The End of Doom (24 page)

Biotech Crops and “Contamination”

Another environmentalist attack on biotech crops is the assertion that GMO pollen “contaminates” organic crops and thus economically harms organic farmers. Not so, says University of Oklahoma law professor Drew Kershen. First, Kershen points out that organic standards are process standards, not product standards. Organic crops receive certification because of the way they are produced: no chemical fertilizers, no synthetic pesticides, and so forth. Saying a product is organic does not mean it is totally free of chemical fertilizers and synthetic pesticides. Organic farmers already experience accidental pesticide drift and the admixture of conventional seeds. They can still obtain organic certification, provided they conscientiously follow all the rules specified by the federal government's National Organic Program. The same standard could easily apply to organic farmers whose crops have experienced minor interbreeding with transgenic crops.

Second, Kershen notes that US law generally does not allow those with special sensitivity to an activity to declare that they have been harmed by it. It is their responsibility to protect themselves from the activities they dislike. “You do not have a claim based on your assertion of increased sensitivity,” Kershen explains. “If you don't like to hear rock music, you can't prohibit your neighbors from playing it at reasonable levels. You have to protect yourself. Stay away from concerts. Soundproof your home.” Similarly, organic farmers could perhaps grow borders that would insulate their crops from their neighbors' pollen flow.

But won't consumers of organic products reject a farmer's crops if they think it is “contaminated” with genes from genetically enhanced crops? Kershen says that argument won't wash either. He offers an example in which a tattoo parlor legally opens between a florist and a Christian bookstore and advertises a special on satanic tattoos. Customers offended by the tattoo shop begin avoiding the florist and bookstore. Under American common law, the florist and the bookstore do not have a cause of action, because “economic expectation is not recoverable.” Similarly, an organic farmer who expected to sell his crop at a premium would nevertheless be able to sell it at market rates as a conventional crop; he loses only the premium he expected to gain.

Kershen makes the further point that those who have created a niche market should be the ones responsible for protecting it. “After all, they are the ones trying to differentiate their products in order to obtain higher profits,” he notes. “Therefore, the rest of us who don't care shouldn't be saddled with the costs of defending their self-imposed standards and labeling.” That would be akin to forcing conventional meat packers to carry “nonkosher” labels on all their meats for the benefit of kosher meat producers.

One method of dealing with the question of pollen flow is for organic farmers to set reasonable tolerances. Many activists and organic farmers advocate “zero tolerance” standards that would in effect outlaw genetically enhanced crops. Since every independent scientific body that has ever looked into the safety of biotech crops has found them to be safe, this would be an absurd requirement.

Crops have exchanged pollen for millennia, and they will continue to do so. Seed breeders have decades of experience in setting tolerances for seed purity. As Mark Condon, vice president for international marketing at the American Seed Trade Association, has explained, “seed purity certification standards were commonly set at 98 percent to 99 percent varietal purity levels or a standard of 1 percent to 2 percent adventitious genetic impurity.” It should be possible to maintain similar standards for organic crops. Since organic farmers set their own standards, they could easily adopt these tolerances and save themselves and conventional farmers a lot of trouble.

Another possibility is that biotechnology itself may come to the aid of organic farmers. Already researchers have developed a way to make genetically enhanced crops sterile, which would limit the spread of transgenes. It might turn out that such technical fixes will make biotech farmers the low cost avoiders and thus shift the balance in favor of organic farmers' claims. You'd think organic farmers and environmentalists would be clamoring for these gene-sequestering technologies, but instead they strenuously oppose them. Why?

One amusing and particularly telling argument for opposition to this technology comes from Vandana Shiva. “The possibility that [biotech sterility] may spread to surrounding food crops or to the natural environment is a serious one,” Shiva gloomily posits in her book
Stolen Harvest
. “The gradual spread of sterility in seeding plants would result in a global catastrophe that could eventually wipe out higher life forms, including humans, from the planet.” Really? This dire scenario is not just implausible but biologically impossible:
The gene technology causes sterility; that means, by definition, that the sterility can't spread.

Biotech Seed Companies Do
Not
Sue Farmers for Accidental Pollination

Why are there patents in the first place? As Abraham Lincoln (himself a patent holder) explained in 1858, patents add “the fuel of
interest
to the
fire
of genius, in the discovery and production of new and useful things.” Patents are also a disclosure mechanism in which inventors are awarded exclusive use of their inventions for twenty years in exchange for clearly revealing to the rest of us how they are made, thus avoiding a world encumbered by trade secrets.

Activists have vigorously pushed the notion that biotech seed companies regularly and aggressively sue farmers who accidentally acquire patented genetically engineered germplasm via pollen drifting onto their farms from neighboring biotech crops. Their chief villain in this anti-biotech morality tale is nearly always the biotech seed company Monsanto. Such a situation would obviously be unfair and wrong. Fortunately, it has never happened.

Take the notorious case of Saskatchewan canola farmer Percy Schmeiser. Activists made a hero out of Schmeiser, who was sued by Monsanto for sowing its variety of herbicide-resistant canola without paying for it. Schmeiser claimed that the canola seed had somehow blown across his fence line. That is not a problem for Monsanto; accidents happen. How did Schmeiser find out that this had supposedly happened? He sprayed three acres of canola underneath some power lines with some Roundup and the plants didn't die. Later testing showed that they were in fact a Monsanto herbicide-resistant variety.

In its decision, the Supreme Court of Canada outlined what then happened. “Mr. Schmeiser complained that the original plants came onto his land without his intervention. However, he did not at all explain why he sprayed Roundup to isolate the Roundup Ready plants he found on his land; why he then harvested the plants and segregated the seeds, saved them, and kept them for seed; why he next planted them; and why, through this husbandry, he ended up with 1,030 acres of Roundup Ready Canola which would otherwise have cost him $15,000,” wrote the court. Given these circumstances, it is not surprising that the court decided against Schmeiser.

