8

SEEDS OF CONFLICT

World peace must be based on world plenty.¹

—NOBEL LAUREATE JOHN BOYD ORR

George W. Bush is not likely to be remembered as a friend of science. In his eight years as president, he held back work on two of the most important scientific issues of our time: stem-cell research and global warming. In 2001, a month before the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center consumed American domestic and foreign policy, Bush took to the radio airwaves to tell Americans of his fears regarding the use of cloned cells from humans in conducting medical research. The whole idea rankled with his ethical and religious sensibilities. “Researchers are telling us the next step could be to clone human beings to create individual designer stem cells, essentially to grow another you, to be available in case you need another heart or lung or liver. I strongly oppose human cloning, as do most Americans,” he said in his address. “We recoil at the idea of growing human beings for spare body parts or creating life for our convenience... Even the most noble ends do not justify any means.”²

With that, the president shut down federal funding into new lines of stem-cell research and sent a chill through the molecular biology community. Many researchers working in the field, appalled at Bush’s misunderstanding and misrepresentation of their science, left the country to continue their work in more liberal environments, such as the United Kingdom. Stem-cell research was not about cloning people, they felt, but about solving some of the most crippling ailments that afflict humankind. Other nations were happy to accommodate these scientists and consequently took the lead in stem-cell research. In 2005 when South Korean scientists announced they had cloned human embryos (which turned out to be a hoax), Bush compounded his opposition in another speech: “I worry about a world in which cloning becomes accepted.”³

Similarly, the president outraged scientists and environmentalists alike with his refusal to believe in global warming. While he paid lip service to fighting climate change in public, he also privately challenged the science behind it and refused to sign measures that would limit carbon emissions by American companies. Worse still, over the last few years of his presidency, details emerged of how scientists were silenced or forced to distort their findings by his administration. Researchers reported hundreds of instances of political interference in their work from 2002 to 2007, which they described as part of a concerted effort to confuse and obscure the global warming issue.⁴ Bush’s actions were summarized and roundly condemned by an editorial in the New York Times: “This administration long ago secured a special place in history for bending science to its political ends. One costly result is that this nation has lost seven years in a struggle in which time is not on anyone’s side.”⁵

What’s curious is that during his time in office, Bush took a distinctly different view on another controversial scientific issue: genetically modified organisms (GMOs). While the idea of meddling with human genetics deeply troubled the president, rearranging the DNA of the things we ate was no problem. Indeed, Bush and the members of his administration were big supporters of GMOs and championed the cause around the world. In 2003 U.S. Trade Representative Robert Zoellick accused the European Union, with its “Luddite” opposition to genetically modified foods, of killing children in Africa: “I find it immoral that people are not being supplied with food to live in Africa because people have invented dangers about biotechnology.”⁶ Bush reiterated the sentiment in a speech a few months later and urged Europe to drop its ban on GMOs:

We can greatly reduce the long-term problem of hunger in Africa by applying the latest developments of science. By widening the use of new high-yield bio-crops and unleashing the power of markets, we can dramatically increase agricultural productivity and feed more people across the continent. Yet our partners in Europe are impeding this effort. They have blocked all new bio-crops because of unfounded, unscientific fears. This has caused many African nations to avoid investing in biotechnologies, for fear their products will be shut out of European markets. European governments should join, not hinder, the great cause of ending hunger in Africa.⁷

Why the dramatically different attitude toward science as it pertained to genetically modified crops? Why was Bush’s opinion on the merits of GMO technology drastically different from his beliefs on stem-cell research and global warming science? Some of the explanation can certainly be found in his religious beliefs, as well as his duty to promote American economic interests. Some members of his administration also had previous links to the companies making genetically modified foods.

Human cloning provokes a number of ethical and moral questions; even many of the scientists engaged in the research have drawn moral lines on their studies. It’s no surprise then, that Bush, a self-professed devout Christian, would find such research questionable at best. Global warming, however, is an issue with considerably fewer ethical dilemmas—everyone agrees it must be stopped and reversed, if possible. Many commentators have pegged Bush’s opposition to fighting climate change to simple economic interests: American companies are polluting, but limiting their ability to do so would put them at a disadvantage with competitors in other countries such as China, which seem to care less about the environmental damage they’re causing.

