Food Fight

by Mckay Jenkins

  A cynic might claim that the $20 million Monsanto throws to the Danforth Center is barely a (tax-deductible) rounding error compared with the company’s nearly $16 billion in annual sales. More cynical would be the view that developing drought-resistant GM corn for Africa is really just a way for seed companies to gain more influence—and market share—on other continents. The principal beneficiary of America’s foreign assistance programs has always been American companies, the U.S. Agency for International Development has said. Close to 80 percent of the agency’s contracts and grants go directly to American firms. “Foreign assistance programs have helped create major markets for agricultural goods, created new markets for American industrial exports and meant hundreds of thousands of jobs for Americans.”

  The Gates Foundation, which spent close to $500 million on African agricultural development from 2009 to 2011 alone (and which also supports the Danforth Center), has become “a stalking horse for corporate proponents promoting industrial agriculture paradigms, which view African hunger simply as a business opportunity,” writes Phil Bereano, a professor emeritus of public policy at the University of Washington. Bereano calls this “agroindustrial philanthrocapitalism”; GM crops, he says, “threaten conventional and organic production as well as the autonomy of African producers and nations.”

  Marion Nestle, a prominent food scientist at New York University, has long been suspicious of industry’s humanitarian claims. If giant seed and chemical companies really want to help “feed the world,” they should dedicate substantially more resources to helping local farmers in Asia, Africa, and South America develop crops that might only be of local value—even if they don’t promote industrial agriculture, and even if they have no potential for corporate profit. How much should companies dedicate to humanitarian food development? Nestle’s modest proposal: 10 percent of annual corporate income, a kind of tithing to help those in need.

  “If companies are going to claim that their work will solve world food problems, they need to put substantial resources into working with scientists in developing countries to help farmers produce more food under local conditions,” Nestle writes in her book Safe Food: Bacteria, Biotechnology, and Bioterrorism. “I continue to believe that to be perceived as credible, the industry must be credible.”

  Indeed, given the destruction that industrial agriculture has done to the American landscape, why should we expect anything different once its technologies are exported to the developing world? “In the United States, we’ve seen the number of farms drop by two-thirds and average farm size more than double since World War II,” wrote veteran food activists Peter Rosset, Frances Moore Lappé, and Joseph Collins. “The gutting of rural communities, the creation of inner-city slums, and the exacerbation of unemployment all followed in the wake of this vast migration from the land. Think what the equivalent rural exodus means in the Third World, where the number of jobless people is already double or triple our own.”

  This kind of criticism drives scientists like Paul Anderson crazy. Critics of GMOs, especially those in food-secure places like the United States and Europe, have no idea what’s at stake for the lives of the poor, he says. Anderson takes an especially dim view of what he calls “anti-technology groups that are funded by Europeans.”

  “Do they have the right to do that? Do they have the right to decide who is going to eat what?” Anderson said.

  Nigel Taylor agrees. His work on virus-resistant cassava is unlikely ever to serve any corporate interest, and like Dennis Gonsalves, Taylor’s primary interest is in serving small African farmers.

  “It’s important that African farmers have a strong say in this because it’s their livelihood, and they should have the right to access any technology that can improve their standard of living,” Taylor said. Creating a virus-resistant cassava plant “would be highly desirable because of the seriousness of brown streak to people’s economic security in East Africa.”

  Given all the noise involved in the GMO debate, Taylor would plainly prefer to leave politics aside and simply work with his cassava plants. He leads me into his tissue culture laboratory to show me minute cassava embryos—clusters of totipotent cells that will be genetically altered before being grown into fully developed plants. Once altered, the cassava cells, under the watchful eyes of Taylor’s team, can be cultured and turned into a thousand or more plants. Of these, only a small number will carry the genetic material needed to protect the cassava plant from brown streak. Much work is required to identify and select the most efficacious. The introduced virus defense works by enabling a plant to recognize a viral infection before it occurs, which it does by generating small RNAs and proteins known as argonauts (named for the Greek explorers) that act to “silence” the infecting virus.

  “What we can do by triggering this defense mechanism early—it’s not an immunization, but it is similar in the manner that it’s pre-arming the plant’s defense mechanism,” Taylor said. “As the virus replicates, it makes double-stranded RNA. The plant can recognize that, and its inherent RNA-silencing mechanisms grab it and chop it up, preventing establishment of the disease. However, in the non-modified plant the virus wins the battle, as the plant cannot fire up these defense mechanisms fast enough to stop the virus replicating and moving to establish infection. By modifying the plant to recognize the virus, and activating the RNA defense mechanisms before the virus arrives, the plant will always stay ahead of the virus and will be resistant. And since the plant makes its own RNA continuously, the plant will always be resistant. So we’re not making a new defense mechanism, we’re just turning on the plant’s inherent resistance systems early and keeping them on.”

