Food Fight

by Mckay Jenkins

  Activists, for their part, have gone to great lengths to make GM crops a symbol of colonial exploitation. In 1999, the Earth Liberation Front torched a genetics research building at Michigan State University where researchers were working on crops for the developing world. The fire caused $900,000 in damage. A spokesman for the group said the research was “not going to end world hunger, it’s going to make more profits for Monsanto.”

  Catherine Ives, the scientist in charge of the lab, was heartbroken. “I would wonder how much time has been spent by people in this organization in developing countries,” she told PBS. “I see women hiking for miles to bring firewood in because they’ve cut down everything around them and have no productive soils. I see children who are malnourished. They do not have sustainable agricultural practices in place in many parts of the world. That is what we are trying to help them develop.”

  Feeding the Poor, or Expanding Markets?

  Critics say the future of GMOs will play out in the developing world, and not necessarily with the benefit of local people in mind. With upward of 90 percent of American corn and soy crops already planted with GM seeds, the only place for industry to expand is in places like Africa and South America. In this view, GMOs will continue to cause social disruptions that are at least as harmful as their ecological disruptions. Just as they have in the United States, the GM soybeans spreading across countries like Argentina and Paraguay are already replacing diverse, traditional crops with less nutritious monocultures mostly being used to feed livestock for the expanding global market for beef. Just as in the United States, these larger and larger farms move from local control to industrial control.

  Monsanto boasts that it has already trained 4,000 farmers in South America to use the company’s seeds and pesticides. Paraguay, where 80 percent of the land is controlled by 2 percent of the population, has become the world’s fourth-largest exporter of soy, with more than 3 million hectares of fields producing more than 8 million tons of soybeans a year. Most of this is GM, and all of it is heavily doused with chemicals, which has contaminated local water supplies and caused public health scares. In 2013 alone, 914 square miles of pristine forest in a wilderness known as Gran Chaco was cut down and burned to create soybean fields.

  Paraguay’s former president Fernando Lugo took a firm stand against global food companies, at one point ordering his own agriculture department to destroy GM cornfields. The destruction of forests and traditional farming, he argued, was ecologically disastrous and destructive to both traditional farmers and the country’s indigenous people.

  Two years later, in 2012, Lugo was ousted in a coup he claimed was orchestrated in part by multinational food companies. His successor, Federico Franco, fast-tracked approval of seven GM soy, cotton, and corn strains; Monsanto, whose Roundup Ready soybeans are used in 95 percent of Paraguay’s production, was authorized to sell its new GM seeds in Paraguay just seven months after Franco was sworn in.

  In Argentina, meanwhile, a woman whose infant daughter died because of pesticide poisoning was given the 2012 Goldman Environmental Prize, one of the world’s most prestigious, for her efforts to ban agricultural spraying. Argentina is the world’s third largest exporter of soybeans; industry uses airplanes to spread more than 50 million gallons of pesticides, especially glyphosate and endosulfan, over GM crops. Going door-to-door to collect stories of families whose homes were surrounded by soybean fields, Sofia Gatica found cancer rates forty-one times the national average. Despite enduring threats from police and local business owners, she persuaded Argentina’s health minister to investigate. In 2010, the country’s supreme court banned agricultural spraying near populated areas, and—reversing a tradition of forcing residents to prove harm—required that companies prove their products were safe. Argentina banned endosulfan in 2013. Gatica and her colleagues are now pushing for a nationwide ban on glyphosate.

  It is in this pot—a world reconsidering both the Green Revolution and what GMOs might contribute to relieving (or worsening) global food problems—that the debate over golden rice remains simmering.

  There are two primary strains of rice grown in Asia: the short-grained japonica (think sushi) and long-grained indica (think jasmine or basmati). In Asia, farmers have been growing countless varieties of rice for thousands of years. Each strain is developed to accommodate both natural forces (like drought and flooding) and personal taste. It’s not just that a grain that grows well (and is considered desirable) in Bangladesh is different from a grain in Japan or China; there are grains preferred in individual Bangladeshi villages that are different from grains grown just a few miles away.

  Here’s the problem: Most of the original research done on genetically modified rice was done on japonica. Most of the poor in Asia eat indica. You can have short, fat grains that are stacked with all the nutrients on earth, but people won’t eat it if they prefer grains that are long and skinny. Equally challenging, most people in Asia prefer white rice, despite the fact that it is considerably less nutritious than brown rice—let alone rice of an unrecognizable golden color.

  “Rice is white, not yellow or golden, and people are very specific about what they will eat,” Alfred Sommer told me. “So let’s assume it’s a yellow version of their local version. Assume it grows well. Will anyone eat yellow rice? Taste, flavor, what it looks like—we don’t know that. We haven’t tested it out yet, so we don’t know. If you gave golden rice to 10,000 people, would they eat it? We have no idea.”

