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Sowing Disaster?
by Mark Schapiro
28 October 2002
The Nation
It's an hour-and-a-half drive over switchbacks from the southern
Mexican city of Oaxaca to the village of Capulalpan, a settlement
of some 1,500 people nestled in the Sierra Norte Mountains. The
thick forest and remoteness of this mountainous region has long
enabled the local Zapotec Indians to maintain their cultural
integrity and, to a great extent, write their own rules. When
Mexican clocks were turned back for daylight saving time in the
spring, the Zapotecs refused to make the adjustment, insisting
that they live in "God's time," not in what they derisively call
"Fox time," referring to President Vicente Fox in far-off Mexico
City. Carlos Castaneda wrote about this region as a center for
natural transcendence in his book Journey to Ixtlan. But over the
past year, this tiny puebla among the cedars and the wild mustard
of the Sierra Norte has been unwillingly thrust into the center of
a worldwide controversy over something quite different than the
quality of its peyote: genetically engineered corn.
Last winter a team of plant scientists from the University of
California, Berkeley, published a paper in the journal Nature
asserting that the genes from genetically altered corn had been
discovered in the local varieties of corn grown here in
Capulalpan. The news traveled quickly. The biotechnology industry
has long claimed that genetic engineering is predictable: that the
genes end up where they are put, and that their presence in the
environment can be controlled. But the discovery of genetically
engineered (GE) corn in Capulalpan appeared to defy those claims.
In 1998 the Mexican government outlawed the planting -- although
not the eating -- of GE corn, in order to protect the genetic
diversity of the crop that is the country's most important food
supply.
Preserving the rich genetic diversity of Capulalpan's corn is a
matter of more than sentimental significance. When disaster
strikes corn anywhere in the world -- disease, too much rain, not
enough rain, a new pest -- plant scientists traditionally come to
this region, which stretches from the Sierra Norte Mountains down
to the southernmost state of Chiapas and into Guatemala, for the
germ plasm to rejuvenate beleaguered domestic varieties. Genetic
diversity is what provides a hedge against unanticipated
environmental changes. In the state of Oaxaca alone, corn grows in
sixty different varieties, in shades of blue, black, purple and
white, as well as the yellow that we have come to associate with
our most widely grown crop.
"This is the world's insurance policy," says Mauricio Bellon,
director of the economics programs at the International Maize and
Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), the world's foremost public
research facility for corn. "The diversity of these land races,
these genes, is the basis of our food supply. We'll have great
science, we'll have great breeding, but at the end of the day, the
base [of this crop] is here. We need this diversity to cope with
the unpredictable.... The climate changes, new plant diseases and
pests continue to evolve. Diseases we thought we had controlled
come back. We don't know what's going to happen in the future, and
so we need to keep our options open. And this," says Bellon, in
the middle of a Oaxacan cornfield, "is what keeps our options
open."
The villagers in Capulalpan had no idea what genetic engineering
was until they found the errant genes in their fields. Genetic
engineering involves introducing genes from a separate organism
into corn -- or any of a number of other food crops -- in order to
express a desired trait. Olga Maldonado, the first villager in
Capulalpan to discover transgenic elements in her corn, found the
very concept bewildering. "Maybe it comes from some other plant,"
she said, "or animal -- it has another ingredient that's different
from corn."
Americans, too, might be blindsided by such a revelation, even
though most of us eat genetically engineered products practically
every day. Walk through your local supermarket, and you'll find it
in breakfast cereals, canned drinks, processed foods of every
sort. Unless it's duly labeled, chances are anything with
processed soy or corn has been genetically modified. The most
popular sweetener today is not sugar, but corn syrup -- and most
corn syrup is made from genetically modified corn. GE corn and
soybeans are fed to animals, so it's in our beef, our pork, our
chicken and our milk. Over the past five years, the products of
genetic engineering have slipped almost unnoticed into the
American food system. Though there is no hard evidence that these
products are harmful to human health, foreign and domestic
scientists and activists are questioning their long-term impact on
the environment, whether their much-heralded benefits are actually
coming true and whether the introduction of what is, in essence, a
new living organism into the ecosystem can be so easily
controlled. And now here these organisms were in Mexico -- which
had banned the planting of genetically engineered crops four years
ago. If the genetic traces could make their way all the way to
tiny Capulalpan, where else are they going to go?
