Special report: Genetically modified food. Far less scary than it used to be /

Date: 26/07/03

Genetically modified crops will neither feed the world nor wreck the planet. So what's all the fuss about?

IN ROCHFORD, east of London, two dozen people gathered recently to discuss their hopes and fears about genetically modified (GM) food. The assembled housewives, pensioners and farmers listened politely to a handful of guest speakers, and then they fired off questions: How can you be sure that GM food is safe to eat? Aren't GM crops hurting the environment? Will GM feed the world's poor?

Such questions have been asked up and down Britain. The meeting in Rochford was one of more than 450 public gatherings in a month-long consultation exercise called “GM Nation?”. The exercise, which ended last week, is only one of several studies commissioned by the British government. Earlier this month, the Cabinet Office, a government department, published an assessment of the costs and gains of Britain embracing, or rejecting, GM agriculture. This week, a group led by the government's chief science adviser published a review of the scientific evidence of the risks and benefits of GM crops. Soon a committee will flesh out the guidelines issued by the European Commission this week on how GM and non-GM (particularly organic) agriculture can co-exist, and who should pay if one contaminates the other. Then in September the results of about 200 field trials looking into the effects of GM crops on the country's bugs and birds will be published.

The last time Britain saw such a flurry of interest in GM food was in 1999, when a series of events turned much of the population against “Frankenfoods” and drove the stuff from supermarket shelves. The upshot was a “voluntary” moratorium on the commercial cultivation of GM crops in Britain, a pause which the government has said it will reconsider in the autumn.

The results are of interest far beyond Britain. The battle over GM foods has pitted the world's main producers - America, Argentina and Canada - against the European Union and others that resist its spread. This may well culminate in a fully-fledged trade war at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) if America presses ahead with its complaint that the EU's five-year de facto moratorium is a scientifically unjustifed trade barrier.

Out in the field

At issue are two broad types of genetic modification, which account for 99% of the almost 59m hectares of GM crops in commercial cultivation. One, called Bt, takes a gene from a bacterium and puts it in plants to give them resistance to certain insects without the use of chemical pesticides. The other uses genes also from bacteria and gives plants resistance to particular herbicides, such as glyphosate.

The main GM crops - soyabeans, maize, cotton and oilseed rape - are now grown commercially in 16 countries and tested in a dozen more. GM commodities are also widely traded, even in the European Union which still imports several GM products, such as soya meal for animal feed. Spain actually grows some GM crops commercially.

Much of the resistance to GM food stems from concern over its potential risks to human health and the environment. This week's review of the scientific evidence in Britain concludes, as several other expert bodies have before it, that there is no evidence to suggest that today's GM crops are less safe to eat than conventional foods. In many countries, GM foods are already heavily scrutinised for nutritional content, toxicity, allergenicity and genetic stability before being allowed on to the market. While the British review is sanguine about today's GM foods, it also recommends more research and longer-term studies on future generations of the stuff.

The case for eating GM crops is far clearer than for planting them. In the late 1990s, opponents of GM technology predicted ecological catastrophe from introducing these “unnatural” creations into the landscape. One of their fears was that the pests which farmers most want to kill off, such as the European corn borer, would develop resistance to the Bt toxin in GM plants.

However, studies of Bt cotton in America and China have shown that, after seven years of commercial planting, the target pests are still as vulnerable to the toxin as ever. But this is no cause for complacency, says Bruce Tabashnik, an entomologist at the University of Arizona. He believes it is only a matter of time before resistance develops - as it has to every other pesticide ever tried.

Then there are worries about gene flow - the wafting of pollen or seed from a GM plant to an unmodified one, and the passing on of undesirable characteristics. This happens as a matter of course between conventional crops, so it should be no surprise that it happens with GM plants, says Allison Snow, a plant biologist at Ohio State University. The consequences depend on the circumstances. Gene flow from one field of GM maize to another may make little difference in the middle of Nebraska; a similar flow in, say, Mexico, home to thousands of wild relatives of the domesticated maize plant could have serious repercussions.

A further worry is over GM plants' potential to harm everything from microbes in the ground to songbirds overhead. America was in a flap four years ago when experiments suggested that GM maize could poison Monarch butterflies: field tests later suggested that such an event was highly unlikely.

Scientists do not have a clear view of the full ecological impact of GM crops, or indeed of conventional farming, says Angelika Hilbeck, an ecologist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. For every study suggesting that GM crops can boost, say, insect numbers by replacing brutal chemicals with more environmentally friendly products, there is another showing problems for the birds and the bees.

On the whole, according to this week's review of the science in Britain, the GM crops that are now being grown commercially are no worse for the environment than conventional farming. Indeed, under proper management, some of them can be better for it. That said, there are limits to the extent to which the experience of, say, Saskatchewan can be applied to Somerset. Ecosystems and agricultural practices vary greatly around the world, and the review calls for much more research into the local effects of GM.

Sow what?

While biology can go some way to answering uncertainties about GM crops, the future of the technology lies with a more dismal science: economics. Crucial here is the demand for GM products along the food chain, from farm to fork. In America, there is certainly some home-grown resistance to GM food, but consumers are generally unperturbed by having GM crops in their backyard or on their dinner plates.

In Europe, opinion polls suggest that public attitudes towards GM food have mellowed from outright distaste at the end of the 1990s to cautious uncertainty. “The advocates of GM technology are wrong when they say that public resistance is based on a misperception of risk,” says George Gaskell, a sociologist at the London School of Economics. “Rather, it stems from an apparent lack of benefit.”

