The GMO War: Unclear Policy, Poor Public Opinion, Who Lost?
The public, with an instinctive fear of unknown food, in an era of frequent food safety incidents, hopes for absolute safety guarantees, but the scientific community cannot provide them——absolutely safe food does not exist.
In the words of Zhang Qifa, developer of genetically modified rice, professor at Huazhong Agricultural University, and academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, “a very beautiful young girl, while waiting for GMO approval, has waited until she became an old woman.”
Since genetically modified cotton was approved for cultivation in 1997, in the following 17 years, not a single important crop was approved for cultivation in China.
August 17, 2014 was an important cutoff point. On this day, three GMO crop safety certificates all expired. These were the only GMO food safety certificates in China: two for genetically modified rice for food use, and one for genetically modified corn for feed use. These three safety certificates, issued in 2009, had once been seen by the GMO industry as where hope lay, and the door to GMO commercialization might open from there. But five years later, not only was commercialization far off, the three certificates also expired after nothing was done.
Of course, the holders of the safety certificates could apply for renewal. Huazhong Agricultural University, holding two GMO rice safety certificates, had already submitted application materials in June 2014. The Ministry of Agriculture’s response was ambiguous: it was under review, and if no safety problems emerged, they would continue to be issued. But “whether to issue them, and when to issue them, depends on the progress of the review process.”
The entire industry knows the high-level stance: research boldly, promote cautiously. It is just that no one knows where the limit of “cautious” lies.
This seems to suggest that the situation of GMO technology in China is worse than before.
Unclear policy has hit GMO research and development companies even harder. Origin Agritech, one of the earliest domestic companies to carry out GMO technology research and development, even has difficulty finding land where it can conduct GMO trials.
“As long as you say you are arranging a GMO trial, the local authorities act as if they had heard you were going to plant opium: GMO things, we cannot touch them!” said Han Gengchen, founder and chairman of Origin Agritech.
The European Union spent 260 million pounds and supported 400 independent research groups in conducting risk assessments of more than 50 GMO safety projects. The conclusion was: there is no evidence that GMO crops that have passed national safety evaluations pose higher risks to food and environmental safety than traditional crops; because they use more precise technology and are subject to stricter regulation, GMO crops may even be safer than traditional crops and foods.
Over the past 20 years, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the World Health Organization, the United States Department of Agriculture, the FDA and other institutions have made similar statements.
No amount of endorsement from scientists and authoritative institutions can dispel the public’s doubts about GMOs. In the words of Lin Min, director of the Biotechnology Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, “the public opinion environment is as bad as it can possibly be.”
New Challenges
In the language of radical opponents, GMOs are an evil technology: carcinogenic, sterilizing, poisoning the land, destroying the nation and the species.
The United States has commercialized this technology, called “evil” by radical opponents, for 18 years. Today in the United States, 93% of corn, 94% of soybeans and 96% of cotton use GMO technology; 70%-80% of packaged foods sold in stores contain GMO ingredients.
“Over 18 years, billions of families have long consumed GMO crops, and no GMO food has been found to cause disease or other problems,” said biologist, former president of Peking University, and academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences Xu Zhihong on October 17 at a GMO symposium in Wuhan jointly convened by the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.
But what people worry about is: can safety now represent safety 50 or even 100 years from now? What about those risks that science cannot identify?
The public, with an instinctive fear of unknown food, in an era of frequent food safety incidents, hopes for absolute safety guarantees, but the scientific community cannot provide them——absolutely safe food does not exist.
What the scientific community guarantees now is that GMO foods approved for market by various countries and holding safety certificates are as safe as traditional foods.
Kevin Ross is a sixth-generation farmer. On 600 acres of land in Iowa passed down from his ancestors, he grows GMO soybeans and GMO corn. He kept a small plot for GMO sweet corn for his own family to eat. In summer, when the corn ripens, Kevin’s wife Sara goes straight to the field to pick a few ears of corn, and her two sons Hudson and Easton both love to eat it.
After the harvest season, Sara strips the corn kernels, puts them in water, adds a little butter, a little sugar, and a little salt, boils them on the stove for 5 minutes, then puts them in bags and freezes them. She keeps two sections of the freezer for corn, so they can eat it all year.
In the United States, the biggest beneficiary country and a supporter of GMO technology, the GMO industry is also facing a thorny challenge.
According to a Washington journalist, in the United States there are as many as 300 groups advocating opposition to GMOs. Among them, most groups are not professionally engaged in the anti-GMO movement; it is just that the anti-GMO demands happen to be related to their own demands, such as promoting organic farming, advocating animal welfare, and more often opposing monopoly by large corporations. In the GMO industry, monopoly of the market by large corporations is especially obvious.
All of this has created resistance for the GMO industry. Cathleen Enright, executive vice president of the Biotechnology Industry Organization, gave an example: “Between 1996 and 2002, the Department of Agriculture needed only 6 months to approve a GMO crop. From 2006 to now, the time has stretched to 2 to 5 years.”
The biotechnology coordinator at the U.S. Department of Agriculture revealed that this is because anti-GMO groups keep filing lawsuits, requiring developers to respond to challenges from various parties.
What worries the industry even more is the debate and ballot initiatives demanding labeling of GMOs.
In 2012, California launched a ballot initiative for mandatory GMO labeling, and from then on a heated discussion about mandatory labeling of genetically engineered foods swept the United States. Under current law, GMO foods in the United States use voluntary labeling, but no producer would voluntarily label them.
In the end, this ballot initiative failed, and so did Washington State’s 2013 ballot initiative for mandatory GMO labeling. Even for wealthy Americans, the wallet decides everything. California consumers did not want mandatory labeling of GMO products to bring price increases. According to estimates, if a mandatory labeling system for GMO products were implemented, each California household would spend an additional 400 dollars per year on food.