I am walking through Olga Maldonado's field in Capulalpan. A
Zapotec Indian with a broad, weathered face, Olga now approaches
her field, where her ancestors have farmed for centuries, with a
new diffidence and uncertainty. "I only know that I am afraid,"
she says.
Her field is on a hillside over the town, with a sweeping view of
the Sierra valleys below. The field itself is a patch of perhaps
200 plants; you can walk from one end to the other in about a
minute. But it's enough to produce food for her, her husband and
their young children for most of the year.
The problems surfaced when Olga first discerned that some of the
corn in her field did not have the hardiness to which she was
accustomed. Several others in the village were having similar
problems: nothing devastating, just that their yields were off,
and in an area where corn is central to the region's economic and
cultural life, that registers as a significant event.
How could transgenic crops have made it into the fields in this
remote location in Mexico? In Capulalpan, Olga herself remembers
buying some corn from the local store, where imported kernels are
sold by the crate (and are, legally, only supposed to be ground up
for food). She didn't know about the government ban on planting,
and she figured she'd try some of it out in her fields. "I planted
that corn out of curiosity," she says. "I bought it at the
government store and planted it to see if it was better than ours.
And because there was more corn in each plant."
But later, when the corn had problems maturing, she had her plants
tested at a small laboratory located on the cusp of a hillside
overlooking the Sierra valley, in the town of La Trinidad. There,
the UC Berkeley microbiologist Ignacio Chapela had helped to
establish a genetic testing facility as part of a successful
effort to demonstrate to Japanese buyers that the large, brimmed
fungi that grow wild at the foot of the trees in the surrounding
forest and look like shiitake mushrooms actually are shiitake
mushrooms. Every month traders make the trek to Capulalpan to
purchase mushrooms, which are flown express to Japan, providing
much-needed cash to the community. This time, however, the lab
discovered something it didn't want: Within the genome of Olga's
corn kernels -- varieties that have grown here for centuries --
was, suddenly, evidence of genetic manipulation. The lab
ultimately found that fifteen of the twenty-two corn samples it
tested from the surrounding mountain communities also had traces
of transgenes.
Genetic engineering has transformed American agriculture: In just
six years, 34 percent of our corn, 75 percent of our soy, 70
percent of our cotton and 15 percent of our canola is genetically
engineered. Genetically engineered potatoes, tomatoes and wheat
are also headed toward mass production. The critical forces behind
the development of the technology itself are just five companies
-- Dow, DuPont, Syngenta, Aventis and Monsanto -- which control
three out of every four patents issued over the past ten years for
genetically modified crops. And fully 90 percent of the
genetically modified seed technology planted around the world is
either owned by or licensed by one company, Monsanto, according to
the ETC Group (erosion, technology and concentration), a
sustainable-agriculture NGO that has followed changes in the seed
industry over the past two decades. According to an assessment by
Chemical and Engineering News, just two companies -- DuPont (owner
of Pioneer and other smaller seed companies) and Monsanto --
control nearly three-quarters of the US corn-seed market. These
companies are now anxious to export the rapid advances the
technology has made across America.
But the very idea of manipulating the genetic structure of a
living organism has caused unease around the world. While I and a
production crew from the PBS newsmagazine show NOW With Bill
Moyers (which aired a version of this story on October 4) were
visiting Olga Maldonado in Mexico last summer, half a world away,
two southern African countries, Zambia and Zimbabwe, were refusing
to accept American donations of genetically engineered corn to
help them contend with a food crisis that was sending tens of
thousands of people into starvation. The European Union was facing
down a possible US challenge at the World Trade Organization over
European restrictions on imports of genetically engineered food.
In countries as far afield as France, India and New Zealand, the
new technology was sparking anti-American demonstrations. The
release of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) into the
environment would later emerge as one of the most contentious
issues to be discussed at the Earth Summit in Johannesburg, South
Africa. Altogether, more than thirty countries have imposed either
a total ban or heavy restrictions on GMO imports from the United
States.
