TakingITGlobal - Panorama - The Food of the...

Published on: Mar 15, 2005

Topic:

Type: Opinions

https://www.tigweb.org/express/panorama/article.html?ContentID=5231

“It is a major blow to the proponents of GM food.” declared Clare Oxborrow in an interview to BBC World. This was hours after the U.S. agri-chemical company Monsanto announced on May 10th, 2004 that it would not try to market a strain of GM wheat it had developed called “Roundup ready” wheat. The wheat was genetically modified to be tolerant to the herbicide glyphosate, which is commercially marketed by Monsanto as Roundup.

GM crops have beneficial genes spliced into them from other unrelated crops by biotechnologists.
Unlike conventional crossbreeding techniques which are time consuming and inefficient, genetic modification offers a more precise and efficient way of introducing new beneficial genes into plants.

The advantages of GM crops are numerous: You can have crops that are drought resistant. Crops tolerant to water-logging. Crops that are resistant to herbicides and pesticides used against weeds and pests. There are GM crops that can produce antibodies, pharmaceuticals and human proteins. Some GM plants can even suck up toxic substances in the soil and store them in their roots, stems and leaves. The list is endless.

GM crops are now grown in more than a dozen countries around the world and in more than 100 million hectares of land. Biotechnology has become the most rapidly adopted new farming technology in history. GM crops have saved an estimated $200 million for U.S. farmers by avoiding extra cultivation and reducing insecticide spraying. U.S. cotton and potato farmers, by one estimate, have avoided spraying nearly 5 million pounds of insecticides by adopting biotechnology. This certainly should be embarrassing to opponents of GM crops who also happen to be voracious environmental campaigners.

The GM wheat of Monsanto would have been the first commercial GM wheat in the world. The farmers who planted it had fewer weeds, less plowing work to do and a larger yield. But their joy has been short lived. Thanks to the campaign against GM food by people like Oxborrow, markets seem to have rejected GM wheat, leading Monsanto to its strategic decision not to market it. The opponents of GM crops point to the results of the worlds largest ever trial of GM crops conducted in the UK. The results, which were made public on Oct 16th, 2003, showed that two out of the three GM crops tested – oilseed and sugar beet had a negative impact on farmland wildlife.

Although these farm-scale evaluations are being portrayed as a test of the environmental credentials of GM crops, it is really the weed killers to which they are resistant that were on trial. The tests simply measured the impact on wildlife of the herbicides used, not of the crops themselves. And the researchers themselves admit this. “Critically, all our results are explained by the application and timing of different herbicides, not by virtue of the plants being GM or not” said Les Firbank, coordinator of the trials.

Still, the opponents of GM crops like Greenpeace and Friends of Earth are delighted by the findings. Ironically, Greenpeace had denounced the trials as a fix, and activists even attempted to sabotage them by physically pulling up the crops. Earlier in 2003, Friends of Earth said that the results would be statistically flawed. If the aim of these activists is to save farmland life, banning any of the GM crops tested is unlikely to make any difference. This is because herbicide use is getting widespread and farmers who are denied access to GM crops may instead turn to non-GM varieties bred to be insecticide resistant.

Their impact on the environment could be worse, because many allow the use of more noxious herbicides than GM varieties. The environmental damage caused by these herbicides will be much greater when compared to herbicides like glyphosate, which toxicologists regard as an environmentally benign chemical that degrades rapidly. For instance, Imidazolinones and atrazine are widely used herbicides with non-GM herbicide resistant crops. Atrazine is suspected of poisoning frogs and polluting rivers while imidazolinones can last so long in soil that it becomes impossible to grow a crop the next season.

Although the use of non-GM herbicide resistant crops can be dangerous to the environment, these crops do not have to undergo the same scrutiny as GM crops. While the GM crops can be banned under world trade rules on the grounds that they pose a threat to the environment, the same is not true for these non –GM herbicide resistant crops. For example, “TT Canola” and “Clearfield” rape seeds developed by conventional crossbreeding and gene mutation techniques have greater problems with persistence of herbicides and resistance than GM crops. Both these strains were approved without any fuss surrounding GM crops.

As one Monsanto spokesman put it “we would be foolish to turn our backs on the possibility that other methods of plant breeding could generate the same results without transgenic approach. The regulatory systems effectively ignore all these other methods and we are driven by politics, not science. As things stand, a non GM plant would bypass the arguments against GM.” This unfair treatment meted out to GM crops is mainly due to the blind campaigning and lobbying by environmental groups against them.