But another 30 states followed suit and also proposed bills targeting GMOs. Connecticut and Maine achieved a limited victory: only when 3 states in the northeastern United States all pass similar bills, with a total population of more than 20 million, would the state’s GMO labeling bill take effect.
In the view of the GMO industry, mandatory labeling looks more like a strategy of anti-GMO groups, aimed at strengthening public distrust of GMOs. Michael, a science journalist writing for The New Yorker, also worries that this is meant to “completely ban GMO technology.” In his article, he said that although in the United States such a thing is reckless and futile, it will affect research by scientists around the world.
Good Times
China’s GMO community once had a brief good time.
In 2008, GMOs, as the only project in the agricultural field, together with large aircraft, entered the 16 major mid- and long-term science and technology special projects. This major special project planned to invest 24 billion within 15 years. This meant it would be the agricultural science and technology project with the most funding in history.
The government’s goal was very clear: to improve the overall level of research on agricultural GMO organisms and industrialization, and to improve agriculture’s international competitiveness.
Under this incentive, GMO crops such as insect-resistant corn, virus-resistant wheat, herbicide-resistant corn, and drought-resistant wheat successively entered the stage of environmental release or productive trials.
Han Gengchen recalled that it was precisely from then that Origin Agritech began to increase investment in GMO research and development, tens of millions each year. In good years, this accounted for half of profits. In bad years, almost all profits were invested in GMO research and development.
Han Gengchen saw this technology as the future of agriculture. His former employer Pioneer was once the leader in the planting industry market, but in the wave of biotechnology it was overtaken by Monsanto, and was acquired by DuPont in 1999.
Many farmers like new technology. In the United States, GMO soybeans took only five years to occupy more than 90% of soybean planting area.
After Kevin received a bachelor’s degree in agriculture from Iowa State University, he returned to his own farm and has been engaged in planting for 16 years. He hopes to pass the land on to the next generation in better shape. Therefore, Kevin does not like to use too many pesticides and chemicals, which both increase costs and harm the soil. Herbicide-resistant GMO crops free him from having to spend as much time managing field weeds as his father and grandfather did, and also make it easier for him to support no-till farming that protects the soil.
Nancy in Wisconsin has been engaged in planting for 34 years and manages 2,100 acres of land. She plants GMO corn, GMO soybeans, and non-GMO wheat (wheat does not yet have a commercialized GMO variety). Twenty years ago, when she was young, she had to put on special protective clothing, gloves, and glasses before she dared to spray various herbicides and pesticides.
GMO technology and agricultural mechanization have made her work simple. She only needs to press a few buttons in the monitoring room and spray one low-toxicity and effective herbicide, glyphosate, to remove all weeds. For crops with insect-resistant genes, almost no pesticide spraying is needed.
The endless disputes about safety have almost made people forget the original intention of scientists in developing GMO technology: to solve agricultural problems, not create more of them.
Scientists introduced insect-resistant genes into crops in order to reduce pesticide use; herbicide-resistant genes were introduced to make farmers’ field work easier and also to reduce the use of highly toxic herbicides; there are also some traits still under research, such as drought resistance and waterlogging resistance, in order to allow crops to be grown on poor land as well, and to ease the pressure on arable land needed to feed nearly 10 billion people globally by the middle of this century.
Like traditional technology, GMO technology also has to struggle against weed and pest resistance. No organism in nature will just wait for death. The emergence of resistance does not mean the failure of the technology; there is no technology that can solve all agricultural problems once and for all.
As ecologist Stewart Brand said in Whole Earth Discipline, opponents of genetic engineering suspect that GMO organisms will bring destruction to the ecology, and this is a reasonable suspicion. Because all crops bring ecological destruction. So the question becomes: compared with traditional crops, do GMO crops bring greater ecological destruction, or do they contribute to the ecology?
According to a report by the British consulting company PG Economics, between 1996 and 2012, due to the application of GMO technology, the world reduced the use of 503 million kg of insecticides and 203 million kg of herbicides, and the environmental impact of herbicides and insecticides fell by 18.7%.
Han Gengchen graduated from Iowa State University in the late 1980s with a doctorate in plant genetics and breeding. Although he studied traditional breeding, he chose GMO technology as his entrepreneurial direction and founded Origin Agritech. He firmly believed in the potential of GMO technology as a very effective tool for solving agricultural problems, though not the only tool.
In 2007, Han Gengchen cooperated with the Biotechnology Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, purchased genetically modified phytase corn, and in 2009 purchased herbicide-resistant and insect-resistant corn for commercial development.
Although in more than ten years since its founding, GMO technology had not brought Origin Agritech a single cent of profit, Han Gengchen still had confidence, and had always used income from the traditional breeding industry to subsidize GMO technology research and development.
In 2009, when genetically modified phytase corn received its safety certificate, Origin Agritech’s stock price on Nasdaq multiplied several times, rising 300% within 6 trading days. Han Gengchen optimistically announced at the time that China’s first GMO corn would be commercialized within 2 years.
Dabeinong was equally optimistic. Its biotechnology center established in 2010 almost copied the full platform and team of large foreign companies. According to the company, it planned to invest 500-800 million yuan between 2010 and 2015. For a relatively weak Chinese company, this was no small expense.
But what came along with the safety certificate was not rolling profits, but an overwhelming wave of doubts. GMO rice in particular struck the public’s fragile nerves: Why should 1.3 billion people be guinea pigs? If insects will not eat it, why should people eat it? Why is only China keen to commercialize GMO staple foods?