GMOs: Famine or feast
Fewer issues today are more controversial than the genetic modification of crops, and yet many claim it will be the solution to forecasted world hunger. Louise Hodgson reports.
What if I told you that the forecasted world hunger due to climate change is preventable? That a scientific technology has been developed, which would allow plants to grow in even the harshest conditions. What if I told you that this same technology could enrich nutrients in crops? And that it could develop high-quality foodstuffs, that could guarantee the health of all humans for years to come. Would you believe me?
Think about the progress science has made, specifically in the life sciences fields such as pharmaceuticals and biotechnology. Every day we come closer to treating more and more diseases, to creating vaccines for pandemics that would once have killed hundreds of thousands, and to discovering the power of stem cells, genomes and other technicalities of life.
The promise is that plants can be created to survive in even the toughest climates. Fears about climate change-associated famine, therefore, may soon be forgotten. We are told there is a solution; and the solution is genetic modification.
However, there are fewer issues today more controversial than genetically modified foods. Genetic modification is the manipulation of an organism’s genes. Using the techniques of molecular cloning and transformation, it alters the structure and characteristics of genes directly, as opposed to traditional breeding, which manipulates genes indirectly. At the moment, genetically modified crops (or genetically modified organisms – GMOs) are being grown around the world, most notably in the US, but they are being adopted more and more by developing countries also, especially in South America and Asia.
But, while some people view GMOs as progress in science, others – especially in Europe – are far less enthusiastic. Michael O’Callaghan is coordinator of the GM-Free Ireland Network, which is working towards keeping Ireland off-limits to the environmental release of GMOs. “The GM-free movement in Europe is often accused of being anti-scientific,” he explains, “in fact, it has many of the world’s geneticists involved in it.”
The criticisms of GMOs are manifold, and for the most part, it comes down to distrust. On one hand, there is the fear of the unknown; what consequences will come from meddling, as such, with mother nature? But also, there’s the usual scepticism of big business; that giant companies are taking advantage of small farmers by creating a monopoly with their patented seeds, which should otherwise be free and plentiful.
According to Nicola Mitchell, founder and CEO of Life Scientific and BioScientific Diagnostics and a pro-GM advocate, at the centre of this mistrust lies misunderstanding. “People feel they’re being somehow manipulated or decisions are being made for them,” she says. “What’s good for us all is that decisions are made based on hard data. But sometimes, with complex areas of science, it’s difficult to communicate. Whereas it’s very easy to say something is ‘bad’, it’s very complicated for a scientist to demonstrate that actually a controversial technology is good, because nothing is either all good or all bad. There’s uncertainty in everything – and the last 1% of uncertainty will cost you 99% of the money to clear out. It’s the law of diminishing returns.”
In Mitchell’s view genetic modification is “like a steam train; it’s progress.” O’Callaghan, on the other hand, claims that the basis on which the science has developed has been proven inaccurate. “The basic genetic model that the biotech industry has been using is considered by some geneticists as being out of date,” he says. “They call it the central dogma. The central dogma is that it used a mechanistic metaphor for living organisms, viewing them as if they were machines, or more precisely, as if they were robots with interchangeable spare parts that could be replaced. And as robots with an onboard computer in which the DNA was seen to be the software that commanded the rest of the machinery. In that model it was thought that particular genes of DNA produce particular proteins. Now we know that that’s not the way it works. The production of protein molecules is governed by the interaction of different genes and by other aspects of the cells that are outside of the DNA.
“So to make a long story short,” O’Callaghan continues, “it’s not scientifically possible at the moment for us to predict what the long-term consequences will be of tinkering with the DNA of living organisms.”
The first GM crops were grown in America in the late 1990s. While Mitchell admits that we are still in a relatively experimental phase of GM technology, the potential is enormous and, more importantly for now, the current risks are minimal. “In a sense, the US is like a guinea pig – giving us the time to really understand the wider complexity of this science. But to put it into a context, plant breeding has been going on for thousands of years, since the beginning of civilisation. And these concerns of safety and the ecological impact, they’re not new to plant breeding and most countries have regulatory processes – like the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the States – in place to help ensure that new crop varieties entering the market places are both safe and meet the farmers’ needs."
