One by one, countries are coming out against crops with engineered genes. America is isolated

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The Fear of FoodOne by one, countries are coming out against crops with

engineered genes. America is isolatedBy Fred Guterl

NEWSWEEK INTERNATIONALJan. 27 issue — Tony Hall’s career has always depended on

his command of certain facts about corn. For instance, did you know that last

year the United States produced more than 9 billion bushels, 42 percent of the

world’s supply? And that a year’s worth of U.S. exports would fill a train of

hopper cars from Paris to Beijing, by way of Calcutta?

 

 

 

 

BACK IN 1984—when Hall was a U.S. congressman from the corn-belt state

of Ohio—he went on a fact-finding mission to Ethiopia, which had been suffering

from famine, so he could better argue the case in Washington for increasing U.S.

food aid. Hall found more than facts. When he and his entourage drove to the

plateau north of the town of Alamata, “I walked upon a scene of about 50,000

people just very peacefully lying around, moaning—and dying,” he recalls. “When

I came home, I decided that there’s lots of things you can do in Congress that

really don’t amount to much. But this was important.”

 

 

Taking up world hunger as your own personal cause isn’t the kind of

behavior you’d necessarily expect from an elected politician, but that’s what

Hall did. He was instrumental in kick-starting several congressional initiatives

to combat hunger, and in 1993 he even fasted for 22 days to make his point.

Arguably his best shot at harnessing America’s vast grain harvest for the

world’s greater good came last fall, when he arrived in Rome as the U.S.

ambassador to the U.N. food agencies. His timing, however, couldn’t be worse.

Right now the last thing even the hungriest parts of the world want is

genetically modified American food, like Ohio’s golden corn.

The Case for Caution

 

 

 

Europe has for years turned its nose up at American products like corn,

tomatoes and soy, which scientists have engineered to contain unnatural genes.

Now, in yet another permutation of a global anti-Americanism, the rest of the

world seems to be following suit. China, one of the world’s biggest agricultural

producers, invested billions of dollars in GM crops only to back off last year

on imports and on new foreign investment in the development of engineered seeds.

Even the world’s poor, it seems, don’t want America’s grain, thank you very

much. In November, India froze food-aid shipments of corn and soy from the

United States. And in October, Zambia turned away 18,000 tons of U.S. corn, even

though 3 million of its citizens teeter on the brink of starvation. “I’d rather

die than eat something toxic,” President Levy Mwanawasa told Sky News.

 

 

Zambia’s rejection, Greenpeace exulted, was “a triumph of national sovereignty.”

But to Hall, for one, it was almost a personal affront. “Just when you think

you’ve seen everything, you see food being shipped out of a country where

starving people are stoning public officials and rioting,” he says. “This is not

an intellectual discussion, it’s a moral issue—a matter of life or death.”

 

 

What has inspired such opposition to so-called Frankenfoods? The answer has

grown as complicated as the gene splicing needed to create them. American

officials, isolated and perhaps a bit paranoid, see Europe’s influence behind

every hesitation over GM crops. U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick calls

Europe’s moratorium on new GM foods “immoral” and “Luddite” and wants to appeal

to the World Trade Organization. Europeans deny arm-twisting other regions.

“There is no European governmental pressure to do this,” says Alexander de Roo,

a Green Party member of the European Parliament. “It’s the governments

themselves who are rejecting GM foods.” Of course, the European Commission’s

Health and Consumer Protection directorate general “did give documentation and

research to concerned countries,” says spokeswoman Beate Gminder, “but we [do]

not make attempts to influence their decisions.”

 

 

Americans are suspicious, in part, because engineered corn seems so safe. After

all, it doesn’t glow in the dark and gives off no lethal radiation. In fact, it

looks and tastes just like plain old corn and, genetically, it’s almost

identical—except for one added gene, which scientists in the laboratory

transplanted from Bacillus thuringiensis , a bacterium. The gene confers upon

the corn the ability to repel pests like the bollworm, a pesky bug that has the

nasty habit of devastating cornfields. The most widely used GM crops—namely,

cotton and corn—have this Bt gene.