The news from Mexico stoked fears around the world that genetic
engineering is out of control. While Ignacio Chapela and his
graduate student David Quist's discovery ignited a firestorm of
controversy by scientists who criticized their work, in August a
study commissioned by Mexico's National Institute of Ecology
confirmed their findings: Transgenic corn genes were in Oaxacan
corn. "What is most important about these findings," Exequiel
Ezcurra, president of the institute, told the newspaper La
Jornada, "is that transgenic creations move quickly into the
environment and that it's time to reconsider ways of insuring our
bio-security."
Nobody knows for sure what precise variety of transgenes wound up
in Capulalpan corn. Dr. Norman Ellstrand, professor of genetics at
the University of California, Riverside, and one of the country's
foremost experts on corn genetics, says that the corn in
Capulalpan could contain any number of characteristics that have
been engineered into American corn. Since corn is openly
pollinated, he explains, pollen from one plant can blow or be
transported in some other way to fertilize another plant. "And if
just 1 percent of [American] experimental pollen escaped into
Mexico, that means those land races could potentially be making
medicines or industrial chemicals or things that are not so good
for people to eat. Right now, we just don't know what's in there."
Chances are good, however, according to Ellstrand, that the genes
are from Bt corn, a popular US corn variety genetically engineered
to produce its own toxins against a pest known as the European
corn borer. The borer presents a sporadically serious threat to US
and European cornfields but is rare in Mexico. Ellstrand says
there would likely be no immediate damaging effects from the
presence of Bt corn in Mexico, but what frightens him is how much
we don't know: This year, he is researching how long transgenes
will persist in native varieties -- whether, in fact, they can
ever be bred out of the population. This is a question that until
now has not even been studied.
At least for the foreseeable future, then, here in the heart of
the world's reservoir for genetic diversity of corn will be
transgenes developed for the vast rolling flatlands of American
corn country -- where, in just six years, Bt corn has moved from
laboratory petri dishes into one of every five acres of cornfield.
Frank McLain shifts the gears on his 1982 pickup as we drive
through his family's cornfields in central Iowa. This land has
been in his family for five generations, since it was homesteaded
in 1862. "What they passed on to me is the feeling that this land
is not just a hunk of dirt that you use and sell," he says, "that
a piece of ground is something that should be kept for the next
generation; that you're just a steward and you're not just to use
it as a tool or as a doormat."
Frank is the first in his family to plant transgenic crops. On the
left side of the road, we're passing a field of Bt corn; on the
right, Roundup Ready soybeans. Monsanto's Bt corn contains a gene
inserted from a bacteria that prompts the plant to produce its own
insecticide; when the corn borer eats it, the plant's toxins go to
work in its digestive tract, literally blowing up its stomach. It
means that Frank has cut in half the amount of pesticides he used
to have to apply to his corn. And Monsanto's Roundup Ready soybean
seeds have been genetically altered -- using a gene from a
bacterium -- in a way that enables them to resist the application
of Monsanto's own herbicide, Roundup. "When I was a kid you'd see
grass or other weeds poking up in these fields, and we'd have to
go through and chop them out with hoes or shovels or whatever to
clean them up manually or mechanically as best we could," Frank
explains. "Now it's pretty easy to come in here with a [Roundup]
sprayer and accomplish the same thing."
Frank's experience with genetic engineering illustrates both the
allure and the potential dangers of the new technology. For many
American farmers, genetically engineered crops offer a level of
predictability in a business that can rise or fall with a few
degrees Fahrenheit each season.
Twenty years ago I visited Frank and his father, Fred, while
reporting a story on the American seed industry. At the time, the
industry was undergoing rapid consolidation as regionally based
seed companies were being bought out by large multinational
pesticide and pharmaceutical companies. Hundreds of locally bred
seed varieties were being phased out in favor of hybrids that
could be grown in broad swaths of land across America.