Pushing GMOs, on the other hand, also furthers the American economic agenda, but in a different way, because many of the technology’s biggest developers, including Monsanto, Cargill and DuPont, are U.S.-based multinationals. After all, the American government has a responsibility to promote American companies around the world. Considering that food is a truly global business, it’s understandable that Bush has been a big supporter of GMOs. But there is another reason for the president’s selective belief in science. September 11, 2001, came to define his presidency— virtually every policy decision he made after the attacks in New York was tied to his crusade against terrorism. The “war on terror” consumed American domestic and foreign policy for pretty much the next seven years, from establishing the Department of Homeland Security to strengthening borders to dramatically boosting defence spending to invading Afghanistan and Iraq. Economic and scientific policies could not escape this mass mobilization any more than they could during the Second World War. Just as science was marshalled to fight the Axis powers, so too would it be used to combat the new threat of al Qaeda and other terrorist groups around the world, a struggle that has no apparent end in sight. Scientists and engineers in every discipline have been called on to help. As we’ll see in later chapters, this has resulted in munitions experts creating new weapons, roboticists developing new forms of artificial intelligence and space exploration researchers coming up with new detection capabilities. As in every preceding American war, food scientists have had to do their part, too.

Genetically modified foods are another significant but subtle weapon in the war on terror. While missiles, tanks and guns aim to kill or incapacitate terrorists, GMOs are expected to work on a different level. They are supposed to ameliorate the circumstances that create terrorists and war in the first place. By creating and then farming crops that are resistant to drought, flooding, pests and other environmental threats, scientists can increase the amount of food available in poor countries. If those farmers can then use such crops to alleviate their food shortages, they can first feed themselves and then start on the road toward exporting, which holds the ultimate promise of economic prosperity. This idea, of using food to lift developing countries out of poverty, dispelling the hopelessness that leads people to take to war and terrorism, is our greatest hope for world peace. Or so GMO proponents like Bush want people to believe.

Better Green Than Red

The idea of food as a weapon is not a new one. For centuries, the strangling of food supplies has played an integral role in siege warfare, where a stronghold like a fortress or a city was encircled and starved into submission. While the idea is generally associated with medieval warfare, it finds itself alive and well into the twenty-first century—the decades-long American embargo of Cuba is just one example. (Cuba is also an example of a siege that simply has not worked.) For the most part, however, the use of food as a weapon has morphed into a subtler form over the past century.

As we’ve already seen, the Cold War manifested itself in several ways: the stockpiling of ever-more powerful nuclear weapons; proxy armed fights in places such as Angola, Chile and Vietnam; and indirect battle through the space race. The United States and the Soviet Union also competed fiercely to win over other, less powerful countries to their way of thinking. Besides steamrolling its way through Eastern Europe at the end of the Second World War, the Soviet Union fomented communist movements around the world in the fifties, from Africa to South America to Asia. The United States countered by financially and militarily propping up developing countries targeted by the Soviets. For the most part, the strategy worked in Latin America and Western Europe. In a few cases, however, the American government tried a better solution, one that involved providing developing countries with the means to become economically and militarily self-sustaining. Mexico was the first such experiment.

In 1940, when Manuel Ávila Camacho was elected president of Mexico, the country was facing food shortages and importing more than half the wheat it needed. Camacho, who hailed from a middle-class family and had some farming experience, was a proponent of industrialization and developing closer ties to the United States. Toward the end of the Second World War, he worked out a deal with the wealthy Rockefeller family to deploy new farming methods in Mexico. Both parties had a significant interest in keeping the population fed and happy. Camacho wanted to protect the country’s fragile democracy while the Rockefellers had businesses, including oil operations, in Mexico that would have been jeopardized if the country fell to communism.