  Sommer knows a thing or two about vitamin A deficiency. So successful were his early efforts to combat the problem that his name adorns an entire wing of the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins, where Sommer is a professor of epidemiology and former dean. Long before the invention of golden rice, Sommer figured out that solving vitamin A deficiency was as simple (and cheap) as getting people to swallow a couple of two-cent vitamin A capsules a year. The trick was getting the pills to the people. Early ideas included combining vitamin A with MSG or salt, but neither really worked. Sugar worked well in places like El Salvador and Guatemala, where people grow their own sugar and process it in factories where vitamin A can be distributed, but these conditions rarely exist in other countries.

  Some clinics combined vitamin A distribution with polio vaccinations, but not everyone who lived in the countryside made it into a clinic. Health workers (or volunteers) would have to trudge long distances to reach remote villages.

  “The problem is that there are very few products that poor people consume widely that we can get to them through some kind of central processing,” Sommer told me. Inserting vitamin A into a universal consumer food like rice seemed like the magic bullet—provided it could be grown locally, would appeal to local tastes, and, critically, provide the nutrient in sufficient quantities. The original version produced a woefully inadequate 1.6 micrograms of beta-carotene per gram of rice; an improved version called golden rice 2 (and developed at Syngenta) replaced the daffodil gene with a gene from corn, and now delivers up to 37 micrograms per gram.

  When golden rice was first being touted in the mid-1980s, the president of the Rockefeller Foundation, which had partially financed the research, asked Sommer to write a piece about it. Sommer wrote—and maintains—that although considerable research remains to be done, when all is said and done, golden rice can be an extremely useful tool for combatting vitamin A deficiency.

  Twenty years ago, the anti-GMO hysteria was already “irrational, but well deserved, given what Monsanto’s poor PR helped to create,” Sommer told me. Golden rice was an attempt to bring something to fruition that “clearly would address a major public health issue and would also help overcome the negative publicity that had been generated by Monsanto’s approach to pushing GMO foods, which were not seen as beneficial to anyone but the agriculture industry.”

  If anything, the prospect of climate change has sped rice research generally into overdrive. In 2004, an international
consortium mapped the entire rice genome; two years later, Pamela Ronald of UC-Davis isolated a gene called Sub1 that helps a plant survive even when submerged in floodwaters for two weeks (most plants die after being immersed for three days). The strain has proven popular in flood-prone places like India and Bangladesh, where some 4 million farmers now plant a version of this rice.

  In 2015 alone, scientists published the genomes of 3,000 strains of rice, many focusing on drought- and salt-resistant strains that might survive hotter temperatures and rising sea levels. Researchers are also hoping to produce a photosynthetically enhanced rice grain that would increase yields 30 to 50 percent with the same amount of water and fertilizer. The Gates Foundation has given $20 million to the project, which has twenty-two teams of researchers from nine countries working on it.

  On a hotter planet, with rising tides, growing populations, and diminishing supplies of fresh water, biotechnology will be more important than ever to produce enough food, especially in the developing world, the Danforth Center’s Jim Carrington told me. Regions like Africa can have 80 percent of their population living on farms, but because of low productivity and poor infrastructure they can still be the least food-secure places in the world.

  “It’s simply not practical to turn all our farming into a Michael Pollan–style idyllic agriculture,” Carrington said. “Especially in developing regions of the world like sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere, food security crops like cassava, millet, and cowpeas have been produced in ways that would meet organic production standards. But the lack of tools, technology, transportation—all the result of a lot of different things—means that organic production has been exceptionally unproductive. It’s a horrible, unfortunate situation.

  “Our research aims are to improve the sustainability of agriculture, to improve the strength of plants to do as much of the work as possible, as opposed to using insecticides and fungicides,” Carrington said. “These are not organic versus conventional issues. These are universal issues. We just happen to include GMO in the toolbox. It is not a panacea, and it is not the only tool in the toolbox. It is just one of dozens. But removing that tool we do at our own peril. We don’t gain anything; we actually lose the ability to solve a lot of important problems that affect real people.”

  Michael Hansen, of the Consumers Union, has been hearing such arguments for two decades. Back in June 2000, around the time golden rice was on the cover of Time, Hansen went to a congressional hearing to hear what people were saying about the technology’s prospects.

  “Right there on the invitation was the statement that golden rice was already saving the eyesight of thousands of children in Asia, and that was all false,” he told me. “Fourteen years later, it hasn’t saved the eyesight of a single child.”

  If you go back to the early 1980s, when genetic engineering was in its infancy, everyone said GMOs could do all these wonderful things, Hansen said. Fast-forward to today, and genetic engineering has all been about herbicide tolerance. By now, some 94 percent of our soy is GE, along with 99 percent of our sugar beets, 93 percent of our corn, and 92 percent of our canola. All of these crops were designed to be herbicide tolerant.

  “All those original claims really only led to an explosion of glyphosate, so they needed something to show that GE will benefit people,” Hansen said. “Golden rice is still being used to get good PR for industry, to show that they can do something that is clearly good. But look at the millions of dollars that have gone into golden rice, and contrast that with what they’ve done in the Philippines with the more traditional things they do. They give little pills to people as vitamin supplements, at a cost of about twenty cents a person per year. They have been fortifying noodles with vitamin A. All this was done with no money poured into it.”