I talked with the McLains then about what effect this
consolidation would have on genetic diversity. They had lived
through the infamous corn blight of 1970, a year in which 15
percent of the US corn crop was devastated by a blight that
attacked a single hybridized corn variety that had been planted in
one out of four acres from Florida to the Midwest. Meat prices
shot up that year, as most of the lost corn was being grown as
cattle feed. The reason for the blight was subsequently identified
by the National Academy of Sciences as genetic uniformity: Corn
seed across the country was, the academy reported, "as alike as
identical twins." Fred told me how he watched as his plants became
black and shriveled under the corrosive effects of the blight.
When scientists quickly raced another slew of corn varieties onto
the market for the following season, they relied on genetic
material contained in traditional corn varieties, whose roots
could be traced back to those land races around Oaxaca.
I hadn't seen the McLains since the summer of 1982, except once
the following year, during a cross-country trip when Fred and his
wife, Donnie, graciously laid out a lunch for me when I pulled
into their farm, located just off Highway 30. At the time,
Monsanto had just announced the creation of the first transgenic
plant, launching the technology that would later evolve into
full-scale genetic engineering. Few understood what that would
mean.
Today, Fred has retired, and Frank, 50, is running the farm. I
have a vivid memory of when I last saw Frank, sitting with him in
a cramped tractor cab listening to the Rolling Stones' Exile on
Main Street at full volume as we churned fertilizer into the soil.
Now, on a sweltering July day, we're rumbling along the dirt road
past those same fields, past acre upon acre of corn plants of
identical height, a perfect crop. Frank points out the window of
his pickup to a field of seed corn almost five feet high. In
addition to his fields of Bt feed corn, he is growing experimental
seed for Monsanto, the nation's largest producer of genetically
engineered crops. "They're wanting to see how it will do maybe one
last time before putting it out in large acreage," he says.
Growing the experimental seed pays a premium and insulates him
from the rollicking prices of commodity feed corn, enabling him to
make a comfortable living from farming -- an increasing rarity for
American family farmers.
Frank, like many American family farmers, is struggling to keep
the farm afloat in an era when hundreds of farms a month are
thrown into bankruptcy by the twin forces of low commodity prices
and the rising cost of inputs, like seed and agricultural
chemicals. He needs to obtain an ever-rising production from his
1,400 acres just to stay alive as a farmer. Through careful
tailoring, the new crops shrink, by at least a bit, the immense
workload involved in running a family farm, and add, at least a
bit, to the reliability of being able to make a livelihood off the
land.
But like most farmers, he is now deeply dependent on the
multinational agribusiness enterprises that dominate the US food
production system. To grow transgenic seeds, Frank has to agree to
Monsanto's conditions. Every year Frank signs a contract with
Monsanto for its patented Bt corn and Roundup Ready soy, agreeing
not to replant it the following season -- which means Monsanto
gets to resell it to him the following year. Frank sees himself as
entrenched on the conveyor belt of American industrial
agriculture. "My job," he says, "is the production end of this
assembly line. We're just a small little cog in the wheel.... What
we're concerned with is production agriculture. To most of us that
means our five or ten miles that we were born and raised and will
probably die in."
But whether he likes to think about it or not, Frank's fate is
entwined with that of Olga Maldonado and other farmers like her.
Indeed, it's even possible, among infinite possibilities, that
Frank is growing the same type of corn that surfaced in
Capulalpan. Ultimately, it is questions of control and
predictability that lie at the heart of the controversy over
genetically modified crops. In the farmer's fields, it is a
question of control over corn's free-floating means of
insemination -- those tassels you see feathering the air in corn
country are like a plant's version of a peacock's tail, there to
produce and release "male" pollen to be carried to the "female"
silks. And inside the corn plant itself is the issue of whether
genetic manipulations might have unforeseen effects. These are
questions that bedevil even the scientists who are engineering the
changes.
Some twenty miles from Frank McLain's farm, in Ames, the Iowa
State University campus spreads out amid leafy oak trees and
pleasant, low-slung buildings. The university hosts one of the
nation's leading plant-science research institutions for
agricultural biotechnology.
