Safe Food: The Politics of Food Safety (27 page)

The file surprised me. It immediately revealed that the industry’s exciting promise to solve world food problems had little to do with the reality of its research and development efforts. Instead, companies were working on crop products most likely to generate returns on investment. Furthermore, industry leaders seemed to view the public not as an enthusiastic partner in enhancing the food supply but rather as a hostile force threatening their economic viability. The industry and its supporters in science, government, and business framed public questions about the safety or other consequences of food biotechnology as irrational challenges by scientifically illiterate consumers. I could not evaluate their science-based contentions that the techniques were inherently safe and the
foods no different from those produced by conventional genetic crosses, however, as none had yet come to market.

Since then, the situation has changed in some ways but not in others. Once the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the marketing of genetically modified foods in 1994, the production of these foods grew rapidly. By 2001, genetically modified varieties accounted for 26% of the corn and 68% of the soybeans planted in the United States as well as 69% of the cotton (the source of cottonseed oil for animal feed). Manufacturers were using ingredients made from transgenic corn and soybeans in 60% or more of processed foods on supermarket shelves—baby formulas, drink mixes, muffin mixes, fast foods, and, as we have seen, taco shells. Early in the twenty-first century, it is not possible to keep genetically modified foods
out
of the food supply.
¹

What should we, as citizens and consumers, make of this situation? This chapter establishes a basis for answering that question by examining the promises of the food biotechnology industry—what it
could
do—in comparison to the reality of its products and actions.

In theory, if not yet in practice, food biotechnology holds much promise for addressing world food problems, most notably the overall shortfall in food production expected early in the twenty-first century. By some estimates, the global demand for rice, wheat, and maize will increase by 40% above current levels as early as 2020.
²
To feed an increasing population on a constant area of arable land, the land must produce much more food—and do so without irreversibly damaging the environment. No technical barriers—again, in theory—prevent the use of genetic manipulations to improve the quantity and quality of the food supply, increase its safety, reduce the use of harmful pesticides and agricultural chemicals, and reduce food costs.
Table 11
lists examples of the stunning range of potentially beneficial applications of food biotechnology that are now available or under investigation.
Figure 11
illustrates a cartoonist’s somewhat ironic view of such possibilities.

These applications could increase world food production, especially given the conditions of poor climate and environmental degradation characteristic of many developing countries, and they also could improve the nutritional quality of indigenous food plants on which so many populations depend. The potential for such improvements explains why industry leaders refer to food biotechnology as “the most important scientific tool to affect the food economy in the history of mankind,” “the single most promising approach to feeding a growing world population while reducing damage to the environment,” and an innovation that will “create miracles to help us feed a hungry world efficiently and economically.”
³
Such statements promise that food biotechnology will improve the food supply more effectively than conventional genetic techniques—those that involve selecting plants with desired traits, cross-pollinating them with related stock, and selecting and growing the progeny for many generations under field conditions. As this chapter explains, food biotechnologists consider such methods to be slow and imprecise and far inferior to their own.

TABLE 11
. Theoretical and current applications of food biotechnology

The promise that food biotechnology will provide food for a hungry world, however, has yet to be fulfilled and is unlikely to be realized in the immediate future. Many of the applications listed in
table 11
pose technical problems of formidable complexity. It is not easy to identify genes for desired traits, isolate them, insert them into plants, and provide the additional molecular components needed to make them function properly. The slow progress of biotechnology in addressing world hunger does not imply that this problem cannot be solved; given sufficient time, commitment, and funding support, the technical barriers could well be overcome.
⁴

FIGURE 11
. This political commentary, “Genetically Modified Specials,” appeared as an “op-art” opposite the editorial page of the
New York Times
, July 15, 2000. (© 2000 Jesse Gordon and Knickerbocker Design. Reprinted with permission.)

Technical problems, therefore, are a temporary barrier and are not the most important one. Instead, the main barrier to producing more food for the developing world is economic. Food biotechnology is a business, and businesses must generate returns on investment. In the food biotechnology business, economic aims (the reality) compete with humanitarian aims (the promises). These purposes conflict: one goal is to produce more and better food for an increasing population, but another is to produce foods with a competitive advantage in today’s global marketplace—particularly “value-added” foods processed in ways that generate benefits for consumers and higher profits for manufacturers.
⁵
Although genetically modified foods might well be expected to meet both goals, they often do not. Like all industries, this one serves investors who demand rapid returns, and financial considerations inevitably influence decisions related to product development. The business imperatives explain why the industry continues to view legitimate public questions about the use, safety, or social consequences of particular products as threats to the entire biotechnology enterprise. Without substantial changes to the economic realities of food biotechnology, its feed-the-world potential remains an unfulfilled promise.