  Let’s say his lab creates 600 cassava plants. Two-thirds of them would likely need to be thrown out for not expressing virus resistance. Once plants have been selected in St. Louis, they are field tested in Puerto Rico, which, like Hawaii, is a popular growing environment for experimental crops. Then maybe twenty plants get to the field in Africa. These get whittled down to one or two that go through all the stages of testing within the regulatory system. Only one plant line would be submitted for formal approval. If this makes it all the way through regulatory testing and approval, countless crops of this improved cassava line could eventually be grown from this one parent plant.

  In Kenya and Uganda, Taylor and his team work with African scientists and government officials. They have conducted socioeconomic studies to assess if farmers would be receptive to what they are offering.

  “If you frame it up for small farmers for on-farm consumption and local trading, almost everyone says yes,” Taylor said. “This is such an important disease, a major threat, and there are very few ways of addressing it. If we can show this works, the farmers have indicated that they would be ready to adopt it.”

  The question for the people at the Danforth Center is whether their cassava will turn out to be a hit, like Dennis Gonsalves’s papaya, or a misfire, like golden rice.

  Golden Rice: The Grain That Will Save Millions of Children—or Won’t

  In the summer of 2000, Time trumpeted a cover story about a GM grain that it said could “save a million kids a year.” The magazine featured a cover photo of Dr. Ingo Potrykus, a gene scientist who had spent ten years trying to alleviate the suffering of millions of children in the developing world who have deficient levels of vitamin A. Lack of this single nutrient causes blindness in up to half a million children each year and weakens the immune system to the point that some 2 million people die each year of diseases they would otherwise survive.

  How to get more vitamin A into the Asian diet? Potrykus had developed what seemed like a brilliant solution: by inserting genes from daffodils into a rice genome, he had derived a plant fortified with beta-carotene, the same pigment Nigel Taylor is hoping to introduce into cassava. Asia alone produces 417 million tons of rice a year; the trouble is, even if children in many poor countries can get their hands on rice, they
frequently do not have access to vitamin-rich fruits or vegetables.

  Potrykus visualized peasant farmers “wading into paddies to set out the tender seedlings and winnowing the grain at harvest time in handwoven baskets,” Time reported. He pictured “small children consuming the golden gruel their mothers would make, knowing that it would sharpen their eyesight and strengthen their resistance to infectious diseases. And he saw his rice as the first modest start of a new agricultural revolution, in which ancient food crops would acquire all manner of useful properties: bananas that wouldn’t rot on the way to market; corn that could supply its own fertilizer; wheat that could thrive in drought-ridden soil.”

  Even more than Dennis Gonsalves and his GM papaya, golden rice made Potrykus and his research team international celebrities, not least because, like Gonsalves, they had done their work for a nonprofit institution—the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), based in the Philippines. The project got $100,000 in seed money from the Rockefeller Foundation, and another $2.5 million from the Swiss government and the European Union. But because nearly six dozen genes they were interested in had already been patented by some thirty-two companies, the research team also had to tiptoe through a legal swamp. DuPont, Monsanto, and Zeneca owned a piece of the rice genome, as did Stanford and Columbia universities and the universities of Maryland and California. Patents to the daffodil genes were held by Amoco, DuPont, Zeneca, and Imperial Chemical Industries. The patent for the bacterium was held by Japan’s Kirin Brewery.

  In the end, Potrykus and his team struck a deal with AstraZeneca (now Syngenta) that gave the researchers the rights to the seeds they would give to farmers in developing countries earning less than $10,000 a year. The company retained the right to market the rice in places like Japan and the United States. To its supporters, this seemed an ideal partnership between public scientists and private industry, especially after other corporations holding patents also waived their own rights.

  The journal Science announced the successful experiment by distributing magazines to 1,700 journalists around the world. In an accompanying note, editors claimed that “this application of plant genetic engineering to ameliorate human misery without regard to short-term profit will restore this technology to political acceptability.”

  Indeed, whatever golden rice’s prospects for the world’s poor, the announcement was a spectacular gift for the biotech industry. After being battered by nearly two decades of growing public resistance to GMOs, biotech companies jumped at the chance to boast that genetic engineering would now feed the world.

  The backlash came swiftly.

  “A rip-off of the public trust,” grumbled the Rural Advancement Foundation International, an advocacy group based in Winnipeg, Canada. “Asian farmers get (unproved) genetically modified rice, and AstraZeneca gets the ‘gold.’”

  Greenpeace, which had taken a strong stand against GMOs from the beginning, mocked golden rice as an intentional ploy to reverse public anxiety about the technology. “People are talking about the potential benefits of the second generation of genetically modified crops when almost no questions raised by the first have been answered,” the group announced. “You don’t have to be paranoid to think the tactics are deliberate.”

  In an article in The New York Times Magazine titled “The Great Yellow Hype,” journalist Michael Pollan suggested that golden rice was being exploited by the biotech industry “to win an argument rather than solve a public-health problem.” Malnourished children would have to eat fifteen pounds of cooked rice a day to satisfy their nutritional needs, Pollan wrote, and even if they could eat that much, their fat- and protein-deficient diets would prevent their bodies from taking up the beta-carotene.