 

 

As the U.S. agriculture industry is eager to point out, the technology has been

a big success: it has reduced the amount of pesticides farmers have had to spray

on their cornfields, with happy consequences for the environment and human

health. U.S. health regulators haven’t been able to find anything wrong with

eating Bt corn. It is now found in roughly two thirds of all corn products on

American store shelves. GM foods already on the market “are unlikely to present

a problem to people’s health,” says Jorgen Schlundt, director of the World

Health Organization’s Food Safety Program. Even Europe’s officials admit that

health risks are minute. So why won’t the rest of the world just relax and bake

some corn muffins? “Because of doubts, ignorance, evil,” says Hall.

 

 

Perhaps. But there may be more to the skepticism over GM crops. In India, for

instance, officials have always maintained European-style safety concerns about

genetically modified foods. Although the government approved Bt cotton last

March—after a bruising four-year battle—it has never OK’d GM corn or other

edible crops. And the controversy over cotton has only stiffened resistance.

Last November, authorities demanded a written guarantee that aid shipments from

the United States contained no GM grains whatsoever. Relief workers at CARE and

Catholic Relief Services couldn’t comply. After six months of stalemate, they

had the sacks of flour shipped off to Africa. In the meantime, India has allowed

no new shipments of U.S. corn-soya flour. Other products have similarly stalled:

in November, New Delhi also put off a decision on whether or not to accept GM

mustard plants, even though they’ve been testing them for years.

 

 

Regulatory officials are often as afraid of public opinion as of the crops

themselves. “We took a lot of flak over GM cotton,” says former Genetic

Engineering Approval Committee chairman, Achyut Gokhale. “It was my job to

ensure we weren’t accused of overhastiness [over GMgrains].” The Indian public,

like those in countries from France to Zimbabwe, seems to have equated GM foods

with U.S. agriculture—and trust neither. They are afraid of foreign genes

somehow contaminating their own crops and fields, and they’re afraid their

farmers might grow dependent on U.S. companies for GM seeds. “Genetic

modification is just a weapon to bring Indian agriculture under the dominance of

American corporations,” says Devinder Sharma, chairman of the Delhi-based Forum

for Biotechnology and Food Security.

 

 

Indian activists remember vividly the row a few years ago over StarLink, a form

of GM corn that had been approved for animal feed in the United States, but

which was found, to the great embarrassment of the U.S. agricultural industry,

to have made its way into Taco Bell burritos and other products intended for

human consumption. StarLink had been engineered to contain a foreign protein

suspected of causing allergic reactions. Subsequent tests proved otherwise, but

the damage was done. Suddenly just about all U.S. grain, GM or otherwise, was

suspected of contamination—and loudly opposed.

 

 

China’s recent about-face on GM foods also has as much to do with politics as

with science. The People’s Republic was actually an early and enthusiastic

adopter of genetic farming. Chai Hongliang and his brother Zhenbo, who farm

cotton in Langfang, about 30 miles southeast of Beijing, used to dump tons of

pesticides on their crops to keep the bugs from destroying their harvest. Five

years ago they started using government-approved Bt cotton, made by U.S. biotech

firm Monsanto; the brothers saved so much on pesticides they doubled their

profits. They even opened a tiny shop to sell the seeds for Bt cotton. Chinese

cotton farmers increased their productivity by 10 percent last year, by some

estimates.

 

 

But overall, Chinese farmers still could not compete against cheaper U.S. crops,

now available after the country joined the WTO. In the spring, officials began

requiring labels on all imports of GM crops. Ships loaded up with 1 million tons

of soybeans slated for export to China sat in U.S. ports for weeks. Beijing

eventually granted a reprieve, but U.S. soy exports to China slipped 20 percent

for the year. Beijing has also declared a moratorium on investment by foreign

seed companies in the development of several new strains of genetically modified

plants.

 

 

What’s interesting is that Beijing’s moves are not simply a protectionist

ploy—reimposing de facto trade barriers forbidden under WTO regulations.

Backtracking on GM foods extends to China’s own growing agricultural industry.

Since the late 1980s, Beijing has lavished money on research into genetic

farming techniques; it currently spends $100 million a year by some estimates.

The idea was to boost productivity and push exports beyond the 5 percent of

agricultural production China currently sells abroad. More than 100 labs have

sprung up, and researchers have invented 150 different strains of transgenic, or

GM, crops. “We all believed this was going to be very important technology,”

says Chen Zhangliang, a researcher at Beijing University who developed

virus-resistant tomatoes and sweet peppers. But last year, just as labs were

ready to commercialize their new crops, the Chinese government stopped approving

them.