Dr. Mike Lee, a plant biologist, is in the agronomy department's
plant-transformation center doing genetic engineering. Lee is at
work on a research project to increase the nutritional value of
corn by inserting the most nutritious part of a hog -- the gene
for hog's milk -- into a corn embryo. A lab technician has
inserted a petri dish of corn embryos onto the lower shelf of what
Lee calls "the gene gun" -- a critical tool of today's genetic
engineers, actually a rectangular box made from thick plastic. On
the top shelf the technician places a petri dish containing
genetic information from a female hog's milk onto a thin layer of
gold pellets -- which serve as the "bullets." She flicks a switch,
and as a meter measuring air pressure per square inch marches
quickly upward, there's a notable "pop": The bullet is fired. Lee
explains:
"You just accelerate those particles inside that chamber at a very
high speed. High enough so that it can crash through the cell
walls, get into the nucleus and then somehow, by a process that is
not completely understood, the DNA that's coating those gold
particles gets integrated into the corn chromosomes. They'll start
to form roots and shoots and a new plant emerges, hopefully a
plant that carries those genes now in their chromosomes." This is
genetic engineering in action, mixing the genetic material from
two organisms that would never ordinarily mix in nature. It's been
done with flounder genes in strawberries, mice genes in potatoes,
cow genes in sugarcane and soy, chicken genes in corn. And now, as
Lee explains, he hopes to increase the nutritional value of corn
with genes from hog's milk.
For Mike Lee, like many other scientists, this technology has huge
potential to increase yields, make food more nutritious, and
develop new varieties of crops that are better adapted to climatic
and pest conditions that threaten food production. "That's why I
got into this business," Lee says, "to create new versions of
existing plant species that are just a little bit more beneficial
to the needs and wants of society."
Lee has a scientist's natural curiosity and excitement about the
new technology, but he is also willing to acknowledge that
considerable uncertainties accompany it. "We're not just changing
carburetors on cars or parts on a machine," he says. "When you
introduce a new DNA sequence into a chromosome it has a new
function for the plant. Well, that function doesn't operate in a
vacuum. It operates in the context of a complex organism growing
in a complex dynamic environment."
It is those uncertainties that provoke ire among critics, aghast
at the hubris of genetic manipulation. More to the point, perhaps,
is the fact that people like Mike Lee are not the ones driving the
development of this technology. Public universities are
significantly outgunned in resources by private research labs,
which are looking, increasingly, for blockbuster products to be
used where they have the biggest markets; even the gene gun used
by Dr. Lee is available through an annual leasing arrangement from
DuPont, which owns the patent on the technology. Lee's
public-spirited ambitions for the technology, and his willingness
to entertain doubts while forging ahead with his research in the
controlled environment of a publicly funded laboratory, are an
anomaly in an arena dominated by a handful of corporations.
The reality is that agricultural biotechnology has little to do
with idealism, and far more with the financial imperatives of the
biotechnology industry. "If you ask why these are the technologies
that are on the market," says Dr. Chuck Benbrook, former executive
director of the Board on Agriculture of the National Academy of
Sciences, "the reason is that the companies that had invested so
heavily in the technology and in buying up the seed industry had
to have product on the market."
Monsanto alone poured at least a billion dollars into biotech
research, according to NPR technology correspondent Daniel Charles
in his book Lords of the Harvest, "before it had a single
genetically engineered plant to sell." Other companies -- DuPont,
Dow, Aventis and Syngenta -- spent billions more on research and
on a seed-company buying spree that lasted well into the 1990s.
The stakes for these companies are huge.
Few studies assessing the long-term impact of genetically
engineered products on the environment or human health were
conducted before they were rushed into mass production. As
Benbrook explains, "Promoters of the technology and certainly the
federal government in the early 1990s embraced biotechnology so
enthusiastically that there was just no patience, no interest in,
no serious investigation of those potential problems. It was sort
of a don't look, don't see policy. As a result, there really was
no serious science done in the United States for most of the 1990s
on the potential risks of biotechnology."