Norman Borlaug, a microbiologist from Iowa who had developed a host of chemicals for DuPont during the Second World War—including a disinfectant for canteens and a glue that held in salt water—was sent south in 1944 to work on the wheat problem. His solution, which took nearly ten years to put together, was a short, stocky hybrid plant, created through the cross-breeding of different kinds of wheat seeds. The new plant was resistant to the stem-rust disease common in Mexico, and with heavy watering and chemical fertilizers, produced significantly more grain than wheat grown from traditional seeds. The results were astonishing. Yields ballooned to the point where Mexico was a self-sufficient producer by the mid-fifties and a net exporter of wheat, shipping out half a million tons annually, by the mid-sixties.⁸

The securing of the food supply became one of the main pillars of the “Mexican Miracle,” which along with investments in education and infrastructure allowed the country to post strong economic growth until the seventies. As one food historian put it, “a model for solving the stubborn dilemma of food insecurity seemed to have been hit upon, combining conventional genetics with the miracles of chemistry: Just add water and mix.”⁹ The “Miracle,” which made Mexico a player in world markets and kept the majority of the population fed, helped fend off any thoughts of turning to communism as a solution for poverty.

With the Mexican success in hand, the American government exported Borlaug’s farming technology to other countries. Next up were India and Pakistan, who in the mid-sixties were fighting famines caused by years of agricultural mismanagement. Borlaug’s hybrid wheat seeds produced the same results as in Mexico. In India, wheat production increased nearly 80 percent in the first year of planting and just about doubled again in the second, with Pakistan seeing similar gains. By the mid-seventies, both countries were self-sufficient in wheat production.¹⁰

The idea of using genetically cross-bred seeds in conjunction with irrigation and chemical fertilizers was then applied to rice. A new hybrid seed, called IR8, was developed and planted in the Philippines. As with previous experiences, production doubled and promptly turned the country into a net exporter of rice. Borlaug was credited with saving millions of lives and awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for the trend he had started, dubbed the “Green Revolution” because of the fields of green crops it produced. While a host of other factors, particularly financial and military support, helped Mexico, India, Pakistan and the Philippines fend off the seduction of Soviet communism, experts agreed that improved crop yields and the resultant economic self-sustainability played a large role. Borlaug himself alluded to how food mitigated conflict when accepting his award. “When the Nobel Peace Prize committee designated me the recipient of the 1970 award for my contribution to the ‘Green Revolution,’ they were in effect, I believe, selecting an individual to symbolize the vital role of agriculture and food production in a world that is hungry, both for bread and for peace.”¹¹

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.¹⁴ 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.”¹⁵

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.

For Americans and Canadians, it’s virtually impossible to get around consuming genetically modified organisms even if they want to, because the technology is in just about everything and there are no laws requiring labelling. Indeed, food retailers who have tried to label their foods as GM-free, such as the Ben &Jerry’s ice cream chain, have been sued into silence by the likes of Monsanto, who have argued that identifying foods as such implies their superiority to those containing GMOs. The administrative attitude toward genetically modified foods in North America is unlikely to change under President Barack Obama, even though the new president wasted no time in reversing many of his predecessor’s science policies, including the funding ban on stem-cell research. The main backing for GMOs may have come from the two Bush presidents, but Obama continued the trend when he named Iowa attorney and GM supporter Tom Vilsack as his Secretary of Agriculture. The new president, however, has at least indicated he is interested in hearing the other side of the story by appointing organic food expert Kathleen Merrigan as Vilsack’s deputy. That decision was probably influenced by Obama’s wife, Michelle, who is an avowed fan of organic farming. The First Lady sent the biotech industry into a tizzy in early 2009 when she planted an organic garden at the White House.

In terms of production, worldwide growth is quickly accelerating. In 2008 biotech crops globally accounted for 125 million hectares, up nearly 10 percent from the year before. Total crops planted between 1996 and 2008 reached two billion acres, an impressive feat given that it took a full ten years to reach the first billion, but only three years to get to the second billion. Total acreage is predicted to at least double again by 2015. The number of countries planting GMOs reached twenty-five in 2008, with fifteen of those—including Colombia, Honduras and a pair of African countries in Burkina Faso and Egypt— classified as developing nations.¹⁷ The United States leads the way in total production, making up nearly 60 percent of the world’s GMO output, followed by Argentina at 20 percent, Canada and Brazil at 6 percent each, and China at 5 percent.¹⁸ The total number of countries growing GM crops is expected to grow to forty by 2015.

