American author of Seeds of Deception and public speaker Jeffrey Smith’s of Fairfield Iowa, first came to the attention of Australians when he was rolled out by the anti-GM activists to try and prevent Australian farmers being given the freedom of choice on crop technology in late 2007.  Fortunately this effort by the anti-technology lobby groups was unsuccessful.

At most meetings organized by these activists that I have attended since that time — and there have been quite a few — stacks of his more recent book Genetic Roulette book were available for purchase, and I snapped up one early on.

A brief perusal of the articles revealed the book was highly biased. Nowhere in the book was there a mention of any of the major good outcomes from GM technology—such as decreased risk of cancer from mycotoxins in moldy corm (see this link for Chassy and Tribe’s efforts on this important topic at Academics Review). On the topics that I was most familiar such as antibiotic resistance in bacteria, Genetic Roulette was deeply misleading and factually wrong.

I decided late 2007 to investigate its claims thoroughly, little knowing how huge the task would be because as it turned out every one of the 65 claims in it — better called myths– was distorted, misleading, plain wrong, or based on misrepresentation or misreading of the sources it quoted.

An early step in providing an antidote for this misadventure appeared in an Australian rural newspaper, which I happily reproduced on my website in November 2007. But that fine article only tackles a sampling of the 65 Smith myths. Other aspects of Jeffrey M Smith’s effort were tackled in other GMO Pundit posts.

Fortunately I was able to team up with Prof Bruce Chassy with University of Illinois and together work through a careful dissection of the book’s claims. We sent our efforts to many experts in particular areas to make sure we got as much rigorous peer review as possible. In some topics, Jeffrey Smith’s claims are based on such flimsy evidence that it was difficult to find experts to take them seriously enough to provide expert review – they were just dismissed as a waste of reviewers time.

The results of our efforts are now published on a special website called Academics Review which we hope will become a forum for a series of other critical reviews where peer-reviewed scientific evidence is brought to shine a light on the wide range of topics that are important for public health or for environmental management, or on any area where modern science can help us make better decisions.

Why write about 65 flimsy myths?

Several people have asked me why I tackled such a time-consuming task.  Now that we have the site finished, we can see the effectiveness and wide reach of internet publication. We can enjoy the splendid esthetic attractiveness of academicsreview.org (for which Bruce and I were mere by-standers while real graphic artists and programmers pitched in). And we are continuing to discover new bad outcomes fuelled by Jeffrey Smith’s misinformation — for example the recent disgraceful hold-up of insect protected eggplant (Bt-Brinjal) in India (see for example Seetharam 2010, Tribe 2009). Taking all this in, Bruce Chassy, myself, and our many valued collaborators and reviewers are very pleased (and relieved) to find it was time and effort well spent.

We are now taking pleasure in encouraging other scientists to join us as members on an internet platform designed to put scientific knowledge and expertise to the service of the broad community.

Go to Academics Review and check it out!

http://academicsreview.org/

References:

Sridevi Seetharam (2010).  Should the Bt Brinjal controversy concern healthcare professionals and bioethicists? Indian J Med Ethics.2010 Jan-Mar;7(1)

David Tribe (2009). Blog posting Jan 30 2009. GMO Pundit blog. Agbiotech Hoax Watch 2009 #4. Genetics “expert Prof ” Smith advises developing country about food policy.

As with Christianity over the centuries, over the last 50 years environmentalism’s done an enormous amount of good. Christianity needed some 1500 years before it’s wake-up call came on 31 October 1517 when Martin Luther nailed 95 theses on the door of the castle church in Wittenberg .

These are fast moving times, and environmentalism’s changed much faster than Christianity did.

Forty-seven years after the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring , the corresponding key date to 10/31/1517 in the reformation of environmentalism, is the day in 2009 when Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Discipline: an Ecopragmatist Manifesto reached the bookstores.

It’s not what Stewart Brand says that important (and there is quite a bit I disagree with in the book). It is the open-minded and pragmatic way he goes about questioning the down-side of the romanticism that has dominated the environmentalist movement of the last 48 years. He points out where scientific environmental pragmatism and scepticism got submerged by quasi-religious faith in big ideas that are often wrong. It is these wrong big ideas are now both harming people, and harming the reputation of environmentalism. Environmentalism needs a Martin Luther to rescue it’s reputation.

As he rightly says “it’s fortunate that there are so many romantics in the movement, because they are the ones who inspired the majority in most developed societies to see themselves as environmentalists. But that also means that scientists and their perceptions are always in the minority; they are easily ignored, suppressed, or demonised when their views don’t fit the consensus storyline.” That’s the problem.