Those risks, as documented by scientists writing in the American
Journal of Botany and the International Journal of Food Science
and Technology, and at the Weed Science Society of America, the
British Environment Ministry and the Pasteur Institute in Paris,
include the emergence of potential allergens that could trigger
reactions in humans; the rising resistance rates of pests to the
Bt toxin; the persistence of Bt toxins in sediment, threatening
nontarget insect populations; lingering residues from Roundup
Ready herbicides left behind in the soil, which could injure
subsequent seasons of crops; and the crossing of new genes into
wild relatives. Unintended environmental consequences are
surfacing around the world. In Canada, Bt toxins produced by Bt
corn were discovered in the sediment of the St. Lawrence River --
which could potentially affect the river soil and marine life. In
Switzerland a scientist demonstrated that in Bt corn the "lignin"
content -- the material that keeps the stalk erect -- is tougher
than in non-GE varieties, a physiological change with
as-yet-unknown consequences. According to an assessment by the US
Department of Agriculture's own Economic Research Service last
spring, yields from GE crops are no higher than yields from
conventional crops, and are already starting to decline -- largely
because of the extra energy it takes the plant to produce its own
insecticide.
Even the industry's spokesman in Washington, Dr. Mike Phillips,
executive director of the food and agriculture department of the
industry trade group BIO, concedes that industry studies have only
followed the trajectory of impact of genetically engineered
organisms "for eight or nine generations." That's not a lot of
time in evolutionary terms. But once a transgenic crop is
introduced, the evolutionary dynamics of living organisms insure
that ripple effects will continue for hundreds of years -- in
fact, they're virtually unstoppable once loose in the environment.
Ten years ago the government's position toward the new technology
was expressed by then-Vice President Dan Quayle, who declared that
no new "unnecessary regulation" was needed to oversee the genetic
engineering of food crops. Genetically engineered crops were, as
was later enunciated by USDA policy, not "significantly different"
from previously existing means of breeding new types of plants.
That principle has provided the foundation of the government's
position ever since.
The result has been inattention to potential risks and sporadic
regulation by the government. The USDA apportioned just $1.6
million out of a $250 million budget for all biotech-related
programs to inquire into risk assessment. (By statute, just 1
percent of the total USDA research budget on agricultural
biotechnology is allocated to risk assessments. Ohio Congressman
Dennis Kucinich fought the biotech industry last spring and
succeeded in raising that figure to 2 percent, which will double
the budget for USDA risk assessments next year.)
The USDA issues use permits for experimental trials of new genetic
varieties of crops, but once they enter commercial production, the
agency has no mandate to oversee them. For ten years, the FDA has
engaged in what it calls "voluntary safety consultations" with
biotech companies, reviewing safety data supplied by the
companies; not once over the past ten years has it refused to
permit development of new GE crop varieties to move forward.
The Environmental Protection Agency has responsibility for any new
variety producing its own insecticide -- which the Bt gene does
for corn, cotton and potatoes. But it relies on the companies to
submit studies as to the potential for environmental harm; nor is
it required by law to do follow-up inspections or independent
monitoring. In August of last year, top officials from each of the
EPA's ten regional offices sent an internal memorandum to their
superiors in Washington expressing concern about the agency's lack
of regulatory authority. A year later the agency still has no
rules supporting long-term monitoring of these crops in the field.
According to the EPA website, twenty "Experimental or Conditional
Use" permits were granted for trial runs of new varieties of Bt
corn between November 1998 and June 2002. Not one had been
inspected until this past August, when officials from the EPA's
Region IX office decided to pay a visit to two experimental plots
of Bt corn being grown by Dow Chemical's Mycogen seed division and
DuPont's seed subsidiary Pioneer in Hawaii. Both were found to be
in violation, and on August 5 were cited for defying requirements
intended to protect surrounding fields from the drift of
genetically altered pollen from its experimental plots.
Michael Hanson, who follows genetic engineering for the Consumers
Union, says that while there are abundant regulations governing
the technology on paper, in reality "the lack of legal authority
to pursue independent investigations, to do follow-up on producer
assertions or to conduct independent assessments of safety claims
means that in practice, the biotech industry has been given a free
ride."
