Reason Magazine - Topics > GM Food

When Vat-Grown Cold Cuts Come to Subway, Thank PETA

gillespie@reason.com (Nick Gillespie) — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 08:37:00 EDT

Foie Gras apologist Baylen Linnekin of the uber-tasty food blog Crispy on the Outside writes in praise of anti-carnivore group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), which just announced $1 million contest to spur development of murderless meat, A.K.A. vat-grown or in vitro meat:

PETA claims the contest is a way to advance its so-called anti-cruelty agenda, stop harming the environment, etc.
I think it's really just an admission by the group of what carnivores and omnivores have always known: meat tastes good. So good that it seems the overwhelming majority of manufactured vegetarian food-plant life that didn't grow from the ground (or ocean)-serves little more than to provide calories that mimic the taste of meat....
Bravo to PETA. This is exactly the sort of thing groups like PETA should have been doing all along. Not terrorizing or suing or intimidating what should be free choices made by peace-loving meat eaters. But putting their money where their ~~breasts~~ mouths are in order to effect voluntary consumer change. All while helping vegetarians eat better tasting food.

More here.

reason on vat-grown meat—it even sounds delicious!

Didn't the awful Subway chain miss a golden opportunity to have Warren "Enjoy Every Sandwich" Zevon become their posthumous pitchman? Move over, Jared, and tell Lon Chaney the news.

Demon Seed

khowley@reason.com (Kerry Howley) — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 12:00:00 EDT

In May 2002, in the midst of a severe food shortage in sub-Saharan Africa, the government of Zimbabwe turned away 10,000 tons of corn from the World Food Program (WFP). The WFP then diverted the food to other countries, including Zambia, where 2.5 million people were in need. The Zambian government locked away the corn, banned its distribution, and stopped another shipment on its way to the country. “Simply because my people are hungry,” President Levy Mwanawasa later said, “is no justification to give them poison.”

The corn came from farms in the United States, where most corn produced—and consumed—comes from seeds that have been engineered to resist some pests, and thus qualifies as genetically modified. Throughout the 90s, genetically modified foods were seen as holding promise for the farmers of Africa, so long as multinationals would invest in developing superior African crops rather than extend the technology only to the rich. When Zambia and Zimbabwe turned away food aid, simmering controversy over the crops themselves brimmed over and seeped into almost every African state. Cast as toxic to humans, destructive to the environment, and part of a corporate plot to immiserate the poor, cutting edge farming technology is most feared where it is most needed. As Robert Paarlberg notes in his new book, Starved for Science: How Biotechnology is Being Kept Out of Africa (Harvard University Press), in 2004 the Sudanese government “took time out from its genocidal suppression of a rebellion in Darfur to issue a memorandum requiring that all food aid brought into the country should be certified as free of any GM ingredients.”

Starved for Science includes forwards by both Jimmy Carter and Norman Borlaug, the architect of Asia’s Green Revolution and the man credited with saving more human lives than anyone else in history. Paarlberg, a Professor of Political Science at Wellesley and a specialist in agricultural policy, wants the West to help small African farmers obtain promising technologies just as it helped Asia discover biological breakthroughs in the 60s and 70s. Instead, he says, a coalition of European governments and African elites are promoting a Western vision of rustic, low-productivity labor.

reason: Was there a particular experience with African farmers that led you to write this book?

Robert Paarlberg: Partly it was the strong impression made on me by my own visits to rural Africa, working with African organizations, working with USAID, working with International Food Policy Research Institute. I started visiting small farms in Africa 15 years ago. I’d seen a lot of poor farmers in Asia and Latin America but absolutely nothing like this. There was simply no uptake of any modern productivity-enhancing technologies at all in some cases. And I wondered why I hadn’t been aware of this. And then, when I saw more and more narrative in the NGO community and the donor community that was frankly hostile to science, I thought “I have to put this down and write a book for younger people in the donor community who may not remember the importance of technology uptake in Asian agriculture 40 years ago.”

reason: You suggest that your understanding of modern ideas about food production arises from interactions with your students. What is it that they want?

Paarlberg: My students know just what kind of food system they want: a food system that isn’t based on industrial scale monoculture. They want instead small farms built around nature imitating polycultures. They don’t want chemical use; they certainly don’t want genetic engineering. They want slow food instead of fast food. They’ve got this image of what would be better than what we have now. And what they probably don’t realize is that Africa is an extreme version of that fantasy. If we were producing our own food that way, 60 percent of us would still be farming and would be earning a dollar a day, and a third of us would be malnourished. I’m trying to find some way to honor the rejection that my students have for some aspects of modern farming, but I don’t want them to fantasize about the exact opposite.

reason: Can you give an example of a genetically modified seed or organism, something in use today?

Paarlberg: Bt crops have been engineered to contain a gene from a naturally occurring soil bacterium that expresses a certain protein that cannot be digested by caterpillars. Mammals can digest the protein with absolutely no problem, but caterpillars cannot. When the caterpillars eat the plant, they die.

What’s wonderful about this is that it’s so precisely targeted at the insects eating the plant. The other insects in the field aren’t affected. Using conventional corn instead of Bt corn, you have to spray the whole field and you end up killing a lot of non-targeted species. With this variety, you don’t have to spray.

reason: That sounds less scary than “Genetically Modified Organism.”

Paarlberg: The book makes the argument that the overregulation of this technology in Europe and the anxieties felt about it in the United States are not so much a reflection of risks, because there aren’t any documented risks from any GM crops on the market. I explain that reaction through the absence of direct benefit. The technology is directly beneficial to only a tiny number of citizens in rich countries—soybean farmers, corn farmers, a few seed companies, patent holders. Consumers don’t get a direct benefit at all, so it doesn’t cost them anything to drive it off the market with regulations. The problem comes when the regulatory systems created in rich countries are then exported to regions like Africa, where two thirds of the people are farmers, and where they would be the direct beneficiaries.

reason: How pervasive are genetically modified foods in the U.S.?

Paarlberg: Roughly 90 percent of the cotton and soybeans produced in the US are genetically modified. Fifty or 70 percent of the corn is genetically modified. If you look at the products on a retail store shelf, probably 70 percent of them contain some ingredients from genetically modified crops. Mostly corn or soybeans.

reason: Are there documented safety risks that merit caution?

Paarlberg: There aren’t any. It’s like the first ten years of aviation without a plane crash.

reason: What about environmental risks? Don’t GM crops affect surrounding plantlife?

Paarlberg: The only impacts they have different from conventional crops are beneficial to the environment. They allow you to control weeds and insects with fewer sprayings of toxic chemicals. And they don’t require as many trips through the field with your diesel tractor, so you burn less fossil fuel. And there is more carbon sequestered because you’re not tilling the soil the way you otherwise would.

There are environmental impacts; there is gene flow. The pollen from a genetically modified maize plant will flow into a neighboring field and will fertilize the crops in that neighboring field. Some of the seeds, as a consequence, will contain the transgene, but that’s no different from pollen from a conventional maize plant flowing into the next field. It’s only if you decide arbitrarily to define gene flow from genetically modified crops as “contamination” and flow from all other crops as natural. Only then does it start to become describable as an adverse effect.

The worst environmental damage ever done by American agricultural was the dustbowl of the 1930s, when we plowed up the southern plains to grow wheat, and all the topsoil blew away. The way we increased production back then was to expand crop area, which was environmentally disastrous. It was a calamity. That was the way we tried to increase production before we had high yielding crops, before we had high yielding wheat varieties, before we had hybrid maize, before we learned to increase the productivity of the land already under cultivation.

reason: Can you give us a sense of what an average African farmer in, say, Zambia, is currently working with?

Paarlberg: It would be a woman and her children primarily, and they would plant not a hybrid maize, but a traditional openly pollinated variety, and they would time the preparation of the soil and planting as best they could for when they thought the rains would come. But the rains might not come in time, or they might be too heavy and wash the seeds out of the ground. It’s a risky endeavor. They can’t afford fertilizer, and it’s too risky to use fertilizer because in a drought the maize would shrivel up and the fertilizer would be wasted. They don’t have any irrigation. As a consequence, even in a good year their yields per hectare will be only about one third as high as in Asian countries, 1/10 as high as in the United States.

reason: Just as it used to be in Asia.

Paarlberg: Everywhere!

reason: Right, everywhere. But Asia has moved on in recent memory. The Green Revolution introduced new biological breakthroughs to Asian agriculture to the point where no one today thinks of South Korea as a rural backwater. Why was Africa not a part of this?

Paarlberg: One reason is that Africa is not easily irrigated. The big irrigated crops like rice aren’t to be found in Africa and the big investments in the Green Revolution went into improving Asian crops like rice. The crops Africans grow weren’t the crops that were being improved during the green revolution.

But I don’t blame it all on the Asia-focus of the original green revolution; we have had plenty of time to invest in scientific research for Africa’s crops, and to make investments in rural public goods like roads or power to make it affordable for African farmers to purchase fertilizer. But African governments have not done that job. In my book I show that typically African governments will spend less than 5 percent of their budget on agriculture even though that’s where two thirds of their citizens work. And if you don’t have larger public sector investments than that, there is just not going to be any uptake in the countryside. But then I go around and show that you can’t blame African governments, entirely, because prosperous donor countries are no longer supporting agriculture in Africa.

reason: No African government other than South Africa’s has made it legal to plant GMOs. You call this “out of character” for the same governments.