Soybeans are the most popular crop grown, accounting for more than half of the area currently planted with GM foods worldwide, followed by corn, cotton and canola. A few countries recently added new crops to that cohort, with the United States now growing GM squash, papaya, alfalfa and sugar beets, while China is farming tomatoes and sweet peppers. Genetically modified versions of the world’s two biggest crops, wheat and rice, have been created and are in various states of regulatory review. Scientists have also successfully tested drought-resistant crops, as well as seeds that “stack” genetically modified traits. SmartStax corn, which Monsanto expects will become available in 2010, combines the abilities of its Roundup Ready and Bt products in that the plants will be resistant to the company’s herbicide and secrete their own pesticides.

Despite the spread, resistance is still firm—and entrenched in parts of Europe. In 2000 the European Union believed it had won a victory with an international agreement that allowed signatory countries to monitor and test GMOs for potential environmental effects before they approved them for commercial use. The Cartagena Protocol, which came into force in 2003, was flawed, however, in that it could be trumped by World Trade Organization agreements. The United States wasted no time in taking its case to the WTO, and won a historic ruling against the EU in 2006. Under the decision, European countries could not obstruct the entry of genetically modified products if there was demand for them within their borders.

GM foods have begun to creep into Europe, but the fight continues as individual countries have recently resorted to the old European standby argument of sovereign rights. Austria, Hungary, Greece, France and Germany have all declared GMO bans of various levels, as have non-EU members Switzerland and Albania. American interests quickly responded with that old American standby, the lawsuit. Monsanto jumped on Germany in April 2009, just days after the government announced a ban on the company’s corn. “They are in conflict with EU rules,” a company spokesperson said.¹⁹

The anti-GMO rhetoric also continues. In 2008 Prince Charles reiterated the concerns he voiced nearly a decade earlier. Companies such as Monsanto are conducting “a gigantic experiment, I think, with nature and the whole of humanity which has gone seriously wrong,” he told The Daily Telegraph. Relying on large corporations for food would result in “absolute disaster” and the “destruction of everything.”

“If they think it’s somehow going to work because they are going to have one form of clever genetic engineering after another then again, count me out because that will be guaranteed to cause the biggest disaster environmentally of all time.”²⁰

Kill Your Enemy, Fill Your Belly

The rhetoric on the other side of the argument is also ratcheting up. While American corporate interests have been and continue to be a big driver of GMOs, an increasing number of scientists, both social and biological, are voicing their support as well. While GMO critics argue that the world has enough food and that it simply isn’t being distributed correctly to the people who need it, many social scientists disagree. The world may actually be heading for disaster because of rampant population growth. Over the past half-century, the world’s population has grown more than it did during the previous four million years and is expected to double again over the next fifty years.²¹ Just about all of that growth is expected to happen in the developing world, where eight hundred million people already have insufficient food.²² At the same time, arable land is decreasing at the rate of about 1.5 percent a year because of the three deadly “ations”— desertification, salinization and urbanization.²³ China and India, the world’s two most populous nations, are already near a crisis point, each using about three-quarters of its available farmland.²⁴

These facts set the stage for what indeed could be, to use Prince Charles’s words in a different context, “absolute disaster.” There’s a concept, called the population-national security theory, that was postulated by social scientists during the Green Revolution and that neatly sums the situation up. It goes like this: a growing population results in overcrowding and exhaustion of resources, which in turn leads to hunger and political instability. Political instability then leads to communist insurrection, which is a danger to American interests. And what’s the ultimate result of threatening American interests? In many cases, it’s been war. President Harry Truman vouched for this theory in his inaugural address in 1949. “More than half the people of the world are living in conditions approaching misery. Their food is inadequate... Their poverty is a handicap and a threat both to them and to more prosperous areas,” he said. “Greater production is the key to prosperity and peace. And the key to greater production is a wider and more vigorous application of modern scientific and technical knowledge.”²⁵

