Global Policy Forum

By Stan Cox

"I'll tell you something - the guts in this machine are the same as the ones in the expensive models. It just doesn't have all the fancy controls." You've heard it before. Having failed to direct your attention to the $800 or $500 washing machines, the salesman winks, rubs at a spot on the $250 model with his cuff, and gives you the real story.

Several African countries have caused an international uproar in recent months by rejecting food aid in the form of whole grain GM corn. Two issues have become commingled in the brawl, which came to a head during the recent Johannesburg Summit. On one hand, many biotech critics are warning that eating GM corn is hazardous to your health. On the other, the biotech industry insists that GM crops are the key to increased food production in Africa. The GM food critics are overstating the threat, and the industry is just doing a sales job.

Many fastidious Westerners are doing the right thing - opposing GM crops - for the wrong reason. Today, I'd eat a GM taco (and probably have) without fearing any symptom worse than a stained shirt. It is a kind of imperialism to insist that hungry people across the ocean not eat the same GM tainted food that we in America ingest at almost every meal. (Note: This is a temporary situation. The time to start worrying will be when GM crops start being used to produce pharmaceuticals.) Meanwhile, in trying to force GM corn onto the plates of African children, the U.S. government is less concerned about their hunger than about expanding the market for biotech seed.

President Levy Mwanawasa of Zambia symbolically acknowledged the distinction between the gastronomic and the economic when he agreed to accept food aid in the form of ground GM corn but not whole grain, which could be sown as seed. He needs the aid but doesn't want to give GM crops a beachhead in his country. Don't be too hard on a president who rejects a technology that is advertised as the key to preventing famines like the one currently looming over sub-Saharan Africa. When you cut through the breathless PR of the biotech industry, it's clear that Africans have nothing to lose by shutting out GM crops.

Writing in the March 15 issue of the journal Science, Pedro Sanchez, former director general of the International Center for Research in Agroforestry in Kenya (and this year's winner of the World Food Prize), went to the heart of Africa's food crisis. He argued that rebuilding soils through proven, low-tech, but knowledge intensive techniques is the key to increasing the continent's food production. Tremendous yield gains could be achieved without GM crops, and conversely, GM crops would fail in poor soil. According to the Christian Science Monitor, small farmers using the soil and water conserving techniques in Zambia produced good crops this year while their neighbors crops succumbed to drought.

Like the $800 washing machine, current GM crop varieties and hybrids work about the same as (or sometimes more poorly than) their non-GM cousins. The alien genes for herbicide or pest resistance are there for marketing purposes and to solve problems created by the industrial style agriculture of which GM crops are a part. That one gene, sitting among the tens of thousands of genes in the plant, is incapable of creating a truly revolutionary variety.

The "guts" of the crop plant - its anatomical and biochemical machinery for collecting sunlight and storing the energy as harvestable grain, roots, or other foods - is the same in GM and non-GM crops. Biotech publicity often expresses the unfocused hope that high technology can be used to overhaul a plant's machinery and create a super-yielder. But to tinker with one gene at a time and overhaul the vastly complex biological pathways that produce a crop of corn or rice, as a plant breeder all I can say is, "Good luck and we'll check with you sometime next century."

A colleague of mine presented a paper at a professional meeting two years ago demonstrating that it takes about the same number of years for a plant breeder/geneticist to engineer and distribute a GM corn hybrid as it does to breed and distribute a non-GM hybrid. The big difference is cost, which can be 28 times as high for the GM hybrid. While the hybrid developed through breeding is fundamentally different genetically from those that came before, the biotech hybrid is just an old model with add-ons. After my colleague's talk, a couple of scientists from biotech firms quietly let him know that he had significantly underestimated the cost of developing the GM hybrid.

Biotech firms are willing to make huge investments to achieve such small product changes, and it's not for the sake of hungry babies. Business' most venerable marketing slogan, "new and improved," has been used to sell prettied-up versions of old stuff for decades.

Farmers all over the world face serious environmental, economic, and political obstacles whenever they set out to grow a crop. Serious, cost-effective approaches to addressing these problems, employing knowledge of genetics, plant and soil science, and ecology are available. Their realization requires political will, not genetic engineering. For the price, neither America's nor Africa's farmers can afford GM crops.