Paarlberg: They have not yet enacted the law, set up the biosafety committee, and granted approval, which is the laborious process that [the United Nations Environmental Program] and the European governments have coached them into adopting.

It’s interesting. In no other area are governments in Africa particularly concerned about hypothetical environmental risks. They know better than to invoke the precautionary principle when it comes to unsafe food in open air markets. They know that they need to first get rid of actual food shortages and raise income; then and only then can they afford to impose the same extremely high standards of food safety on open air markets that are imposed on supermarkets in Europe. Yet curiously when it comes to GMOs they adopt the highly precautionary European standard, which makes it impossible to put these products on the market at all. I take that as evidence that this is not an authentic African response, it’s a response imported from Europe.

reason: So the romanticization of bucolic farm landscapes unmarred by scientific advance has an American and European pedigree.

Paarlberg: It’s not what we do at home—only two percent of agricultural products in the US are organically grown. And many of those that are organically grown are grown on industrial scale organic farms in California that don’t bear any resemblance to small bucolic farms. But it’s the image we promote in our new cultural narrative. It’s something that affects the way we give foreign assistance.

reason: Many of the anti-agricultural science gurus you mention in your book have a spiritual dimension. Can you talk a bit about Sylvester Graham?

Paarlberg: Sylvester Graham, the father of the modern graham cracker, was opposed to the modern flour milling industry. He didn’t like the industrialization of bread production, and he wanted women to go back to grinding flour. He was a religious man, a minister, and he had all of the narrow minded prejudices we might associate with a New England clergyman from the 19^th century. He thought that women should stay in the home, he believed people should be vegetarians because that would keep their sexual appetite back. We sometimes forget what goes along with the food purist zealotry. It’s often zealotry about more than just a certain kind of food to eat.

In Zambia today there are expatriate Jesuits from the United States who have come to believe genetic engineering is against God’s teaching, though this is not a belief that is embraced by the Vatican. They believe that all living things, including plants, have a right not to have their genetic makeup modified. Of course we have been modifying the genetic makeup of plants ever since we domesticated them 10,000 years ago, but these particular fathers are focused only on genetic engineering.

reason: Isn’t it paternalistic to blame Europeans for the decisions of African governments? Is this something African elites are at least as complicit in?

Paarlberg: It’s a codependency. The African elites depend upon Europe for financial assistance, they depend upon European export markets, they depend on NGOs for technical assistance, it’s just easier for them to follow the European lead than to go against that lead. And to some extent the European governments depend upon having dependents in Africa that will, despite the difficult experience of colonization, continue to imitate and validate and honor European culture and taste.

reason: What exactly have European NGOs done to discourage productivity in farming? You quote Doug Parr, a chemist at Greenpeace, arguing that the de facto organic status of farms in Africa is an opportunity to lock in organic farming, since African farmers have yet to advance beyond that.

Paarlberg: Some of it is well intentioned. The organic farming movement believes this is an appropriate corrective to the chemical intensive farming that they see in Europe. In Europe, where prosperous consumers are willing to pay a premium for organic products, it sometimes makes sense to use a more costly production process. So they think, “Well it’s the wave of the future here in Europe, so it should be the future in Africa as well.”

So they tell Africans who don’t use enough fertilizer that instead of using more they should go to zero and certify themselves as organic. That’s probably the most damaging influence — discouraging Africans from using enough fertilizer to restore the nutrients they mine out of their soil. They classify African farmers as either certified organic, or de facto organic. Indeed, many are de facto organic. And their goal is not to increase the productivity of the organic farmers, but to certify them as organic.

I just find that to be lacking in moral clarity.

reason: But there are functioning organic farms. If I decide to buy only organic food from Africa, what will I be buying?

Paarlberg: It wouldn’t be grown by small fair-trade-type poor farmers. It would be grown through a vertically integrated, probably European, company that would bring in the machinery, bring in the seeds, bring in the fertilizers, set up a production system that would more nearly resemble a colonial-era plantation than a small independent African farm.

reason: We’ve seen similar resistance to GMOs in India and Brazil, both of which now have legalized the use of genetically modified crops. What happened?

Paarlberg: Farmers were planting them illicitly before the final approval—that’s one reason they were forced into the approval. The technology worked so well that farmers were planting them on their own and you couldn’t criminalize all Brazilian soybean growers so you had to approve them. Similarly in India, Bt cotton spread on its own and performed so well that the government was eventually shamed into approving it.

reason: You aren’t just calling for people to get out of the way. You want increased aid for agricultural research. But why would any of this require aid? If it’s going to prove profitable, shouldn’t the incentive for private investment be there?

Paarlberg: The farmers who need the technology in Africa don’t have enough purchasing power to be of interest to private companies. Or they’re growing crops that aren’t a part of a commercial seed market that would interest private seed companies. The only way to reach them, really, is to consider the crops that they grow, for example tropical white maize or cassava. It’s a little bit like the orphan disease problem. It’s really something that has to be done as a public good by the public sector.

That’s how the green revolution proceeded in India in the 1960s. It was a wonderful success, and it wasn’t really driven by the private sector. It was driven by philanthropic foundations and public investment. Also you need not just seed improvement, but more rural farm-to-market roads, electrification, and things that really governments and only governments are incentivized and capable of doing.

There was a time, before scare stories about technology spread, when the concern was a much more legitimate one: that we’ve handed this technology over to private companies to develop, and they won’t have any incentive to get it to Africa. And to some extent that’s still a legitimate concern. There was never any fear that Brazilian farmers or Canadian farmers wouldn’t be able to get the technology, because they’re big commercial growers. The concern was originally that Africans would want the technology but wouldn’t be able to get it because they didn’t have the purchasing power or the investment climate that could attract private companies.

reason: The book is 200 pages of frustration. Are there any glimmers of hope ahead?

Paarlberg: Just last week in Nairobi the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and African Agricultural Technology Foundation announced that they would be going forward with the drought-tolerant maize project that I describe in chapter 5 of my book. I’m very pleased that the Gates Foundation has seen the opportunity that this new technology provides. It would be too bad if drought tolerant corn were being grown in Iowa in 2010 and not available to the farmer who really needed it in Africa.

Drought in Africa pushes small farmers back into poverty whenever it strikes. They have to sell off all their household possessions to buy the food their families need until the next season. It blocks the escape from poverty that they might otherwise achieve. Anything that puts a safety net under crop yields is going to protect small African farmers from that periodic decapitalization and let them start accumulating assets for a change.

Kerry Howley is a senior editor at reason.

Are Farmers Stupid, or Deluded, or Both?

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 15:00:00 EST

Last week, the ideological environmentalist group Friends of the Earth (FOE) launched another attack in its misinformation campaign against biotech crops. FOE's latest salvo is its report "Who Benefits from GM Crops?," issued explicitly to counter the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-Biotech Applications' (ISAAA) annual global assessment of biotech crops. FOE claims biotech crops yield less than conventional crops, harm the environment, are technologically stagnant, have done nothing to help poor farmers, and are monopolized by a few giant corporations.

The ISAAA 2007 report on the global status paints a far different picture. The ISAAA notes that farmers around the world continue their rapid adoption of biotech crop varieties. In 2007 the global planting of biotech crops rose to an all time high of 282 million acres, a 12 percent increase over 2006. In addition, the number of farmers choosing to grow biotech crops rose from 10.3 million in 2006 to over 12 million in 2007. The ISAAA report notes that 11 million of the biotech growers are resource poor farmers in developing countries, the majority of whom cultivate insect-resistant cotton. Biotech crops are now planted in 23 countries, and 29 others have approved the import of biotech food and feed.

Let's look at FOE's claims about the alleged faults of biotech crops.

Do biotech crops yield less than conventional crops? FOE is artful in its use of data. Some biotech varieties did initially impose slight yield penalties when compared to conventional varieties. This occurred because breeders improved conventional varieties during the years it took biotech crops to be approved by regulatory agencies. Even so, farmers adopted slightly lower yielding biotech crops because they were cheaper to grow. Biotech crops need fewer pesticide applications and require less plowing. A 2006 study by the British agricutural and food economics consultancy, PG Economics, found no impact from biotech on soy yields while cotton and corn enjoyed higher yields. Even though biotech seeds cost more, overall lower production costs more than make up for the initial expense. The PG Economics report estimates that biotech crops have increased farm incomes by $27 billion since 1996.

Do biotech crops harm the environment? FOE claims that biotech crops use more pesticides than conventional varieties and it identifies crops resistant to the herbicide glyphosate (aka Roundup) as the chief offenders. Farmers kill weeds without harming their biotech crops by spraying with glyphosate. The PG Economics study found that the adoption of biotech crops reduced the use of pesticides since 1996 by 224 million kilograms (493 million pounds), or just about 7 percent.