The theory has been repurposed for modern times, with the word “terrorist” replacing “communist,” and it has many supporters within government and the scientific community. Right up until his death in 2009, Norman Borlaug backed the use of genetically modified crops as a tool to boost food production levels and fight the conditions that create war and terrorism in developing countries. “This is the most fertile ground for planting all kinds of extremism, including terrorism. And the people of the developed nations won’t live in peace and tranquility with that pot boiling over,” he said. “First, it’s internal conflict in a country, civil war. Then other countries get involved and here we go again. Those are the dangers.”

Borlaug, who in addition to the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded a litany of accolades, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Congressional Gold Medal, the National Medal of Science and the Padma Vibhushan (India’s highest honour to non-citizens), carried considerable weight in the debate. Having already been credited with saving more than 240 million people from starvation, he continued to campaign on into his nineties for the cause of using technology to solve hunger.²⁶ He even appeared in Monsanto promotional videos to defend the company’s genetically engineered crops. “What we need is courage by the leaders of those countries where farmers still have no choice but to use older and less effective methods,” he said in one video. “The Green Revolution and now plant biotechnology are helping meet the growing demand for food production while preserving our environment for future generations.”²⁷

But how much of a factor is hunger in driving people to take up arms? While a number of inputs, including politics, religion and simple aggression all contribute, social scientists and war historians agree that poverty, hunger and the hopelessness they create are among the biggest motivators. Peter Singer, a social scientist at the Brookings Institution in Washington D.C. and author of several books on war, says it’s no different from why people turn to crime. “You have people go into crime because of desperation or they go into it because of the context of how they were raised where poverty was a driver. You have people go into crime because they’re greedy or they’re downright evil and they were born that way. Much of the same parallel can be made as to why conflicts and wars start.” Poverty and desperation tend to hollow out the social and political institutions that are needed for good governance and for stability and prosperity, he says. “Conflict entrepreneurs take advantage of that absence of good governance.”²⁸

Food and the escape from poverty are among the key drivers of recruitment for conflicts in Africa, particularly among children. As many as 250 million children live on the street, more than 210 million must work to feed themselves and their families and one-third of all children suffer from severe hunger. In Children at War, which looks at the horrific rise of child soldiers over the past few decades, Singer found that such hopelessness presents a huge pool of labour for the illegal economy, be it organized crime or armed conflicts.²⁹

The children themselves point to food as a major reason for why they enlisted as soldiers. Fighting may be a dangerous choice of profession, but in many cases it’s better than the alternative. “I don’t know where my father and mother are. I had nothing to eat. I joined the gunmen to get food,” said one twelve-year-old soldier in the Congo.³⁰ “If I left the village I would get killed by the rebels who would think I was a spy. On the other hand if I stayed in the village and refused to join the army, I wouldn’t be given food and would eventually be thrown out, which was as good as being dead,” said another, aged fourteen. “I heard that the rebels at least were eating, so I joined them,” said yet another.³¹

The story is similar in parts of the Middle East. In Afghanistan, where decades of war have destroyed virtually every institution, hunger is rampant. A pair of Afghan boys told Singer they had the choice of following a cow around to scoop up its excrement to sell as fuel or joining one of the armed factions. Enlisting provided them with clothes, food and a shred of self-respect.³² Graeme Smith, a Canadian journalist who covered the recent war for three years for The Globe and Mail and a former colleague of mine, says such stories are numerous. The reasons Afghans enlist with al Qaeda and the Taliban are usually not political or religious, as the Western media would have us believe. “They’re inextricably linked, hunger and war. Right now, hunger is absolutely one of the big factors driving the conflict,” he says.³³