 

 

Although officials cite the usual safety and environmental concerns, the

prospect of being shut out of export markets may be the more compelling fear.

Once GM crops are planted widely, it’s difficult, if not impossible, to remove

them from the agricultural system. Keeping GM and non-GM grains apart proved

difficult in the case of StarLink. What’s to keep GM corn crops, with their

powerful added gene, from overtaking weaker natural corn strains—especially when

Chinese peasants, mindful of their pest-repelling qualities, plant them

surreptitiously in their gardens? China fears forever tarring its exports with

the GM brush, which would put the kabosh on markets in Europe, not to mention

skittish Asian countries like South Korea. It’s not a theoretical threat. After

China developed GM strains of tobacco, Europe shut the door to Chinese imports

in the 1990s. “It significantly affected trade,” said Huang Jikun, director of

the Center for Chinese Agricultural Policy in Beijing. “The government realized

the [economic] impact biosafety concerns could have.”

 

 

China’s turnaround has underscored just how isolated Washington now is. “We

figured China was our buddy on biotech,” says a U.S. official. “Most of our

resources were going to problem areas like Europe.” That’s now changed. The U.S.

government recently started training Chinese regulatory officials on transgenic

crops. Lobbyists for the U.S. soybean industry, which supplies China with half

of its soybeans, buttonhole Chinese officials at conferences and send scientists

information about GM soy.

 

 

Environmental groups sense Washington’s desperation. Greenpeace set up shop in

Beijing last summer and began working through the Chinese press and Communist

Party-controlled neighborhood committees to “build public awareness of

genetically engineered food,” says Zhou Yan, the group’s information officer.

Greenpeace newsletters can now be found in the waiting rooms of almost any

governmental or scientific office that deals with GM crops. In late 2001,

Greenpeace teamed up with an environmental group in southern China to produce a

report warning of the dangers of genetically modified organisms, or GMOs.

(Another government organization later pronounced the report unreliable and had

it recalled.)

 

 

There are signs that the Chinese public is beginning to have doubts. When

Huang’s agriculture policy center surveyed more than 1,000 Chinese consumers, 3

percent said they would not eat GM food—not many, but more than previous studies

have shown. “A few years ago when I talked to policymakers, no one was against

GMOs,” Huang said. “But in the past two or three years, when I talk to some

officials they say, ‘I’m not going to eat biotech food’.” Says the U.S.

official: “One nightmare scenario is that the [trade] protectionists work with

the environmental nongovernmental organizations, thinking it would be clever to

encourage antibiotech hysteria. That would be a disaster.”

 

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A change in the risk-reward ratio might give GM crops a fillip. So far, genetic

technologies haven’t led to drastically lowered prices but, as supplies

increase, some experts think 30 percent drops are likely. In 2001, GM crops

worldwide covered 53 million hectares, 15 percent more than the year before,

according to a recent study by the International Service for the Acquisition of

Agri-biotech Applications, a research organization in the Philippines. Brazil,

the world’s second-largest producer of soy, has so far eschewed genetically

engineered varieties. But Brazilian scientists are developing several types of

GM crops. If they come up with tempting new seeds, Brazil may decide to take the

plunge sooner rather than later.

 

 

What ultimately happens in places like India, China and Brazil, though, will

depend a great deal on what happens in Europe. At the moment, GM foods aren’t

terribly popular with European consumers, whose memories of the fiasco over

mad-cow disease are still fresh. Once better regulations are in place, attitudes

may soften. This year the EU is putting in place labeling rules. If liability

laws were also strengthened, so that consumers felt they had better recourse

against food-industry shenanigans, European consumers might alter their

resistance to GM crops. “I think GM foods are going to be accepted by European

consumers sometime in the next five to 10 years,” says Julia Moore of the

Woodrow Wilson International Center in Washington, D.C. “If the U.S. is

smart”—if it doesn’t further alienate European consumers with lots of trade-war

chest-thumping—”we’re talking about closer to five than 10.” The question is,

will it be too late to change the minds of consumers in the rest of the world,

who won’t have the benefit of such protections?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

With Tom Masland in Cape Town, Sarah Schafer in Beijing, Ian Mackinnon in New

Delhi, John Ness in New York, Tracy McNicoll in Paris and Ginanne Brownell in

London

 

© 2003 Newsweek, Inc.

 

 

 

 

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