In addition, herbicide resistant crops enable farmers to switch to no-till farming which dramatically reduces soil erosion. In fact, an August 2007 study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences finds that "no-till farming can build soil fertility even with intensive farming methods." However, some regions experienced an increased use of glyphosate as farmers shifted to no-till agriculture. So if glyphosate applications are going up, is it harmful to the environment or human health? Not even the hyper-cautious Pesticide Action Network puts glyphosate on its list of "bad actors." Nor does glyphosate linger in the environment—it is rapidly degraded by soil microbes with a half-life of a week to several months, which is shorter than many of the herbicides that it replaces.

FOE also claims that spraying biotech crops with herbicides is forcing the faster evolution of herbicide resistant superweeds. Just as bacteria eventually evolve to resist antibiotics, so too do weeds evolve to resist herbicides. This process started with the introduction of modern herbicides after World War II, well before the advent of modern biotech varieties. Fortunately, biotechnology is a fine tool for developing new ways to control weeds.

FOE argues that crop biotechnology has stagnated and correctly points out that the vast majority of biotech crop varieties incorporate just two traits: insect resistance and herbicide tolerance. These traits are valuable to farmers though they don't not offer obvious benefits to consumers. If few new biotech crops have yet to make it to the tables of consumers, FOE can take a good bit of the credit. FOE and other ideological environmentalists have campaigned tirelessly to block the development and spread of new beneficial biotech crop traits. FOE does its best to stop biotech in its tracks and then turns around to assert that researchers have developed nothing new.

However, FOE will soon not be able to make that hypocritical claim. Biotech researchers are now incorporating traits for drought resistance, salt tolerance, and one which enables plants to thrive on half a dose of nitrogen fertilizer. Crops with these traits will be particularly valuable for poor farmers in developing countries. Despite FOE's opposition, "Golden Rice," which has been genetically improved to help prevent vitamin A deficiency, which blinds 300,000 to 500,000 poor children each year, should become available by 2011. In addition, researchers are creating crops that provide enhanced nutrition such as tomatoes with increased folate.

Anti-biotech campaigns by activist groups like FOE have succeeded in frightening the governments of many developing countries into banning biotech crops. Nevertheless, biotech crops have been embraced by poor farmers around the world—whenever their governments will let them. The World Banks's World Development Report 2008 (WDR) notes that second-generation biotech crops are now making their way to the market. The WDR reports, "Transgenic rice, eggplant, mustard, cassava, banana, potato, sweet potato, lentil, and lupin have been approved for field testing in one or more countries. Many of those technologies promise substantial benefits to poor producers and consumers."

And finally, FOE complains that biotech seeds are monopolized by a few large companies. Again, FOE activists should look in the mirror to find the culprits behind this industry consolidation. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the number of startup and well-established seed companies that aimed to develop agricultural biotech exploded. But, as we've seen, crop biotech ran into a buzz saw of environmentalist opposition, especially in Europe. Consequently, since biotech seeds are relatively low in value compared to biomedical treatments, small crop biotech companies withered and the industry consolidated into fairly large companies, chiefly Monsanto, Dupont, Syngenta and Bayer. St. Louis, Missouri-based Monsanto dominates the market for biotech seed. Some 60 percent of all biotech improved seeds contain traits developed by Monsanto. FOE is certainly responsible, in part, for Monsanto's exploding profits.

Finally, let's revisit the title of FOE's new report: "Who Benefits from GM Crops?" As the ISAAA report clearly shows, millions of farmers around the world think that they benefit from biotech crops. Since this is so, FOE can only conclude that these farmers are either stupid or deluded or both. If biotech crops did not deliver their promised benefits, farmers around the world would not be adopting them at exponential rates. Not even FOE's most determined efforts to spread anti-biotech misinformation can obscure this plain fact.

Disclosure: I used to own some Monsanto shares years ago. It looks as though I should have held onto them. I don't own any other crop biotech stocks. I grew up on a farm and I can tell you that plowing and weeding are not all that much fun.

Ronald Bailey is reason's science correspondent. His most recent book, Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution, is available from Prometheus Books.

Bill Gates Aims to Save Africa

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 15:20:00 EST

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is following in the footsteps of the Rockefeller Foundation by fomenting a Green Revolution for the 21st century. The first Green Revolution blossomed from Rockefeller Foundation funding for plant breeding in Mexico in the 1940s. At that time, Mexico could not feed itself and was importing half of its wheat supplies. The Rockefeller Foundation hired young plant breeder Norman Borlaug to see what could be done to boost the productivity of poor Mexican farmers. Backed by $100,000 in annual funding from the foundation, Borlaug and his colleagues flourished. They created highly productive dwarf wheat varieties enabling Mexico to become self-sufficient in grains by 1956. By 1965, Mexican wheat yields rose 400 percent over their 1950 level.

In 1952, the Rockefeller Foundation began funding a similar effort to boost the productivity of poor Indian farmers. In the mid-1960s, India was importing grains to avert looming famines. The dwarf wheat varieties developed by Borlaug and his colleagues were again decisive in winning the battle against hunger on the subcontinent. Indian wheat production grew from 12.3 million tons in 1965 to 20 million tons in 1970 and the country was self-sufficient in grains by 1974. Green Revolution food production in Asia grew much faster than its population did, increasing calorie availability per person by nearly 30 percent and making wheat and rice cheaper. The Green Revolution prevented the deaths by starvation of perhaps a billion people. In terms of human well-being the Rockefeller Foundation's modest investment in agricultural research arguably paid the biggest dividend in history.

Unfortunately, the Green Revolution did not extend to the entire planet. Sub-Saharan Africa remained largely untouched. As a consequence, average per capita food production in Africa has declined by 12 percent since 1980.

Enter the Gates Foundation. In September 2006, the Gates and Rockefeller Foundations announced a joint $150 million effort to create an Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA). Last week, the Gates Foundation upped its ante on boosting production by another $306 million. About half of these new grants will fund efforts to improve seeds and soils in Africa. The Gates Foundation has clearly identified the right target. "For the poorest people, GDP [gross domestic product] growth originating in agriculture is about four times more effective in raising incomes of extremely poor people than GDP growth originating outside the sector," according the World Bank's World Development Report 2008. But why did the Green Revolution not take off in Africa?

The International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) has noted, "Poor infrastructure, high transport costs, limited investment in irrigation, and pricing and marketing policies that penalized farmers made the Green Revolution technologies too expensive or inappropriate for much of Africa." This list is basically an international bureaucracy's euphemism for saying that government corruption and mismanagement has kept African farmers poor. "Poor infrastructure" means that governments built no roads over which seeds, fertilizers and pesticides could be shipped cheaply to farmers. And conversely, without good roads, farmers can't get their crops to market.

For example, Uganda has just 58 miles of paved roads per million citizens, Mozambique just 87 miles . By contrast, the United States has 8,000. In addition, African governments have a history of imposing price controls on food crops ,which discourage farmers from growing more than they need for their families. Africa has not been alone in pursuing this destructive policy. In the 1960s, India paid its farmers 40 percent less than the world price for their grain. Green revolutionary Borlaug managed to persuade the Indian government to drop grain price controls. Restored market incentives persuaded Indian farmers to rapidly adopt new high yield crop varieties.

Interestingly, modern crop technologies fostered by the Gates Foundation might enable poor farmers to outflank, in part, these corrupt and stupid government policies. For example, seeds that contain traits like pest-resistance and drought-resistance could reduce farmers' dependence on government subsidized pesticides and irrigation systems. In fact, the Gates Foundation has provided nearly $40 million to researchers to develop drought resistant corn varieties for Africa. In addition, the foundation is funding low-cost drip irrigation systems designed by International Development Enterprises that can reduce the cost of irrigation from about $6,000 per acre to about $37.

About half of the $306 million in agricultural grants announced last week will go to the African Soil Health Program which aims to work with 4.1 million small-scale African farmers and regenerate 6.3 million hectares of farm land through better soil management practices. For the time being, AGRA supports only conventional crop breeding and does not fund the development of new varieties by means of genetic engineering. Rich countries have poured almost $600 billion in foreign aid into Africa over the past four decades. Result? Zero increase in per capita incomes. Is the Gates Foundation now pouring in good money after bad? Let's hope not.

The Gates Foundations' new Green Revolution has already provoked resistance from anti-globalization and anti-technology activists. For example, the California-based Food First/Institute for Food Development and Policy held a conference in Mali in November opposing the new Green Revolution. Food First peddled the now standard activist line that the first Green Revolution was a colossal mistake that primarily helped rich farmers become richer.

Like many such fables there is a grain of much exaggerated truth to the claim. Small farmers were slower to adopt Green Revolution techniques but most of them eventually did. Furthermore, higher farm incomes boosted demand for other goods and services, which in turn stimulated the rural nonfarm economy. Real per capita incomes doubled in Asia between 1970 and 1995. By doubling farm yields, tens of millions of acres of forests and wetlands were spared the plow and hundreds of millions of lives saved from starvation. The Green Revolution was not perfect, but critics ignore how bad poverty and hunger would have been without it.

In The Seattle Times, Food First executive director Eric Holt-Gimenez denounced the Gates Foundation's efforts to foster an African Green Revolution. "It's a corporate strategy for colonizing Africa's food and agriculture systems, which thus far have resisted," he said. Considering that today some 200 million Africans subsist on the thin edge of starvation, Africa's food and agricultural systems should be so lucky as to be colonized by new Green Revolution agricultural research and technologies.

