has little hope for quick relief-and that GM companies
have little hope for a quick return on their investment. Thus, for all
the hype about using GM to solve the current crisis, or to end hunger
generally, the industry will be financially inclined to focus on simpler
projects with faster payoffs, such as new varieties of commercial crops
bred to tolerate herbicides and pesticides.
Even if GM companies do manage to improve crops that truly matter for
food security, these miracle seeds won't help if they're not accessible
to poor farmers. That means companies must either price seeds cheaply
enough for farmers to buy each year or stop objecting when poor farmers
save and reuse the seeds the following year. Today, Monsanto and other
seed companies object strenuously to seed saving, which they call "seed
piracy" and which they claim deprives them of profits. Yet seed saving
is central to food security for the billions of farmers too poor to buy
new seeds every season. More to the point, while pirated profits are a
real issue among wealthy Western farmers, it's a bogus concern in the
developing world, where poor farmers were never going to buy new
seeds-and certainly not expensive GM seeds-every year anyway.
In fact, many critics believe the GM industry's objections to seed
saving have less to do with lost profits in the developing world than
with the industry's long-term goal of owning, literally, the seed
sector. When seeds are conventionally bred, breeders don't own
them-anyone can use or improve the seeds. But genetic modification
allows a company to claim property rights over a particular DNA
blueprint and to charge a licensing fee for each and every copy-much as
Microsoft now claims an interest in each and every copy of Windows. By
relaxing its proprietary zeal and allowing seeds in the developing world
to be "open source," the GM industry could do much to bolster claims
that it is really trying to help poor farmers.
Finally, if the industry wants public support, it can no longer dismiss
public concerns about the risks of GM crops-health risks for humans but
also the ecological risk that GM crops will escape farms and contaminate
the wilderness. True, some concerns are overblown. Ecological
contamination, or "gene flow," is a real threat only when pollen from a
GM crop in a farm field finds a nearby wild relative; in the United
States, most commercial crops such as corn or soybeans don't have any
wild relatives. But gene flow is a possible concern in places like
Chile, where commercial potatoes do have wild relatives. Human health
risks are even less clear-cut. Though we've yet to see credible reports
of GM foods causing human health problems, we've also not had the
benefit of credible long-term health studies.
Until such studies have been completed, the GM industry needs to stop
regarding a skeptical public as a nuisance. And even if GM technology is
shown to be safe, the industry needs to accept that many consumers may
still choose not to eat genetically modified foods. That means no more
lawsuits against food companies that market their food as "GM free."
That also means no more lobbying against laws requiring that foods with
GM ingredients be labeled as such. Consumers have a right to know what's
in their food.
What would the industry get in return for such good behavior? Money, for
one. Whatever one thinks of the GM industry, it's hardly fair to force
private companies to make products for farmers so poor they can't pay.
Once upon a time, breeding new crops for poor farmers was inseparable
from the West's larger food-aid strategy and was managed-and
financed-largely by governments. (Indeed, most of the green revolution
miracle crops from the 1960s were bred by government- and
foundation-backed researchers.) Since then, much of the public-sector
breeding enterprise has been dismantled (partly at the behest of the
seed industry, which was tired of competing with public agencies),
leaving a massive gap in our system for developing critical new crops.
GM companies say they (and their technologies) offer the best means of
closing that gap. But it's hard to see why these companies would invest
heavily in regionally appropriate, but potentially unprofitable, crops.
Rather, what's more likely is that the industry will use the promise of
a solution to the food crisis to press for more regulatory flexibility
and more consumer acceptance-and then use that freedom to keep making
the same big-money cash crops they always have.
We shouldn't be shocked by such pragmatism. Seed companies, like any
company, are in business to make money. But our policy toward GM
companies should be no less pragmatic. If we want private companies to
take on what is essentially a public job-helping farmers too poor to
participate in the market economy-we're going to have to pay them to do
it. So let's make a deal: In return for targeting vital regional and
local crops, and for making the seeds accessible to poor farmers, GM
companies will get hefty subsidies for research and development of these
crops.
Would such a deal be enough to ignite a gene revolution? If the main
obstacle to GM miracles is lack of financial and political support, as
the industry argues, then such a deal could be the catalyst for serious
innovation. But if, as many critics believe, the real obstacle here is
that GM technology simply isn't all that its proponents claim, that the
real challenges of food insecurity-degraded soils, political
instability, lack of water, and soaring energy costs-are beyond the
reach of a single technology, that, too, would quickly become clear. In
either case, by reframing the GM debate as a challenge to do the
revolution right, we can encourage a more constructive conversation
about the real role that this technology might play in the future of
food security.