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Genetically engineered crops may help feed the world. But people who choose not to consume what alarmists call Frankenfoods should not be forced to eat them. So the ability of the government to regulate and industry to manage genetically modified crops matters. It matters a lot.
Unhappily, there's reason to believe that neither the government nor the industry is up to the job.
If you doubt it, consider the strange saga of an experimental strain of genetically engineered rice that somehow escaped from a test plot and found its way into the food supply before it was approved for human consumption. Settling the subsequent lawsuits will cost agricultural giant Bayer CropScience a whopping $750 million, the company said in July. The rice, meanwhile, has been withdrawn from the market and has not produced a dime of revenue for the company. It hasn't fed anyone except battalions of lawyers.
I first came across the rice story in 2007, and wrote a story for FORTUNE headlined Attack of the Mutant Rice. I had a great time reporting the story, visiting rice farmers in Stuttgart, Arkansas ("The Rice and Duck Capital of the World") where the nation's two biggest rice mills are located and learning what I could about the regulation of GMOs.
It's important to note that the biotech rice, which known as Liberty Link Rice because its genes had been altered to resist a weed killer called Liberty, posed no known health or environmental risks. But its spread exposed flaws in the regulatory system and cost thousands of rice farmers money because once it became known that the biotech rice had infiltrated the food supply, Japanese and European buyers (who don't want genetically modified crops) stopped importing rice from the U.S. for a time. Nearly half of the nation's rice crop, which is worth about $1.5 billion at the farm level, is exported. So prices fell, leading to about 400 lawsuits on behalf of rice farmers.
For many of America's 8,000 rice farmers -- who never wanted Liberty Link rice in the first place, because their overseas customers don't want it -- this was a horror story. Darryl Little, a widely respected official who directs the Arkansas State Plant Board, told me: "This is the most traumatic thing I've seen in the rice industry in 30 years. It's been devastating."
The lessons here are many.
First, getting unwanted, biotech foods out of the food supply is even harder, it turns out, than putting the proverbial toothpaste back in the tube. As I wrote in FORTUNE:
If in the past year or so you or your family ate Uncle Ben's, Rice Krispies, or Gerber's, or drank a Budweiser -- Anheuser Busch is America's biggest buyer of rice -- you probably ingested a little bit of Liberty Link, with the unapproved gene. (A very little bit -- perhaps ten to 15 grains of transgenic rice in a one-pound bag of rice, which contains about 29,000 grains.)
Second, biotech crops aren't easy to control once they have been planted. This is a significant issue because it casts doubt on an idea called "coexistence" -- that biotech crops and, say, organic crops can live side by side. Indeed, government efforts to solve the rice mystery — which consumed more than 3500 hours of investigative time, according to this report from the U.S. Department of Agriculture — never determined "the exact time period and means of incursion" of the engineered gene into conventional rice seeds. If you can't pinpoint the problem, how can you prevent it from happening again?
Interesting article. As a
Interesting article. As a student, it brought me back to one of my life science courses where we openly debated the pros and cons of so-called “Frankenfoods.” What intrigued me was the article’s statement that the Liberty Link Rice poses no known health or environmental risks. It underemphasizes the idea that there could very well be significant and very real health or environmental threats – we just don’t know what they are yet. Perhaps the effects have not yet begun to surface. Studies have well documented that GMOs grown in monocultures can harm the ecosystem when it becomes the dominant seed and replaces the diversity needed for a thriving farming system. Will GMOs ultimately be that sustainable? And how well do we understand the consequences of modifying plant DNA structure – enough to push it broadly and say there is no environmental risk?
I don't know how you can
I don't know how you can possibly make the statement "Liberty Link Rice ... posed no known health or environmental risks". It comes straight from industry sources and is unproven. There may well be substantial risks to both health and the environment. We just don't know. But the risk of uncontrolled spread (that the industry maintained could not happen) is now proven, as you point out in your article.
The history of human 'advances' in technology follows this same path - minimal testing in the laboratory followed by large scale testing in the wider environment. This technology cannot be withdrawn once it is in the environment. Is that not, of itself, a huge environmental risk?
We must demand that our scientists test exhaustively over a long enough period to guarantee safety before release into the environment. And apply the precautionary principle throughout the process.
I suggest you read John Robbins' 'The Food Revolution' for more examples of the dangers (and lack of benefits)of GE and industrial agriculture.
I have a particular
I have a particular perspective on GMOs. As much as 40% of the world's food production is wasted, due in large measure to poor harvesting practices, supply chain inefficiencies and, not least, consumers and restaurants buying more than they need and letting it go bad. Surely we should be fixing those problems before we muck about with GMOs? The fixes are often simple - for example those bags you can buy that absorb the gasses given off by ripening fruit, so that the fruit doesn't over-ripen; or having supermarkets improve their merchandizing practices (except that would mean they sell less, which is another story!). Where technology is required, it's relatively ancient and well understood stuff, such as effective tracking and supply chain management systems.
I am willing to trust that GMOs are safe to eat. I am absolutely unwilling to trust that they are safe for the environment. We should fix the obvious problems first before we go there.