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Wake Up Sleepy Gene

The Green Revolution had its share of critics, not to mention some limitations that prevented it from being the silver bullet that ended world hunger. In places where it did work, the revolution was criticized for making farmers dependent on chemical fertilizers sold by the likes of Monsanto and DuPont. Continued use of pesticides also resulted in newer chemical-resistant weeds, which then escalated the need for newer, more powerful pesticides, and so on. Critics also said that by growing a single kind of wheat or rice rather than many different breeds, farmers ended up reducing the variety and therefore the nutritional quality of their diets, leading to malnutrition. Others said that the movement introduced non-sustainable farming practices such as over-irrigation, which caused ground water tables to dry up in places such as India, accelerating desertification.

The Green Revolution never took root in Africa because of the continent’s general lack of water and varied soil qualities. While much of the movement’s miracle results were due to technologically engineered hybrid plants and chemical pesticides, the seeds simply didn’t amount to much without proper old-fashioned irrigation. Africa’s soil quality also tended to differ within very short distances, which made it difficult to successfully plant and raise one single breed of crop. Detractors also argued that communism, not to mention proper capitalism, failed to take root because many African nations simply lacked the political infrastructure and stability needed to sustain any one form of government for very long.
In Africa, the Green Revolution ultimately had a net-neutral geopolitical effect.

With the Green Revolution’s limitations in mind, scientists continued their genetic experimentation on organisms. A huge breakthrough came in 1973, when a group of Stanford researchers transplanted genes from a frog into bacterial cells, marking the first successful attempt at creating “recombinant” DNA. The success sparked a debate within the scientific community about whether such research, which inevitably drew charges of “playing God,” should continue. A general consensus to move slowly was reached, but by the early eighties, that approach was out the window. In 1976 Herbert Boyer, one of the Stanford experimenters, founded the first biotechnology company, Genentech, to work on commercializing recombinant DNA. In 1982 the company launched an insulin product called Humulin, the first genetically engineered medicine to pass muster with the Federal Drug Administration. Humulin was synthesized in E. coli bacteria cells, which are commonly found in the human gut, then inserted into traditional insulin. The result was a longer-lasting drug that was better absorbed into the human bloodstream. Humulin proved to be a big hit and landed Genentech on the cover of
Business Week
and
Time,
kick-starting the biotech boom. As the eighties unfolded, a pharmaceutical revolution was under way, with genetically engineered drugs for everything from growth hormone deficiency to blood clotting hitting the market.

At the same time, research into creating better foods through the use of recombinant DNA was continuing. The first commercial product to pass FDA testing was the Flavr Savr tomato created by Calgene, a small company based in Davis,
California, near the biotech hub of Stanford and San Francisco. Tomatoes had traditionally presented a problem for farmers because of their softness. In order to survive transport across hundreds or thousands of kilometres, they had to be picked while still green and firm, then artificially ripened with an ethylene gas spray at their end destination. Calgene scientists, however, managed to make a tomato that was resistant to rotting by adding a gene that fooled the fruit into ripening on the vine while at the same time retaining its firmness. The Flavr Savr was approved by the FDA for sale in 1994, but ultimately flopped because it delivered results opposite to those that GMOs promised. Calgene’s tomato needed more land to grow than traditional breeds, which meant it was ultimately more expensive. Flavr Savr also didn’t deliver superior taste or texture, so farmers and consumers couldn’t really see the point. Struggling Calgene was eventually acquired in 1996 by Monsanto, which was quietly building its own genetically modified food empire.

