Researchers hailing the Californian vote against proposals for mandatory labelling of genetically modified food are missing the bigger picture
IMAGINE there are two plates of food in front of you. One is labelled "natural", the other "genetically modified". Which would you choose? I know what I'd do. Regardless of what the logical side of me knows, I'd feel more comfortable eating "natural" food.
In an ideal world, this wouldn't be a problem. If people don't want to eat GM food, they shouldn't have to, regardless of whether their reasons are rational or not. Food is about so much more than just stuffing down nutrients, after all, and how we feel about what we eat really does matter.
Trouble is, the world is far from ideal. Nearly a billion people go hungry because they cannot grow or buy enough food. And there are problems with the food we do eat. An estimated 2 billion people suffer from a lack of iron, causing everything from tiredness to premature death. Around 250 million preschool children are short of vitamin A, leading to blindness in the worst cases.
The outlook is grimmer still. There will be ever more mouths to feed, and ever more challenges facing farmers. Fuel and fertilisers are becoming more costly, soils are eroding or becoming saline, pests and diseases are evolving to outwit our defences. To add to our woes, the climate is changing and the weather becoming more extreme. In fact, farming is a massive part of this problem - it contributes more to global warming than all the world's cars, trains, ships and planes put together. Rising food prices not only cause suffering, but also threaten political stability.
So the world desperately needs better crops. The good news is that they can be improved dramatically. We know it's possible to boost yields by improving the efficiency of photosynthesis, for instance, because some plants have already evolved this improvement. Similarly, there's no doubt we could create crops that need less water, grow in salt water or make their own nitrogen fertiliser, for instance. As for making grains and fruits richer in iron or vitamin A, it's already been done.
So why aren't people in poor countries already eating healthier food, richer in iron and vitamin A? Partly they can't afford to pay for it, so commercial companies have little incentive to develop such crops. Instead, such work has to be funded by public money or philanthropists such as Bill Gates.
A big part of the problem, of course, is the vociferous objection to GM foods. While the line between conventional breeding and genetic engineering is increasingly blurred, it is generally only practical to produce crops with complex new properties by deliberately modifying their DNA, rather than inducing random mutations and hoping a few will have the desired trait (as in conventional breeding).
The opposition to GM crops is making it much harder to get funding to carry out the necessary research and to get over all the regulatory hurdles. Earlier this year, for instance, campaigners attacked the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation for funding the development of nitrogen-fixing crops that could boost yields without boosting emissions of the highly potent greenhouse gas nitrous oxide. Simply not needed, apparently. Greenpeace, meanwhile, tried to halt field trials of vitamin-A-rich "Golden Rice" in the Philippines, on the ludicrous basis it would deter the consumption of vegetables.
The Monsantos of this world have the economic muscle needed to get crops approved despite protests, but for cash-strapped universities, it's a different story. Their development of the crops we so desperately need is being impeded by anti-GM protesters.
How can this opposition be overcome? Not by rational argument, that's for sure. Even for those who understand that nature is the ultimate mad scientist, and that plants are riddled with all kinds of genetic modifications, from mistakes made during DNA replication to insertions of viral DNA, it doesn't make existing GM crops any more appealing.
Rather, we need to win people's hearts as well as their minds. And the way to do that is to make GM foods appealing. Instead of crops designed mainly to boost the profits of large corporations, we need a new generation of GM crops that offers clear benefits to consumers, from looking better to tasting better to being better for us. Scare stories about cellphones causing cancer didn't stop them taking off because they are so useful. Similarly, scare stories about GM foods will lose their power if GM products that help prevent cancer or heart disease can be bought in supermarkets.
The very last way to win hearts is to trick people to eat GM crops by not telling them what's in their food. Californians may have voted down the proposal for mandatory labelling of GM foods - Proposition 37 - after food firms spent $45 million on TV ads telling them it would raise food prices, hurt farmers and spark legal wrangles. Few consumers will be any keener on eating GM food, though - quite the contrary.
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Thu Nov 15 19:34:16 GMT 2012 by Brad
I appreciate a balanced article but being a plant molecular biologist, a Californian and an academic with no ties to industry I can tell you this was not about consumer choice which is a wonderful thing. This was just old fashioned protectionism by certain growers and interests that would force competitors to endure additional costs and regulatory hurdles. Secondarily this was to try to create a sense of fear about products which are as safe or safer for humans and the environment. If GM products are to be labeled then let's be fair and label Insulin, MSG, the riboflavin in your multivitamin, the amino acid supplements you take and the endless list of microbial produced products that are the end result of hard core genetic-metabolic engineering. Also why not foods created through genetic changes caused by chemotherapy drugs or ionizing radiation or crop species crossed to distant and highly poisonous relatives for specific traits, in-viable embryos forced to live by microdissection and transfer to invitro culture, grown and back crossed until only a small portion of the other genome exists in the crop but with hundreds to thousands of totally unknown genes from poisonous species. The latter example is actually very common and how many resistance traits were brought into food crop varieties. You are right that people need to be more exposed to the technology and familiar with it because that is how people come to understand the reality of it. Even as recently as the late 70?s own mother would not heat the formula she gave me in the microwave because of a popular fear of residual radiation. I could go on indefinitely but I think it suffices to point out that of the many European molecular biologists I have worked alongside over the last several years support the use of GMOs unanimously because it is a technology and a process they are intimately familiar with.
Sun Nov 18 14:19:54 GMT 2012 by Tom Andersen
Brad has it right - if one was forced to label 'GM' then why not everything else. But why stop at genetics:
"Warning: this food has been sprayed with pig manure. Pig manure has been shown to contain many harmful microbes. Washing will not remove all traces of pig manure from this product."
"Warning: this organic food may have been sprayed with Rotenone and copper. Rotenone has been linked to Parkinson's like diseases in experiments on rats."
Fri Nov 16 05:36:11 GMT 2012 by Eric Kvaalen
"Nearly a billion people go hungry because they cannot grow or buy enough food."
They aren't hungry -- they are malnourished. It's not the same thing.
"Around 250 million preschool children are short of vitamin A, leading to blindness in the worst cases."
In the worst cases they die! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_A says 670 000 children under 5 years old die of vitamin A deficiency every year.
Otherwise I agree with the article.
Fri Nov 16 12:00:06 GMT 2012 by Ali C
Eric, I usually agree with your posts, but in this instance I feel that you are belittling the suffering of many people around the world who are BOTH malnourished AND hungry. You can find fat malnourished people the world over, but there are still many places where hunger is pretty much endemic for one reason or another (usually someone's war or selfishness, ultimately). I really hope I am mis-informed and you are correct, but I fear it is not the case.
Regards, (and keep the good work on those pesky hippocampi)
Sun Nov 18 15:01:41 GMT 2012 by Eric Kvaalen
I'm not saying that there aren't people who go hungry. I'm just saying there are not one milliard people who go hungry.
I can't find or remember the figures I've seen. (My hippocampi didn't do their job well enough!) But for example, one form of malnourishment is kwashiorkor, caused by children not getting enough protein, even if they don't go hungry. In some regions, kwashiorkor causes 30% of the deaths of children under 5. http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kwashiorkor#.C3.89pid.C3.A9miologie
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