Ronald Bailey is reason's science correspondent. His most recent book, Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution, is available from Prometheus Books.

"The Real GM Food Scandal"

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 12:41:00 EDT

The biggest biotech scandal of all? The enormous delays in introducing new, beneficial crops to farmers worldwide, says the current cover story in British Prospect magazine.

The piece outlines the sad fate of Swiss biologist Ingo Potrykus' "golden rice"--the much-ballyhooed genetically engineered rice that was going to prevent "1-2m deaths a year, and...save up to 500,000 children a year from going blind." Bureaucratic delays and European bio-tech skepticism have kept the rice, which was announced on the cover of Time in 2000 as the next big thing, from being widely distributed. Current timelines still say it may be at least another 5 years before anyone starts benefiting from one of the coolest humanitarian innovations in recent memory.

The scientific way of ensuring that crops are safe is to test the product, not the process. Perversely, regulations in the US as well as Europe require the opposite. The result is that it takes much longer and costs at least ten times as much to bring a new GM crop to market as an equivalent conventionally bred crop. As Potrykus has pointed out, no scientist or scientific institution in the public domain has the funding or the motivation to go through such an expensive and drawn-out procedure. Only large companies or the most richly funded charities can and the only projects companies are likely to back are those that make big profits. Producing rice that saves the lives or the eyesight of millions of the poorest peasants offers no great financial rewards.

The kicker:

In delaying cultivation, the anti-GM lobbies have exacted a heavy price. Their opposition has undermined agrobusiness in Europe and has driven abroad much research into plant biotechnology—an area in which Britain formerly excelled. Over-regulation may well cause the costs of the technology to remain higher than they need be. Above all, delay has caused the needless loss of millions of lives in the developing world. These lobbies and their friends in the organic movement have much to answer for.

Check out a new study on the global health effects of biotech crops.

Modern, Marvelous Maine

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 09:10:00 EDT

Maine limps to the finish line, officially becoming the last state in the union to allow genetically modified insect resistant corn. Why did Maine finally cave--biotech environmentalism beat out organic environmentalism:

Organic growers have been concerned their that crops will be contaminated by cross-pollination with the genetically modified corn.
But the Board of Pesticides Control said Friday that its mandate of reducing pesticide use and its concern about state farmers being at a competitive disadvantage without the genetically altered feed trumped those concerns.

More corn from reason here, here, and here.

Barbara Kingsolver's Latest Fiction

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 14:15:00 EDT

The steaks, chops, and roasts in our dining room deep chest freezer were often labeled with the names of the cows and pigs from which they came. About ninety percent of the food I ate growing up came from the pastures, fields, and the garden on my family's farm. The garden was fertilized with manure that I personally shoveled from the dairy barn and our house was heated with wood that I personally chopped and stacked every summer. I know from farming. So I have been some what bemused by the recent spate of pretentious back-to-the-land, eat local books including Michael Pollan's absurdly overwrought The Omnivore's Dilemma and Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon's Plenty. Pollan actually went out and killed an animal and then ate it—just imagine! How deliciously and primitively recherché! The latest of these is the New York Times bestseller, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, by novelist Barbara Kingsolver with help from her daughters and husband.

Kingsolver and her family recently moved to a 100 acre farm near the one in Meadowview, VA, on which I helped slaughter and butcher cows, pigs, chickens, turkeys, ducks, geese, and where we kept a root cellar filled with potatoes and turnips; 20 or so hives for honey; churned butter, canned cherries, tomatoes, cucumbers, beans, corn, blackberries, and nearly anything else fruit or vegetable that we could coax out of the soil. Beans were dried for winter storage strung on threads above my bed. That was how we fed ourselves year round with trips to the local Piggly Wiggly reserved for picking up essentials like toilet paper and soap. Little did I know that my family's hardscrabble farm would four decades later be at the forefront of a new food fashion trend.

Once ensconced on their 100 acre farm tucked away in a holler in Washington County, Kingsolver tells the tale of how her family decided to spend a whole year trying to eat nothing but what was grown on their farm or could be bought from local farmers. What follows is a sometimes lyrical story of planting, weeding, butchering, and canning. Unfortunately, Kingsolver adopts absolutely every one the modern urban fables with regard to food production, starting with the claim that organic is more nutritious. There is very little scientific evidence for that claim. In addition, organic is not necessarily better for nature since yields are generally lower than conventional farming, which means that more land must be used to produce food.

Reading Kingsolver, one could also conclude that pesticides were created by giant chemical companies whose sole aim was to cause cancer. But even the American Cancer Society agrees that there is "no evidence that residues of pesticides and herbicides at the low doses found in foods increase the risk of cancer." Studies also show that eliminating pesticides could cut corn yields by 30 percent, rice by 57 percent, soybeans by 37 percent, and wheat by 24 percent. Again, that would mean that a lot more of nature would have to be plowed up to maintain the food supply at current levels.

Family farms are not declining because of some conspiracy by industrial ag giants. Actually, what happened is that farmers became so productive that we needed fewer of them. In 1950, 15 percent of Americans lived on farms. Today only 1 percent of us live on farms. The meantime, the output of staples like wheat and corn nearly tripled, while vegetables nearly quadrupled. And the amount of land devoted to crops fell slightly. This dramatically increased agricultural productivity liberated many like me from farm labor so that we could do other work.

Kingsolver also worries about fashionable topic of "foodmiles." She hectors readers about the fact that the food on most Americans' plates travels an average of 1500 miles to get there. "Well-heeled North American epicures are likely to gather around a table where whole continents collide discreetly on a white tablecloth: New Zealand lamb with Italian porcinis, Peruvian asparagus, and a hearty French Bordeaux," writes Kingsolver. "The date on the calendar is utterly irrelevant." She denounces this situation as "botanically outrageous." I think it's just plain wonderful. If it were economically impractical, that lamb and those asparagus spears would stay south of the equator and New Zealander and Peruvian farmers would be poorer.

Kingsolver has evidently never heard of comparative advantage, which is the idea that people are most efficiently employed in activities in which they perform relatively better than in others. Nevertheless, Kingsolver stumbles across the notion when she claims that by raising their own food, her family earned the equivalent of $7500. To her credit, she does go on to admit, "Steven [her husband] and I certainly could have earned more money by putting our farming hours into teaching more classes or meeting extra deadlines, using the skills that our culture rewards and respects much more than food production." If somehow 15 percent of Americans still stubbornly insisted on trying to make a living on farms, we would all be deprived of the other higher value goods and services they produce today. And the real incomes of Americans since 1950 wouldn't have nearly quadrupled, as they have.

I have nothing against farmers markets. In fact, I take it that the country is becoming so wealthy that people can now make a decent living from labor-intensive activities like organic farming. But this kind of farming is essentially an artisanal activity much like basket weaving, potting, and wood working. My wife and I go every week to the local farmers market off Water Street in Charlottesville, VA, or if we're out of town, we go to the one at Dupont Circle in Washington, DC. I am very glad that people want to spend their lives raising tasty Mortgage Lifter tomatoes and Albemarle Pippin apples. And I am also very glad that I don't have to.

Now I would be a liar if I didn't admit that occasionally Kingsolver's prose transported me back to my mom's linoleum-floored kitchen filled with the smell of black cherries being canned. Heavenly. And to my grandparents' backyard eating sweet chilled slices of watermelon on a summer's evening after a hard, sweaty, dirty day of baling and stacking hay. But I also vividly recall the mind-numbing drudgery of farming and the fact that it is possible to get tired of eating pasture-fed steaks week in and week out. I also remember what's like to shear sheep and to smell of the sickly odor of lanolin for a week afterwards. And sleeping in barns in January and February to oversee the lambing. And it's not for nothing that dairy farms are called "penitentiaries without walls." Why? Because you have to milk the damned cows twice a day every day for 365 days a year. If you don't their udders burst.

I'm happy that Kingsolver and her family had a nice little farming adventure, but ultimately, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is another Kingsolver novel; a fiction about how easy and pleasant it is to grow all of one's food.

At one point, Kingsolver makes fun of a vegan movie star who wants to create a safe-haven ranch where cows and chickens can live happy lives and die a natural death. Kingsolver dismissively writes: "We know she meant well, and as fantasies of the super-rich go, it's more inspired than most. It's just the high-mindedness that rankles; when moral superiority combines with billowing ignorance, they fill up a hot air balloon that's awfully hard not to poke." That pretty much sums up how I feel about Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.

Disclosure: My sister stayed on the farm and eventually inherited it. She's happy where she is and I'm damned happy where I am.

Ronald Bailey is Reason's science correspondent. His book Liberation Biology: The Scientific and Moral Case for the Biotech Revolution is now available from Prometheus Books.

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Attack of the Cloned Food

kmw@reason.com (Katherine Mangu-Ward) — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 16:09:00 EDT

The FDA recently extended the comment period for the public to expresses its views on the introduction of milk and meat from cloned animals into the food supply.

A bunch of food trade groups sent a letter to the FDA during the initial comment period asserting that it is "in the public interest of the agency to take the time needed to 'get it right'." And The Center for Food Safety (check out their poster at right) wants you to send a letter demanding that, among other things, food products from cloned animals pass "independent and transparent long-term testing (with the burden of proof of safety on the clone developer)."

