With election day approaching, celebrity anti-GMO activists started showing up to support the effort. Here was Tyrone Hayes, the Berkeley biology professor and former Syngenta scientist who made international headlines for showing that Syngenta’s pesticide atrazine causes hormone disruptions. There was Ben Cohen of Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream, speaking about how difficult it was to be GMO-free in the ice cream industry “because most of the feed given to cows comes from GMO crops.”
Alika and the SHAKA Movement held a daylong Hawaiian music festival called Aloha da Vote. A party called Shake It for SHAKA advertised “tribal ethno global beats to move feets & stir us into ecstatic bliss dance heaven.”
The Vote
Alika Atay didn’t care whether they danced, walked, or drove to the polls, he just wanted to get them there and get them to vote. The early returns did not seem promising. Local television and radio stations continued to bombard Maui residents with ads paid for by Monsanto and Dow, and the tactic seemed to be working: as Alika drove around, he noticed the polling places were empty. With just four hours left before the polls closed, exit interviews indicated that the industry side was winning 60–40.
Alika and his team began feverishly working Facebook and Twitter. They called everyone they knew. If you haven’t voted yet, get out and vote. If you have voted, fill your car with friends who haven’t, and get them to the polls.
“We had people working all the precincts,” Alika said. “We said, ‘Let’s make our signs the last things people see before they vote.’”
Autumn Ness said she was never in any doubt. She knew how many doors she had knocked on. Sure enough, when the final vote was tallied, supporters of the moratorium—a shoestring, grassroots organization battling $8 million spent by two of the biggest companies in the world—had won, with just over 51 percent of the votes. The vote to ban all GM farming on the island was decided by just a thousand votes.
“That night, when people read the results and the reality sank in that we had won, there were a couple thousand people gathered, hugging each other,” Alika told me. “I saw a lot of young people, a lot of Hawaiians, coming up to me and saying this was the first time they had ever voted. There were people who had given up on the system—the elders—they chose this time to say, ‘Maybe this will be worth it.’”
The celebrations were short-lived. SHAKA and the rest of the moratorium’s supporters knew the companies would take their victory to federal court, just as they had on Kauai and on the Big Island. So as soon as the votes were counted, they filed a lawsuit—unusual for the side that won an election—seeking to force the county to enforce the ban.
The next day, Monsanto and Dow Chemical filed their own lawsuit. Just as they did after the Kauai and Big Island votes, the companies claimed the Maui initiative had no authority to preempt state and federal laws that already regulated GMOs. “This local referendum interferes with and conflicts with long-established state and federal laws that support both the safety and lawful cultivation of GMO plants,” said John Purcell, a Monsanto executive.
Barry Kurren, the federal judge who struck down both Kauai’s bid to restrict GM farming and the Big Island’s own GMO restriction, issued an injunction, pushing for more arguments to be heard; the county agreed to wait several months to start enforcement.
Kurren reassigned the case to Chief Judge Susan Mollway, and on June 30, 2015, Mollway ruled that the county law was indeed preempted by state and federal law, and that the county had overstepped its authority by banning GMOs. Notably absent from her ruling was any opinion about the safety of GMOs.
No portion of this ruling says anything about whether GE organisms are good or bad or about whether the court thinks the substance of the ordinance would be beneficial to the county.
Alika Atay, the SHAKA Movement, Lorrin Pang, and a handful of others have appealed the ruling to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. Their goal: Get the county to enforce the will of its own citizens.
To Alika, the victory—however compromised—represented a profound moment in the history of his indigenous people. No longer would native Hawaiians feel intimidated by colonial economic forces, no matter how well-heeled.
“For me, that was the bigger message,” Alika said. “It gave these young people a taste of victory. They knew how much hard work and sacrifice came along with that victory. So now, when future challenges come up, they’ll know what to do. We were aina warriors.”
Part Three
7.
Feeding the World
Dennis Gonsalves saved an industry by redesigning the genes of a single papaya plant. Nigel Taylor is doing similar work, but he’s working to protect food for an entire continent.
When I visited Taylor, I discovered him deep inside a large greenhouse outside St. Louis. He was looking wistfully over a small forest of foot-tall cassava seedlings, pawing through a canopy of five-lobed leaves. One by one, Taylor pulled up plants, looking closely at the color of the roots. He was hoping to see orange, but—all too often—he saw white instead.
Taylor moves methodically, but there is an unmistakable urgency to his work. A soft-spoken man with a gray beard and ponytail and a rich Scottish accent, Taylor is a senior research scientist at St. Louis’s Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, one of the world’s leading (and most well-funded) nonprofit plant research institutions. Taylor is experimenting with genetically engineered cassava, an improved version of an essential crop grown by millions of small farmers in Africa. Cassava is dense with calories, it can tolerate heat and drought, and it can be grown in depleted, marginal soil. But like white rice, cassava is also an imperfect source of nutrition: it fills bellies, but does not fully nourish bodies. Inserting genes that would make cassava more nutritious—coding plants to produce and store vitamin A, vitamin E, or iron—might solve significant health and nutritional problems for the 250 million people who depend on the crop.
