A Chequer-Board of Nights and Days

Ronald Bailey reminds us of the deleterious effect of knee-jerk resistance to genetically improved foods:

The European Union and fellow traveling anti-biotech activists may well succeed in bottling up the next wave of genetically improved crops that aim directly at helping poor farmers in the developing world. How? Anti-biotech European regulations are spooking the governments of poor countries into preventing their farmers from growing the new genetically enhanced crops. And that’s a shame, because researchers in laboratories and plant breeding stations around the world are endowing new biotech crop varieties with traits like disease resistance and improved nutritional value.

For example, researchers are trying to save bananas and plantains from commercial extinction in the coming decade. Bananas and plantains rank fourth as a staple crops after rice, wheat, and maize, providing food for nearly 400 million poor people. Unfortunately, bananas and plantains, are rapidly succumbing to global plagues like black sigatoka and a new variety of Panama disease. As a result, yields have dropped by half in many poor countries.  

Bananas and plantains are sterile, and thus generally propagated by farmers as genetically identical clones. If one clone is susceptible to a disease, so are all of the other clones. Sterility also obviously makes it difficult for plant breeders to create new disease-resistant versions of bananas and plantains. This is precisely where biotechnology comes in handy.  Researchers are trying to create hardy clones by directly inserting disease resistance genes from rice into banana tissue and coaxing the tissue into producing full grown plants, which can then be propagated.  

Then there is golden rice. Golden rice was the first crop developed specifically as a nutritional enhancement for hundreds of millions of vitamin A–deficient poor people whose main staple is rice. In the developing world some 500,000 people per year go blind due to vitamin A deficiency. Conventional rice produces almost no vitamin A.  Golden rice has a yellow hue because it has been genetically engineered to produce beta-carotene, the yellow precursor molecule that is turned into vitamin A by the body. The original version of golden rice released in 2000 contained beta-carotene genes from daffodils, and a serving of it provided about 20 percent of the recommended dietary allowance (RDA). A new version released this year, containing genes from corn (maize) has boosted the amount of beta-carotene per serving to 50 percent of the RDA.   

The non-profit International Rice Research Institute is working with the Golden Rice Humanitarian Board to crossbreed genetically improved golden rice with local Asian varieties for eventual release to poor farmers.   

Finally, there is the case of disease resistant cassava. Researchers at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center near St. Louis, MO, has developed a cassava plant that resists the devastating effects of cassava mosaic virus. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch points out that African subsistence farmers produced 108 million tons of cassava in 2004, more than two-and-a-half times the amount of corn they produced.  But African farmers could produce a lot more if it weren’t for the cassava mosaic virus. The virus reduces yields across Africa by 30 percent to 40 percent, and caused losses as high as $2.7 billion in 2003.     

The Danforth Center researchers ride to the rescue. They inoculate the cassava plant against the disease by inserting a gene for the protein coat of the mosaic virus into the plant’s own genome. This poses no health danger to people since they have suffered no ill effects from eating the virus on infected plants for decades. The Danforth Center’s genetically improved cassava is now ready for field testing, but because of concerns about the reaction of the European Union and anti-biotech activists, no African nation has had the nerve to approve such tests yet.

Interestingly enough, while we like to flagellate ourselves for our supposed indifference to the sufferings of others (witness the bizarre debate we had after the Asian tsunami over whether America was "stingy" with its aid), no hue and cry is raised over Europe's disastrous policy regarding genetically improved foods. To be sure, the Europeans are by and large good people who mean well to their fellow human beings. But their policies do more to augment suffering than many of the phantom failings we like to obsess over.