In a more recent case, Indiana soybean farmer Vernon Hugh Bowman admitted that he had saved Monsanto soybeans and replanted them. He claimed that once he bought the seeds, what he did with them afterward, including saving and replanting, did not violate Monsanto's patents. Bowman had the option of planting conventional soybeans whose seeds he could legally save for replanting each year. It's clear that he chose not to do this because he specifically wanted the weed-control convenience Roundup Ready seeds afforded him; he just didn't want to pay for them.

The case of
Bowman v. Monsanto Co.
made it to the US Supreme Court in 2013. During oral argument, Chief Justice John Roberts got right to the heart of the matter by asking: “Why in the world would anybody spend any money to try to improve the seed if as soon as they sold the first one anybody could grow more and have as many of those seeds as they want?” The court ruled unanimously against Bowman.

Given the hullabaloo spread by activists, one might be forgiven for thinking that big biotech companies are suing farmers all of the time. That's not so. In fact, the vast majority of farmers in the United States keep their promise not to save seeds from crop varieties they purchase from biotech companies. Consider Monsanto's record. The company sells its seeds to about 250,000 American farmers every year. Between 1997 and 2012, Monsanto filed only 145 lawsuits over seed patents, of which only 9 actually went to trial. Monsanto won each case at trial. An additional 700 or so cases have been settled out of court.

GMO Labeling?

Don't consumers have the right to know that they are eating foods made with ingredients from biotech crops? Concerned consumers should already know that in the United States, somewhere around 80 percent of all prepared foods in grocery stores contain ingredients from biotech crops. What sort of ingredients? Mostly soybean oil and corn syrup, in which biotech proteins and DNA are very nearly undetectable.

If consumers don't know this, perhaps it means that they are not all that concerned. Nevertheless, polls regularly find that large majorities favor labeling biotech foods. There are good reasons to suspect that this may be because, after all, what self-respecting person ever would tell a pollster that he or she
didn't want to know
something about an apparently important issue? A 2010 European Commission report, however, maintains that polls may not be a good way to evaluate actual consumer attitudes toward foods made with biotech crops. The researchers report that despite strongly negative polls, when it came to looking at actual buying behavior, “most people do not actively avoid GM food, suggesting that they are not greatly concerned with the GM issue.”

Under the specious banner of consumer rights, an unholy alliance of donation-hungry fear-mongering environmental groups and profit-hungry organic foods companies in the United States is campaigning for mandatory labeling of food made using ingredients from biotech crops. In several states, ballot initiatives have come up for a vote, and in others, legislatures are considering such a mandate. So why not label the foods and be done with it? Because the opponents of biotech farming are not actually interested in trying to give consumers information. Instead, their fond hope is that consumers will mistake such labels as warning labels and then shy away from buying foods made from biotech crops. In other words, they aim to spread disinformation, not provide real information.

This is why the US Food and Drug Administration has refused to require labels on foods made from biotech crops. As has been shown earlier, every independent scientific body that has considered the issue has determined that the current varieties of biotech crops are safe to eat. The FDA states that the agency “requires special labeling … in cases where the absence of such information may pose special health or environmental risks.” The FDA further notes that it “has no basis for concluding that bioengineered foods differ from other foods in any meaningful or uniform way, or that, as a class, foods developed by the new techniques present any different or greater safety concern than foods developed by traditional plant breeding.” Since foods using biotech ingredients do not pose special health or environmental risks, they need not be labeled. A statement issued in 2012 by the board of directors for the American Association for the Advancement of Science noted, “The FDA does not require labeling of a food based on the specific genetic modification procedure used in the development of its input crops. Legally mandating such a label can only serve to mislead and falsely alarm consumers.” Misleading and alarming is the goal of activists.

In a March 14, 2013, editorial, “Why Label Genetically Engineered Foods?”
The
New York Times
pointed out that there is no scientific reason for requiring such labels. The
Times
editorial made the sensible observation that if people wanted to avoid foods made with biotech ingredients, they could simply buy foods labeled organic.

In 2013, the grocery chain Whole Foods Market announced that it will require its suppliers to either source non-GMO ingredients or to clearly label products with ingredients containing GMOs by 2018. Of course, private companies have a perfect right to make such contractual arrangements.

In April 2014, Representative Mike Pompeo (R-KS) and Representative G. K. Butterfield (D-NC) introduced the Safe and Accurate Food Labeling Act. The act would require the FDA to promulgate rules with regard to voluntarily labeling foods as containing or not containing ingredients from bioengineered crops. The new FDA labels “may not suggest either expressly or by implication that foods developed without the use of bioengineering are safer than foods produced from, containing, or consisting of a bioengineered organism,” and vice versa. In addition, the act would preempt individual state biotech labeling mandates. Naturally, this preemption provision has riled anti-biotech activists. Given the vexed politics of the labeling fight, it is doubtful that this act will become law.

University of California agronomist David Zilberman worries that compulsory labeling would stigmatize biotech products and reduce investment in new GM traits. “The net effect will be to slow the development of agricultural biotechnology, and this in turn may negatively affect health, the economy, and the environment,” he writes. “It is actually counterproductive to the many environmental and social goals that we cherish. Therefore, labeling of GMOs will be a step in the wrong direction.”

Looking at the political trajectory of the battle over labels, it is probable that food companies will end up simply slapping a label on everything saying: “This product may contain ingredients from modern biotech crops.” The information should merely be included in the list of ingredients. One can hope that as the EU report suggests, for most consumers, including those shopping at Whole Foods, such information will pretty soon go in one eye and out the other with little effect on their purchasing decisions.