Non-food GM. The men in white coats are winning, slowly

The non-food use of genetic modification is moving ahead on several fronts. But it still has obstacles to overcome, and far to go

IF YOU are a stay-at-home European or Australian, it is quite possible that never, knowingly or not, have you eaten any genetically modified (GM) product. But, unknowingly, you may well be wearing one right now: GM cotton is widely grown. And you may have been treated with a drug produced with the use of GM. Wide public support has enabled anti-GM zealots to win battles on the food front in Europe and elsewhere; and fear of losing trade deters GM in other countries that grow and export the stuff, even if they would readily eat it themselves. Yet, overall, the enemies of GM are losing the war.

That might sound unlikely: this year's big GM news was not an advance but an inglorious retreat. Monsanto, an American agri-business that is the main commercial promoter of the technique, and thus the arch-villain for its enemies, decided not to bring its GM wheat variety to market, not even in the largely GM-tolerant United States. But food is a special case. It is easy to shout “Frankenfood” and scare someone into taking no risks, real or imagined, with his bread or burgers; not so easy with his shirt. However the war may go in the supermarkets or cattle feed-lots, the non-food uses of GM technology have ensured that the technology is here to stay. And those uses are steadily multiplying.

At the microscopic level, bacteria are routinely modified to produce enzymes for use in industrial processes. Cotton is so far the only widespread non-food GM crop. But others are on the way. Researchers are modifying potatoes, even trees, to suit the paper industry; GM oilseed rape (canola) can make better detergents or lubricants. Sheep can be altered, as Australian scientists have done, to grow more and better wool (though not yet, as one American website spoofed, wool so tungsten-rich that it works as a filament in light bulbs). Both plants and animals can be altered to produce pharmaceuticals; the resultant “bio-pharming” is still in its infancy, but its commercial day will come.

And a huge new use for GM crops is already under way. To produce bio-fuel or bio-plastics, made from maize or sugar, say, rather than petroleum, you don't need a GM “feedstock”, but why not? The exhaust is not going to spray out deadly footloose Frankengenes (or any genes at all).

Not that the way ahead is clear. The spread even of non-food GM will be affected by the vagaries of public perception. You may be happy to fill up with GM-derived fuel, but remain uneasy about GM food. If so, anti-GM militants argue, you must say no to both: whether it goes into your mouth, into the steer that ends as your beefsteak, or into your petrol tank, GM maize is grown in fields not far from non-GM maize, and may “contaminate” it. So stop the lot. And, good science or not, that is a real commercial argument: one may think the fear of non-food GM crops quite irrational, but if lots of consumers do fear them, the most cynical farmer may be entirely rational not to plant them.

Applied to cotton, that argument has plainly carried little public weight. Cottonseed oil is in fact eaten, notably in margarine, but few people associate cotton with food. No such luck for any sort of grain. The argument will surely affect bio-fuel projects in Europe: such fuels may be acceptable, but not GM-based ones.

Yet, whatever the uncertainties, non-food GM is indeed going ahead, for all the propaganda against it, some solid, some arguable and some fictitious. It is quite true that Monsanto's GM seeds cost more than others, and that it tries to keep a grip on the use and supply of them; too tight a grip, say those who speak for third-world farmers. But it is not true, for instance, that its (or other people's) pest-resistant GM cotton has lower yields. A recent study in western India reported significantly higher ones. And, yield apart, quite certainly this cotton can bring higher profits, because it needs far less spraying. A Chinese study of two cotton-growing provinces in 2001 estimated savings of $250 per hectare (2.5 acres) in labour and insecticide - which, by the way but not by chance, also means far less poisoning of farmers by sprays.

The best answer to those who doubt GM's practical benefits comes not from researchers but farmers. On one (pro-GM) estimate, in 1997 the world grew 1.4m hectares of GM cotton; last year, 7.2m ha. In America, which introduced it, by now 75% of cotton is GM. China authorised its commercial planting only in 1997; by 2001 there were 1.5m ha, 30% of the cotton area; last year 2.8m ha. India, the world's biggest cotton-grower, began with GM cotton only in 2002, and in 2003-04 planted less than 100,000ha. But in the new season that figure would treble, predicted a Monsanto joint-venture that already sells $12m a year of seed there. The actual spread may well have been even faster.

