The new year is here, and people everywhere are publishing their top 10 lists for the last year. Rather than try to come up with a similar list and fit exactly 10 items into it, I thought I would put together a short list of genetic engineering campaigns that rose and fell this year. Get ready for the Top Flops of 2009!

Beet This

The first campaign I would like to talk about is part of an ongoing effort to oppose genetically engineered sugar beets. Sugar beets are an interesting variety of plant, bred from chard and fodder beets to become a white behemoth that is up to 1/5 sugar by dry weight. About 30% of the sugar produced in the world comes from these beets, 1 million acres of them in the US, so it comes as no surprise that sooner or later a GE sugar beet would come along. Europe, however, is a much bigger producer, apparently for political and historical reasons as much as biological. (Read the Wikipedia page for more history.)

Growing fields of beets is not always easy, and conventional sugar beets have often required many applications of different herbicides and pesticides. When Monsanto’s Roundup-Ready sugar beets came along in 2008, they were very popular among farmers that adopted them, and 2009 saw a dramatic expansion with about 90% of acres in the U.S. being planted with the biotech beets. This got the anti-GE groups wondering, what would be the best way to stop the beets?

A group of organizations led by the Center for Food Safety got together and decided to start a beet sugar boycott – which surfaced just in time for Valentines Day:

Today the Center for Food Safety, along with allied food safety, environmental, and corporate watchdog groups, launched the Non-Genetically Modified (GM) Beet Sugar Registry, documenting commitments from over seventy grocery chains and food producers including Organic Valley not to use or sell GM beet sugar. This call to halt the introduction of GM sugar beets into the food supply comes on the heels of public outcry over mercury contamination of our nation’s dominant sweetener – high fructose corn syrup – and on the eve of the year’s sweetest holiday – Valentine’s Day.

There’s nothing so sweet like exaggerating not only the risks of beets engineered to produce one enzyme that switches the farmers from one suite of herbicides to another, but also exaggerating how much support their boycott had.

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