Genetic engineering is a relatively new process whereby snippets of DNA from some creatures--plants, animals, bacteria--are shot into reproducing cells of other creatures. If done correctly, the organism acquires the trait that the gene encodes: the ability to produce insecticide, pump out extra growth hormones, withstand herbicidal sprays, and so on. The effects are not very different from what can be achieved with traditional breeding, but the process is much faster and more flexible.

The world has seen greater changes in agriculture than the introduction of GMOs. The Green Revolution of yesteryear indeed revolutionized agriculture, multiplying crop yields and minimizing losses to such freeloaders as fungi and weevils. Hardier and more bountiful strains of staple crops (first wheat, later corn and rice) dramatically increased food production worldwide. According to statistics generated by the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization, total cereal production rose by a factor of 2.5 between the start of the Green Revolution around 1960 and the present day. Meanwhile, world population doubled--but the number of starving people has actually declined: today, roughly 800 million people are going hungry. That is over one out of eight people worldwide. In 1970 the number was over 900 million, closer to one out of four. Sounds like pretty good progress so far.

In fact, without improvements in crop yields to support a burgeoning human population, the number of cultivated acres would have had to more than double. This would mean plowing over more than 80% of Earth's land area--more land in fact than is arable. Simply put, that was and is impossible, and attempting it may have led to catastrophic starvation, war, and all the bad things that accompany too many people with too little food. Blame it on overpopulation.

But the Green Revolution, necessary though it may have been, may still exact serious long-term consequences. Traditional farming, using crop rotation and polyculture (planting more than one crop on a field), leaves the soil healthy for the next year of planting. Modern agriculture relies on cheap oil to run farm equipment, plentiful fresh water to irrigate crops, artificial fertilizer, and toxic sprays to kill pests. These practices leave soil polluted and over-salinated. One estimate has 50,000 square kilometers of cropland lost per year to soil degradation or erosion. America, a land blessed with vast plains of fertile topsoil, has already lost three-quarters of its topsoil. A recent New York Times article (8/11/01) highlighted the nation's dwindling water supply, tapped out by suburban sprawl and irrigated farmlands in regions not meant to be farmed. Mistreated land gives out eventually. When the crops no longer grow, the people starve.

Malnutrition claims more lives than pure starvation, but is not as easily remedied. High-intensity monoculture grain farming from the Green Revolution provides much-needed calories, but does not provide the vitamins and minerals necessary to stay healthy. In many countries, the small quantity of green vegetables produced by poor farmers are promptly sold because they command a higher price than the grain on which the workers subsist. The cause of malnutrition is not a lack of growing power, but the lack of buying power by the hungry poor. Many of the poorest, hungriest nations in the world are in fact food exporters.

Seen from this angle, so-called "Golden Rice(TM)," the prize of the GM foods industry, could be a boon for the destitute. That's certainly what its backers claim. Golden rice gets its orangish hue from the increased level of vitamin A conferred by its daffodil and bacterial genes. Vitamin A deficiency afflicts hundreds of millions of people. If left untreated, it can and does lead to blindness.

The biotech industry could not have picked a better poster child than golden rice, at least not from the crops they have conjured so far. If every adult in the severely vitamin A deficient nations of Asia ate only golden rice, their average daily intake of vitamin A would double or triple. However, it would still be under half of the recommended daily intake. Furthermore, a certain level of fat is necessary for absorption of the vitamin, fat that most malnourished people can't obtain from rice, golden or not. The actual health benefits of the rice are as yet unknown.

Plaudits would be given to Syngenta, Golden Rice's marketer, for waiving its royalty fees on the rice for poor farmers, if that weren't part of the deal it secured with the inventors of the rice in the first place.

The glamour, albeit uncertain, of golden rice shields the biotech industry from criticism leveled at its other creations. A new type of salmon is in the works up at Aqua Bounty Farms, under the label of AquAdvantage Bred salmon. This Atlantic salmon will produce growth hormone year-round, rather than for one season, by incorporating genes from the Chinook salmon and the ocean pout. Consequently the fish will grow much larger, much faster. This has obvious market potential.

What it also has is disaster potential. William Muir and Richard Howard of Purdue University published a paper entitled "Possible ecological risks of transgenic organism release when transgenes affect mating success: Sexual selection and the Trojan gene hypothesis." Using mathematical modeling they determined that super-sized fish, more attractive than their puny brethren, could in a couple dozen generations outbreed the population of their wild counterparts. Bred in fish farms purely for size, the fish would likely fare poorly in the open sea, and die off. Having bred their kin out of existence, the superfish would bring the species to extinction. This is known as the "Trojan gene effect."

While the industry claims the fish would remain penned and sterile, there is no guarantee mistakes won't be made. In 1988 one million penned salmon escaped after a storm ripped through the Norwegian coast. There is no need for one million to escape when one dozen could do the job quite effectively.

Why risk so much? For higher profit in the industry. Salmon prices have dropped dramatically in recent years due to the rise of aquaculture, the practice of raising seafood like livestock. Bigger fish command higher prices, it's that simple.

Note that this danger is not unique to supersalmon or other GMOs. People have bred animals for size for millenia, and crops for pesticide resistance for decades. The difference with genetic engineering is the speed of the process and the source of the new traits. Anti-GMO activists often charge that genetic engineering is inherently evil because it meddles with nature at its most fundamental level. This argument is specious; humankind does nothing but meddle with nature, if one could even pin down such an imprecise phrase.