This is the precautionary principle at work: The idea that "if an action or policy might cause severe or irreversible harm to the public, in the absence of a scientific consensus that harm would not ensue, the burden of proof falls on those who would advocate taking the action."

But as reasonable as the precautionary principle seems at first, it practice its terms are nearly impossible to satisfy. First, it asks the companies to prove a negative--that nothing bad can happen because of cloned meat and milk. Further, it demands scientific consensus that the products of genetically identical animals are indistinguishable from what's already on the market. Which they are, by definition. But as last week's excellent article by Ron Bailey pointed out, "scientific consensus" is a notoriously slippery concept.

"Based on FDA's analysis of hundreds of peer-reviewed publications and other studies on the health and food composition of clones and their offspring, the draft risk assessment has determined that meat and milk from clones and their offspring are as safe as food we eat every day," says Stephen Sundlof, director of the FDA's Center for Veterinary Medicine. There's a reason for this--it's the same food.

At least there's this, in response to many of the 4,000 comments posted on the FDA's site raising moral concerns about cloning: "The [FDA] has said that it will limit its judgment to the science of cloning because it does not have the legal authority to address the ethics or morality of the debate."

One comment on the FDA site, from a Ms. Johnne Fischer, who obviously opposes the approval of cloned foods at the moment, says: "I refuse to buy meat and dairy products that do not tell me the origin." For Ms. Fischer and those like her, there's a simple solution that doesn't involve a ban. Some producers are bound to take the trouble to ensure that their supply chain is clone-free and boast of that fact on their labels.

More from Ron Bailey on the precautionary principle here.

The Snap, Crackle and Pop of Doom?

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Fri, 08 Sep 2006 12:21:00 EDT

In August, Bayer Cropscience reported to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) that some of the American long grain rice crop had been commingled with its genetically modified (GM) LL-601 rice. LL-601 is the abbreviation for the gene that confers resistance to the Liberty Link herbicide. LL-601 rice, which has not been approved for human consumption, was field tested between 1998 and 2001 and was dropped by Bayer when other varieties proved more productive and it judged that the time was not ripe for introducing GM rice. No one currently knows how the LL-601 rice got commingled at a rate of six grains of LL-601 to about 10,000 grains of conventional rice.

The announcement by the USDA and Bayer produced a predictable furor. Japan immediately banned imports of American long grain rice (but not short grain rice). The European Union restricted U.S. rice imports to only those that have been tested for the offending gene. Ireland banned U.S. rice exports outright. Gleeful anti-biotech activists called for imposing a worldwide ban on imports of U.S. rice.

Before the flap over "contaminated" U.S. rice could die down, Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth declared that they had tested Chinese rice products in Britain, France and Germany and had detected the presence of rice genetically modified to resist insects. The Chinese government responded that no genetically modified rice varieties had yet been approved for commercialization. Which is true, but recent research shows that genetically modified rice offers a potentially great benefits to China's farmers and commercialization appears to be only a matter of time.

So should you dump the boxes of Rice Krispies and Uncle Ben's in your pantry into a biohazard receptacle? Nope. First, keep in mind that you've probably already have been eating foods made with ingredients from Liberty Link crops. The USDA and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have found that LL-601 gene and the protein it produces are safe for consumers and the environment in such crops as corn, soybeans and canola. As USDA Secretary Mike Johanns declared, "It is important to note that the protein found in this regulated rice line, LL Rice-601, is approved for use in other products. It has been repeatedly and thoroughly scientifically reviewed, and used safely in food and feed, cultivation, import and breeding in the United States. It is also approved for use in nearly a dozen other countries around the world." Of course, inevitably some American rice farmers are suing Bayer over their lost sales to the regulation-happy Europeans and Japanese. It's a pity they can't sue foreign regulators for lost sales due to stupid directives.

What about that Chinese rice? My guess is that if Europeans are finding traces of GM rice in food products imported from China, it's likely that enterprising anti-biotech activists will soon announce the same allegedly dire findings here. The Chinese rice has apparently been modified using the long familiar technology of incorporating a gene from bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) which acts as anti-caterpillar insecticide. Bt is non-toxic to humans and animals and does not kill insects that leave crop plants protected by it alone. So it unlikely that whatever traces of GM rice that make it into foods imported from China will harm Americans who have been eating foods made from ingredients derived from crops protected by Bt for more than a decade now. It is estimated that at least 70 percent of all processed foods on American grocery shelves are made using ingredients from biotech crops.

However, both the Bayer and Chinese cases point up how activists misuse the current case-by-case regulatory approval system.There has to be a better way to protect public health while permitting the swift introduction of safe and beneficial agricultural technologies. In fact, Drew Kershen, a professor of law at University of Oklahoma, offers a three point plan for wending our way out of the current international biotech regulatory morass.

First, GM crops and non-GM crops should be regulated in the same manner for similar or identical risks. If a regulatory system would cover a specific trait were it in a conventionally bred crop, then it should also regulate that same trait in a GM crop. If not, then it should not be regulated in a GM crop either.

Second, once a trait has been approved, it should be approved for all varieties and all crops. There is no need to make a trait go through the regulatory system again and again and again. This would clearly apply to the Liberty Link case.

And third, comparable science-based regulatory systems should mutually recognize one another's approvals of the same traits by either direct recognition or by means of a short, fast-track recognition process. Obviously, just how much confidence to repose in European, Chinese or Indian regulatory systems is subject to debate, but the principle is sound.

In any case, the rest of the world outside European Union will soon be awash in safe biotech crop varieties. The EU will eventually have to choose between stopping all imports and growing all its own food or adopting a more reasonable science-based regulatory system.

However, until something like Kershen's sensible suggestions are implemented, the world's consumers will continue to enjoy periodic bogus food scares conjured up by anti-biotech activists.

Biotech Forests

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Fri, 01 Sep 2006 09:45:00 EDT

Last March, activists at the 8th Conference of the Parties (COP-8) for the Convention on Biological Diversity meeting in Curitiba, Brazil called for a global moratorium on genetically modified trees (GM trees). The activists claimed that genetically enhanced trees could harm the environment and the livelihoods of indigenous and local communities. In response, the COP-8 passed a resolution recommending the CBD signatories "take a precautionary approach when addressing the issue of genetically modified trees." The precautionary approach "recognizes that the absence of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing decisions where there is a risk of serious or irreversible harm." In general, it is chiefly decisions that would permit the deployment of new technologies that the precautionary approach postpones. We shall see that this line of attack cuts both ways when considering the effects of genetically enhanced trees.

In response to the COP-8 resolution, the United Nations Environment Programme is considering a global moratorium on the planting of genetically modified trees. UNEP is accepting comments on the proposed moratorium until September 1.

Are GM trees a danger to the natural environment? Opponents claim that the potential effects of GM trees include the contamination of native forests, the destruction of biodiversity and wildlife, loss of fresh water, the collapse native forest ecosystems, and cultural destruction of forest based traditional communities and severe human health impacts.

What biotech opponents mean by "contamination" is that GM trees could interbreed with conventional trees passing along their modified traits. That could happen, but is that a real threat to native forests? For example, one of the traits that biotechnologists have modified is boosting soft cellulose and reducing tough lignin fiber in wood. Such trees are easier to turn into paper and produce much less waste. However, trees with this bioengineered trait would have great difficulty surviving in the wild, so it is very unlikely to spread to native trees. Oregon State University forestry professor Steven Strauss dismisses activist concerns over GM trees somehow wiping out wild forests as "sheer nonsense." As for destroying biodiversity and wildlife, GM trees are much more likely to help than to harm. How? By boosting the productivity of tree plantations.

Opponents dismiss tree plantations as "green deserts" devoid of the natural biodiversity of wild forests. Actually, tree plantations do harbor a lot of wild species, but even if they didn't they would still offer significant environmental benefits. Right now about one-third of the world's industrial wood comes from tree plantations and if it could all come from tree plantations that would dramatically relieve pressure to harvest natural forests. An Israeli biotech company claims to have been able to engineer eucalyptus trees that grow four times faster than conventional trees. The modified trees are being field tested by a major Brazilian forestry company. If it works, this means that more trees can be grown on less land.

In fact, Roger Sedjo, a senior fellow at Resources from the Future notes that "all of the world's timber production could potentially be produced on an area roughly five to ten percent of the total forest today." Sedjo points out that this would mean that "more of the earth's forests could remain in their natural states, thereby maintaining continuous habitat for biodiversity conservation." It's hard to see what could be more eco-friendly than saving natural forests from loggers' axes.

What about the claim that biotech trees would harm indigenous and local communities? Again, to the extent that indigenous communities are directly dependent on native forest products and species for their livelihoods, reducing commercial pressure to cut down those forests will protect their traditional ways of life. Another concern is that forestry corporations in cahoots with developing country governments will expand tree plantations onto indigenous lands. Surely the better and more direct solution to problems caused by defective land tenure is to give indigenous people strong property rights to their land rather than banning biotech trees.