Since the American invasion in 2001, fighting and the resultant deaths have followed weather and agricultural patterns. Fighting usually kicks off after the country’s main cash crop, the poppies from which opium is derived, is harvested in the spring months and continues until it gets cold in December. Day labourers tend to get paid well during the poppy harvest, Smith says, but after that they are at a loss for ways to buy food. For many—like the cow poop boys—enlisting is the only option. As Charles Stith, the former U.S. ambassador to Tanzania, puts it, this is fertile ground for terrorist organizations on recruiting drives. “The foot soldiers of terrorist groups tend to be on the lower rungs of the socio-economic ladder,” he says. “People who have hope tend not to be inclined to strap 100 pounds of explosives on their bodies and go into a crowd and blow themselves up. People who have hope are not inclined to lie in wait outside an airport with a missile looking for a plane full of tourists to shoot down.”³⁴

Recruiting the poor, hungry and hopeless isn’t a tactic reserved for terrorists and African warlords. It’s also a longstanding practice in developed nations, although the idea of poverty is relative in such places. Since food—especially the unhealthy, heavily processed kind—is plentiful and cheap in prosperous countries, recruitment of the poor usually takes advantage of a person’s lack of education or job prospects. The U.S. government, for one, has had to deal with charges of using a “poverty draft” for its forces ever since the end of mandatory conscription following the Vietnam War, despite pitching military service as a good way for recruits to earn college tuition. During the first Gulf War, African-American leaders criticized the disproportionate numbers of blacks in the military compared to whites and the population in general. African-Americans, usually from economically depressed areas of the country, made up a quarter of all troops in Iraq in 1991, but only 12 percent of the population. One study found that 33 to 35 percent of all qualified black men at the time had served in the military, more than double the percentage for white men. “This nation ought to be ashamed that the best and brightest of our youth don’t volunteer because they love it so well, but because this nation can’t provide them jobs,” said Benjamin Hooks, the president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.³⁵

Fifteen years later, little had changed for the second Iraq war. Concerned citizens in New York, in one example, began organizing “counter-recruitment” rallies in the face of what they saw as increasingly aggressive attempts by military recruiters to draw in students from high schools in poor areas such as East Harlem. Barbara Harris, one of the protesters, passed information on to students about the financial aid they could receive for college. “If a young person wants to enlist, at least he or she knows what it’s about, what the truth about recruiting is. They can decide if that’s the best choice for them.”³⁶

Nevertheless, the United States has moved quickly to try to fight hunger as a conflict motivator in Iraq, particularly with GMOs. In 2004 the U.S.-led Coalitional Provisional Authority government, in place since the 2003 invasion, handed control back to Iraq’s own government and issued its controversial one hundred orders. The rules were designed to transform the country from a centrally planned economy to a market-driven one, but critics suggested they were really intended to facilitate a form of American economic colonialism. Order 81—which sounds like the ominous directive given by the evil Emperor to exterminate the Jedi in the Star Wars movies—clearly opened the door for American GMO producers. The order’s Plant Variety Protection clause allows for the patenting of new plant forms, or genetically modified crops. Iraq’s agricultural system was badly shattered during the first Gulf War and wasn’t allowed to fully recover because of American and British sanctions afterward, but it is still in better shape than Afghanistan’s. With the worldwide Islamic Jurisprudence Council having approved GMOs for consumption in 2000, it will only be a matter of time before Iraqi farmers are awash in Roundup Ready products. In Afghanistan, where the agriculture system is little better than it was in the Stone Age, it’ll be a while yet.

Patenting Humanitarianism

But the enemies of GMOs don’t buy the “make food not war” argument or the promises of humanitarianism put forward by purveyors. While Prince Charles has called the playing of the Africa card “emotional blackmail,” Greenpeace continues to maintain that the only people who benefit from genetically modified foods are the shareholders of the large biotech companies. The proof is in the pudding, says Greenpeace Canada’s anti-GMO campaigner, Eric Darier. The technology to provide drought-resistant or nutrient-enhanced crops is possible, but the only seeds to have been commercialized since the mid-nineties are those that are tied to chemical fertilizers. “There’s nothing new per se. There were a lot of promises and we at Greenpeace were saying that wasn’t the purpose. The purpose was for Monsanto to control the seed market and to be able to push their own herbicides,” he says. “It’s a very sophisticated way of controlling the market.”³⁷

Some farmers who plant Monsanto seeds, both in North America and in India, have in fact complained about the company’s “technology user agreements,” which contain a number of restrictive clauses. One such limitation, for example, prevents farmers from saving seeds from year to year. Critics say this clause is intended to force farmers to buy new seeds every year, but Monsanto insists it’s because GM products, just like Norman Borlaug’s hybrid seeds before them, don’t reproduce very well.