This reflexive almost paranoid suppression of critical views comes through of the environmental hierarchy’s common portrayal of those who stray from the party line as being evil or in the pay of vile multinational corporations (or both). This dogmatism is preventing environmentalists from working out themselves where they are wrong.

Brand refreshingly and frankly states that he is willing to change his mind when he realises that the evidence shows his own opinion is wrong. He even gives examples of his own big mistakes. Such intellectual honesty is the way scientists work, as that’s the way science is successful. Science gains by throwing out false opinion. The opinions of science are always subject to change, and scepticism should be, and usually is, welcome. Not only welcome, it is absolutely necessary. Sadly, we are a very rarely see this in environmentalist “advocacy” groups, at least in their public statements. They seem to think that being an advocate means they can forget about scientific due process (although they are happy to claim the credibility of being supported by science). As the recent Glaciergate and E-mailgate scandals about the IPCC demonstrate, we sorely need evidence-based environmentalism to restore full credibility to environmental policies.

I hope that Brand’s wake-up call for greater respect for sceptical hardheaded science is heeded by the various environmentalist lobby groups, because as Brand demonstrates , the issues on which it needs to be brought to bear are important. Brand’s discussion of genetic engineering of crops and food production is perhaps the best single exposition for the intelligent general reader why genetic engineering is needed for pragmatic solutions of important environmental challenges, such as reducing the amount of nitrogen fertiliser used in agriculture, and reducing greenhouse gas emissions caused by the use of this fertiliser.

As Brand has credentials in organic farming, he may finally get through to the great bulk of organic farming community who seem to be the dominant sources of resistance to genetic modification in agriculture. If they took Brand’s advice, they would finally realise that the organic way and genetic engineering are very compatible:

“I have a history with organic farming-more than I realised. Reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2007), Michael Pollan’s natural history of American agriculture, I was surprised by this passage:

Organic Gardening and Farming struggled along in obscurity until 1969, when an ecstatic review in the Whole Earth Catalog [famously written by Brand] brought it to the attention of hippies trying to figure out how to grow vegetables without patronising the military-industrial complex. Within two years Organic Gardening and Farming’s circulation climbed from 400,000 to 700,000.”

To give a further taste of flavour of the book:

“In 2000 project called BioCassava Plus, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, undertook to engineer a radically improved cassava. It had eight goals for the new cultivar. In terms of nutrition, a daily diet should provide all a person needs of bioavailable protein, vitamin A, vitamin E, iron, and zinc. In addition, the new cassava should be free of cyanide, should be storable for two weeks instead of one day, and should be resistant to the viruses that afflict the crop. Each trait would be engineered separately and then stacked into a single all-purpose crop plant. “This is the single most ambitious plant genetic engineering project ever attempted,” says the project leader, plant biologist Richard Sayre from a Ohio State… when all these traits get stacked into what will be a farmer-preferred cultivar from Africa, this work will be done by African scientists in African laboratories. We’re developing the tools mostly in the United States and Europe but once these tools are in place, it becomes an African-owned and developed project.” Field trials have begun in Kenya and Nigeria…

.. another venture of the Gates foundation is the African biofortified sorghum project, with Florence Wanbugu’s Africa Harvest Biotech Foundation leading a consortium of nine institutions, including DuPont-Pioneer. Sorghum is a drought-tolerant staple for 500 million worldwide. The GE version will improve digestibility and vitamin K and E, iron and zinc, and three amino acids. Greenhouse trials are under way in South Africa. (Vitamin A, incidentally, is currently distributed to the developing world in the form of 500 million capsules costing about a dollar apiece. Getting the same amount of vitamin A from a fortified crop will cost about a fifth of a cent.) GE bananas are also being developed to provide a full allowances of vitamins A and E and iron for countries like Uganda, that rely on bananas as their major food source.

“Greenpeace will fight to keep GE bananas, cassava, and sorghum from poor countries’ fields, just as it will keep opposing golden rice, says Janet Cotter of Greenpeace‘s Science Unit in London.” That quote was in an April 2008 issue of Science.

Because the story is being told by an environmentalist with irrefutable Green credentials, the environmental movement will at last wake up to the cruel injustice being inflicted on the world’s poor by well-meaning, well-fed, rich Green romanticists from the developed world.

These well-meaning romanticists are currently able to justify to themselves deliberately impeding the delivery of beneficial genetically engineered food crops to the people who can most benefit from them — the rural poor of the third world, as has just happened in India with insect protected genetically engineered eggplant, banned because of environmentalist activism.