  “The unspoken challenge here is that if we don’t get over our queasiness about eating genetically modified food, kids in the third world will go blind,” Pollan wrote. “Granted, it would be immoral for finicky Americans to thwart a technology that could rescue malnourished children. But wouldn’t it also be immoral for an industry to use those children’s suffering in order to rescue itself? The first case is hypothetical at best. The second is right there on our television screens, for everyone to see.”

  And Vandana Shiva, who would become an international celebrity for vehemently opposing golden rice, called the grain a Trojan horse for the biotech industry. In books like The Violence of the Green Revolution, Shiva had lambasted the planting of Western varieties of wheat and the attendant herbicides, which pushed traditional, vitamin-rich greens like bathua to extinction. Now, she wrote, “the ‘selling’ of vitamin A as a miracle cure for blindness is based on the (corporate) blindness to the alternatives.”

  And so it has gone. Even in countries where vitamin A deficiency has been most acute—where, one would think, support for such a product would be uniformly enthusiastic—golden rice has been met with acute skepticism and even violence. The government of India is still considering banning all GM field trials for ten years. In Kenya, the government has banned the import of GM food (though not GMO research).

  In August 2013, hundreds of protesters smashed through fences surrounding a field in the Philippines so they could uproot a plant that had been hailed as the potential savior of millions of Asia’s malnourished poor. “We do not want our people, especially our children, to be used in these experiments,” a farmer and leader of the protest told the Philippine newspaper Remate.

  To this day, golden rice—once seen as a savior of the global poor—has not been approved by a single country. What happened?

  The Green Revolution

  The International Rice Research Institute, where Potrykus did his work, had been launching successful breeding projects for decades, and until it started working with GMOs, it had largely met with global gratitude. In the early 1960s, a plant pathologist named Peter Jennings created a fast-growing, high-yielding strain known as India Rice 8 that became so popular that (legend has it) some Indian families even named their children “IR8.”

  Such research mirrored work generated by other scientists at the center of what came to be known as the Green Revolution, which used both new plant-breeding techniques and the heavy use of petrochemical fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides to dramatically increase the amount of food that farmers could grow. Between 1950 and 1983, crop yields of cereal grains doubled, tripled, even quadrupled. Since grains provide about 80 percent of the calories people consume worldwide, such advances dramatically improved the diets of billions of people: between the 1970s and 1980s, the total amount of food available per person in the world increased 11 percent, while the number of hungry people fell 16 percent (from 942 million to 786 million).

  When Norman Borlaug, a researcher at Texas A&M University, won the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize for developing high-yielding wheat and rice, his citation said that “more than any person of this age, he helped provide bread for a hungry world.”

  Borlaug has never been shy regarding his feelings about how best to feed the poor and hungry. The organic movement is “ridiculous,” Borlaug has said. “For those who want to go the organic route, God bless them. Let them spend more money for their food. But looking at the world at large, this is an impossibility. . . . Most of the people who are opposing biotechnology, they’ve never known hunger. These people say that the little farmer should permanently accept that he’s going to stay on that three-acre farm with a hoe and a machete. That’s fine in Utopia, but don’t give the world the false idea that they can produce the food that’s needed for 6 billion people.”

  Borlaug’s thoughts notwithstanding, the Green Revolution, which laid the global foundation for the spread of GM crops, also left a swath of troubling consequences. The synthetic fertilizers that spurred such high crop yields also created more weeds and insects, which led to a huge increase in the use of herbicides and insecticides. In India, chemically treated land jumped from 15 million acres in 1960 to more than 200 million by the 1980s, contr
ibuting to a dramatic global increase in human exposure to toxic chemicals. These poisons also killed natural predators, and soils worldwide edged closer to becoming chemically saturated and lifeless.

  M. S. Swaminathan, a renowned Indian geneticist and a leader of India’s Green Revolution, later recalled that he had foreseen these complications as early as 1968. “Exploitive agriculture offers great possibilities if carried out in a scientific way, but poses great dangers if carried out with only an immediate profit motive,” he said. “Without first building up a proper scientific and training base to sustain it, [it] may only lead us, in the long run, into an era of agricultural disaster.”

  By 1999, Swaminathan noted that “the significance of my 1968 analysis has been widely realized.”

  Plant geneticists like the Danforth Center’s Paul Anderson believe GMOs may provide an answer to many of these global food problems. But the debate over spreading GMOs across the developing world has additional complexities, notably that the technology, and the industries pushing it, are largely based in Europe and the United States. The shadow of colonialism has not been lost on local political leaders or on anti-GMO scientists.

  Indeed, for every plant scientist who sees GMOs as a powerful tool to feed the world, there is a scientist, or an activist, worried that genetic technology will simply speed up the processes of industrial agriculture that are already in place. Despite the boasts of chemical and biotech companies, there is little evidence that GM crops reduce global chemical use; rather, pushing GMOs at home and in the developing world “has contributed to the increased use of herbicides to control weeds and the resulting increase in environmental pollution,” Cornell’s David Pimentel writes.