Another danger of GM crops as put forward by opponents is genetic pollution. They say that transgenes like the herbicide resistant genes introduced into GM crops might spread to other wild organisms like weeds, resulting in the proliferation of super-pests which show high resistance to herbicides and pesticides. But herbicide resistant crops developed through traditional breeding techniques and the heavy use of herbicides and pesticides also pose the same risk. Opponents also fear that the introduction of genetically modified organisms into the environment may cause extinction of other species.

In contrast, biotech actually offers the solution to such problems. Researchers have developed different techniques to prevent transgenes from getting into other organisms. One clever method used is to introduce transgenes into chloroplast (the little factories in plant cells that produce energy by using sunlight) instead of the cell nuclei where majority of plant’s genes reside. The trick is that pollen of most crop plants do not have chloroplasts, which makes it impossible for a transgene in that crop to get into any other plant through crossbreeding.

The development of Technology Protection System (TPS) by the U.S. department of agriculture and Delta Pine Land Co. was aimed at addressing the issue of spread of transgenes. TPS involves a complex of three genes that makes seeds sterile by interfering with the development of plant embryos. Any biotech company producing GM crops would like to implement TPS as it would help it protect its intellectual property rights.
As for the extinction of species due to the introduction GMOs is concerned, we need to look at the other side of the coin. According to recent reports, banana plants could become extinct in another 10 years. This is due to the unique method of reproduction of bananas which makes the plant susceptible to fungi, viruses and pests.

If scientists can’t find a way to genetically enhance the banana’s ability to resist pests, then the bananas may become extinct once for all. A cheap source of carbohydrates and nutrition for the world’s poor will be lost. But the good news is, several biotech companies say they can save the bananas from extinction by genetically modifying it. The opponents of GM crops should definitely welcome such biotechnologies. However, this is not the case. Their real concern then seems to be about “bio-imperialism”. They fear that if farmers across the globe start adopting GM crops, the control of humanity’s food supply will be in the hands of a few big biotech companies.

Though their fear may sound rational at first, it ceases to be a threat if we look at the big picture. All technologies can be patented. The patent gives exclusive rights to the inventor to exploit his invention. The same is true for biotechnology too. With the help of these patents, opponents fear, the biotech companies will have total control over the food crops they produce. But patents, like many other things in life, have an expiry date. Conventional patents have a life of 20 years, after which anyone can exploit the invention or discovery which was protected by the patent.

Thus biotech companies have control over the crops they produce only for a limited period of time. And this can further be limited if the life of biotech patents can be reduced after negotiations between governments and biotech companies. The governments can also setup their own agencies which can control the varieties of GM crops introduced into their countries. Further, the agencies themselves can engage in active research and development of GM crop varieties. This way, the fears of bio-imperialism can be put to death.

On the other hand, the consequences of not adopting GM crops can be dangerous even for developed countries. As one spokesman from the department of agriculture, government of New Zealand put it “It will prove to be a costly mistake if New Zealand fails to ride the wave biotech revolution.” If it’s going to be a costly mistake for an industrialized country like New Zealand, then it should be disastrous for a developing country like India.

Indian economy is almost entirely agriculture based. A majority of its population depends either directly or indirectly on agriculture for its livelihood. But Indian farmland productivity is much lower than the world average. Agricultural output in India is mainly dependant on the monsoons. Even a small deviation from normal in the monsoons spells doom for millions of poor farmers who live on a day to day basis.

For instance, the Cauvery delta farmers in the state of Tamilnadu have been pushed to the brink of existence by the failure of monsoons in successive years. Hunger and poverty are forcing these farmers to eat rats and commit suicide. Drought resistant GM crops can definitely save these farmers and the economy of the state. As Anderson of the International Food Policy Research Institute argues - how can we debate on whether these farmers need drought resistant crops or not, while watching their horrible plight? We certainly do not have any ethical right to do this.

Another case is the recent controversy surrounding Bt. cotton in India. Some farmers, in the state of Gujarat, had planted Bt. cotton on around 11,000 acres of land. The farmers had planted an unapproved variety of Bt. cotton obtained from the black market. When the government of India learned about this, it ordered them to burn the standing crops, worth over $12.6 million even as thousands of cotton farmers in other states were committing suicides after their cotton crops failed to withstand the attack of Bollworms.