Leaving the science aside, GMOs mean big business for a small number of multinational companies. Monsanto is a US-based agricultural biotechnology corporation and a giant in the area of GM crops. It is also a very controversial company that leans heavily on the legalities of plant breeding and patenting, and often acts as fuel for the fire in the fight against GMOs. Interestingly, both Mitchell and O’Callaghan agree that Monsanto’s aggressive business tactics are doing nothing to ease the controversy surrounding GM.
Percy Schmeiser is a farmer from Canada who became an international symbol for independent farmers’ rights following a lengthy legal battle with Monsanto. In 1997, the company found unregistered Roundup Ready Canola plants – a Monsanto patent – in Schmeiser’s field, and sued for patent infringement. What had happened to Schmeiser has occurred to other farmers around the world: his plants had been contaminated by Roundup Ready Canola pollen from a neighbouring field, as is the natural way for plants to breed. As this occurred without his knowledge and he had no practical way to prevent the contamination, Monsanto’s reaction appears at best unfair but at worst quite sinister.
“Companies like Monsanto have a policy that aims to take as much control as it can over the food chain,” says O’Callaghan. “It has adopted the strategy to patent as many of the world’s principle food seeds as it can. And the simplest way to get a patent on a food seed variety is to genetically modify it first.”
“Monsanto is well-known to everyone as a very legally-based company,” says Mitchell. “It’s one aspect of the business, but you need a balance, and I agree that their overly-legal approach has cost them a lot, and possibly cost the science a lot too.
“But the industry won’t invest if they don’t get protection [in the form of patents] and that’s the sadness; everything comes down to money at the end of the day. You’ve the same sort of issue in pharmaceuticals. If there’s a better way, let’s find it, but that’s the only way we have at the moment. We need the investment and the resources to develop these sciences to benefit humankind, and then it’s about distributing, in a more balanced way, the benefits and the upside of the technology and the business.”
Mitchell, therefore, remains positive. There is a lot of potential but details, such as legalities, need to be ironed out. In this way, Mitchell truly believes in GM’s ability to aid in the fight against world hunger. O’Callaghan, however, remains decidedly sceptical, and questions as to whether there is even a fight in the first place.
“One of the big myths is that we need GM crops to end world hunger. Now, on the other side, the numerous, well-respected organisations, such as for example the International Assessment of Agriculture, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD), which was set up by the United Nations to look into the whole issue of meeting the food needs of the world’s expanding population, concluded after four years of work, in a report that was published last year, that far from solving the world’s food problems, GM crops will have little if any role to play,” he states assuredly.
“The agri-biotech commodity trade lobbies, which are hugely powerful, paint GM crops as green biotech, and the argument is being very successfully made that, first of all, there isn’t enough food to go around today and, also, the solution is to increase food supply through GM crops. And both of those things are actually false. There is no shortage of food; currently there’s a distribution problem,” he continues.
However, there is no denying the fact that climate change will lead to crop failures in the future. Those faced with the impossible task of growing their food in regions that are experiencing increased extreme conditions, such as drought and so on, will be left with very little choice but to go hungry. Surely this scenario will require a biotechnical solution? Surprisingly, O’Callaghan replies yes – just not GM.
“There are species of crops that can be developed using biotechnology, but not genetic modification techniques. With marker assisted selection, for example, you have a record of a genome in the plant and you can see which genes are present in a particular specimen, and then select that one for breeding, without genetically modifying it. This method would have been used for two or three blight-resistant potatoes on the market that are not GM – they were developed using traditional and modern biotechnology.”
Considering some 20,000 genes within the human body are patented by the biotech industry – genes relating to breast cancer, for example – in order to secure the rights to research into and treatments of certain diseases, it follows that even O’Callaghan’s traditional approach to plant breeding could still very well face the same patenting problems associated with GMOs. If this happens, we’re back to square one.
In Ireland, and indeed Europe, Mitchell’s pro-GMO attitude is in the minority. Ireland is officially GM-free and the GM crops grown on the continent are small in number. However, the problem of climate change will not go away and, with it, the question of whether or not to employ GMOs will gain in importance. That is why both Mitchell and O’Callaghan call for further dialogue and an informed debate. “I’m a risk-taker by nature,” says Mitchell, “and I’m obviously biased. But I’m allowed to be biased; we all are. So we must come together and make decisions on a consensual basis. I would feel very strongly in the favour of involving a scientist, a lawyer, a consumer, a politician – all of the disciplines – in the debate on this issue.”