Genetically Engineered Profits

Few companies have been as controversial for as long as Monsanto. The company was founded at the turn of the twentieth century by John Francis Queeny, a veteran of the then-fledgling pharmaceutical industry, and its first major customer was Coca-Cola. Besides selling the soft-drink company the artificial sweetener saccharin, Monsanto also turned Coke on to caffeine, which was added into its soft drinks. By the forties, Monsanto had grown into a multinational company and expanded into plastics and other chemicals. Like virtually every American business at the time, the company joined the fight against Germany and Japan and helped produce chemicals for
the Manhattan Project. After the Second World War, it became a big producer of the pesticide DDT, which positioned the company nicely to create a defoliant for American forces in the Vietnam War. That chemical, Agent Orange, turned out to be as dangerous as DDT. It was found to be highly carcinogenic to anyone who came in contact with it, which ultimately resulted in Monsanto paying out hundreds of millions of dollars to victims in lawsuits and settlements. The company has also been busted in several countries for illegally dumping toxic waste in lakes and rivers. Given its size and historical dominance of the chemical market, Monsanto has over the years become the environmental movement’s Public Enemy No. 1. It is equally loathed as the quintessential Big Corporation that lobbies, sues and bullies its way into getting what it wants. A cottage industry of books and documentaries has sprung up to criticize Monsanto, making it one of the most reviled American companies this side of Halliburton and McDonald’s.

Monsanto led the charge in the Green Revolution and, subsequently, the move toward genetically modified organisms. The company developed and patented a herbicide called glyphosate and began selling it in 1973 under the brand name Roundup. Farmers couldn’t get enough of the chemical which, to paraphrase the marketing line for Raid bug spray, “kills weeds dead.” By the early eighties, Roundup was the top-selling herbicide in the world.

But as every technology company knows, you’re only as good as your latest product, especially when your patent eventually expires (in the United States it’s seventeen years). Monsanto’s next product was particularly ingenious. To keep farmers from shifting to cheaper, generic imitations of Roundup after its
patent expired, the company developed genetically modified seeds that worked in conjunction with its herbicide—and
only
its herbicide. Roundup Ready soybeans became available in 1996, followed in 1998 by Roundup Ready corn/maize, and soon thereafter with canola/rapeseed and cotton. The seeds were genetically engineered to resist Roundup, so the farmer could spray the herbicide onto an entire field rather than having to selectively find and eliminate the weeds one by one, a huge time savings. In technological parlance, Monsanto had created a “white list”—only those plants it deemed worthy would survive its chemical killer. In business terms, the company had created a market advantage that could not be matched by competitors once its patent on Roundup expired.

The company also perfected a drug called Hygetropin that boosted milk output from cows, which it put on the market in 1994 as Posilac. Hygetropin was created in similar fashion to Genentech’s Humulin, by inserting a cow’s natural growth hormones into E. coli bacteria, where they were separated into a purer form and then injected back into the cow. The result, Monsanto said, boosted a cow’s milk output by about 10 percent a year. The company also perfected insect-resistant corn and cotton seeds by injecting them with genes from the
B. thuringiensis
bacteria. The resultant Bt corn and Bt cotton plants essentially secreted the bacteria, which is harmless to humans but deadly to insects looking for a snack.

While Monsanto became the biggest and most active researcher and purveyor of genetically modified organisms through the eighties and nineties, it was hardly the only one. Other big chemical companies, including American duo DuPont and Cargill, Britain’s Zeneca, France’s Aventis and
Belgium’s Plant Genetic Systems, all moved to get a piece of the burgeoning biotech pie, which in the mid-nineties represented billions upon billions of dollars in potential profits. The road to those riches, however, was anything but smooth.

Cow Licked

The outcry over GMOs started not with a bang, but with a moo. In the late eighties, Britain discovered its cattle had fallen prey to Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE), better known as mad cow disease. The sickness, which slowly turned the cows’ brains to mush, was found to have been caused by feeding cattle a cocktail of antibiotics, hormones, pesticides, fertilizers and protein supplements. Considering that cows normally eat grass, it’s not much of a surprise that they got sick off the bovine equivalent of junk food. In the early nineties, as the disease was discovered to be widespread and the panic rose, other European countries banned British beef. British food regulators, however, maintained that the disease was limited to cows and had absolutely no effects on humans. How wrong they were. In 1996, just as cans of tomato paste made from Flavr Savr were starting to creep into Britain, scientists linked BSE to a variant of Creutzfeldt-Jacob Disease, which drives humans just as batty as the sickened cows. Eating contaminated beef meant you could contract a fatal brain disease, and cases began to pour in. As of early 2009, 165 people had died in Britain and 23 in France, with more cases expected, since the disease can take up to forty years to incubate.
¹²

