CHEMICAL & ENGINEERING NEWS / GOVERNMENT INSIGHTS / July 19, 1999 / Volume 77, Number 29 / Bette Hileman
Over the past year, consumer resistance to genetically modified foods has escalated dramatically. The European Union has effectively placed a moratorium on all new approvals of bioengineered crops (C&EN, July 5, page 7), and the U.S. has lost hundreds of millions of dollars in exports because the EU refuses to buy most corn that may be genetically modified. In February, a United Nations attempt to negotiate a biosafety protocol broke down in bitter disagreement over the risks of transgenic crops.
Some of this opposition stems from irrational fears, some from trade protectionism. But some of it is based on realistic concerns about the effects of transgenic crops on health, the environment, and the livelihoods of the world's poorest farmers. Prominent agricultural thinkers have been offering advice recently on how to avoid the real dangers of biotechnology and promote an open, honest global dialogue on its benefits and risks.
In late June, Gordon Conway, president of the Rockefeller Foundation and an agricultural ecologist, gave an invited speech to the board of directors of Monsanto, one of the world's largest developers and promoters of genetically modified crops. (Monsanto has posted a response to the speech on their website.) Conway told the board that genetically modified crops have great potential to help feed the world's burgeoning population and to protect the environment. He noted that the Rockefeller Foundation has already spent $100 million to engineer more nutritious and more resilient rice varieties for the developing world. But the vast benefits of biotechnology may never materialize, he warned, if Monsanto and others do not take necessary steps to reestablish trust and promote an honest debate around the world. "Monsanto needs to speak and act differently if this technology is to be a part of the solution to the problems faced by the most disadvantaged and the most vulnerable of our fellow human beings," he said.
The risks of biotechnology fall into three areas -- environment, human health, and sustainability of the food system, Conway said. To protect the environment, Monsanto and other companies need to ensure that caution is taken to avoid movement of transgenes via pollen to weeds or to relatives of genetically modified crops. "This is a legitimate concern," he said. Field-test facilities need to "be designed with an extra degree of caution and located at considerable distance from any wild relatives," he said.
Furthermore, researchers need to closely monitor plants with genes from viral pathogens to avoid the possibility that the genes might combine with other viral pathogens to create entirely new viral strains, Conway said. And Monsanto ought to take special precautions to ensure that insects do not become resistant to the natural toxins in crops that have been modified with genes from the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt), he noted. Monsanto also should monitor more closely the effects of Bt crops on nontarget insects, Conway urged.
To protect human health, antibiotic resistance marker genes should not be used in genetically modified crops, Conway said. Existing substitutes for these genes would avoid the potential risk that transgenic crops would increase resistance in humans or animals to some antibiotics, he explained.
Monsanto also needs to acknowledge that transgenic crops could create new allergies or exacerbate existing ones, Conway said. The recent increase in allergic reactions to soy in industrialized countries could be an outgrowth of genetic alteration, he said.
And to help reassure those who prefer to avoid transgenic food, "Monsanto should come out immediately and strongly in favor of labeling" such food, he said. "If consumers wish to be informed whether they are eating genetically modified foods, they have a right to know," he explained.
To protect the livelihoods of the world's poorest farmers, Monsanto needs to "disavow" development of so-called terminator crops, which are designed to prevent the germination of grain as seed, Conway said. There is "widespread negative public reaction to encouraging poor farmers to use such technology," he explained, because they traditionally save seed from year to year. Millions of subsistence farmers should not become dependent on a "dozen or so multinationals for their future livelihoods," he said.
This is not the time for Monsanto to undertake a new offensive by a public relations agency, Conway concluded. "It is time for a new relationship based on honesty" and "full disclosure," he said.
On its web site, Monsanto responds that the dialogue with Conway "has been frank and productive, and we look forward to it continuing."
Wes Jackson, also a prominent agricultural thinker and founder and director of the Land Institute, Salina, Kan., agrees with most of the cautionary steps Conway suggested. But he recommends an even more conservative approach to the development of transgenic crops. He considers a plant's genome a kind of miniature ecosystem that evolved over eons. When genes from organisms widely separated in evolutionary distance are spliced together, this may have unintended consequences in a complex adaptive "genomic ecosystem," altering the genomic architecture and making it less resilient, he says. A safer, more predictable, approach that would still capture many of biotechnology's benefits would be to splice together genes from within plant families.
Both Conway and Jackson urge adherence to the precautionary principle as a way to derive maximum benefits from biotechnology. Conway recently convened the heads of 20 foundations to discuss means of financing a global public dialogue on genetically modified foods. Without such a dialogue involving openness to challenging ideas, the technology may be permanently subsumed in acrimony.