The other major impediment to humanitarian uses of GMOs, critics say, is the actual patenting of the seeds themselves. In 1999 a German plant science professor named Ingo Potrykus, the biotech incarnation of Borlaug, came up with a seed he called Golden Rice while working at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology.³⁸ The genetically engineered rice, which is yellow or orange in colour, produced significantly higher levels of vitamin A and was positioned to solve one of the biggest malnutrition problems in the world. The World Health Organization says up to 250 million preschool children in 118 countries suffer from vitamin A deficiency, which can lead to blindness and ultimately death.³⁹ Researchers at the Institute of Food Technologists peg the number of deaths per year at between one and two million.⁴⁰ Suddenly, as the new century approached, the potential to use the newest food technology to save a significant number of lives looked like it would finally be realized.

But Potrykus found that, despite the fact that he had created his rice in an academic setting free from corporate influence, the issue of intellectual property still crept up. Not only had Monsanto and other companies patented all their seeds, they had also protected the techniques used to make them. Potrykus’s Golden Rice, it turned out, was unknowingly in potential violation of seventy different intellectual and technical property rights held by thirty-two different companies. If the rice were to be disseminated to poor farmers, each of those rights would have to be negotiated, a fact Potrykus found deplorable:

It seemed to me unacceptable, even immoral, that an achievement based on research in a public institution and with exclusively public funding, and designed for a humanitarian purpose, was in the hands of those who had patented enabling technology early enough or had sneaked in a material transfer agreement in the context of an earlier experiment. It turned out that whatever public research one was doing, it was all in the hands of industry (and some universities).⁴¹

Potrykus soon changed his tune, though, when AstraZeneca, the large Anglo-Swedish pharmaceutical company that held much of the intellectual property used in Golden Rice, offered to negotiate a deal that would allow farmers free access to the patents. Potrykus then turned his criticism on the various regulatory agencies around the world, particularly in Europe, that demanded his rice jump through all sorts of hoops to get approval.

Ten years after it was invented, Golden Rice was still not available anywhere in the world. Food scientists who back GMOs are livid that such strict regulatory review is being enforced when so many people are dying. It’s a situation that illustrates just how emotional and paranoid people in the developed world have become about food, a luxury that people in the developing world don’t have. Bruce Chassy, the associate director of the biotechnology centre at the University of Illinois, says products like GMOs should receive the same sort of regulatory fast-tracking that drugs like AIDS medications get. “We can’t spend thirty months monitoring a drug while people are dying,” he says. “I have a problem with this moral equation. What is it about one to two million people dying a year from vitamin A deficiency that doesn’t make you want to try out just about anything?”

Golden Rice finally went into field tests in the Philippines in 2008 and may become commercially available to farmers there in 2011, but its long road to market highlights the problems of using GMOs for humanitarian purposes. Critics say the issue of patents slows down and discourages research into non-profit-based uses of GMOs, while advocates argue it’s the overly cautious approach of regulators, influenced by the emotionally charged scaremongering of critics, that is impeding progress.

Ultimately, barring a huge disaster, GMOs will continue their spread. With the continued growth in population, food will become scarcer, which means that conflict—war and terrorism—will likely only increase. As Chassy puts it: “There’s this giant train barrelling down the tracks at us and it’s going to cause more civil unrest and suffering in the world than anything conceivable.”

If we think there’s a lot of conflict in the world today, we ain’t seen nothing yet. If GMOs are indeed, as Prince Charles says, a giant experiment, it may just be an experiment worth trying.