The Gujarat farmers have now scored a major victory as the state government of Gujarat has refused to destroy the crops. Much of the crop has been harvested and sold. The state of Andhra Pradesh too has now approved Bt. cotton for commercial cultivation. This is a victory for both the farmers and the future of GM crops in India. Although a small victory, it showed that farmers wanted access to GM crops and do not want the controversy over GM crops being carried out in their name to deny them their basic right to use the best seeds available.

GM crops and GM food are definitely the answer to many of the problems the poor of the world are facing today – hunger, malnutrition and disease. GM food can not only address these problems effectively but it can actually lend a helping hand in routing out poverty from the face of the planet, given the fact that most of the worlds’ poor people are farmers or somehow depend on agriculture for a livelihood.

According to an estimate by IFPRI, the global food production must increase by 40% in the next 20 years to feed 8 billion people. We now have more mouths to feed and less land left, due to the rapidly growing population. This means we now have to grow more food in less land. Biotechnology is certainly showing us the way to just this. As biologist Richard Flavell concluded in a 1999 report to the IFPRI, “It would be unethical to condemn future generations to hunger by refusing to develop and apply a technology that can build on what our forefathers provided and help produce adequate food for world with almost 2 billion more people by 2020.”

All new technologies, from plastics to pesticides, have been double-edged swords. They have had their own share of benefits and ill effects. A technology is widely adopted if its positives are weighed to be more than its negatives. And the negatives don’t just remain as negatives. They contribute positively when the existing technology is perfected or a new technology is developed to get rid of them. They actually propel human technological advancement. Biotechnology is one such new technology. For all the yet-to-be proven ill effects of GM food, there are also a number of benefits, and more risks of not adopting them.

References:
• Dr. Strangelunch : Why we should learn to stop worrying and love GM food, by Ronald Bailey
• “What the Future Holds” – aBetterEarth.org - Excerpted from Genetically Engineered Food: Changing the Nature of Nature, by Martin Teitel and Kimberly Wilson (Park Street Press, Rochester, Vermont, 2001).
• G.M. Foods: Hope or Horror? by Radley Balko
• The Bollworm, the Suicidal Farmer, by Salil Singh
• NewScientist.com
• BBC News, BBC World

« return.



by Aravind C
Published on: Mar 15, 2005
Topic:
Type: Opinions
https://www.tigweb.org/express/panorama/article.html?ContentID=5231