Fortunately Brand’s wonderful book will not be ignored because it makes its statements in a highly direct controversial fashion. He delivers only three short but lethal bullets, unlike the first Martin Luther’s list of 95 theses nailed to the door of the Schlosskirke in 1517.

“Cities are green. Nuclear energy is Green. Genetic engineering is Green” is unavoidable clarity from the new Martin Luther. So look out for them when they arrive in a Penguin paperback edition, due in March, my local bookstore tells me.

——————-

Update May 2010

Pam Ronald, at Science blogs has this to say:

For Earth Day, let’s celebrate Stewart Brand, the distinguished writer, lecturer and author of the classic Whole Earth Catalog, which won the national book award in 1972.

He also has a new book called “Whole Earth Discipline” where he argues that the established Green agenda is outdated, too negative, too tradition bound, too specialized, too politically one-sided to address the scale of environmental problems that we face today.

You might want to check out John Tierney’s column.

“[Stewart Brand] was the one, after all, who helped inspire Earth Day by putting the first picture of the planet on the cover of his “Whole Earth Catalog” in 1968.”

(Continues at link).

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. If you take a look a the registry, it is a collection of small producers, co-op grocery stores (including one in my own Madison, WI), and just one company large enough to be mentioned by name. Considering that Organic Valley probably already sourced its sugar from organic sources, pledging not to buy sugar from a source they already don’t buy from is a marketing no-brainer. And although they say “grocery chains,” I count only one small chain in their list. Some food producers don’t even use sugar at all!

This campaign built itself entirely on food-fear strategies from the start – note the mention of mercury in corn syrup (which, by the way, was at such low levels that Marion Nestle was not impressed). Throughout the year, this was the strategy employed by the CFS, to use candy-laden holidays as reason to try to drum up consumer opposition to sugar derived from GE beets. The registry list never grew – its purpose was to help petition large candy companies such as Mars and Hershey to reject sugar from those beets. This led to an ironic statement on their part:

I have always looked to sugar as one of the few ingredients I could count on to be GM-free, unlike corn syrups and some other sweeteners. Without labeling of GM products, I have to rely on companies that have publicly stated that they will avoid GM sugar in order to make my purchasing decisions.

Remember when white sugar was the devil? Now it is apparently a safety net of foodies. Tom Laskawy at Gristmill  remarks that he will “stick to organic sugar.” Good old organic empty calories – your ticket to good health!

Andrew Kimbrell, the director of the Center for Food Safety, went a few steps further with Poison: One Lump or Two? Repeating the same line about mercury and corn syrup, Kimbrell suggested that consumers are now going to be poisoned by pesticides in their coffee cups:

Concurrent with the USDA’s approval of the GM beets for human consumption, the EPA eased its regulation of herbicide residues on sugar beet roots, allowing for a surprising 5000% increase. The public has no way of knowing how much damage may be caused by long-term consumption of these pesticides.

Never mind the fact that the sugar is highly refined and indistinguishable from that from conventional beets. DNA, protein, pesticide, good luck finding any of them in there at all. Never mind the fact that sugar beets have been grown with a suite of nastier pesticides that roundup would replace. And never mind the fact that the 5,000% figure is taken out of context as well.

However, a spokesperson for Monsanto told FoodNavigator-USA.com: “The referenced ‘5,000 percent increase’ is not being used in its complete and correct context…Refined sugarbeet roots produce pure sugar that is the same as any other sugar, and with no glyphosate residue.

“Critics of Roundup Ready sugarbeets like to publicize this decade-old EPA increase to scare people, but do not further qualify their math by purposely omitting two important facts: 1) The original 30-year-old tolerance was set at time when glyphosate was not used on sugarbeet crops, and 2) the increase is currently at a maximum EPA safe tolerance level of 1/1000th percent (0.001%).”

Andrew Kimbrell crossed the line in a desperate attempt to raise false fears about pesticides in table sugar. Did it work on Valentines day? Nope.

So Kimbrell dialed up the rhetoric a few months later for the next big candy holiday: Mother’s Day.

Sugar is extracted from the beet’s root and the inevitable result is more glyphosate in our sugar. This is not good news for those who want to enjoy their chocolate morsels without the threat of ingesting toxic weed killer.

…this could be the last year Mother’s Day candy doesn’t contain elevated pesticide levels.