But once foreign genes are introduced to the genepool of a species, they cannot be retracted. Cross-pollenization of species provides a plant kingdom parallel to escaping GM fish. Canola, a plant whose seeds yield a common vegetable oil, provides a good case study for GMOs run rampant. The RoundupReady version of canola is resistant to the heavily-used herbicide Roundup, used to clear weeds from crop fields. A study done in Denmark has shown that canola readily transfers its introduced genes to a related wild plant in just the first generation of cross-pollenization. By the third generation, the two plants were indistinguishable.

A wild cross-pollenization of canola in Alberta realized anti-GM activists' worst nightmares in 1997. Three types of canola resistant to three different herbicides were planted near each other and soon after--lo and behold--so-called superweeds with resistance to all three soon sprung up. Such tenacious strains of crops could prove impossible to control if not reined in early enough.

RoundupReady canola has found itself far from home in recent years, spread perhaps by cow manure, or, as Canadian farmer Percy Schmeiser claims, by an errant gust of wind blowing seed off a truck. Schmeiser was hounded by agro-giant Monsanto for allegedly stealing their seed to use on his fields. Monsanto went to the trouble of hiring private investigators and filing a lawsuit against the man, which they eventually won, to ensure he could not profit off their plant.

Genes introduced from the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis into the corn plant have been used to create a strain called Bt corn, which produces a toxin lethal to the European corn borer. The toxin resides in, among other locales, the corn's pollen, which blows with the wind. Some of this pollen finds its way to milkweed leaves. The leaves are in turn consumed en masse by the larvae of migrating monarch butterflies on their way to Canada via America's heartland. In a study conducted by professor John Losey of Cornell, Monarch caterpillars that ate milkweed dusted with Bt corn pollen grew more slowly and died off at a significant rate; the control caterpillars did not die. Just as serious are concerns about the effect of the toxin on beneficial insects such as lacewings, which are natural predators of pest insects. By 1999 over one third of U.S. corn fields grew Bt corn.

Yet these concerns may be overblown. Milkweed plants growing a mere meter away from a field of Bt corn in Ontario were shown to lack the pollen density necessary to cause noticable effects in Monarch caterpillars. For all the hullabaloo over the purported threat, there has been no detected drop in the Monarch population, and few people actually expect one. The Bt toxin was used as a spray before it was incorporated into the genome of corn, and has actually been noted for its lower toxicity than many comparable pesticides.

The StarLink brand of Bt corn made a big splash in the media some months ago. This unapproved GM corn contains a chemical called Cry9C that was suspected of being an allergen. Unbeknownst to consumers, the corn worked its way into foods from taco shells to tortillas before being recalled. Though the danger was minimal--the EPA estimated 0.14% of corn products sold in 2000 probably contained StarLink corn--the biotech industry in America felt the backlash. Yet all the negative publicity accomplished little on this side of the Atlantic. Many countries, including much of Europe, have strictly curtailed or regulated GMOs recently, but the United States has held back. The EPA should establish strict guidelines for the introduction of genetically modified crops, but that didn't happen during the Clinton administration, and the new EPA Lite is unlikely to do anything. The FDA still regulates GM crops as normal crops, requiring no special labeling. The principle of consumer awareness should not be compromised on such a contentious point as genetic modification of one's dinner.

Again--what is the point of all these entailed risks, however dubious some of the claims against Bt crops are? Another Purdue University study puts the benefits at nearly nil. The average crop damage to corn wreaked by the European corn borer is in fact less costly for Indiana (the home of Purdue) farmers than planting one's fields with Bt corn as a preventative measure.

Perhaps the genetically modified crops require less pesticide use. The Union of Concerned Scientists did a thorough study of the efficacy of Bt cotton as opposed to regular cotton, and concluded that in the short-term it does reduce pesticide use. Farmers who used the cotton tended to be pleased with it, and not need chemical sprays. A displeased few did need sprays although Monsanto (the cotton's distributor) claimed they would not. Some Texas farmers even became irate enough to sue the company for misrepresentation.

Still, Bt cotton has been an overall success. The trouble lies in long-term use of cotton (and potatoes and corn) with the Bt-producing gene. Many farmers, especially organic farmers, have used Bt as a spray for years, encountering little trouble with resistant bugs. The extensive planting of the crops will likely accelerate the development of resistance to Bt. Farmers who once used Bt may have to turn to harsher chemicals to control pests, and the genetically engineered crops will be as ineffective as the run-of-the-mill boll of cotton.

Less famous but holding great promise is a strain of tomato recently developed to grow in soil so salty most plants would die. This tomato (and future plants using the same type of genetic manipulation) could be a boon for farmers who have had to abandon land due to oversalinization, estimated to afflict one-quarter of the world's farmland. Dr. Maris Apse, a researcher in the laboratory that created the salt-resistant tomato, spoke of the ethical side of crop engineering:

"It's not that these crop plants are deficient in any way. It's that we're changing the conditions that they're growing in, and we have to think rationally about how to change them so that they can adapt to the changes man is making to their environment."

When the benefits and hazards are balanced, not much remains but a muddle. Neither peril nor panacea, the biotechnology industry begs for regulation, not rejection. While the technology is still in its youth, federal regulation is even farther behind. FDA rules on GM animals such as the quick-growing salmon remain murky and incomplete. Dangers like that to the Monarch butterfly are discovered after the fact rather than before for lack of careful study.

End-of-the-world prognostication lacks merit, but so does biotech propaganda that their miracle crops will save the world. Little evidence exists that GM foods are dangerous for humans to eat today; eating tomorrow is a chancier proposition. With the world's population as it is today, there is no single solution to the problem of hunger. Sustainable agriculture cannot feed six billion people. Genetic modification of food may please agrobusiness, but at most it's a quick fix for a few problems. The real hopes for tomorrow lie elsewhere..
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