“It is a major blow to the proponents of GM food.” declared Clare Oxborrow in an interview to BBC World. This was hours after the U.S. agri-chemical company Monsanto announced on May 10th, 2004 that it would not try to market a strain of GM wheat it had developed called “Roundup ready” wheat. The wheat was genetically modified to be tolerant to the herbicide glyphosate, which is commercially marketed by Monsanto as Roundup. GM crops have beneficial genes spliced into them from other unrelated crops by biotechnologists. Unlike conventional crossbreeding techniques which are time consuming and inefficient, genetic modification offers a more precise and efficient way of introducing new beneficial genes into plants. The advantages of GM crops are numerous: You can have crops that are drought resistant. Crops tolerant to water-logging. Crops that are resistant to herbicides and pesticides used against weeds and pests. There are GM crops that can produce antibodies, pharmaceuticals and human proteins. Some GM plants can even suck up toxic substances in the soil and store them in their roots, stems and leaves. The list is endless. GM crops are now grown in more than a dozen countries around the world and in more than 100 million hectares of land. Biotechnology has become the most rapidly adopted new farming technology in history. GM crops have saved an estimated $200 million for U.S. farmers by avoiding extra cultivation and reducing insecticide spraying. U.S. cotton and potato farmers, by one estimate, have avoided spraying nearly 5 million pounds of insecticides by adopting biotechnology. This certainly should be embarrassing to opponents of GM crops who also happen to be voracious environmental campaigners. The GM wheat of Monsanto would have been the first commercial GM wheat in the world. The farmers who planted it had fewer weeds, less plowing work to do and a larger yield. But their joy has been short lived. Thanks to the campaign against GM food by people like Oxborrow, markets seem to have rejected GM wheat, leading Monsanto to its strategic decision not to market it. The opponents of GM crops point to the results of the worlds largest ever trial of GM crops conducted in the UK. The results, which were made public on Oct 16th, 2003, showed that two out of the three GM crops tested – oilseed and sugar beet had a negative impact on farmland wildlife. Although these farm-scale evaluations are being portrayed as a test of the environmental credentials of GM crops, it is really the weed killers to which they are resistant that were on trial. The tests simply measured the impact on wildlife of the herbicides used, not of the crops themselves. And the researchers themselves admit this. “Critically, all our results are explained by the application and timing of different herbicides, not by virtue of the plants being GM or not” said Les Firbank, coordinator of the trials. Still, the opponents of GM crops like Greenpeace and Friends of Earth are delighted by the findings. Ironically, Greenpeace had denounced the trials as a fix, and activists even attempted to sabotage them by physically pulling up the crops. Earlier in 2003, Friends of Earth said that the results would be statistically flawed. If the aim of these activists is to save farmland life, banning any of the GM crops tested is unlikely to make any difference. This is because herbicide use is getting widespread and farmers who are denied access to GM crops may instead turn to non-GM varieties bred to be insecticide resistant. Their impact on the environment could be worse, because many allow the use of more noxious herbicides than GM varieties. The environmental damage caused by these herbicides will be much greater when compared to herbicides like glyphosate, which toxicologists regard as an environmentally benign chemical that degrades rapidly. For instance, Imidazolinones and atrazine are widely used herbicides with non-GM herbicide resistant crops. Atrazine is suspected of poisoning frogs and polluting rivers while imidazolinones can last so long in soil that it becomes impossible to grow a crop the next season. Although the use of non-GM herbicide resistant crops can be dangerous to the environment, these crops do not have to undergo the same scrutiny as GM crops. While the GM crops can be banned under world trade rules on the grounds that they pose a threat to the environment, the same is not true for these non –GM herbicide resistant crops. For example, “TT Canola” and “Clearfield” rape seeds developed by conventional crossbreeding and gene mutation techniques have greater problems with persistence of herbicides and resistance than GM crops. Both these strains were approved without any fuss surrounding GM crops. As one Monsanto spokesman put it “we would be foolish to turn our backs on the possibility that other methods of plant breeding could generate the same results without transgenic approach. The regulatory systems effectively ignore all these other methods and we are driven by politics, not science. As things stand, a non GM plant would bypass the arguments against GM.” This unfair treatment meted out to GM crops is mainly due to the blind campaigning and lobbying by environmental groups against them. Another danger of GM crops as put forward by opponents is genetic pollution. They say that transgenes like the herbicide resistant genes introduced into GM crops might spread to other wild organisms like weeds, resulting in the proliferation of super-pests which show high resistance to herbicides and pesticides. But herbicide resistant crops developed through traditional breeding techniques and the heavy use of herbicides and pesticides also pose the same risk. Opponents also fear that the introduction of genetically modified organisms into the environment may cause extinction of other species. In contrast, biotech actually offers the solution to such problems. Researchers have developed different techniques to prevent transgenes from getting into other organisms. One clever method used is to introduce transgenes into chloroplast (the little factories in plant cells that produce energy by using sunlight) instead of the cell nuclei where majority of plant’s genes reside. The trick is that pollen of most crop plants do not have chloroplasts, which makes it impossible for a transgene in that crop to get into any other plant through crossbreeding. The development of Technology Protection System (TPS) by the U.S. department of agriculture and Delta Pine Land Co. was aimed at addressing the issue of spread of transgenes. TPS involves a complex of three genes that makes seeds sterile by interfering with the development of plant embryos. Any biotech company producing GM crops would like to implement TPS as it would help