Time to Restore Balance on Biotechnology

Time to Restore Balance on Biotechology
For many years, genetic engineering techniques have offered agriculture an opportunity to solve many production, storage and marketing problems, lower unit costs, enhance product attributes, fight insects and diseases, and economize on the use of natural resources such as land, water and energy. Big advances were made first in crop products such as corn, soybeans and cotton in the United States, but before the benefits of biotechnology could be applied to perennial crops or adapted to other countries, an organized campaign of opposition derailed further progress.

The Politics of Fear
The biggest weapon of the opponents of biotechnology has been exploitation of fear. For example, they helped capture the media's attention by prancing around in monster costumes and raising the specter of sinister, destructive "Frankenfoods" that might result from genetic engineering techniques. They popularized the term "genetically modified organisms", shortened to GMOs, that insinuated that somehow a genetically modified apple or potato would contain some new hazardous organism, rather than the same structure of benign chemical constituents as conventionally bred apples or potatoes.

To illustrate how dangerous they believed genetically engineered products to be, they tried to stop scientific testing of genetically modified crops by destroying the test plots, knowing full well that without scientific data, it would be difficult to demonstrate that their fears were unfounded.

They cleverly used concerns about Mad Cow disease, outbreaks of E-coli and other food safety scares unrelated to genetic engineering to argue that national food safety programs needed to be modified. They won a raft of new restrictions on the testing, planting, marketing and trade in genetically engineered products. They had a strong influence in the establishment within the European Union of the European Food Safety Agency, but when that agency showed that it was going to base its decisions on sound science, they worked to poison the atmosphere for genetically engineered products in individual countries.

Opponents Cried "Wolf" too often
A decade later, genetically engineered strains dominate the corn and soybean industries of the United States and have become widely adopted in many other countries because they require less labor, fertilizers, herbicides and energy. Nothing resembling the doomsday scenarios painted by the opponents has occurred. Although their credibility has been badly damaged, they continue to fight a rearguard action on labeling, buffer zones, liability for cross-contamination, etc., to block wider acceptance of genetic engineering.

Many European farmers that originally saw banning of genetically engineered crops as a way to protect their domestic markets have realized that they have simply given their global competitors a decade head-start in improving productivity and profitability. Many are now pressing their governments to remove unwarranted regulations and prohibitions. Many scientists have become more courageous in resuming their work on genetically engineered crops. Some countries have again begun to permit open field testing.

However, there remains widespread fear among the general population, especially in Europe, about the perils of genetic engineering. They have neither the scientific background nor the media savvy to understand how their perspectives have been distorted by steady campaigns of misinformation.

Time for Courage on Genetic Engineering
The potential benefits of genetic engineering in feeding a growing world population, improving human health, fighting climate change and solving many other societal problems is so great that the agricultural community needs to step forward with courage to advocate the full exploitation of genetic engineering's capabilities, accompanied by the many cautions and safeguards that have already been established.

Courage will be needed from the governments and politicians who must make the decisions. It will be needed from the research administrators and the scientists who must do the work of pushing the frontiers of knowledge. It will be needed by the producers and suppliers of genetically engineered products. Above all, it will be needed from the mega-retailers that now have so much influence on the choice of products that are offered to the public.

The mega-retailers have been guilty of failing to use their enormous resources to separate strident claims from the mountains of solid evidence on the outcomes of genetic engineering in food and agriculture that have been accumulated over more than thirty years of research in some of the top universities and research institutes in the world. At the very least, it is time for them to get out of the way and allow consumers to make the choice themselves.

First published in the World Apple Report, Volume 15, No. 1, January 2008, page 1

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