Four years ago, several big international companies, Monsanto among them, were promising consumers a brave new world of healthier, better-tasting GM foods. But it has been slow to appear. Today there are consumer-friendly GM crops in the works - tomatoes high in heart-protecting anti-oxidant molecules, for example - but it will be many years before they appear in a market near you.

Moreover, the firms in the business are not as robust as they once were. Monsanto and Syngenta, formerly part of profitable pharmaceutical companies, are now independent operations and no longer have the same deep pockets for GM research or for purchasing seed companies. Syngenta has shifted some of its focus to industrial applications of GM plants, such as producing pharmaceuticals, that might gain easier acceptance in Europe than GM foods.

This tolerance will quickly evaporate, however, if one slips into the human food supply. America has already had a couple of such scares. In one, a variety of GM maize, used for animal feed but not approved for human consumption, made its way into taco shells. Hundreds of millions of dollars-worth of processed food and raw grain had to be destroyed.

This failure to enthuse consumers comes as no surprise to Lawrence Busch, an agribusiness expert at Michigan State University. Historically, firms such as Monsanto and Syngenta, which had their origins in agrochemicals, saw farmers, not shoppers, as their main customers. So when they turned to biotechnology in the 1990s to help boost their flagging sales and offset high development costs, such companies focused on easy traits that would be of immediate interest to farmers, their traditional customer, rather than to food manufacturers or shoppers.

Most farmers who have tried GM crops since they first started to spread commercially in the mid-1990s like them, which is why acreages expanded by more than 10% last year. And this is despite the higher cost of the seed and the strict conditions that companies often attach to their contracts of sale. There is even a thriving market in smuggled seed in Brazil, where the government has not yet formally authorised commercial planting. Up to one-third of Brazil's soyabean acreage is GM, according to Tray Thomas, an agribusiness expert in Des Moines, Iowa.

The specific benefits conferred on farmers vary. In general, though, those who turn to, say, herbicide-resistant soyabeans, do not plant them for higher yields. GM versions are not much more productive than conventional varieties. Rather, farmers choose them because they are easier to manage, demand less weeding and take lower-cost, less toxic herbicides. Bt crops, on the other hand, can produce higher yields than ordinary ones, under certain circumstances. They also need less insecticide, which is better for health and, maybe, for the environment too.

Leonard Gianessi of the National Centre for Food and Agriculture Policy in Washington, DC, reckons that eight different commercially grown GM crops in America, from herbicide-resistant soyabeans in Minnesota to virus-resistant papaya in Hawaii, boosted American farm income by $1.5 billion in 2001. Studies in Argentina, China, South Africa and Spain have also shown that farmers can gain. On the other hand, Britain's Soil Association, an organic farmers' trade association and opponent of GM crops, can point to studies showing that farmers in America, at best, only break even from their use of GM.

The bottom line, says Michigan State University's Mr Busch, is that farmers generally see cost advantages from GM crops - or they would not keep planting them. But in its recent economic review, Britain's Cabinet Office noted that the financial benefits that might accrue to British farmers from planting, say, herbicide-resistant oilseed rape are unlikely to compensate for the lack of a market should their main customers shun the stuff. Indeed, having GM on the farm could add to costs throughout the food chain. New European rules on labelling and traceability, to come into force later this year, will demand further careful separation of GM and non-GM crops, and a detailed paper trail from field to foodstore.

The rules will also require that the distinction between GM and non-GM be applied to animal feed and “derivatives” - such as soya oil - which appear in a wide variety of processed foods. When consumer-oriented GM foods reach the market, producers may welcome these new regulations as a way of singling out higher-value products. But in the absence of a premium for GM foods, they are seen by the food industry as an onerous extra cost.

What's in it for me?

The essential problem for GM foods is that farmer-friendly crops do not, at present, translate into comparable benefits further down the food chain. Archer Daniels Midland, one of the world's leading grain handlers, does not see a big difference between the price of GM and of conventional produce. Food manufacturers, such as General Mills, are equally sceptical about the advantage to consumers in GM food. At the same time, the message coming from some of Europe's powerful supermarkets is that they don't want to stock anything that they have to describe as GM.

For all their complaints about foreign opposition to GM crops, however, there is, as yet, little sign that farmers in America or Argentina are abandoning the technology in droves. Those who do, in order to cater to GM-wary markets, expect a premium. Non-GM soya exports to Japan, for example, command a premium of around 10%.

But Europe's resistance to GM foods is having an effect beyond its borders. In Canada, for example, there is a fierce row in the prairies over Monsanto's new GM wheat. The company claims that it will greatly assist farmers in weed control, thereby reducing farm costs. But the Canadian Wheat Board is advising farmers not to plant it, since much of their produce makes its way to export markets in Europe, which might be jeopardised if GM material were to sneak in. Countries from China to Zambia have also seized upon Europe's resistance to GM to justify their own import barriers. On the other hand, new markets are opening elsewhere to cater to GM-wary populations: one country's trade loss is another's golden opportunity.

Far from taking over world agriculture, GM crops represent less than 5% of world farm acreage. Hesitant markets, as well as scientific uncertainty, will continue to slow their spread in Europe and Asia. For all the extravagant promises of salvation, and the dire predictions of damnation, the past five years of public resistance have brought GM technology down to earth. Its future now lies in more focused applications in particular parts of the world. GM never did stand for Global Miracles.

Genetically modified food will neither feed the world nor wreck the planet. So what's all the fuss about?