In all three countries, those figures are the result of choices made by farmers, not by bureaucrats or supply companies. The anti-GM notion that third-world farmers have to be arm-twisted or deceived into GM planting is nonsense. If they can measure the results in renminbi or rupees, farmers will embrace GM.

So much for the notion that the only real gainer from GM crops is wicked, multinational Monsanto. In fact, on the seed-supply side, it has rivals. Swiss-based Syngenta, its big European competitor, is moving into GM cotton, through a deal signed in August with Delta and Pine Land, an American market leader already offering Monsanto versions. Though mostly under licence from Monsanto, its Indian competitors have recently produced GM cotton varieties of their own. China's Academy of Sciences developed its own varieties in the mid-1990s, and now offers more than 20, adapted to varying climatic or soil needs.

The low-down on Roundup

Nor yet is it true that the whole thing is really a plot to sell Monsanto's Roundup herbicides, by hooking the farmer on crops modified so they can be safely sprayed with Roundup, but with nothing else. That may sound plausible of soya, the world's main GM crop, which is nearly all modified to be herbicide-tolerant. Similar GM cotton varieties indeed exist. But the main GM cotton is Bt cotton, named after a tiny bug, Bacillus thuringiensis, whose insect-fighting properties have been transferred (to several crops besides cotton) not to sell more herbicide, Roundup or any other, but to require less pesticide.

What is notable about GM cotton is how little has been altered. The sundry GM varieties are built to aid farmers, not textile mills. Resistant to pests, herbicides or both, the result is still cotton. Here is just a new way of producing the stuff.

But many other GM ideas, in the pipeline or farther off, will alter the product, as old-style breeding does. There will be no tungsten sheep-fleece, but sheep in future will grow not just more wool, but softer wool. Old flowers will get new colours or scents: a Melbourne company has already released purple GM carnations; in Indiana an academic is at work on the scent of roses. Lawn and golf-course grass will be tougher, trees more resistant to drought, or adapted to clean up contaminated soil.

Other shifts are already producing “the same old stuff”, but in novel ways. Pigs or indeed potatoes can produce human proteins for medical use (though none has yet received authorisation), foot-and-mouth vaccine can come from alfalfa, genes from enzyme-making bacteria can do the same job in tobacco, and useful new enzymes can be found and put into old bacteria. Researchers see few limits, other than human timidity, to how far they can go.

The paper industry illustrates the diversity of GM. Its basic raw material is trees. Researchers in New Zealand and Chile have produced pest-resisting pines. Oji Paper, a Japanese giant that uses fast-growing eucalyptuses from South-East Asia, has put carrot genes into them so they can flourish in acid soil. But GM can go further. Trees contain not only the cellulose that papermakers want, but lignin - crudely, the stuff that makes a tree a tree - which they don't. Separating the two is costly; how nice to use trees that start off with less lignin. They can be created. Researchers at the State University of North Carolina have bred aspens with only half the lignin of ordinary ones - and, it turned out, they have the additional advantage that they grow faster. Do not expect Canada or the Nordic countries to be shortly covered with GM pines; commercial use of GM trees in Europe is at least ten years off. Butit is on its way.

Likewise with starch. Papermakers use it - several tonnes are required per 100 of finished paper - both to bind the pulp fibres together and to “size” the surface, so you can print on it. In Europe and North America, the starch often comes from potatoes. But spuds produce two kinds of starch: amylopectin, which papermakers like, and amylose, which they dislike. In the 1990s the world leader in potato starch, AVEBE, a Dutch co-operative, developed a GM potato containing more amylopectin, less amylose, but was thwarted by the European Union, which forbade its marketing. AVEBE is now growing a new version, though it will be years before it can reach the market. Through a Swedish subsidiary, BASF, a German chemicals giant, also has created a high-amylopectin GM potato. The Swedish authorities gave permission for an experimental plot in 1999, and last April for large-scale planting. The company would love to grow its potato elsewhere in Europe. But the EU's consent is still required and that has not yet been forthcoming.

