Mutants on the menu

UNESCO Courier, Sept, 1998 by France Bequette

Genetically modified plants are being developed so quickly that they could become the backbone of tomorrow's agriculture. For better or for worse?

Feeding the world is one of the big challenges of the next century. Paradoxically, whereas the planet's farmers actually produce more food than world population needs, about 800 million people are chronically undernourished and two billion suffer from malnutrition, nearly all of them in the poor countries of the South.

The number of mouths to feed is expected to increase by almost 100 million annually in the next thirty years. A worldwide shortfall in production is not yet the main cause of hunger, but output will have to be stepped up in the first half of the next century.

The area of cropland will certainly have to be expanded, but a limit will quickly be reached. Biodiversity is already under threat; deforestation causes erosion and impoverishes soil, irrigation leads to salinization and water resources are shrinking. Today farmers are also required to respect the environment and the health of consumers. In the 1960s, the "green revolution" was about maximizing production by using massive quantities of fertilizers, pesticides and other inputs. The downside of this race to boost output was that it generated pollution.

Massive inputs did not eliminate crop losses, which are still considerable, running in the early 1990s to 42 per cent of all the wheat, rice and maize harvested worldwide. Would it not be best to enable plants to fight diseases and pests by themselves? This is the proposal of the transgenic revolution which is currently sweeping the world of agriculture.

In 1953 James Watson (USA) and Francis Crick (UK) discovered the spiral structure of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), but it was not until thirty years later that the first gene transfer was made, in the laboratory, on a tobacco plant. The first field tests were conducted in 1987 and the technique then took off. A decade later, genetically modified crops were growing on 15 million hectares of land around the globe. In 1998, United States farmers alone sowed 20 million hectares of genetically modified maize, soya and cotton. Argentina and Brazil have accepted genetically modified organisms (GMOs), and so have China and Australia. By the year 2000, genetically modified crops are expected to be growing on 60 million hectares worldwide - 81 per cent of them in North America, 10 per cent in Asia and one per cent in Europe. In the United States alone, they will comprise a $100-billion market over the next decade.

Why this spectacular expansion? Farmers have crossed different varieties and species from time immemorial. But, says European Ecology Institute Chairman Jean-Marie Pelt, "this painstaking work by agronomists has always taken place within the barriers between species. . . . Barriers strictly delimiting a given species, without the chance of hybridization with others, except, possibly, closely related species." Genetic modification makes light of all these barriers. Theoretically gene transfer makes all kinds of things possible. Plants are already capable of producing haemoglobin, a growth hormone, and human insulin.

The supporters of transgenic agriculture point to other advantages. If a plant has a gene which resists certain pests, there is no need for it to be treated with a chemical which threatens the health of the person who applies it and pollutes soil and water. It can also be given a gene to make it resistant to a herbicide, enable it to survive cold or drought, and even change its taste or nutritional qualities.

So are GMOs the key to the future of agriculture? Certainly not, say its detractors. First, because genetically modified crops favour large-scale industrial agriculture to the detriment of small farmers and the countries of the South. If small farmers opt for genetically modified seeds, their costs rise and they will have to sign contracts with transnational firms like Monsanto, Novartis, AgrEvo, Dupont, Pioneer or Rhone-Poulenc and buy seeds from them every year, as well as the herbicides the plants are treated to resist. One example is Round-Up Ready, the genetically modified rapeseed produced by Monsanto, which is resistant to Round-Up, a herbicide made by the same firm.

In addition, if we become capable of producing substances tasting like, vanilla or cocoa from plants which can stand up to the climates of the northern hemisphere, farmers in poverty-stricken countries may lose their meagre source of income. Yet according to the American Biotechnology Industry Organization, things are less alarming. It gives examples of technology transfers such as the passing on to a research institute in Indonesia of material to produce insect-resistant potatoes by tissue culture, and the insertion of a fungicidal gene into African bananas.

Since research in this field is very costly, genetically modified plants are usually privatized through patenting. Monsanto, with an annual turnover of more than $6.6 billion, says it spent $166 million last year on GMO research, but refuses to say how many patents it applied for. Small companies and the countries of the South stand no chance against the big transnational firms.