Lax regulation, however, is only part of the story. The industry
received its most important historical spur from Congress, which
passed the Plant Variety Protection Act in 1980, giving
patentlike, proprietary protection to the developers of new plant
varieties. These protections made the seed industry an attractive
investment for chemical and pharmaceutical companies. And genetic
engineering made patent protection far simpler to enforce; by
inserting genetic "markers" alongside the new genes, the
proprietary genes inside the plant become clearly identifiable. If
Frank McLain, for example, were to defy his agreement with
Monsanto and replant the seed he purchases from them every year,
the company would be able to tell that its gene was inside his
plants. Thus, genetic engineering also serves as a sort of
branding mechanism -- the brand is imprinted in the very biology
of the plant -- strengthening the proprietary hold of corporate
patent-holders over their creations, and giving them an
ever-tighter grip on the farmer.
A hundred miles east of the McLain farm, Laura Krause is standing
amid her fields of corn, which sway with a refreshing summer
breeze. Krause is one of Iowa's 500 organic farmers. Wearing a
straw hat, with a sun-reddened face and lively eyes, Krause
appears the very icon of the American farmer from the last
century. Her farm is tiny; she farms a hundred acres of corn,
broccoli, potatoes, kale and carrots, all of them certified
organic.
Krause's cornfield varies wildly, with plants from four feet to
others over six feet tall, a notable contrast from most of the
corn in Iowa, which seems to spread for miles in tight walls of
plants of identical height. Her field crackles with insects, and
birds swooping in and out to eat them. Krause bought the farm here
ten years ago, and has kept growing her home-grown seed, a variety
developed by the owner of this land a century ago, by replanting
it every year. She sells the seed to other organic farmers.
But not this year. In February, she sent her seed to a local lab
for routine tests: Because she's certified organic, her customers
want to know if there are transgenes in her corn. And sure enough,
she discovered that genetically modified genes were in there. The
test didn't tell her which variety they were, but she says they
were most likely from Yield Guard, Monsanto's variety of Bt corn,
which is widely grown in her area of Iowa. She lost her
certification, and the price she received for her corn dropped by
half -- from $3.50 a bushel to $1.75 a bushel.
Now, like Olga Maldonado in Oaxaca, Laura Krause has transgenes in
her corn whether she wants them or not. "There's no way for me to
go into that field and look for the plants that contain the
transgenes and deselect them," Krause says. "There's no way for me
to sort them out, because they all look exactly alike. I can't get
my business back, because I don't have any way to remove this gene
from this [corn] population."
How did it get there? Corn pollen containing the transgene could
have come from the local combine operator, who is supposed to
clean out his machinery before visiting organic farms, or -- most
likely, she thinks -- it came from pollen that blew in from a
neighbor's field. All it takes is a handful of loose pollen to
land on one of her silks, and transgenes enter the genetic mix.
But Krause does not want to sue her neighbor. Besides, corn pollen
is known to travel as far as six miles by the wind, so it could
have come from anywhere within striking distance in this
corn-filled corner of the state. And there is as yet no legal
precedent establishing liability for the financial damage caused
by genetically engineered crops. Ron Rosmann, president of the
board of the Organic Farming Research Foundation, whose own
cornfields in southern Iowa were contaminated with Bt genes, says
that cases like Krause's are only going to increase "as they
release more and more genetically engineered seeds.... What we're
unfortunately coming to is that zero contamination for corn is
impossible." Organic farmers in Nebraska, Minnesota and elsewhere
in Iowa, Rosmann says, have also experienced contamination similar
to that on Laura Krause's farm.
Companies retain the legal right to enforce their patent-holder
prerogatives over unlicensed use of their seed. And if their
pollen happens to escape and fertilize crops in another field such
as Krause's, there is no legal means for farmers to enforce the
purity of their own varieties. Laura Krause, and thousands of
farmers like her, are finding themselves in a legal black hole.
In response, a group of farmers in Iowa has crafted a state bill
that would establish an indemnity fund to be paid out in instances
of GE contamination with the hope that the bill will be introduced
in this coming legislative session. In Congress, Kucinich has
introduced a bill that would establish firm lines of liability for
the companies that produce the "contaminating" seed, but at this
stage it has little chance of passing. And next month, state
residents in Oregon will be voting on an initiative that would
require labeling of all foods containing GE ingredients.
As for Mexico, the biotech industry itself no longer even disputes
Chapela's assertions that transgenic corn made its way over that
"ironclad wall" into Oaxaca. Rather, according to Dr. Phillips of
BIO, the fact that GE crops are in Mexico's soil now, despite the
government planting ban, should be an invitation to let more in.
