Seeds of hope

08/08/1998

The debate on transgenic crops is gathering ever more steam. Are politicians and the media rushing to judgement? The new president of the American Soybean Association, a Catholic farmer from Minnesota, contrasts his experiences and hopes with those outlined by Ellen Teague and Tom Wilkie in recent articles. DEEP down, all of us want tomorrow to be much the same as today. We want things to get better, of course, but we cannot escape the feeling that the world is going to the dogs. So we favour putting a brake on innovation to stop things getting worse.

This attempt at homespun wisdom might miss the point, however, if applied to the story of transgenic crops in Britain.

And the story, were it true, would be worrying, with its corporate villains, compliant authorities and disregard for the future of humanity.

The reality is more complex, and more hopeful. For those famous soybeans of Monsanto?s are not Monsanto?s at all, and never were. Soybeans begin their life as the property of the farmer who planted and harvested them.It is we who have to answer to our customers for whatever may seem to be wrong with them.

So who are we? There are about 400,000 of us, family farmers, spread through around 30 states, mostly in the Mississippi basin. Western Minnesota is a part of that basin, is nothing if not farm country, and looks like most of the rest of the American Midwest. Those of us who farm it are the descendants of Swedes, Norwegians, Dutch, Germans and Irish who arrived about a century ago. They transmitted to us a strong sense of Christian stewardship of the land, and a keen commitment to hand it on to the next generation in a better state than they found it.

My own family, of German and Irish extraction, has farmed there for four generations. The community of 300 souls, where we now raise soybeans, maize and small grains, lies about 100 miles west of Minneapolis and St Paul. Its name, Murdock, may not ring a bell for many readers of The Tablet, but it lies about 40 miles south-west of Sauk Center, the model for Gopher Prairie in Sinclair Lewis?s first and most enduringly emblematic novel, Main Street.

It is stating the obvious to say that the American Midwest has been dealt some impressive cards by the history of the twentieth century. Every significant innovation that has helped food producers to respond to rising world demand ? mechanisation, enhanced fertility, genetic improvement, plant protection, economic bulk transport, modern commodity finance ? has its roots there in whole or in part.

We have been left, after a century of development, with a key responsibility before world opinion for meeting the world?s current shortfalls in basic agricultural commodities that no one else can come near to taking on in the foreseeable future.

As part of this overall picture, we will this year prove to have planted some 75 million acres ? the approximate land area of the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland combined ? with soybeans, from which we hope to get a crop of nearly 80 million tonnes if things go well. What lies behind the transgenic debate in Britain is the realisation that about 35 per cent of that acreage will consist of varieties having genetic material containing a short length of DNA, the equivalent of a single gene, which was inserted several years ago by genetic engineering techniques into an ancestor of the seed sown this year. This gene provides the resultant plant with enhanced resistance to the action of a herbicide called Roundup, and allows farmers to apply less to control the weeds that compete with the soybean crop.

The insertion technique was approved by regulatory authorities in the United States, in Europe and elsewhere. The need for, or even the usefulness of, any attempt to segregate transgenic beans from the non-modified sort, for any reason including public health, was explicitly ruled out, so insignificant was the modification in terms of the crude protein which the soybean is grown to produce.

These official decisions, reached after years of trials, of studies on environmental impact, on public health, on food safety, on nutritional value, have led us to think that an innovation, adopted to improve the way we produce our beans, will not be making any difference to the suitability or safety of the beans for their many subsequent uses lower down in the system.

American opinion has few problems with that. But half our national crop is exported, either as beans for crushing into oilseed products, as oil, as meals for the animal feed industry, or as food and non-food products which have uses and applications across the whole range of consumer goods. As an industry, we have to think globally. What happens in our export markets matters to us.

The reaction in Europe to transgenic crops has been remarkable for its virulence, its tardiness, and its lack of grasp of the complexities of agriculture.

We are accused, for example, of dicing with the ecological well-being of the plant world, of locking posterity into irreversible dependence on agricultural chemicals, of colluding in a corporate conspiracy to deprive farmers in developing countries of any prospect of breaking out of the investment traps in which they find themselves, of taking risks with public health, of using people, by subterfuge, as guinea-pigs for new and untried technology, and of deliberately muddying the waters by expressly mixing in transgenic beans with their non-transgenic counterparts.

Now we read in The Tablet that we are at odds with some basic principles of ethics and belief, matters taken very seriously in the American Midwest. None of the accusations, thankfully, stands up to scrutiny, and they meet with incredulity when relayed to American farmers.