Biotechnology can also help protect and restore tree species that are threatened by pests and disease. For example, the American chestnut was devastated by an introduced fungal disease that killed more the 3.5 billion trees in the first half of the 20th century. These majestic trees could reach 100 feet in height and five feet in diameter. The chestnut had been the dominant hardwood species throughout the Appalachian Mountains. An enterprising squirrel, we are told, could travel from Maine to Georgia without touching the ground through the interlinked branches of chestnut trees. Now scientists at the University of Georgia and the State University of New York are investigating ways to insert blight-resistance genes into American chestnut artificial seed embryos. Thanks to biotechnology, the American chestnut could be restored later this century to the forests from which it has been missing for nearly two generations.

Looking at current silvicultural practices can also help clarify the benefits and risks involved with GM trees. "Many ecological criticisms of GM trees appear to be overstated," concludes a recent study by silviculturalists at Oregon State University. "The ecological issues expected from the use of GM poplars appear similar in scope to those managed routinely during conventional plantation culture, which includes the use of exotic and hybrid genotypes, short rotations, intensive weed control, fertilization and density control."

For example, choosing to plant a conventional poplar or 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 will be orders of magnitude less than the vast number of new chemicals that distinguish a pine from an aspen," notes the Oregon State study.

Some activists are not content to campaign for moratoriums backed by the United Nations. In 2001, the activists from the radical Environmental Liberation Front destroyed genetically modified trees at the University of Washington-Seattle and a poplar farm in Oregon.

Recall that under the precautionary approach favored by anti-biotech activists the absence of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing decisions where there is a risk of serious or irreversible harm. By opposing biotech trees, it seems that the activists have gotten it backward. The risks to the environment, specifically to wild forests, are far too great to postpone further research and development of genetically enhanced trees. The only sensible conclusion is that imposing a United Nations' moratorium on GM trees risks serious and irreversible harm to the earth's wild forests.

Mr. Green Genes

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Fri, 07 Jul 2006 00:00:00 EDT

Long time anti-biotech activist Jeremy Rifkin has come out in favor of a biotechnology technique. Should beleaguered biotechnologists break out the champagne and start celebrating? Not hardly. Earlier this week, Rifkin wrote an op/ed in the Washington Post in which he declared his support for marker assisted selection (MAS) for use in plant breeding. So far, so good.

MAS is a molecular technique in which researchers identify sections of DNA in a plant or animal located near a gene or genes that confer specific valuable traits. In plants, such traits might increase their resistance to drought or disease, or they might boost their productivity. Once a trait has been identified, researchers can trace it as they crossbreed the plants containing it with commercial varieties. Thus MAS makes it far easier for plant breeders to identify which of the crossbred plants carry the trait. That means that breeders don't have to plant the seedlings and then wait for them to grow up in the field before identifying which ones carry the sought-after new trait. MAS can cut the time to develop new commercial crop varieties in half.

Rifkin points to all of these advantages, but then declares that MAS has "made gene splicing and transgenic crops obsolete and a serious impediment to scientific progress." Whoa. Could that be true?

Plant geneticists and breeders don't agree. According to Alan McHughen, a plant biotechnologist at the University of California, Riverside, "The problem for Rifkin: MAS is not, as he suggests, an alternative to gene splicing (recombinant DNA or rDNA), but an adjunct. Both are powerful and useful tools that can be used together."

McHughen offers a real life example of how MAS and gene-splicing have been used to introduce disease resistance in rice. Many rice varieties have regularly been devastated by bacterial leaf blight. Fortunately, back in the 1970s researchers identified a blight-resistant species of wild rice native to Mali. Given the state of biotech then, it took years for the Xa21 gene that confers blight resistance to be identified. By the late 1990s, some California plant biotechnologists succeeded in using gene-splicing to insert the Xa21gene into commercial rice varieties to endow them with blight resistance. In 2003, Chinese plant breeders reported using MAS to identify and guide their efforts to successfully crossbreed a blight resistant rice variety with a productive commercial variety. Both are resistant to blight, but Rifkin wants to claim that one is a danger and the other is safe. Rifkin asserts that "With MAS, the breeding of new varieties always remain within a species, thus greatly reducing the risk of environmental harm and potential adverse health effects associated with genetically modified crops."

However, as McHughen points out, "The irony—if not stupidity—is that the resulting plant in each case is genetically identical. If one plant is safe, the other is equally safe. If one carries risks, the other carries the identical risks. Yet to Rifkin, the GE (genetically engineered) rice is so hazardous that it demands banning outright, and the other rice is the savior of sustainable agriculture." And what if the genes for disease resistance had not been found in a wild variety of rice, but in corn? Should farmers forego that advantage just because Mother Nature hadn't figured out a way to get beneficial genes from one species to another before human gene splicers came along?

Evidently, Rifkin thinks that breeding "within a species" is safe, but inserting genes from outside species is inherently bad, perhaps even immoral. Back in 1998 when he was flogging his book, The Biotech Century: Harnessing the Gene and Remaking the World, Rifkin warned that because of biotech, "All living beings are drained of their substance and life becomes a code to be deciphered. There is no longer any question of sacredness or specialness."

Of course, not all of us share Rifkin view that tomatoes, soybeans and rice are inviolable entities, so he hints at environmental risks and adverse health effects to get people's attention. However, Rifkin doesn't cite examples of any such dangers. He can't; there haven't been any. In 2004, the National Academy of Sciences issued a comprehensive report with the fetching title, Safety of Genetically Engineered Foods: Approaches to Assessing Unintended Health Effects that concluded, "To date, no adverse health effects attributed to genetic engineering have been documented in the human population." The NAS also found that "assess[ing] products based exclusively on their method of breeding is scientifically unjustified." In other words, there is no reason to assess food made from genetically engineered crops any differently than foods made from traditional breeding methods. The NAS did recommend additional scrutiny if specific genetic modifications significantly change the nutritional composition of a food crop. Speaking of health risks, toxic varieties of crops have been produced by means of conventional breeding, as happened in the case of an insect resistant variety of celery (produced too much psoralen) and a potato (too much solanine).

So what about the potential environmental "risks" hinted at by Rifkin? He shares one frequently expressed concern by many opponents of genetically engineering crops that transgenes (the inserted genes) will "contaminate" conventional varieties or wild relatives through crossbreeding. As support, Rifkin cites a Union of Concerned Scientists survey that claimed that traditional varieties of corn, soybeans and canola are "pervasively contaminated with low levels of DNA sequences originating in genetically engineered varieties of these crops." Rifkin adds, "Cleaning up contaminated genetic programs could prove to be as troublesome and expensive in the future as cleaning up the viruses that invade software programs."

Rifkin fails to explain why something like the Xa21 gene is a "contaminant" if it derives from crossbreeding with a gene-spliced variety, but is not a contaminant if it comes from crossbreeding with an MAS variety. "No geneticist uses the term 'contamination'- it is a purely non-scientific construction designed to elicit an emotional response from non-scientists," says McHughen. "DNA is not a virus and bears no analogous relationship to computer viruses, except, perhaps, by those who wish to trick people into adopting an otherwise unpalatable political agenda."

Ultimately, Rifkin's latest proposal creates a false dichotomy, genetic engineering or MAS, when, in reality, it is both. McHughen concludes, "Rifkin is an opportunistic parasite, preying on people's scientific ignorance to generate funding and support."

Amber Waves of Drug-Producing Grain

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Fri, 14 Apr 2006 10:58:00 EDT

Chicago—Plants are biochemical factories fueled by sunlight that can be genetically tweaked to make whatever biomolecule is desired. And they scale up easily. If you need more of a drug, just plant more corn, barley, rice, or tobacco. Wait four months and harvest pounds and pounds of cures. That's the idea behind biopharming. Plants can produce thousands of pounds of complex low cost biomolecules that pharmaceutical chemists cannot.

The Biotechnology Industry Organization's annual convention, BIO 2006, held a panel discussion on this burgeoning industry, "Plant-Made Pharmaceuticals—Challenges and Opportunities," which included representatives from a couple of biotech companies that are using plants to produce pharmaceuticals.

The French biotech company Meristem Therapeutics produces a recombinant lipase (brand name Meripase) that helps people with cystic fibrosis to Ventria Bioscience, which has developed a variety of biotech crops that produce lactoferrin. Lactoferrin is naturally found in milk and has anti-bacterial, anti-viral, and anti-fungal properties. Ventria envisions incorporating lactoferrin in medicines to treat acute diarrhea and in topical ointments to alleviate inflammation and fight fungal infections.

Not everyone is happy with the vision of amber waves of drug producing grain. Naturally, environmental and anti-biotech activists are against them. But pillars of American business such as the Grocery Manufacturers Association of America are too. At another BIO 2006 panel, Mark Nelson, GMA's Vice President, Scientific and Regulatory Policy, declared, "Pharmaceuticals should not be produced in the food or feed crops." The beer giant Anheuser-Busch threatened to boycott rice produced in Missouri if Ventria's lactoferrin rice were grown in the state.

Both activists and food companies fear what would happen if food crops were contaminated by pharmcrops. Activists cite nebulous concerns about health effects, and grocers more concretely worry about loss of business that inevitable product recalls would cause.