"If you're the government of Mexico," he says, "hopefully you've
learned a lesson here and that is that it's very difficult to keep
a new technology from entering your borders, particularly in a
biological system.... It really is incumbent upon the Mexican
government to step up the process and get their regulatory system
in place so that [they] can begin accepting these products and
give farmers the opportunity to choose."
American farmers, both those growing organic and non-GMO
conventional corn, have paid a heavy price for the porousness of
that "biological system." The American Corn Growers Association,
representing corn producers in twenty-eight states, estimates that
US corn farmers have lost more than $814 million in foreign sales
over the past five years as a result of restrictions on
genetically modified food imports imposed by Europe, Japan and
other world buyers. That enormous figure doesn't even account for
the depressed prices farmers now receive for their corn as a
result of an oversupply (of unexported corn) on the domestic
market -- with a deleterious effect on farmers' livelihood that
the recent farm bill attempts to address with up to $20 billion in
subsidies. For every American taxpayer, that amounts to a personal
subsidy to the agricultural biotech industry.
Defying evolution by customizing traits that would never appear in
nature holds out the dream of new markets -- and premium prices --
in the evergreen enterprise of food production. But the dream,
even according to the USDA's own assessments, is turning sour.
While promoting agricultural biotechnology with one hand, the
department's Economic Research Service is reporting, with the
other, that not only are yields not coming anywhere near
expectations, but that genetically engineered corn and soybeans
have not meant an overall improvement in the financial status of
farmers.
Still, the horizons of agricultural biotechnology continue to
expand. I am driving in a van with Dr. Kan Wang, an agronomist at
Iowa State University in Ames. We turn off a country lane onto a
dirt road and into the woods. A student of Dr. Wang's unlocks a
gate, and we continue driving on the dirt road through the woods
until we reach an extraordinary sight: a tiny cornfield, set amid
a large soybean field, in the middle of the woods. This is where
the next generation of genetic engineering is unfolding: Dr. Wang
is conducting research into the development of vaccines in corn.
In the field a hundred or so corn plants are surrounded by an
electric fence. Each tassel is capped by a brown paper bag, what
Wang jokingly refers to as a "corn condom." I am here to witness
corn sex, or, really, safe sex for corn. The reason? Wang is
experimenting with a vaccine in this corn that will prevent
diarrhea in baby pigs: When pigs eat the corn, she wants them to
be immunized against a disease that is costing hog farmers
millions of dollars in losses each year. And they don't want the
corn pollen flowing anywhere they don't want it to go; nor do they
want any outside pollen fertilizing these special plants. Thus the
corn condoms. Right now, Wang is testing the corn to insure that
it's not also developing potential allergens for the pigs. And if
it works for pigs, says Wang, "it could work for humans too."
This is the future of agricultural biotechnology. One might have
some measure of confidence with the prospect of corn vaccines in
the hands of Dr. Wang, the only scientist in the country working
exclusively with public funding to explore the possibilities --
and risks -- of breeding medicines into corn. She has taken
extreme precautions with this field: It is miles away from any
neighboring corn, and is surrounded by soybeans and woods, with
which corn has no chance of cross-pollinating.
But Dr. Ellstrand, the plant geneticist, fears what might happen
when the pharmaceutical industry, which is now testing corn as a
vehicle for antibiotics and vaccines, starts putting such
medicines into mass production. "Corn produces a lot of pollen,"
he says. "And once there's a little bit of contamination, there's
the potential for releasing pharmaceutical corn genes into food
crops."
Thus far, the record has not been reassuring. Farmers like Laura
Krause and Olga Maldonado have already, through the various routes
that a living organism may travel, been the recipients of unwanted
transgenes propelled beyond the barriers of control.
Standing in his Berkeley, California, greenhouse, Ignacio Chapela,
the scientist who ignited the controversy in Mexico, comments:
"The genie is out of the bottle. What we are confronted with now
is just thousands of very different genies that are still in their
bottles, and the question is this: Do we want to keep those
bottles closed or are we opening them?"
Copyright © 2002 The Nation
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