it protect its intellectual property rights. As for the extinction of species due to the introduction GMOs is concerned, we need to look at the other side of the coin. According to recent reports, banana plants could become extinct in another 10 years. This is due to the unique method of reproduction of bananas which makes the plant susceptible to fungi, viruses and pests. If scientists can’t find a way to genetically enhance the banana’s ability to resist pests, then the bananas may become extinct once for all. A cheap source of carbohydrates and nutrition for the world’s poor will be lost. But the good news is, several biotech companies say they can save the bananas from extinction by genetically modifying it. The opponents of GM crops should definitely welcome such biotechnologies. However, this is not the case. Their real concern then seems to be about “bio-imperialism”. They fear that if farmers across the globe start adopting GM crops, the control of humanity’s food supply will be in the hands of a few big biotech companies. Though their fear may sound rational at first, it ceases to be a threat if we look at the big picture. All technologies can be patented. The patent gives exclusive rights to the inventor to exploit his invention. The same is true for biotechnology too. With the help of these patents, opponents fear, the biotech companies will have total control over the food crops they produce. But patents, like many other things in life, have an expiry date. Conventional patents have a life of 20 years, after which anyone can exploit the invention or discovery which was protected by the patent. Thus biotech companies have control over the crops they produce only for a limited period of time. And this can further be limited if the life of biotech patents can be reduced after negotiations between governments and biotech companies. The governments can also setup their own agencies which can control the varieties of GM crops introduced into their countries. Further, the agencies themselves can engage in active research and development of GM crop varieties. This way, the fears of bio-imperialism can be put to death. On the other hand, the consequences of not adopting GM crops can be dangerous even for developed countries. As one spokesman from the department of agriculture, government of New Zealand put it “It will prove to be a costly mistake if New Zealand fails to ride the wave biotech revolution.” If it’s going to be a costly mistake for an industrialized country like New Zealand, then it should be disastrous for a developing country like India. Indian economy is almost entirely agriculture based. A majority of its population depends either directly or indirectly on agriculture for its livelihood. But Indian farmland productivity is much lower than the world average. Agricultural output in India is mainly dependant on the monsoons. Even a small deviation from normal in the monsoons spells doom for millions of poor farmers who live on a day to day basis. For instance, the Cauvery delta farmers in the state of Tamilnadu have been pushed to the brink of existence by the failure of monsoons in successive years. Hunger and poverty are forcing these farmers to eat rats and commit suicide. Drought resistant GM crops can definitely save these farmers and the economy of the state. As Anderson of the International Food Policy Research Institute argues - how can we debate on whether these farmers need drought resistant crops or not, while watching their horrible plight? We certainly do not have any ethical right to do this. Another case is the recent controversy surrounding Bt. cotton in India. Some farmers, in the state of Gujarat, had planted Bt. cotton on around 11,000 acres of land. The farmers had planted an unapproved variety of Bt. cotton obtained from the black market. When the government of India learned about this, it ordered them to burn the standing crops, worth over $12.6 million even as thousands of cotton farmers in other states were committing suicides after their cotton crops failed to withstand the attack of Bollworms. The Gujarat farmers have now scored a major victory as the state government of Gujarat has refused to destroy the crops. Much of the crop has been harvested and sold. The state of Andhra Pradesh too has now approved Bt. cotton for commercial cultivation. This is a victory for both the farmers and the future of GM crops in India. Although a small victory, it showed that farmers wanted access to GM crops and do not want the controversy over GM crops being carried out in their name to deny them their basic right to use the best seeds available. GM crops and GM food are definitely the answer to many of the problems the poor of the world are facing today – hunger, malnutrition and disease. GM food can not only address these problems effectively but it can actually lend a helping hand in routing out poverty from the face of the planet, given the fact that most of the worlds’ poor people are farmers or somehow depend on agriculture for a livelihood. According to an estimate by IFPRI, the global food production must increase by 40% in the next 20 years to feed 8 billion people. We now have more mouths to feed and less land left, due to the rapidly growing population. This means we now have to grow more food in less land. Biotechnology is certainly showing us the way to just this. As biologist Richard Flavell concluded in a 1999 report to the IFPRI, “It would be unethical to condemn future generations to hunger by refusing to develop and apply a technology that can build on what our forefathers provided and help produce adequate food for world with almost 2 billion more people by 2020.” All new technologies, from plastics to pesticides, have been double-edged swords. They have had their own share of benefits and ill effects. A technology is widely adopted if its positives are weighed to be more than its negatives. And the negatives don’t just remain as negatives. They contribute positively when the existing technology is perfected or a new technology is developed to get rid of them. They actually propel human technological advancement. Biotechnology is one such new technology. For all the yet-to-be proven ill effects of GM food, there are also a number of benefits, and more risks of not adopting them. References: • Dr. Strangelunch : Why we should learn to stop worrying and love GM food, by Ronald Bailey • “What the Future Holds” – aBetterEarth.org - Excerpted from Genetically Engineered Food: Changing the Nature of Nature, by Martin Teitel and Kimberly Wilson (Park Street Press, Rochester, Vermont, 2001). • G.M. Foods: Hope or Horror? by Radley Balko • The Bollworm, the Suicidal Farmer, by Salil Singh • NewScientist.com • BBC News, BBC World « return.