In Britain, people are unfamiliar with the soybean as a crop. They never see it in their fields, and they only come across it as an invisible ingredient in processed foods. But it is a very recent entrant into Western diets generally. Production in the United States grew from near-zero in the 1920s. Wartime shortages of vegetable oils, and post-war shortages of protein in Europe and elsewhere, drove an expansion in production which even today shows no sign of slowing down.

We have been able to respond to demand in large part by developing and selecting new varieties, and we now have a very wide genetic resource base. Thousands of varieties are currently sown, and about 100 new ones enter production every year, each one introducing genetic variation which is hundreds of times greater than that introduced by transgenic biotechnology. Turnover in variety use is rapid: a 15-year-old variety of soybean is practically past its useful life.

The new gene technology is an extension of variety selection by streamlined means. It is undeniably a significant milestone in crop production. For farmers of my generation, it is the most remarkable development that they will encounter in their working lives, comparable to what the introduction of hybrid maize meant to our grandfathers in the Thirties.

But it is only a milestone, and not a revolution. It does not overturn established practice and set us on an entirely new course for the future. It is a logical continuation of crop selection as we have known it for hundreds of years, using tools that have been invented through a better understanding of the way the physical world works.

IN practice, we have to be ready to use what tools we can to respond to weed pressure and pest infestation, which often require action at very short notice. There are currently well over 40 basic plant protection products ? herbicides, pesticides, biocides ? to which we might have to resort to protect a soybean crop, some of which we would prefer not even to have on the farm, for health and safety reasons, if we could avoid it. But we often have no choice.

We need herbicides, unless we are going to go back to hand weeding, or the kind of deep ploughing that brings about soil compaction and erosion. We want to reduce their use to the minimum consistent with effectiveness, both to keep land in good heart, and to keep our costs down.

But the much-maligned Roundup, in spite of its reputation, is particularly friendly to the environment. It biodegrades in a matter of days after doing its job. Added to that, the crop?s enhanced tolerance of herbicides achieved through biotechnology allows us to reduce spraying to one application before planting, and one other later in the season. Roundup can be used at rates of less than a pint per acre with excellent results. Without it, we would have to spray four or five times.

We started to take a long hard look at the technology when it first came into view over 10 years ago. We thought there was something to it. We have since followed closely its progress through trials, validations and official approvals. Nothing has emerged from all the scrutiny to cause us to believe that in using it we are putting health and safety or the environment at risk.

That said, the prominence accorded to Monsanto?s role in the debate in Britain seems exaggerated to us. They are by no means the only performer worldwide, and we cannot help thinking that they have been chosen as a soft target. I have no privileged insights to share on the question of why American biotech companies get such a hard time in Europe. But when we read of the collapse in the past week of a ground-breaking joint venture between Monsanto and the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh to bring cotton production in that country into line with the latest technology, allegedly because of pressure from European environmentalists, we wonder what future is being imagined for agriculture in the developing world.

Farming in the emerging economies in the years beyond 2000 will be successful only if it has the best technical inputs. As the Pontifical Council Cor Unum concluded about two years ago, this is primarily a question of solidarity and the just distribution of resources. Biotechnology has a role to play, as the council notes. But cutting farmers off from it by suggesting that they limit themselves to traditional practices condemns them to a depressing future. Can picking over the discarded genetic resources of richer economies be all that awaits them?

Commercial sorghum selection programmes exist in America, not least because the United States is the world?s biggest sorghum producer. Kansas will produce more of it than wheat this year. Can we doubt that the research benefits will reach Africa very directly in an appropriate way if the will is there to make it happen?

Against this, the messages we are hearing from Britain do not meet the challenge. We get the impression that public opinion, for whatever reason, is turning in on itself and being led into directions that are dead ends. Slogans and anecdotes are being transformed and, worse, institutionalised, into the kind of regulation that fosters illusion and brings no benefit to anyone.

The only responsible solution is to stand back and take a long hard look at the whole picture.

We should maybe come back to Sauk Center?s most famous son, and leave the last word to him. Lewis writes of a character in his 1925 novel Martin Arrowsmith ? well worth reading for its insight into the vocation of the researcher ? that she had for science great respect and no understanding. Often she asked Martin to explain his work. . . . She came to his laboratory, asked to see his flasks and tubes, and begged him to bully her into understanding, but she never sat back watching for silent hours.