  Hansen would like to see considerably more investment in traditional foods that support local growers rather than global conglomerates, and that have evolved over millennia to endure droughts and pests. In some places, this is happening. In Kenya, farmers have recently increased the area planted with such indigenous greens (rich in protein, vitamins, iron, and other nutrients) by 25 percent.

  Yet in June 2016, more than one hundred Nobel laureates signed a letter urging Greenpeace to drop its opposition to golden rice. ”We urge Greenpeace and its supporters to re-examine the experience of farmers and consumers worldwide with crops and foods improved through biotechnology, recognize the findings of authoritative scientific bodies and regulatory agencies, and abandon their campaign against ‘GMOs’ in general and Golden Rice in particular,” the letter stated.

  Greenpeace refused to back down. “Accusations that anyone is blocking genetically engineered ‘Golden’ rice are false,” the group said. “‘Golden’ rice has failed as a solution and isn’t currently available for sale, even after more than 20 years of research. As admitted by the International Rice Research Institute, it has not been proven to actually address Vitamin A Deficiency. So to be clear, we are talking about something that doesn’t even exist.

  “Corporations are overhyping ‘Golden’ Rice to pave the way for global approval of other more profitable genetically engineered crops. This costly experiment has failed to produce results for the last 20 years and diverted attention from methods that already work. Rather than invest in this overpriced public relations exercise, we need to address malnutrition through a more diverse diet, equitable access to food and eco-agriculture.”

  Michael Hansen, who was trained as an evolutionary biologist, spends a great deal of time traveling around Asia teaching farmers and consumers about farming and food. Recently, in the Philippines, he saw an ad on the side of a bus for chicken tenders that had been fortified with vitamin A the old-fashioned way—and not with GMOs. In the Philippines at least, vitamin A deficiency has plummeted, and it has had nothing to do with golden rice. “If you want to get at these problems, you can deal with the symptoms or with the causes,” Hansen said. “This is basically an issue of poverty. All poor people can afford to buy is rice. So the way to get people out of that, you have to deal with poverty. What if all that money had been put into food-fortification techniques, or to teaching people to grow foods that are high in beta-carotene that people actually eat? Mangoes, yellow maize, papaya, yams, red peppers, spinach, cabbage—all have high levels of beta-carotene, and these are all foods that are culturally appropriate.

  “Golden rice is just a PR move,” he said. “Now they want to do golden bananas, engineered with vitamin A, and they want to do trials in Uganda. Nobody has published data that has shown these are safe. Yet they are already doing some kind of feeding trials. They’re talking about golden corn.”

  Alfred Sommer, the vitamin A expert at Johns Hopkins, takes a different view. To his mind, GMO critics oppose golden rice because they fear it would be a smashing success, and thus ruin their chances of opposing GMOs elsewhere.

  “I’ve come to accept that GMOs are in fact just a more sophisticated version of hybridization,” Sommer told me. “This is just more rapid than crossbreeding things. It’s not like there’s a mad scientist out there trying to grow people out of corn.

  “I can understand people being concerned, but the fact is that all our soy is GMO, and nobody seems to have been hurt by that,” Sommer said. “Big Ag will do what Big Ag does. Today, nobody notices that soy is all GMO, and in twenty years nobody will remember this.”

  8.

  The Plant That Started Civilization, and the Plant That Could Save It

  If you think about the GM grains that prop up the world’s global food system, there is one leg in the stool that is mysteriously missing: wheat. How have corn and soybeans become almost entirely GM, and wheat—the plant that started civilization 10,000 years ago, and that covers tens of millions of acres in the United States alone—has not?

  It has not been for a lack of desire. Monsanto began testing Roundup Ready wheat on experimental farms back in 1994, and in 2004, the FDA decl
ared that the company’s wheat posed no health or safety risks. But that same year, Monsanto abandoned plans to release its seeds onto the market, a dramatic decision that food safety advocates (who had long complained that the FDA’s information had been provided by Monsanto and did not include the FDA’s own tests) considered a “watershed event.”

  What happened? Why aren’t we all eating GM bread, and bagels, and hamburger buns?

  One reason has to do with the unimaginably intertwined global food system, which (when it works) can get grain grown on one continent to food processors on another continent to consumers on a third continent. When the system doesn’t work, when something gets into the system that is unexpected, unapproved, and unwanted, the whole thing can come to a screeching halt.

  Just ask Larry Bohlen. In the summer of 2000, while working for the environmental group Friends of the Earth, Bohlen was spending his time looking over the EPA’s approval process for GM crops. One day, he noticed something strange about the approval of a strain of GM corn called StarLink. The corn had been engineered by the company Aventis to carry the insecticide Bacillus thuringiensis, or Bt, which kills the destructive European corn borer. Because the corn contained a protein called Cry9C, which the EPA suspected might cause allergies in people, StarLink had not been approved for human consumption, but Aventis had still been allowed to sell StarLink to farmers to grow corn for animal feed.