The Global Food Fight

Robert L. Paarlberg

From Foreign Affairs, May/June 2000

Article preview: first 500 of 4,871 words total.

Summary:  New technologies often provoke strong resistance -- even when, as with genetically modified crops, their benefits vastly outweigh their potential harms. The fact is that transgenic food has no proven downside. Nevertheless, scare-mongering consumer groups in Europe have led a global backlash against this new technology. The battle has thus far pitted rich American farmers against rich European consumers. But the real losers are the poor farmers and underfed citizens of the tropics, who desperately need all the help that gene science can deliver.

Robert L. Paarlberg is Professor of Political Science at Wellesley College and an associate at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University.

FOOD FOR THOUGHT

Powerful new technologies often provoke strong resistance. When the internal combustion engine gave us automobiles, advocates of horse-drawn buggies scorned the fad. When nuclear fission was first mastered, much sentiment turned against its use -- even for peaceful purposes. Thus today's backlash against the commercial use of recombinant DNA technology for food production should not be surprising. Consumer and environmental groups, mostly in Europe, depict genetically modified (GM) food crops, produced mostly in the United States, as dangerous to human health and the environment. These critics want tight labeling for GM foods, limits on international trade in GM crops, and perhaps even a moratorium on any further commercial development of this new technology -- all to prevent risks that are still mostly hypothetical.

The international debate over GM crops pits a cautious, consumer-driven Europe against aggressive American industry. Yet the real stakeholders in this debate are poor farmers and poorly fed consumers in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. These are the regions most in need of new transgenic crop technologies, given their difficult farming conditions and rapidly growing populations. Yet poor farmers in tropical countries are neither participating in nor profiting from the GM crop revolution.

GENE GENIE

The genetic modification of plants and animals through domestication and controlled breeding has gone on with little debate for roughly 10,000 years. But since 1973, genetic modification has also been possible through the transfer of isolated genes into the DNA of another organism. This type of genetic engineering -- also known as genetic transformation, transgenesis, or simply GM -- is a more powerful and more precise method of modifying life. Genes carrying specific traits can be transferred using a "gene gun" between species that would not normally be able to exchange genetic material. A trait for cold resistance, for example, can be transferred from a fish to a plant.

As powerful as GM technology is, the large corporate investments needed to develop commercial applications for transgenic crops did not begin until 1980, when the U.S. Supreme Court extended patent protection to new types of plants and plant parts, including seeds, tissue cultures, and genes. Only after the Court guaranteed the protection of intellectual property rights did private corporations make the substantial investments necessary to develop commercially attractive transgenic crops.

The first GM crops that emerged were designed to solve important farm problems: pest control, weed control, and soil protection. The Monsanto Company, for example, developed soybeans with a built-in immunity to glyphosate, the active ingredient in the Monsanto herbicide Roundup. Having planted these GM soybeans, farmers could control weeds with a single spray of glyphosate, which had previously been lethal to the soybean plant. This reduced the need to employ more toxic and long-lasting weed killers or soil-damaging tillage. Several companies also developed GM varieties of cotton and corn engineered to contain a naturally occurring toxin -- Bacillus thuringiensis (also known as Bt) -- that minimizes insect damage to plants while dramatically reducing the need for chemical sprays.

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