Nor need potatoes be the only source of engineered starch. The world grows 190m tonnes a year of cassava, nearly all for food or animal feed. But its starch too can go into paper, and in Thailand a little already does. That could become a lot: Thailand grows enough cassava to be the only significant exporter, and recently decided to allow commercial GM crops. If public fears of GM food and “contamination” can be overcome, cassava could be one.

The whiff of fear

Those fears have already affected tobacco. It is a “halfway house”: cigarettes are not eaten, but they are consumed. Tobacco has in fact already been genetically modified, both to produce more nicotine and less. The now-vanished high-nicotine cigarettes landed their maker, Brown & Williamson, with a (failed) lawsuit from America's Food and Drug Administration. Today's low-nicotine GM ones just do not sell very well: Vector, which makes them, recently put on hold plans for a nationwide roll-out.

Neither outcome had much to do directly with GM. But growers of ordinary tobacco hate Vector's GM smokes; partly, although they will not admit it, because “low-nicotine” is hardly their favourite slogan, but also, as with food crops, for fear of contamination and consumer reaction, even though Vector grows its GM weed outside traditional tobacco areas.

Not least, ordinary growers fear for their exports and, as with food, they may be right. In the 1990s China was the first country to grow GM tobacco, aiming to improve the crop's resistance to viruses. Within a few years, foreign pressure forced it to cry off. Doubts in Europe will deter both European and other growers and processors. SEITA, as France's cigarette monopoly was then called, was once authorised to do research on GM tobacco, but made little commercial use of the results.

What about bio-pharming, for which tobacco is well suited because it produces lots of leaf and has been much studied? This prospect arouses fewer fears - at least in Kentucky, says a source there, where the first bio-pharmed crops have been grown. The rival varieties are very different. And the money could be good. A hectare's output of cigarette tobacco is worth about $9,000. As against? Well, one enthusiast in 2002 estimated the same hectare could grow over $400,000-worth of a skin-growth hormone, or near $5m of an anti-coagulant protein. That is surely dreamworld: as supply of the protein rose, its value would fall, and anyway only a portion of such riches would reach the grower. Even so, the sums (not least, far lower labour costs) are still interesting.

Down on the pharm

There is no visible end to the technical possibilities of bio-pharming. America, well ahead of Europe in this respect, has recently been issuing 30-40 permits a year for field trials: tomato, potato, alfalfa, lupin, rice and maize are among other favoured plants. Far smaller organisms can be used: bakers' yeast is one. And the list of potential products is vast: human albumin and haemoglobin, interferon, vaccines for hepatitis-B, anthrax, cholera and diarrhoea are among the few that a layman has even heard of.

The time between field trials and commercialisation is long, however - at least six years, because any hopeful results still need testing and must then win regulatory approval. But in time bio-pharming and other uses of GM will become a familiar, low-cost means of producing, in volume, things that were once rare. Insulin, for instance, has long been made by putting the human gene for it into a helpful bacterium. Previously, it came, in a less than ideal form, from the pancreatic glands of slaughtered pigs.

The big, publicly visible boom in non-food GM, however, is likelier to come in chemicals, plastics, fibres and fuel. Instead of petroleum, these will be derived from maize, soya or other crops - sugar beet in Europe, say. In time, plants may even be modified to make polymers themselves; it was done experimentally, but then dropped, by Britain's ICI and later Monsanto in the 1990s. Metabolix, a research company in Massachusetts, is now getting bacteria to grow finished plastics that are biodegradable.

