Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout: The Making of a Sensible Environmentalist (59 page)

Optimists might, therefore, have expected that the GMO opposition would welcome this case. As the contrary is the case, and the anti-GMO forces are doing everything to prevent Golden Rice reaching the subsistence farmer, we have learned that GMO opposition has a hidden, political agenda. It is not so much the concern about the environment, or the health of the consumer, or the help for the poor and disadvantaged. It is a radical fight against a technology merely for political success. This could be tolerated in rich countries where people lead a luxurious life, even without the technology. It cannot, however, be tolerated in poor countries, where the technology can make the difference between life and death, and health or severe illness. In fighting against Golden Rice reaching the poor in developing countries, GMO opposition has to be held responsible for the foreseeable unnecessary death and blindness of millions of poor every year.
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It soon became clear to Dr. Potrykus and his colleagues that it would not be easy to win approval for Golden Rice in the counties where vitamin A deficiency was most severe. The anti-GM movement had succeeded in erecting such a thicket of bureaucracy that it was impossible to gain approval even for field trials. They decided to form an organization, the Humanitarian Golden Rice Project, and to recruit support from key organizations. These include HarvestPlus (which in turn is funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the World Bank), the Swiss Development and Collaboration Agency, USAID, and the Syngenta Foundation, together with local research institutes and several nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), including the Rockefeller Foundation and the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI).
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The Project set out to obtain rights to the numerous patents involved in creating Golden Rice. It was decided that when the rice became available it would be given free to farmers in developing countries who earned less than US$10,000 per year. Then began the arduous work of steering the rice through the regulatory process in key countries. It was not until 2004 that the first field trial was conducted in Louisiana, which proved Golden Rice produced sufficient beta-carotene under farm conditions. Then in 2005, with the help of the Syngenta Foundation, a new variety of Golden Rice was produced that contained 23 times as much beta-carotene as the original strain. This, along with studies on human uptake of beta-carotene from Golden Rice, now provides proof Golden Rice will be effective in preventing vitamin A deficiency with a cup of rice per day.
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Yet progress has been intolerably slow.

Despite their efforts it was not until 2008 that they received permission for field trials in the Philippines and Bangladesh.
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As of this writing there are still no farmers growing Golden Rice in any country. Millions of people continue to suffer from a vitamin A deficiency for no good reason, and many of them die young and blind. If the World Health Organization’s numbers are correct there have been two to four million cases of childhood blindness since Golden Rice was invented.
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When I left Greenpeace it was partly because I realized its members didn’t really care about people. But I had no idea they could fall this low. I guess you
can
sink a rainbow.

But there is hope that by 2012 it will be possible to begin cultivating Golden Rice for public consumption. Surely it is inevitable that nutritional improvements such as this will eventually become accepted as conventional. Since Golden Rice was invented, scientists have developed many new varieties of GM crops with nutritional benefits : rice with a high iron content and enhanced vitamin E, tomatoes with increased antioxidants called anthocyanins, cassava with beta-carotene, carrots with twice the calcium. And there are many more to come. As Lawrence Kent, the senior program officer of agricultural development at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation stated, “We’re hoping some initial successes are going to trigger additional interest, especially from national governments. If we can help get more nutrients into these staple foods, we really can help millions of people improve their lives.”
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One of the main reasons for optimism about the future of GM foods is that farmers are demanding access to the seeds so they can benefit from increased yields and superior products. Contrary to the activist fabrication that GM seeds are being pushed down farmers’ throats by greedy multinationals, it is the farmers themselves who are driving more and more countries to accept genetically modified crops. Typically, most politicians are afraid to buck the noisy, threatening rhetoric of the anti-GM crusaders. It has been left largely to the hard-working people of the land to fight for the right to plant genetically improved varieties.

The anti-GM campaigners shamelessly claim the farmers are on their side because they are victims, by virtue of their innocence and gullibility, of the multinational companies’ diabolical plot to enslave them with “toxic” seeds. I suppose they can always find a few dissident farmers to support their cause, but there is no question the overwhelming majority of mainstream farmers support GM technology and the benefits it brings to them and their customers. The anti-GM forces have purposefully adopted a parasitic relationship with the world farming community. They are using farmers to gain sympathy from a largely urban support base that does not understand genetics and does not know what is going on out in the country. Dr. Ingo Potrykus is correct; they should stand trial for crimes against humanity.

The first field trial of insect-resistant cotton (Bt cotton) was conducted in the United States in 1990. By 1995 there were one million hectares (2.5 million acres) of GM cotton growing in the U.S., and today there are about four million hectares (10 million acres), or about 90 percent of the cotton grown in the country. American farmers are obviously free to buy cottonseed from whomever they wish. They have chosen to pay considerably more for Bt cottonseed over conventional varieties because reduced need for pesticides and increased yield more than make up for the increase in seed cost. In 1996 Australia followed the U.S. and approved GM cotton for planting. It achieved similar positive results. This early success did not pass unnoticed in the other major cotton-growing countries, including China, India, and Brazil.