The effort would continue with Halloween, too, gathering signatures but with no real effect. This time there’s a new misleading tactic employed. As a judge ruled this year that the roundup-ready sugar beets should have undergone the more stringent environmental impact statement (rather than the environmental impact assessment it did go through), the beets were effectively re-regulated. The main reason the judge gave was that the USDA didn’t prove that cross-pollination with other crops wasn’t going to be a problem. But the Halloween petition misrepresented the ruling to suggest that the judge determined that the sugar beets weren’t safe for human health:

Last month, in a stunning setback for the biotech industry, a federal court ruled that genetically modified (GMO) sugar beets should never have been approved for introduction into the food supply.

Not true. The judge’s ruling applies to planting the crop, which is under the purview of the USDA. The FDA oversees the food safety aspects. D’oh.

There is no such thing as genetically modified sugar. It has no genes!

As Halloween approaches, I am shocked to learn that your company is experimenting on our children! As you know, a federal judge recently ruled that the GMO beets should not have been approved for planting, yet the sugar from these experimental beets has been in the food supply since 2008.

This one is thanks to the Center for Environmental Health, which includes in its staff Charles Margulis, who used to work for Greenpeace, the CFS, and the Organic Consumers Association.

Nevertheless, despite their best efforts at scaring up fears about pesticides in coffee and confections, this particular campaign coordinated between many anti-GE organizations failed to get any backing from the big candy companies and other major buyers of sugar. Despite exaggerations and plain falsehoods, this campaign flopped.

Take the Challenge

While Biofortified was still young and we were trying to find time to blog, everyone’s favorite author Jeffrey Smith made a foray into social media. The end of genetic engineering would surely come through bringing people together to blog together about how bad GMOs are. Everyone loves blog carnivals!

Is this a person, or a teddy bear?

With much fanfare, the No GMO Challenge was born on Earth Day. Bloggers could take a public stand against genetic engineering, and proclaim that they are going to live free of genetically modified organisms for a month. And to join the blog carnival, all they had to do was submit a post in the comment section.

Ok, first of all, this is the laziest blog carnival I have ever seen. I have submitted to, and hosted many blog carnivals in the last few years. Bloggers submit their posts by email, and the carnival host reads them, organizes them, and picks the best ones to string together in a creative fashion. It is not only a chance for submitting authors to show off their work, but also a chance for the host to show off their stuff. I’ve seen animations, fun stories,  comic strips, all sorts of stuff. I went over the top once for the 45th Skeptic’s Circle and made it a podcast for a week with phoned-in lines from each blogger. But sometimes with time crunches blog carnival hosts will admit that they didn’t have the time to do anything interesting, and just put the links together in a list.

The No GMO Challenge was even lazier than that. All submitting bloggers could look forward to was a link in a small stream of comments. In return, they were supposed to investigate every last food they ate to eliminate and avoid any ingredient that could come from a GE crop. Switch corn syrup for cane sugar, trade canola for olive oil, and unless you go for blue – stay away from corn. And I thought I was asking a lot by instructing people to call a Skype number to read a few sentences. Can you imagine telling someone how to eat for a month?

Hang on, I’ve left something out. Olive oil. A big, old-fashioned metal can containing a gallon of olive oil. For the best post submitted to the carnival, a small family food outfit offered up a sample of their “GMO free” stuff. I have GE-free olive oil, too. All olive oil is. Still, hey, offering up food for prizes in a food-related blog carnival comment thread is a nice idea. And if anyone was having a hard time looking for GE-free foods to eat, they could look up Jeffrey Smith’s corporate sponsors.

I was very busy at the time, but there was no stated restriction about no “pro GMO” posts in the carnival, so I thought I would drop them some links in a future carnival and see what happened. With classes over in late May and research going fine, I eagerly anticipated their June “carnival.” It never came.

As a matter of fact, all No GMO Challenge activity abruptly ceased in June. Facebook, Dead. Twitter, Dead. No GMO Challenge page… down for maintenance. Now it is completely missing. And not even the Google cache or the Wayback machine saved any of it. So in some sense, you’ll have to take my word for it that there was indeed a gallon of olive oil at stake! It is simply surprising that given the number of google hits that the event got that it dried up so quickly. I didn’t think it would have much staying power, but this is ridiculous! (It was apparently supposed to post every week.)

Strangely, Real Food Media, where it was hosted, made the link to the root directory of the “carnival” redirect to an announcement for it. This post I am writing stands as the only known record of what happened to this disappearing campaign.

So why did this flop? Yes it asked a lot of its contributors, and gave little in return. It appealed only to a narrow niche of bloggers and was not attractive to the wider public. But most of all, it flopped because the folks that started it didn’t care enough to pursue an idea to its own conclusion before moving on to other ventures.

2010 Predictions:

Judge White’s decision against GE sugar beets could be considered a major flop for GE crops, although it seems like more of a setback than anything else. But embedded in this issue there is a potential flop for the coming year. Although the judge ruled that the USDA should have completed a more stringent environmental impact statement before deregulating Roundup-Ready sugar beets, whether or not the farmers can plant them this year is still unknown.

The ‘environmental’ issue was over whether the beets would cross-pollinate with nearby seed crops of related varieties, however, beets typically only flower in their second year of growth. Therefore, farmers planting sugar beets in 2010 will pose very little risk of cross-pollination, because they are only grown one season and harvested.

Producing seed, however, takes two years. Since seed producers had to start plants in 2008 for the 2010 season, and roundup-ready beet seeds were in very high demand (90%), there may be a shortage of non-GE sugar beet seeds for the coming season. While it was argued that GE sugar beets threatened one organic seed producer’s ability to do business, the same might be said for the conventional sugar beet farmers this year unless they are allowed to use the GE sugar beet seeds that are available. And it is not like any old non-GE sugar beet seed will do – farmers will need to have enough of the varieties that are resistant to pests and diseases and can thrive in their climate.

The U.S. sugar beet industry could suffer billions of dollars in losses if Roundup Ready varieties are banned next year, according to attorneys representing growers and processors.

“At this point, a halt on planting Roundup Ready sugar beet seed for the 2010 root crop in 10 states would create severe seed shortages in many areas of the country and pose other very significant problems potentially resulting in billions of dollars in damages to thousands of sugar beet farmers, to cooperatives and processors and to communities across the country… ” attorneys Gilbert S. Keteltas, John F. Bruce, Christopher H. Marroro of Washington, D.C., and Joanne Lichtman of Los Angeles, said in court documents filed Wednesday, Nov. 25, in federal court in San Franciso.

The Center for Food Safety was behind the case brought against the USDA. If you look at the legal action taken against the Roundup Ready sugar beets as a campaign to prevent farmers from growing them, it may be a flop this next year due to seed availability issues. But the resentment it may spark in sugar beet farmers should they not be able to plant them could be the bigger flop – a failure to negotiate the needs of two different sectors of agriculture that may only deepen the divide between them. The planting issue has not yet been decided, and hopefully something can still be negotiated that makes everyone happy.

What is your goal here?

But let’s end this one on a note of certainty for the new year. A new suggestion has been made just before the end of December that I already know will be a flop. Home gardeners usually buy seeds from their local nursery, and it turns out that many of these seeds from from the vegetable breeding company, Seminis, which is owned by Monsanto. With the discussion of Monsanto and seed monopolies that has recently resurfaced, I found one blogger announce that gardeners should boycott any garden seeds that come from Seminis.

I have nothing against Seeds of Change and am at this moment considering buying seeds from them, and to their credit they have pledged to not sell GMO seeds. But, if I was a new gardener concerned about Frankenfoods I’d probably like to know that by buying from them I was supporting a company like Mars, Inc. That information is inexplicably absent from the list of “safe from Monsanto seeds.” If you are serious about avoiding Monsanto/Seminis seeds in your garden it isn’t as easy as taken what you read on the internet as gospel.

How do you keep your garden safe from seeds produced by Monsanto/Seminis and other companies who are not aligned with your ideology.

Perhaps the first problem is that ‘ideology’ is taking the front seat. Perhaps if they knew that there are no genetically engineered seeds available in nurseries it would be a big help?

You’re going to have to do research that’s harder than reading lists that have been copied and pasted around the internet.

Step #1 Pick up the phone and call the seed company you want to buy from and ask if Seminis supplies their seeds. If Seminis is their supplier keep looking until you find another seed company.

Step #2 Repeat Step #1 until you find a company that doesn’t. Or at least until you find a seed company that carries the particular seeds you want that aren’t supplied by Seminis. Some companies may only carry certain seeds from Seminis, and you may end up having to make a moral trade-off if you really want to grow a particular, flower, vegetable or fruit.

You should also learn to collect and save your own seeds or try buying some cool heirloom varieties of the veggies you want to grow. Don’t judge me too badly when you see me at Home Depot buying Burpee seeds, a gardener has to do what a gardener has to do.

And gardeners are going to do what gardeners do – pick up seeds that they find promising at their local nursery and plant them this year. Very few people will find it worthwhile to spend this much time making sure that their seeds don’t come from a company that also makes genetically engineered seeds. Plus those commercial seed companies make some pretty amazing modern garden varieties that produce a lot. Like the No GMO Challenge, this is asking people to go to great effort for little percieved personal benefit.

If this was even successful it might even be a bad idea – wouldn’t that just send the message to Monsanto that they should stop selling their conventional seeds and just make GE crops? In contrast, buying more conventional seed would force them to produce more seeds that aren’t genetically engineered. This is more about trying to attack a particular company than to make a statement about genetic engineering. I don’t think this will go anywhere.

So there you have it, my list of past and future GE-related campaign flops. New Years is often a time for optimism, fresh starts, and reflection on past successes – but it is also about resolving to correct past mistakes. It is my fond hope that people who campaign against genetically engineered crops re-evaluate their goals and strategies, and think about what they are working toward. If a campaign necessitates falsehoods, asks way too much of the public for your own ideological purposes, or lasts barely more than a month after much publicity, wouldn’t you wonder if it is the right thing in the first place?

“Terminator” technology, also referred to as “Suicide Seeds,” are marketing terms coined by GE opponents to reframe what is technically called Genetic Use Restriction Technology, or GURT. This technology can take several forms, the most widely discussed one was developed by scientists working at the USDA and the Delta and Land Pine company, which is now owned by Monsanto. It works by means of three engineered genes, that when brought together in one plant, they act in combination to halt the development of embryos in the seeds the plant produces. The result is a plant that produces food as normal, but does not produce fertile seeds.

For those that are interested in a full scientific explanation of the technology, you can read about it here. But in short, GURTs can be used by seed companies to protect their intellectual property by preventing farmers from saving and replanting their seeds, which has often led to several lawsuits, some high-profile. It has also been suggested that for some crops that do not get much attention from plant breeders, that it would provide an incentive for them to spend the time and money it takes to improve a crop, because they could guarantee being able to sell their seeds in the future.

The public reaction to GURTs has been to imagine that it will turn farmers into servants of the seed industry, completely dependent upon them for seed purchases year after year. It is assumed that no non-GURT seeds will be available, and that this technology will allow seed companies to tell farmers what to grow and at what price, tell people what to eat, and basically rule the world. Hyperbole aside, at the very least the worry is that it will make farmers unable to choose what to grow, or financially yoked to a large corporation. For small-scale farmers in developing countries, they worry that it will give those large companies the power to extract all the money they can, keeping them in an impoverished state.

The strong backlash against “Terminator” GURTs has likely contributed to Monsanto’s decision to pledge not to use GURTs in any of their seeds. They acquired the technology when they bought Delta and Land Pine in 2000, a cotton breeding company. Nevertheless, many people believe that GURTs are widespread in use, even Vandana Shiva seems to repeatedly indicate that she believes that Bt cotton seeds are sterile and cannot be regrown. (You would think that since preventing the use of GURTs in commercialized GE crops is regarded as a victory for GE opponents, that they would all be very conscious of its absence.)

How much of this opposition is based on legitimate fears, and how much does would it change seed buying/replanting practices on farms?

As I have said elsewhere, monopolistic control of food crops by a few companies does not sound very likely to me, since companies making GE crops are sprouting up around the world, and antitrust laws in this country and others. Not to mention that government agencies and nonprofit organizations are also working on GE crops for developed and developing countries alike. In the case of GE crops developed by companies, since they would have patents on their engineered traits, they would have the authority to require royalties for farmers to plant fields of those crops. Given that farmers today are not allowed to save GE soybeans and replant them without paying a fee to the seed company, the only difference in this situation with a GURT is that the control would be biological rather than legal.

Would it force farmers to buy seeds every year? The fact is, many farmers already rebuy seed every year. In the case of hybrid crops that have higher yields than open-pollinated varieties, the hybrid must be regenerated each year from two inbred parents (which are typically proprietary). The debate over seed saving was hashed out in the debates over hybrid corn in the 1900s, and the result is that the vast majority of corn grown are hybrids. The increase in yield and other beneficial traits outweighs the continual cost of buying the seed.

Indeed, as Raoul Adamchak explains in Tomorrow’s Table, even organic farmers often purchase new seeds every year. Whether it is an heirloom Brandywine tomato or a hybrid sweet corn, seeds bought from a company that specializes in seed production (and/or breeding) are often a good bet against a bad batch of seed. From page 133:

At reasonable prices it is easier to let the seed companies provide the seed. In addition, they generally do a better job of maintaining seed purity and quality. If hybrid prices get too high, growers can switch to [Open-Pollinated varieties] instead, and save seeds. This can be a difficult choice is a specific trait like disease resistance, size, or uniformity is needed. Yields may also be less.

Even if seed saving is possible to do, it is still economically preferrable to go with seed provided by professional seed-producing operations, aside from issues of variety and transgene patents. If the price of seed gets too high, whether genetically engineered or not, farmers will go back to other varieties that are better for their bottom line. The economics of the situation will drive farmers one direction or another. I’m no economist, but it seems that the economics of competition in the seed market will ensure that there are alternatives available, irrespective of the presence or absence of GURTs.

“Terminator’s” you Eat

There is a very widely used and accepted conventional analog of Terminator GURTs that most of us have eaten – they’re called Seedless Watermelons. These are generated by manipulating the number of chromosomes in watermelon cells to give them three copies of each chromosome instead of two. (For more on how this works, you can watch a video I made about it here.) The resulting “Triploid” Watermelons sponteneously abort their seeds, leaving a juicy, seedless fruit. The seeds have to be regenerated year after year from other plants, and farmers and consumers obviously cannot replant seeds that don’t even exist!

Ironically, while genetic engineering is not allowed in organic agriculture, Seedless watermelons are. Nevermind the fact that the chromosome numbers are artificially manipulated using chemicals – it appears that this early form of direct genetic manipulation has been grandfathered in.

My point in bringing up the seedless watermelon is this: It results in exactly the same thing as genetically engineered GURTs – and that is it effectively prevents the plant from generating fertile seeds. The argument is often made, most vociferously by Shiva, that GURTs are immoral because they interrupt the traditional practice of seed saving. Shiva and others must therefore agree that seedless watermelons are also immoral for the same reason. Why is there no call for a moratorium on seedless watermelons? Well, that would be the pits.

Anyone wonder where the seeds are in bananas? There’s another one for you. The bananas we eat are also triploid, and produce no seeds. Although you can grow new banana trees from cuttings, it doesn’t produce any seeds that you could plant. Is the cavendish banana immoral, too?

Neither of these were made with genetic engineering, which means that unless Shiva hasn’t heard of Bananas and Seedless Watermelons, that the objection is not based on its effects on seed saving but on something else.

Can you think of any more examples?

Spread of Sterility?

In the global discussion of GURTs, there is a widespread perception that the “Terminator” will get out and run rampant, killing off not only every native crop but also spreading into other species and wiping them out. This about this for a second, is it possible for sterility to spread?

Not by any genetic mechanism I am familiar with. The pollen grains from GURT crops that cross-pollinate with others will make a few sterile seeds that will not grow and so their genes will not make it to the next generation. So if you grew corn next to another farmer who grew corn with a GURT in it, some of the seeds from the edge of your field could have been pollenated by a few stray grains from your neighbor’s field. If you were growing an open-pollinated variety and saved seed from year to year, you would have a few seeds that wouldn’t grow – but only if you gathered them from the margins of your field (which is not a good idea anyway).

And as for GURTs spreading into other species sterilizing them – these claims are based on a basic misunderstanding of how evolution works. Genes spread when they provide a benefit to the organism, and sterility is the exact opposite of an advantage. Aside from the small increases that can be seen from genetic drift – a trait needs to help the plant survive and reproduce to sweep through a population, and sexual sterility by definition does not do that.

But take a look at what Vandana Shiva said on pages 82-83 of her book, Stolen Harvest:

Molecular biologists are currently examining the risk of the terminator function escaping the genome of the crops into which it has been intentionally incorporated and moving into surrounding open-pollinated crops or wild, related plants in nearby fields. Given nature’s incredible adaptability and the fact that the technology has never been tested on a large scale, the possibility that the terminator may spread to surrounding food crops or to the natural environment is a serious one. The gradual spread of sterility in seeding plants would result in a global catastrophe that could eventually wipe out higher life forms, including humans, from the planet.

It is ironic that Shiva often argues that genetic engineering and the “Terminator” violate evolution, when it is evolution that proves that her claims are unfounded.

It is possible that one of the three genes in the Delta and Pine-style GURT could mutate and not function anymore – so this style of GURT is not 100.00% fool-proof. However even in that case the remaining two functional genes would not spread sterility because you would need all three genes to bring about sterility. Still no scientific justification for Shiva’s declaration about ‘spreading sterility,’ however it is possible that a few transgenes of the other traits in the crop could still leak out on rare occasions.  At Genetic Maize Anastasia argues that a different style of GURT would be a better choice for preventing gene flow.

The prevention of gene flow is an interesting issue when it comes to GURTs. On one hand, companies want to make money selling their GE seeds and not have to chase patent infringers for saving their seeds. So the biological reification of the legal landscape seems to be what the opponents are the most afraid of. On the other hand, GURTs can be seen as a layer of protection for those who do not want to grow (or eat) genetically engineered crops.