Taylor yanks up another cassava. The root of this one is the color of a Creamsicle, and Taylor smiles faintly. The gold-orange hue of the root means the plant is generating beta-carotene, the same compound that gives carrots and sweet potatoes their color. Beta-carotene is essential to the body’s generation of vitamin A, a crucial nutritional staple whose absence causes blindness and death in hundreds of thousands of children in the developing world. Vitamin A is found in animal products like eggs, liver, and dairy products, but in countries that don’t eat much of these things—especially parts of Africa, Asia, and Latin America—reliable sources of vitamin A can be hard to come by. With the right genetic tinkering, Taylor’s “golden cassava” could help solve vitamin A deficiency for the many cultures that experience it.
But first he has to get all of the components of the genome just right, and it’s not just nutrition he has to address to make the crop more productive.
There are also the flies.
In recent years, cassava crops have been attacked by growing swarms of whiteflies, which serve as vectors for a pair of viral diseases called mosaic and brown streak. These pathogen-carrying insects have long been a plague, but warming temperatures, possibly caused by climate change, have helped their numbers explode. Traditionally, the only answer has been to spray plants with pesticides, an only marginally effective solution that carries its own dangers for both farmers and the people they feed.
“Spraying to control whiteflies is not effective, because—like spraying for mosquitoes to get rid of malaria—you have to kill every one,” Taylor said. “These flies are incredibly efficient; you can find a couple thousand flies on a single plant. When we were doing our first field trials, they were flying up and we were breathing them in, wheezing them in. It was really unpleasant.”
In the 1990s, scientists working across sub-Saharan Africa focused on breeding cassava to develop plants resistant to the mosaic virus. They were very successful, Taylor said.
But then the brown streak disease came along.
Brown streak had been around in coastal Kenya and Mozambique for a long time, but it started spreading like crazy in the early to middle 2000s. Cassava varieties that had been developed to resist the mosaic virus were helpless before brown streak, which morphed from being an isolated disease to an epidemic throughout coastal East Africa.
“People have been looking for sources of resistance to the brown streak disease, but so far, it has proved difficult,” Taylor said. “When a plant gets infected, it can recognize the pathogen, and this stimulates its defense mechanism. But when it’s a battle between the plant and the pathogen, brown streak always triumphs.”
Cassava is “vegetatively propagated,” meaning farmers take stem cuttings from one season’s crop to establish the next. Therefore, if one year’s plants are infected with the disease, it is carried over to the next planting cycle. “Even with no new infections, your yields are being affected,” Taylor said. “Diseases are always there. Insect vectors are always there.”
Where traditional breeding is facing challenges, Taylor is counting on genetic engineering to succeed. Like Dennis Gonsalves, a scientist Taylor very much admires, Taylor is hoping to take an existing cultivar and introduce new gene sequences that—if he can get the sequences right—will make cassava resistant to brown streak. In this, his work is very much like that done on Hawaiian papaya. The difference is that on Hawaii, the price of failure is the collapse of a local industry. In Africa, the collapse of cassava would dramatically affect the lives of millions of people.
Paul Anderson, one of Taylor’s senior colleagues, has something of a cold-eyed view of the interaction between humans, food, and agricultural technology. Anderson is the director of the Danforth Center’s Institute for International Crop Improvement and oversees the center’s work on cassava, sweet potato, sorghum, and cowpeas. He has long studied the rise and fall of crops and human civilizations, and when it comes to the human dependence on farming, he has little patience for sentimentality.
“Human populations rise and fall based on the promise of food produced in those geographies,” he said. “There are lots of instances of crops going by the wayside due to various problems, and others arising. This is why some societies succeeded and some did not. One of the key factors was the ability to grow crops, and those that created multiple crops succeeded. Those that didn’t were doomed to be hunters and gatherers.
“Historically, starvation typically arises with too much dependence on one type of crop,” he said. “The potato blight in Ireland—that sort of scenario has played itself out in a lot of different places and in different times. Sometimes diseases could be addressed with cultural practices, with farmers noting that some things you did decreased the possibility of disease. You could manage to get by. But that sort of thing takes time. You gotta be really lucky, or get somebody already doing that cultural practice. One always tries to grow a crop where it hasn’t been grown before, to find how it is limited by temperature or water availability or what have you, so any plant breeder is going to be working on expanding the value of that acre by growing in many places and having it yield well.”
Take sorghum and corn. Sorghum tolerates drought quite well in places like the Sahel, the semi-arid band of Africa south of the Sahara desert. Corn (also known as maize) does not. But maize has advantages that sorghum does not: it tastes better, and its nutrients are more readily available. With maize porridge, your body absorbs 80 to 90 percent of the grain’s protein, Anderson said. With sorghum, it’s only 65 percent.