China, which produces nearly one-third of the world’s cotton, adopted GM cotton in 1997. Today 7.1 million Chinese farmers use genetically modified cottonseed as a result of which they get higher yields. This improves their standard of living. The Internet is loaded with misinformation about the failure of GM cotton in China. These stories are put out by Greenpeace and other anti-GM organizations that must rely on fabrications because there are no true examples of GM failure. China has become a leader in research and development of GM varieties In 2002 it became the first country to establish plantations of GM trees (poplar).
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In the U.S., the Department of Agriculture recently gave ArborGen approval to plant up to 250,000 GM trees in the American southeast.
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Farmers in India, the second largest cotton producer, didn’t initially enjoy such a supportive government as their counterparts in China. GM crops were effectively banned in India due to anti-GM campaigns led by Vandana Shiva, a Western-educated feminist who claimed to be defending the “traditional agricultural practices” (read poverty and lack of education) of poor rural farmers. Then, in 2001, 10,000 hectares (25,000 acres) of GM cotton were secretly planted in the western-most state of Gujarat. By mid-summer, nearby farmers noted the GM cotton plants were healthy and green while the surrounding conventional cotton was brown and damaged by the usual plague of cotton bollworms. The state government became aware of the situation and announced the “illegal” GM cotton would be burned. This annoyed the farmers who organized and figuratively “marched on city hall with their pitchforks” to protest the planned burning. This resulted in the government changing its policy and approving GM cotton. It was first planted in 2002. By 2009 GM cotton was grown on 7.6 million hectares (18.8 million acres), where five million farmers chose to buy GM seeds, mainly from varieties developed in India. This amounts to nearly 85 percent of the area of cotton under cultivation in India.
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Clearly, the anti-GM movement’s interpretation of this as a failure of GM technology or a refusal on the part of farmers to adopt these new varieties lacks credibility. Yet it doggedly continues to oppose these crops despite their popularity among the very farmers it claims to support against the “multinational” seed companies.

A similar situation emerged in the Philippines, where the government was afraid to give farmers permission to plant insect-resistant GM corn even though they wanted to do so to rid their crops of the devastation caused by the corn borer. In 2002 Greenpeace warned that planting “toxic” GM corn “would result in millions of dead bodies, sick children, cancer clusters and deformities.”
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They held a hunger strike for 29 days, finally calling it off on May 22, 2003, when it became clear that the government would allow farmers to plant GM corn because its top scientific advisors had recommended it do so. By 2009 400,000 hectares (one million acres) of land had been planted with GM corn.

In Brazil, Greenpeace succeeded in getting a judgment from a tribunal in 1999 to prevent the sale of GM soybeans. The government hesitated to step in, as it was typically sensitive to the high-profile attacks on GM foods. Meanwhile farmers in Argentina began to grow GM soybeans in 1996. By 1997 there were more than a million hectares (2.5 million acres) dedicated to producing these soybeans. As Brazil and Argentina share a common border it was not long before truckloads of GM soybean seeds were hauled from Argentina to Brazil, where farmers were eager to benefit from their higher yields. Thus began a long battle between farmers, Greenpeace and its allies, the courts and the government over the legality of GM crops.

In 2003 I traveled to Porto Alegre in southern Brazil, where I addressed a large group of soybean farmers at their union meeting. I encouraged them to continue to defy the edict against GM soy and to take their message directly to the government. Many members of the media attended the meeting and my presentation received extensive coverage. I like to think I had some small role to play in the fact that in 2004 the government of then president Lula de Silva finally lifted the ban. As of 2009 more than two-thirds of the Brazilian soybean area was planted with GM varieties. In Argentina, 95 percent of the soybean area is GM, while in the U.S. 85 percent is GM. Between them, the U.S., Brazil, and Argentina produce nearly 90 percent of the world’s soybeans.

By the end of 2008 there were 25 countries growing GM crops on 125 million hectares (312 million acres), about the same area as the total annual harvested cropland in the United States.
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This is an incredible accomplishment given that the first commercial GM crops were established only 15 years ago. There is every indication this trend will continue.
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It is likely that long before the end of this century virtually every food crop will have one or more genetically modified traits built into it. GM technology is so powerful in its potential to improve growth, yield, efficiency, disease resistance, and nutrition that it almost certainly will become universally adopted around the world.

Why then do anti-GM forces continue to make a concerted effort to drown out this good news story with misinformation and propaganda? I believe it is because they do not care about human welfare or the environment for that matter, but are determined to strike a blow against the globalization of agriculture, multinational corporations, and capitalism in general. This campaign works for them because they are able to scare a large segment of the public who do not have an understanding of this relatively new science, which is both invisible and complicated. Despite the fact that there is not one iota of truth to their campaign of fear, they succeed with many people who are afraid of the unknown.

There is also a growing trend among environmental activists to take on campaigns they will never win in the foreseeable future. They will never stop the growth of GM technology; they will never stop nuclear energy or fossil fuel energy; they will never stop the sustainable management of forests for timber production; and they will never stop salmon aquaculture. This creates an opportunity for an endless campaign of propaganda, supporting an endless fundraising campaign to support even more propaganda. As a political strategy it is quite brilliant, except they didn’t actually devise it themselves, it just happened that way. It happened that way because the campaigns they won are now over, and as they gradually abandoned science and logic in favor of zero-tolerance policies, they inevitably ended up with unwinnable campaigns. Unfortunately we will have to put up with these campaigns for a long, long time.

One very bright sign for the advancement of agriculture and the eradication of poverty, malnutrition, and disease in the developing countries is the emergence of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation on the international aid scene. With billions of dollars from Bill and Melinda Gates as well as from Warren Buffet, the foundation is bringing a new level of professionalism to the business of helping others. As a clear sign that the foundation is serious about bringing the most advanced agricultural practices to bear on the problems in Africa and other developing regions, it has hired Sam Dryden as head of agriculture development.
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Mr. Dryden has a long career in genetic engineering and seed development. The company he developed, Emergent Genetics, was sold to Monsanto Co. in 2005. He serves on the U.S. board of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, which works to ensure crop diversity for food security. He also serves on the National Academies Roundtable on Science and Technology for Global Sustainability. His qualifications ensure that the foundation’s work will make use of intensive agricultural practices and advances in genetic science, for the benefit of countries that do not yet share the benefits enjoyed by the developed countries. Three cheers for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation!