by Karl Haro von Mogel on 11 January 2010 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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by Karl Haro von Mogel on 11 December 2009 Matt Ridley, author of an upcoming book on science called The Rational Optimist, wrote an article for The Economist called The new NUE thing. NUE stands for Nitrogen Use Efficiency, a trait that can maintain yields with lower applications of costly fertilizer. Nitrogen Use Efficiency has got him, well, rationally optimistic about the environmental benefits of some GE traits.
Imagine you could wave a magic wand and boost the yield of the world’s crops, cut their cost, use fewer-fossil fuels to grow them and reduce the pollution that results from farming. Imagine, too, that you could both eliminate some hunger and return some land to rain forest. This is the scale of the prize that many in the biotechnology industry now suddenly believe is within their grasp in 2010 and the years that follow. They are in effect hoping to boost the miles-per-gallon of agriculture, except that the fuel in question is nitrogen.
In a play on those who call GE crops an “unmitigated environmental disaster,” he instead calls them an unmitigated environmental miracle. While I wouldn’t go so far as to call them a miracle, it is quite astonishing what has been achieved in the literature in so short a time, and what traits we are likely to see commercialized in the next decade.
The Union of Concerned Scientists, however, just released another report, this time questioning the usefulness of genetic engineering to make crops more nitrogen-efficient.
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by Karl Haro von Mogel on 25 November 2009 As a society, we are scared of viruses. They are too small to see, insert themselves into our own cells, and turn our bodies into factories for making more of them. On top of that, they make us feel ill and can be tough to beat. HIV, H1N1, Papaya Ringspot Virus – it’s hard to find anything good to say about the little pseudo-living things. So it comes as no surprise that when people hear that scientists sometimes use DNA from viruses to genetically engineer crops, they get scared.
Viral DNA in food? How nefarious! Well, not really.
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by Anastasia Bodnar on 16 November 2009  Ever gotten apples from the farmer’s market or grocery store only to have them go bad in the back of your fridge? I know I have. Just a few weeks ago, I got about 20 apples from the CSA. Unfortunately, I can only eat so many per day and they started to go bad before I got to eat them. Some of them got really nasty (as you can see to the right) within just a few days despite being in the fridge.
Eating locally is great, but since apples only ripen once per year, and they spoil relatively fast, that means we only have fresh apples for a short time each year. That’s too bad, since apples are a wonderful crunchy snack loved by kids and adults that provide health benefits from their fiber and antioxidants.
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by Karl Haro von Mogel on 11 November 2009 When it comes to genetic engineering in agriculture, most of the attention on the web and in films focuses on Monsanto when there are several other big companies (and a lot of little ones) that also work in this area. Reuters has just published a list of the big six, for your perusal:
- Monsanto Co (MON.N) – Based in St. Louis, the company posted record net sales of $11.7 billion and net income of $2.1 billion for fiscal 2009. Among its key products are corn, soybeans and cotton that tolerate weed-killing treatments and resist pests.
- Pioneer Hi-Bred – Subsidiary of DuPont (DD.N) based in Johnston, Iowa. Produces, markets and sells hybrid seed in nearly 70 countries worldwide and is the closest rival to Monsanto for market share in U.S. biotech corn seed market. Revenue totaled $4 billion in 2008.
- Syngenta AG (SYNN.VX) – The Basel, Switzerland-based company operates in 90 countries and generated 2008 sales of $11.6 billion. Collaborating with International Rice Research Institute to improve rice.
- Dow AgroSciences – Subsidiary of Dow Chemical Co (DOW.N) based in Indianapolis, Indiana. With global sales of $4.5 billion, company offers insect-protected corn and cotton, among other seed products, and is expanding its research into wheat.
- BASF (BASF.DE) – Based in Ludwigshafen, Germany, this leading global chemical company is increasingly focusing its health and nutrition division on plant biotechnology to increase crop yields. Like its rivals, BASF is working on a drought-tolerant corn seed. Revenue in its agricultural division totaled 3.4 billion euros in 2008.
- Bayer CropScience AG – The unit of Bayer AG (BAYGn.DE), had 2008 sales of 6.4 billion euros and operates in 120 countries. The company is pursuing 56 “bioscience” research projects involving six crops.
Hopefully people will come to know that there is more to the private sector than just Monsanto. Lists of the big ones are easy to make, though, what about a profile of the little companies? Start-ups in Africa, South America? What about China?
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