The manure hit the fan. Public outrage at being misled by regulators was palpable and manifested in the outright rejection of the sorts of things that caused mad cow—namely, the chemical
cocktails cattle had been pumped with. The anger spread to all of the supposedly “safe” technologies used in food production and inevitably targeted the new genetically engineered foods, which came along at exactly the wrong time. The anti-GMO crusade was led by a few high-profile names, including Greenpeace and Prince Charles. Greenpeace blockaded European ports where American GMO shipments were due to arrive while the heir to the British throne stoked fears through the media. In a front-page article in the
Daily Mail
in the summer of 1999, the Prince posed ten questions such as “Do we need GM food in this country?” and “Is GM food safe for us to eat?” His answer to both rhetorical queries was an emphatic “no.” Genetically modified foods would lead to an “an Orwellian future” and “the industrialization of life itself,” Charles wrote.
¹³

European grocery stores responded first by labelling foods that contained genetically modified ingredients. When nobody bought them, they were eliminated entirely. Restaurants, including fast-food chains, forbade suppliers from using GMOs for fear of public backlash. The furor then spread beyond Europe. In North America, image-conscious food companies worried about the potential damage if they were targeted by anti-GMO crusaders and quietly moved to limit their exposure. In 2000 Simplot, the potato people, ditched Monsanto’s New Leaf spud, which like the company’s Bt corn and cotton was genetically engineered to produce its own pesticide, after getting its marching orders from McDonald’s. “Virtually all the [fast-food] chains have told us they prefer to take non-genetically modified potatoes,” a Simplot spokesman said.
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Monsanto gave up on New Leaf a year later, once potato-chip makers Frito-Lay and Procter & Gamble joined the boycott. Monsanto was
also forced to abandon Posilac, its growth hormone for cows, after critics charged it accelerated mastitis—an inflammation of breast tissue that resulted in, among other things, pus-filled milk—and also cancer in humans. Regulators in Japan, Australia, New Zealand and Canada, a country that had typically been very friendly to GMOs, refused to allow the sale of genetically engineered cow growth hormone. Monsanto finally unloaded what critics have called “the most hated product in the world” to drug maker Eli Lilly in 2008. The transaction wasn’t the end of Posilac, however, with Eli Lilly announcing it would “continue to provide dairy farmers with this important production tool.”
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The European furor also had a significant impact in Africa. Fearing their products would be shut out of important European markets, governments and farmers refused to grow genetically modified crops. A number of countries, including Nigeria, Sudan, Angola, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Mozambique and Malawi, went a step further and refused to accept any food aid that contained GMOs for fear that such products could contaminate their own crops. Governments in those countries decided they would rather let their people starve than risk contaminating their food supplies with unknown substances. The “Luddite” and child-killing comments that Bush and his administration

levelled at Europe were hardly surprising.

You Can’t Stop Progess, or GMOs

The controversy has certainly not stopped the inexorable march of genetically modified foods. In North America, where regulations governing their use are virtually non-existent, they’re everywhere. The landmark ruling came in 1992, when President Bush (senior) decreed GMOs were not substantially
different from traditionally grown crops and therefore required no special labelling. Canada, which generally rubber-stamps American health rulings, followed suit. Now, about two-thirds of the processed foods found on North American grocery store shelves contain genetically modified ingredients.
¹⁶
Produce aisles are naturally full of such foods, as are meat departments, since livestock is fed on GMO crops such as corn. Restaurants can’t help but serve them to customers and even fast-food chains such as McDonald’s, which rejected Monsanto potatoes and instituted a widespread ban of GMOs in Europe, are using them in North America.