Food fight

Natural History, Dec, 2003 by Stanley A. Freed

As Marc J. Cohen writes in his review ["Crop Circles," 10/03], "few aspects of everyday life provoke such sharp disagreement as the emerging biotechnology of food." Barely mentioned by Mr. Cohen, the farmer is a major player in the battle over biotechnology.

In India, for example, farmers were critical in the struggle over whether to permit genetically modified (GM) cotton to be grown. The government tried to stop it, but a small company smuggled GM (Bt) cotton into the state of Gujarat, and for three years farmers grew it beside fields of traditional cotton. The secret was revealed in 2001 by a great bollworm infestation. Although the indigenous variety was devastated, the Bt cotton was unharmed. The government ordered the destruction of the illegal crop, but farmers had seen the overwhelming advantage of Bt cotton. The government soon approved its cultivation (S.A. Freed and R.S. Freed, "Green R.evolution: Agricultural and Social Change in a North Indian Village," Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History, 85, 2002).

India is a democracy where 75 percent of the people rive in rural areas. The farmers are voting with their plows.

Stanley A. Freed

American Museum of Natural

History

New York, New York

MARC COHEN REPLIES: I was surprised that Stanley

A. Freed felt that I had "barely mentioned" farmers in my review, since I identified boosting small-farmer productivity in developing countries as key to reducing world hunger, and as the main area in which biotechnology might help. Otherwise, I find his comments right on the mark. Indeed, Bt cotton has boosted the incomes of poor farmers elsewhere in the developing world, including South Africa and China, while reducing pesticide use. The problem of how quickly the cotton pests will develop resistance to the Bt toxin remains a major issue in managing the technology. Research is also needed to determine the extent to which impoverished farm households are converting their income gains into better nutrition. In a case similar to the one Mr. Freed cites, soybean producers in Brazil engaged in civil disobedience on their farms, planting herbicide-tolerant seeds derived from biotechnology in defiance of a government ban. So there is no doubt that farmers in developing countries are major participants in the biotechnology debate.