If food biotechnology companies are primarily businesses, then their primary concern is to recover the costs of research and development and to maximize returns on investment. Research costs can be high; it takes years and hundreds of millions of dollars to bring a genetically engineered food to market. Nevertheless, even before the FDA approved the first such food for production, business analysts viewed the industry as one with a huge market potential. In 1992, they predicted that the value of the industry would increase to at least $50 billion by the year 2000. As late as 1998, some were predicting that worldwide sales could exceed $300 billion by 2010. These predictions were overly optimistic, but food biotechnology is still big business. Worldwide sales of genetically modified crops rose from $1.6 billion in 1998 to about $2.2 billion in 1999, and are now expected to rise to $25 billion by 2010.
⁶

Regardless of the accuracy of such estimates, the rapid expansion of the food biotechnology industry is impressive. By 1998, about 1,400 companies had invested more than $110 billion in agricultural biotechnology, and the FDA had approved about 50 food products for marketing. By 2001, genetically engineered crops were growing on at least 109 million acres throughout the world, a 25-fold expansion just since 1996. Although 80% of the acres were in North America, Argentina, and China, 10 other countries also had substantial plantings and more than 40 countries permitted field trials of one crop or another, most intended for animal feed.
⁷
Despite the recent decline in planting of genetically engineered corn that occurred as a result of European opposition (discussed in
chapter 8
), some segments of the industry are doing very well.

One especially successful agricultural biotechnology company is Monsanto, which has played an unusually active—some might say aggressive—role in the industry. Monsanto is a multinational company based in St. Louis, Missouri, whose corporate motto used to be
Food, Health, Hope
.
⁸
After the company merged with Pharmacia & Upjohn in 2000 to form an agricultural unit of Pharmacia, it changed the slogan to
A Single Focus: Agriculture/A Renewed Purpose: Value
. Monsanto employed about 14,000 people worldwide in 2002. Its agricultural biotechnology products exceed financial expectations. Its stock price rose by 75% in 1995 and by another 70% in 1996; at that time, company officials estimated that their products would earn $2 billion by the year 2000, $6–7 billion by 2005, and $20 billion by 2010. By 2000, sales exceeded $5 billion, well ahead of projections.
⁹

Not all companies are this fortunate or skilled. In 1998, for example, just 8 out of 350 publicly traded food biotechnology companies were profitable.
¹⁰
Business analysts attribute the typically poor performance to uneven management, corporate shortsightedness, and product failures. Most companies were slow to invest sufficient funds in research, as was the U.S. government. Investors are leery of regulatory hurdles and consumer opposition. Financial imperatives require food biotechnology companies to work on projects that are technically feasible and likely to repay the costs of investment in short order. Thus, they focus research efforts on “input traits” that will make crops easier and less expensive to grow through control of weeds, plant diseases, ripening, insects, or herbicide-resistance, or will make foods last longer on the shelf and cost less to process. If these characteristics benefit the public, they do so invisibly. Most of the financial rewards go to the companies that produce the seeds and chemicals. In some situations, farmers also benefit.
¹¹

Monsanto applies its research budget for agricultural biotechnology, which exceeds the combined total of all the publicly funded tropical research institutes in the world, almost exclusively to temperate-zone agricultural problems. The company brilliantly designs its principal agricultural products to establish control of the entire industry. Its flagship product is the herbicide Roundup. Monsanto scientists genetically engineer soybeans and corn to be “Roundup Ready,” so their crops grow happily when doused with that herbicide while the competing weeds are killed. Farmers who buy Monsanto’s seeds also buy Monsanto’s herbicide. The company began selling Roundup Ready soybeans in 1996; just two years later, farmers planted them on one-third of U.S. soybean farmland, covering 25 million acres. The company’s research “pipeline” mainly emphasizes Roundup Ready crops designed for animal feed. Monsanto’s emphasis on these crops is understandable; annual sales of Roundup exceed those of the next six leading herbicides combined. The company also produces a variety of crops genetically engineered to contain a toxin derived from
Bacillus thuringiensis
(
Bt
). As we saw in the introductory chapter, the
Bt
toxin inhibits the growth of insect pests and has been used for years as a spray on organic farms. Monsanto’s patent-protected innovation was to genetically engineer the
Bt
toxin into the plant itself so that insect resistance would not wash off in the rain.

Monsanto’s crops grow mainly in the United States and other industrialized countries. Because developing countries lack a viable market for such products, few agricultural biotechnology companies can afford to invest in solutions to the food problems of the developing world. The agricultural needs of developing countries are well defined, and numerous private and public agencies support useful projects, but these funding sources are not coordinated and often tend to favor the priorities of donors more than recipients.
¹²
For years, Dr. Roger Beachy, the director of a U.S. biotechnology research institute devoted to improving crops in developing countries, complained that he could get little support from industry beyond permission to use patent-protected techniques “for specific crops under certain circumstances.”
¹³