Whatever one thinks about the activists' health concerns, the grocers' fear of costly and disruptive recalls is well-founded. It has happened before: Millions of dollars of products were recalled when they were discovered to contain minute amounts of the biotech insect-resistant corn variety StarLink. In October 2000, an activist lab found that StarLink, approved by the Environmental Protection Agency only for animal feed, had been detected in two brands of taco shells, prompting recalls and front-page headlines. Lost in the furor was the fact that there was little reason to believe the corn was unsafe for human consumption—only an implausible, unsubstantiated fear that it might cause allergic reactions. In the end, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control found that there was absolutely no evidence that anyone had suffered any adverse reaction to eating foods containing StarLink corn.

And then there is the Prodigene case. Prodigene produces a vaccine for pig diarrhea in corn. Prodigene contracted with a farmer in Nebraska to raise and harvest their biotech corn. The next year the farmer planted soybeans and a few volunteer corn plants sprouted. As farmers do, he harvested soybeans without worrying overmuch about the few corn plants. He delivered his 500 bushels of soybeans to a grain elevator, but when government inspectors checked it they discovered the corn. Less than an ounce of corn led them to condemn the entire elevator—500,000 bushels of soybeans. Prodigene was fined and ordered to pay for and destroy all the soybeans. In 2003, after the Prodigene fiasco, the U.S. Department of Agriculture imposed stricter isolation requirements on pharmcrops.

The BIO 2006 panel featured an Iowa farmer, Bill Horan, who contracts to grow various pharmcrops for both Meristem and Ventria. Horan's PowerPoint presentation showed the great lengths to which he goes to make sure that no pharmcrops escape his fields. For example, the Meristem lipase corn grew in a one acre plot surrounded by 100 foot swaths of fallow land in the middle of 440 acre soybean field.

Horan described the four layers of redundancy he uses to insure that no pharmagenes get out of his fields. First there is geographical separation from the nearest corn field. Second there is temporal separation: He planted the Meristem corn more than a month after neighboring farmers planted their corn. This means that the neighbors' corn will have completed pollen production and fertilization well before the Meristem corn begins to do so. Third, Meristem corn tassels (the male sex organs on corn) are sterile, so they don't produce pollen that could contaminate neighboring corn anyway. The Meristem corn is fertilized by normal commercial corn plants that are planted next to it. And fourth, even though the Meristem tassels are sterile, they are removed once the corn ears start to grow. The corn is harvested by equipment that is completely dedicated to it alone. When not in use, the equipment is locked away in a shed. The high price that Horan can charge for his pharmcrop more than justifies all the trouble and expense.

So far the total amount of land used to plant pharmcrops over the last ten years is 800 acres. One calculation assumed that 40 plant-made pharmaceuticals, worth $1 billion each, would require about 40,000 acres of land. The United States has 470 million acres of arable land. As one participant quipped, "It's not farming, it's gardening."

But do we have to use food and feed crops to produce cheap medicines? Horan insisted, "If you want to insert a gene for protein in a nonfood crop, that's a recipe for disaster. That's basically a weed and you don't know what genes it has, what it will crossbreed with, and so forth." The advantage to crop plants, said Horan, is that we know a great deal about corn. He pointed out that many crop plants simply cannot survive in the wild, and so they do not escape into the wild. "Give me a weed to grow and I can't guarantee anything," said Horan.

Yet there are ways to grow plant-made pharmaceuticals other than open fields. For example, the North Carolina biotech company Biolex Therapeutics uses the aquatic plant lemna, also known as duckweed, to manufacture human proteins like alpha interferon and human growth hormone. The Biolex lemna system is completely contained within plastic modules, and the plants reproduce clonally; that is, they don't flower and they don't pollinate, so they can't crossbreed with other plants. And no one eats duckweed. Finally, lemna plants double biomass in about 36 hours, which means that one can scale up to produce human proteins very quickly.

Plant-made pharmaceuticals by making medicines cheaper and faster could help solve all kinds of global health problems. However, if farmers and drug manufacturers want to continue to use food crops to produce medicines, there had better not be anymore cases like StarLink or Prodigene. If that happens, the public and food manufacturers will make sure that Congress and the regulators fallow their fields permanently.

Hungry for Biotechnology

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Wed, 31 Aug 2005 00:00:00 EDT

The European Union and fellow traveling anti-biotech activists may well succeed in bottling up the next wave of genetically improved crops that aim directly at helping poor farmers in the developing world. How? Anti-biotech European regulations are spooking the governments of poor countries into preventing their farmers from growing the new genetically enhanced crops. And that's a shame, because researchers in laboratories and plant breeding stations around the world are endowing new biotech crop varieties with traits like disease resistance and improved nutritional value.

For example, researchers are trying to save bananas and plantains from commercial extinction in the coming decade. Bananas and plantains rank fourth as a staple crops after rice, wheat, and maize, providing food for nearly 400 million poor people. Unfortunately, bananas and plantains, are rapidly succumbing to global plagues like black sigatoka and a new variety of Panama disease. As a result, yields have dropped by half in many poor countries.

Bananas and plantains are sterile, and thus generally propagated by farmers as genetically identical clones. If one clone is susceptible to a disease, so are all of the other clones. Sterility also obviously makes it difficult for plant breeders to create new disease-resistant versions of bananas and plantains. This is precisely where biotechnology comes in handy. Researchers are trying to create hardy clones by directly inserting disease resistance genes from rice into banana tissue and coaxing the tissue into producing full grown plants, which can then be propagated.

Then there is golden rice. Golden rice was the first crop developed specifically as a nutritional enhancement for hundreds of millions of vitamin A–deficient poor people whose main staple is rice. In the developing world some 500,000 people per year go blind due to vitamin A deficiency. Conventional rice produces almost no vitamin A. Golden rice has a yellow hue because it has been genetically engineered to produce beta-carotene, the yellow precursor molecule that is turned into vitamin A by the body. The original version of golden rice released in 2000 contained beta-carotene genes from daffodils, and a serving of it provided about 20 percent of the recommended dietary allowance (RDA). A new version released this year, containing genes from corn (maize) has boosted the amount of beta-carotene per serving to 50 percent of the RDA.

The non-profit International Rice Research Institute is working with the Golden Rice Humanitarian Board to crossbreed genetically improved golden rice with local Asian varieties for eventual release to poor farmers.

Finally, there is the case of disease resistant cassava. Researchers at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center near St. Louis, MO, has developed a cassava plant that resists the devastating effects of cassava mosaic virus. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch points out that African subsistence farmers produced 108 million tons of cassava in 2004, more than two-and-a-half times the amount of corn they produced. But African farmers could produce a lot more if it weren't for the cassava mosaic virus. The virus reduces yields across Africa by 30 percent to 40 percent, and caused losses as high as $2.7 billion in 2003.

The Danforth Center researchers ride to the rescue. They inoculate the cassava plant against the disease by inserting a gene for the protein coat of the mosaic virus into the plant's own genome. This poses no health danger to people since they have suffered no ill effects from eating the virus on infected plants for decades. The Danforth Center's genetically improved cassava is now ready for field testing, but because of concerns about the reaction of the European Union and anti-biotech activists, no African nation has had the nerve to approve such tests yet.

Not surprisingly, the constituency of anti-biotech environmental groups like Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth is not poor African and Asian farmers and their families, but affluent and easily frightened European consumers. In response to ferocious pressure ginned up by the misleading campaigns of ideological environmentalists, EU politicians and bureaucrats have built an all but impenetrable wall of anti-biotech regulations around themselves. Wielding these onerous crop biotechnology regulations, the EU, on specious safety grounds, has essentially banned the importation of most biotech crops and foods. But these regulations do not only have consequences for European farmer and consumers

The EU wants to export its regulatory system to the world, and it is offering "capacity building" foreign aid to persuade developing countries to adopt its no-go or go-slow approach to crop biotechnology regulations. Even more tragically, some developing countries are so afraid of the EU's anti-biotech wrath that they are willing to risk the lives of millions of their hungry by rejecting food aid that contains genetically enhanced crops.

Activists usually blame the inaction of rich countries for killing people in poor countries. However, instead of outrage here, we get Greenpeace geneticist Doreen Stabinsky primly quipping in the Post-Dispatch, "Hunger is not solved by producing more food. We're the breadbasket of the world, and we have hungry people in the U.S."

Hunger may not be solved by producing more food, but it sure couldn't hurt.

Patent Sense

bdoherty@reason.com (Brian Doherty) — Thu, 01 Apr 2004 00:00:00 EST

Activist groups such as the Rural Advancement Foundation International complain that the technology behind genetically modified (GM) crop seeds is usually patented, often by huge conglomerates such as Monsanto. They fear patent controls will make poor farmers serfs of global agri-conglomerates because they'll have to buy seeds every year under restrictive licensing agreements.

But patents don't last forever. In the U.S. they last 20 years from the issue date, and in Europe it's 20 years from the application date. For some key GM plant patents, including several held by Monsanto, that anniversary arrives this year -- and as the decade progresses many more will be expiring. In the long run, because the patent system eliminates "trade secrets" and tells the whole world how things are done, it guarantees that inventions will become available to anyone, free of restrictions.

Gregory Conko, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, notes that agribusinesses frequently allow use of their patented seeds and genes by nonprofit foundations and researchers, such as the developers of beta-carotene-filled "golden rice," designed to reduce vitamin A deficiencies in the developing world.