“Over the last ten years, more and more people are growing maize, but it is not a stress-tolerant crop,” Anderson said. “But farmers really like it, so if they get good growing conditions for two, three, four years in a row, they increase the maize on their farm. But then there will be a drought, and the maize crop will fail.
“So that happens, and farmers are used to that,” Anderson said. “But if it happens two years in a row, the farmers are lost. He leaves the farm and moves into the city. This has happened most recently in Kenya, after a significant drought caused big population movements. The choice of the wrong crop caused a lot of farmers to fail.”
So genetic engineers have a couple of options, Anderson said. They can work on drought-tolerant maize, which plant breeders have been pushing for as long as recorded history, or they can develop a sorghum that is more palatable and has improved nutrition, Anderson said.
“Genetic engineering isn’t an end in itself, it’s just a crop-improvement practice that extends your ability to make improvements,” Anderson said. “So depending on what time in history one was in, one had tools one could use. Genetic engineering very recently added a new tool—a significant tool, but it’s no different than other tools, like the fertilization of plants, or the hybridization of corn.”
The United Nations estimates that the world will be inhabited by another 2 billion people by 2050, half of them born in sub-Saharan Africa, and 30 percent in South and Southeast Asia. All of these places are projected to experience acute and worsening drought, which may well make the breakdown of food systems one of the most dangerous effects of climate change.
With such catastrophic changes on the horizon, the need for advanced technology like GMOs has never been so acute, Anderson said. “Making plants more stress-tolerant—these are difficult issues to address,” he said. “It boils down to this: Is there sufficient genetic variation in the crops of interest? If not, then one has to create variation in the crop so it can be manipulated. Drought tolerance, cold tolerance—these have been targets for plant breeders for thousands of years. Genetic engineering is going to be required to make these big changes.”
To Anderson, using GM technology to improve crops in the developing world is a solution that ripples far beyond the growing of food.
“In most limiting situations, you’re talking about the ability to provide nutrients and calories to get you through the year,” Anderson said. “You don’t have to go very far to see that if you double this, or even increase it by 50 percent, you can sell your crops or share them. You can get the leverage that allows you to move out of poverty. It’s poverty that’s the biggest problem in these situations.
“Food availability is more dramatic, but it’s ongoing poverty that won’t allow a person to achieve their potential. Field labor is almost entirely women and children. Fix this, and a farmer’s kids might get to go to school or have a book when they go to school.”
Paying for Orphans
With so much at stake, and with genetic engineering offering so much promise, why haven’t multinational corporations put more muscle into this work?
The answer is money. Or, rather, profit.
The Danforth Center looks like a hybrid between a university and a corporation, and in a way it is: the center’s campus is massive, gleaming, and growing, with 200,000 square feet of gorgeous, state-of-the-art laboratory buildings set off by a sky-lit atrium and a lengthy, fountained reflecting pool. This will soon be joined by $45 million of additional research space and another hundred additional researchers—including the University of Delaware’s Blake Meyers.
The Danforth Center’s work is also situated somewhere between university research and corporate agriculture: they do basic science, but they also get their plants out into the field. Their work is not just theoretical, in other words; it is meant to help make practical changes in some of the neediest parts of the world. Most academic scientists are more concerned with publishing research papers than implementing full-scale field tests, Nigel Taylor said, and in any case don’t have the money or the staff to deal with things like international bureaucracy, which can kill imaginative projects before they ever get off the ground.
On the other hand, global food companies, with their deep pockets and their eyes on huge profits, have almost exclusively focused their attention on commodity crops—corn, soy, canola—that make them billions of dollars a year in the enormou
s North American food market. Building laboratories for genetic engineering is expensive, the companies say, and they need a return on their investment to make the whole thing worthwhile. “Orphan crops”—so named because of their neglect by big industry—are left to university researchers and nonprofit centers like Danforth. Cassava, papaya, millet—these crops may be critical staples for millions of the world’s poor, but they will never generate the kind of profits demanded by multinational corporations.
Instead, companies donate money to nonprofit researchers doing this sort of work: the Danforth Center’s cassava project alone has received some $20 million in grants from Monsanto, as well as from the Gates Foundation and the U.S. Agency for International Development. The nonprofits get research money, and—in the bargain—the multinationals can say they are doing their part for the needy.
In other words, the Danforth Center sits at the very joint of the GMO debate: its scientists are working to help the world’s most vulnerable people, but they also provide excellent public relations for companies like Monsanto to boast that GMOs are “feeding the world” and not just “feeding the fast-food industry.” The relationship between the two institutions is distinct and blurry at the same time. The Danforth Center was built literally across the street from Monsanto’s world headquarters in St. Louis, and both Monsanto’s president and its former chief scientist sit on the Danforth Center’s board of directors. Scientists move back and forth between industry and the center. Paul Anderson, for example, spent ten years as the research director of food and feed research at Pioneer Hi-Bred, the same DuPont company caught in the fierce GMO debate on Kauai and Maui. Before that, he served as a senior manager in Pioneer’s efforts to move the company’s grain into Asia, Eastern Europe, and South America.
Food Fight Page 17