The use of farm crops for such purposes is not new. After long research into maize-based plastic, Cargill (grains) linked up with Dow (chemicals) in 1997 and their joint-venture, which began production in 2000, now sells about 140,000 tonnes a year for packaging and bedding. Nor need the crops be GM: Cargill Dow's maize has not been. But it could be. The ethanol makers who already supply over one-fifth of Brazil's motor fuel use sugar cane, but they could as well use soya, some of it the theoretically illegal, but in fact amnestied, GM versions that local farmers have eagerly adopted. And the first step in any such process, fermentation of the maize (or other) glucose, involves enzymes, which these days are usually produced using GM: new “super enzymes” are found by experiment, and the appropriate genes to produce them are fed into some fungus or bacillus that will do the job better than nature till then has done it for herself.

Many organisms are used - DSM, a Dutch chemicals company, lists 34 - and the enzymes go wider still: into detergents, cheesemaking (instead of rennet from calves' stomachs), cotton-weaving and countless other processes, new and old.

But that is all scientists' stuff. The world, perhaps to its own peace of mind, has only a nascent idea of it. Greater awareness will come when, to the joy of farmers and governments of oil-lacking countries, the men in white coats have advanced enough for the suits to set their enzymes to work, profitably, on what any eye can see in the fields.

Yes, but how soon? The key word here is “profitable”. Even at today's output (about a thousandth of world plastics output), says Cargill Dow, sales of its maize-based plastic “will barely scratch the surface” of its $750m investment. DuPont, with Genencor, a biotech leader, has put genes from two organisms into a third, to help turn maize glucose into a fibre that it calls Sorona. But it is still far from commercial production, let alone profit.

And those two are well-publicised products, already some way down the road, from world leaders. In the Netherlands, DSM, which makes a feedstock for nylon, is studying sugar beet as a source. Given the EU protection that beet needs to make it competitive with imported cane sugar, can this ever make a profit?

Beautiful bio-fuels

Bio-fuel (which does not depend on GM, but could well use it) is more advanced. Yet not far. Brazil's output, near 4 billion American gallons (15 billion litres) a year of sugar-based ethanol, leads the world. America makes maize-based ethanol, usually mixed one-part-in-ten with petrol. But even with a tax break of 52 cents a gallon (13.7 cents a litre) of pure ethanol, the 80, mostly small, plants will make only 3 billion-plus gallons this year, or less than 2% of all motor fuel used. Bills now before Congress propose 5 billion gallons by 2012; that would by then mean only about 2.5%.

Of course, with high oil prices, these ethanol plants may multiply faster than expected: in oil terms, about $10 on a barrel of crude matches the ethanol subsidy, and oil has risen more in price than that this year. And Brazil's lower-cost ethanol could boost supply (but - you guessed - imports pay a duty of 54 cents a gallon: at bottom, the ethanol subsidy is about farm incomes, not replacing oil).

The EU, producing both bio-diesel and ethanol, is far behind. In all, it makes about 700m gallons a year. Its aims (and motives) are a bit higher: 5.75% of consumption from bio-fuels by 2010. But that too will need subsidies.

The use of GM on the farm crops - and in making the enzymes to work on them more efficiently - will in time speed up and cheapen the production of bio-fuels. But none of these figures suggest the new processes and fuels are about to take over the world tomorrow morning.

Indeed, profit is the big doubt for these grand oil-replacement dreams: they depend much on its price. Pharmaceuticals - especially, though not alone - face a huge and poorly mapped quagmire of intellectual property rights. Yet the real hurdle for non-food GM may still be public opinion.

The pharmaceutical and chemicals companies are mighty, and are quite capable of lobbying hard on behalf of their GM-based innovations. But GM's foes are many, and they can be unscrupulous with facts. If anything goes wrong - as in America in 2002, when GM maize, born of seeds from the previous year's bio-pharmed crop, was found in fields of ordinary soya - the news swiftly reaches far more people than ever hear of the routines in place to avoid such errors. GM needs skills, and courage, in its public relations no less than its laboratories or finance departments.

The non-food use of genetic modification is moving ahead on several fronts. But it still has obstacles to overcome, and far to go.

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