It is still possible, indeed probable, that companies like Monsanto will try to maintain patent-like protections through restrictive licensing agreements with farmers. "Monsanto's agreement system could continue," Conko grants. "But once the patent expires, there are far fewer startup cost for the next entrepreneurial firm to reproduce it, either without licensing agreements or with one but at a lower price."

Eating Tasty Clones

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Thu, 06 Nov 2003 00:00:00 EST

Second Chance was cloned from a 21-year-old steer named Chance who obviously could not pass on his genes any other way. Second Chance or his descendants could end up on your dinner plate one day. Since the birth of the sheep Dolly, the first mammal cloned in 1996, researchers have succeeded in cloning a host of farm animals including goats, pigs, mules, and cows. Since producing animal clones is very expensive, it's unlikely that many clones will soon end up as Salisbury steak or a rack of lamb. Instead cloning is being used to preserve and pass along genes from superior or rare animals. Still, one day, as cloning becomes more efficient, meat and milk from clones will be sold to consumers. Is that a problem?

First, people already regularly eat lots of clones, that is, cloned fruits and vegetables. This includes most wine grapes, and all seedless grapes. Granny Smith, Red Delicious, and Gala apples are all clones, as are garlic and most blueberries. One might think that being genetically identical might actually enhance food safety since people have already eaten the clones' forbears without ill effects.

Similarly, the forebears of many animal clones will already have been served as hamburgers or barbecue with no apparent ill effects on consumers. So it seems reasonable to think that if the forebear was tasty and harmless that its genetically identical twin will also be equally tasty and harmless. The notoriously cautious National Academy of Sciences found last year that "There is no current evidence that food products derived from adult somatic cell clones or their progeny present a food safety concern." The NAS added, "The products of offspring of cloned animals were regarded as posing no food safety concern because they are the result of natural matings." Despite the lack of evidence that eating cloned animals or products derived from them is somehow unsafe, the NAS panel recommended "that an evaluation of the composition of food products derived from cloned animals using available procedures would be prudent to minimize any remaining food safety concerns." And that is being done.

Last week, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) after reviewing the available scientific evidence issued a preliminary report that concluded, "Edible products from normal, healthy clones or their progeny do not appear to pose increased food consumption risks relative to comparable products from conventional animals."

But in modern America, no new technology goes unchallenged. So-called consumer activists like Carol Tucker Foreman from Consumers Federation of America caution against animal cloning. However, Foreman offers no scientific evidence that there may be any safety problems with animal cloning, just pandering to vague fears about new technologies.

Earlier this week, an FDA scientific panel essentially backed the safety findings of the agency's preliminary report, but split down the middle on approving the use of cloned animals for food on the basis of animal welfare concerns. Cloning technology is still so crude that it often takes hundreds of attempts to produce one healthy clone.

The FDA panelists pointed out that many cloned animal fetuses never come to term and many die of defects shortly after being born. (Food safety note: The FDA already forbids putting diseased and defective animals into our food supply and these rules would clearly apply to defective clones.) Given the panoply of animal welfare issues that could be raised with regard to using animals as food, it seems a bit peculiar to worry overmuch about cloning. And cloning can improve animal welfare too. For example, much animal pain and suffering could be eliminated by cloning disease-resistant animals.

So relax—thanks to cloning, you may soon safely enjoy a nice medium rare New York strip from Third Chance, Fourth Chance, Fifth Chance, or even 10,000th Chance.

Asking the Wrong Questions?

rbailey@reason.com (Ronald Bailey) — Wed, 05 Nov 2003 00:00:00 EST

Last month the British Royal Society's flagship scientific journal, The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, reported the results of a three-year Farm Scale Evaluation (FSE) study that compared conventional crops with genetically enhanced herbicide-resistant crops. Anti-biotech activists immediately claimed that the FSE results supported their demands for a total ban on genetically modified agriculture.

"For years the GM corporations have been claiming that their crop would reduce weed killer use and benefit wildlife," Greenpeace responded in a statement. "Now we know how wrong they were." Tony Juniper, director of Friends of the Earth, argued, "These trials have shown that GM oilseed rape and beet cause more damage to the environment than even conventional crops. The maize results are at best inconclusive. Going ahead with the commercialization of any of these GM crops would be totally unacceptable."

But do crops that are genetically enhanced to tolerate herbicides hurt the environment? Looking at the details of the FSE study reveals the evidence of harm to be less than compelling. The very limited question that FSE researchers were asked to investigate was whether or not there was any "difference between the management of GMHT [genetically modified herbicide tolerant] varieties and that of comparable conventional varieties in their effects on wildlife abundance and diversity." To find out, farmers planted several score fields half with conventional varieties, and half with GMHT varieties. The researchers then looked at the abundance of weeds, invertebrates (insects, spiders, snails, etc.) and vertebrates (chiefly birds) living in the farm fields and along the uncultivated margins of the fields.

What did they find? They found that fields growing herbicide-tolerant beets and canola had fewer bees and butterflies. Why? Because bees and butterflies consume nectar, and the GMHT fields had fewer flowering weeds for them to feed on. The researchers noted that "the results for bees and butterflies relate to foraging preferences and might or might not translate into effects on population densities." In other words, bees and butterflies prefer to flit off to areas where flowers bloom and stay away from relatively weed-free fields. Meanwhile, another group of insects—springtails—increased in GMHT fields because they feed on dead plant matter, e.g., the weeds killed by herbicides. Except for those groups, the researchers concluded, "The FSEs have shown that GMHT management has no strong effect on the majority of the higher taxa of aerial and epigeal arthropods..." Translation: Surface dwelling and flying invertebrates were largely unaffected by GM crops.

What about weeds? By engineering in herbicide tolerance, farmers can use safer, less toxic herbicides to control weeds throughout a crop's growing period. For conventional crops, farmers typically pre-treat a field with herbicide to kill off weeds before or shortly after they plant. Since their crops are generally susceptible to herbicides, farmers are limited in the herbicides they can use once their conventional crop begins growing. So weeds that escaped the pre-treatment continue to grow and compete with crop plants for nutrients and sunlight. Since herbicide-tolerant crops can be treated at any time, this means that farmers can more easily control weed infestations.

So it is not surprising that the FSEs found that there were fewer weeds in beet and canola fields, and therefore there were fewer weed seeds available to feed wildlife such as birds. On the other hand, weed densities were greater for GMHT maize, most likely because the conventional herbicide (atrazine) has such a long-lasting effect that it kills far more weeds during and after treatment. Maize fields, both conventional and GMHT, had far fewer weeds per square meter than either beets or canola. In fact, choosing to grow maize rather than beets or canola has a far greater effect on wildlife than growing genetically enhanced crops.

The Greenpeace claim that GM growing does not reduce the amount of weed killer used by farmers was shown by the FSE study to be dramatically false. Farmers used 48 percent less herbicide for GM beets, 43 percent less for maize, and herbicide applications were not significantly different for canola, although in the U.S., canola farmers typically use 60 percent less herbicide than do conventional growers.

The FSEs clearly provided some fascinating new information about the differences in the conventional and genetically enhanced crops. The investigators should be applauded for rigorously and fairly answering the questions given to them. However, their findings do not ineluctably tell policymakers or the public what to do about genetically modified agriculture, no matter what the anti-biotech activists may claim. The future direction of farming depends far more on value judgments and aesthetic concerns than it does on scientific studies like the FSE. The central question probably is: What kind of landscape do people prefer?

Consider that no matter what effects either conventional or GM crops have on wildlife, they pale in comparison to the impact that the introduction of modern herbicides and pesticides 50 years ago had on farmland biology. Farmers' fields became dramatically more productive, and comparatively weed- and pest-free.

Of course, this modern revolution in farming has boosted food production many fold, and makes food cheaper and more abundant than it has ever been in history. Few people would advocate doing away with conventional farming in order to boost wildlife populations, if by doing so we increased the risk of starvation. Farming, it's worth remembering, is the opposite of letting nature run wild—that's why agriculture is so much more productive than hunting and gathering.

Besides, the FSE researchers themselves point out that an alternative to banning GM crops would be to manage the landscape to produce the sort of plants that would support the preferred collection of insects, spiders, birds, mammals, and so forth. In fact, if protecting wildlife is the right goal, the higher productivity of genetically enhanced crops means that less land has to be planted to grow food for people, thus leaving more land for nature. So there may be less wildlife in the fields, but more across the whole landscape, after it has been allowed to revert to nature.

But why not ask a deeper question? Why favor the sorts of wildlife that thrive in relatively open areas like farms in the first place? Chopping down essentially all of Britain's forests to create farms had a far greater effect on wildlife than herbicides or genetically enhanced crops do. In the United Kingdom today, 85 percent of the total arable land surface is sown in crops. Why not get rid of farms entirely and restore Britain's once dominant woodland species? After all, farmers in the European Union have no business at all growing highly subsidized sugar beets, since the sugar they produce costs several times the world market price for that commodity. It's the same with maize-—farmers in Ohio can grow corn much more cheaply than the British.

The FSE program offers some fascinating scientific insights, but it cannot tell us how farmland should be managed. If anti-biotech activists want to favor certain wildlife and not others, that is their choice. But they cannot make the case for their preferences by arguing that "science" has somehow proved their point.