My Mission is to Protect You

In the first Terminator film, Arnold Schwarzenegger played the enemy, a robot bent on terminating Sarah Connor before she could bear Humanity’s Last Hope. In the second film, the same Schwarzenegger instead played the part of the protector of Connor and her son. How can “Terminator” technology instead become a protector working for seed savers rather than against?

To explain this, let me turn to Jeremy at the Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog. Jeremy is not known for very glowing reviews of genetically engineered crops, although he has said that he tires of the same old pro-anti debate. But recently, he posted a very thoughtful rant on seed saving and GURTs:

When are the knee-jerk opponents of genetically modified crops going to realize that genetic use restriction technologies (GURTs) are their friends?¹

(…)

GURTs thus stop any characters bred into a GMO from being transferred into another variety of the same crop and into the crop’s wild relatives.

So, IIED, remind me, please: why is that a bad thing?

Does it stop the farmer saving seeds? On the contrary, it makes life easier, because the farmer does not have to worry about genetic pollution. She can, of course, still take advantage of good pollution, or introgression, if she wants to.

Does it stop her using farm-saved seed? No, how could it, when any polluted seeds are going to fail to grow. It makes using the farm-saved seed more secure.

Can she still exchange and sell farm-saved seed? You bet, and not only that, but her customers and swap-partners will be grateful that her seeds cannot possibly be polluted.

Opponents of GURTs seem to think that massive influxes of foreign pollen are the norm. They’re not. And I certainly wouldn’t want to accept, even as a gift, seed from someone who knew so little about farming and seed saving that they couldn’t even maintain their own varieties. Cross pollination from a different field is a fascinating and rare source of diversity in farmers’ fields, not the norm. GURTs pose absolutely no threat to farm-saved seed. In fact, I believe that they can enhance genetic diversity (by maintaining the separation between varieties), improve seed quality (for the same reasons) and have no impact at all on the livelihoods of poor farmers.

So you can easily see that GE crops with GURTs in them can instead be used to protect non-GE crops from cross-pollination. Indeed, as many opponents of GE crops argue that farmers are afraid of getting sued for cross-pollination, this fear would be all but eliminated if they were using GURTs. Percy Schmeiser would have remained an obscure canola farmer in Canada. He wouldn’t have been able to spray his fields and collect herbicide-tolerant canola seeds for replanting, and he couldn’t have gotten sued.

There’s something else to think about when it comes to opponents of genetic engineering. Often, the argument is made that GE crops cannot be grown unless there is a 0% risk of affecting the environment, organic farms, etc. Zero percent risk does not exist anywhere in the Universe, but this is as close as it comes. Essentially, the most hardcore anti-GE voices out there are asking for GURTs, whether or not they are aware of it. The more you demand absolute exclusion of cross-pollination in biosafety regulations, the more incentive you are giving biotech companies to develop terminator technologies. If you really cannot stomach GURTs, then maybe pushing a little less hard on absolute separation would be tactically smarter (just a little advice).

GURTs are not opposed for scientific reasons – the pseudo-biological reasons given by Shiva et al are a scientific veneer on what is really an economic argument. They fear consolidation of the seed market and corporate control of the food supply. But as Jeremy has demonstrated, the seed-saving diva Shiva might find GURTs to be her best ally in keeping a GE-free farm-saved seed supply in circulation amongst poor farmers. If a GURT can prevent the flow of patented transgenes into openly-traded seed supplies, it would instead be a A T-101 working to protect her effort from Monsanto’s T-1000. Ironic, isn’t it?

I’m not advocating the use of GURTs, lest anybody misunderstand me. (Although I could form a cogent argument in favor of GURTs in pharma-crops.) But there is more to this trait than meets the eye, and I think that it has become a lightning-rod issue that is less clear-cut than its opponents make it out to be. The Terminator can be sent to kill, but it can also be sent to protect. Discussions about the use of technology so often hinge on these kinds of dualities, which is why we need to discuss these things in a more sensible (and scientific) fashion.

I’ll leave you with Jeremy’s dynamite conclusion.

I hold no brief for or against GMOs, though I do think they have yet to prove themselves in the areas where they make the loudest claims. This is not about GMOs. It is about honesty. Any opponent of GMOs, however good the rest of their arguments might be, immediately loses my respect if they are also against GURTs.

*Arnold voice*: “Respect Terminated.”

I thought it would be a good idea to write a post detailing several of them, and then Steve Savage at Sustainablog went and did it for me. Check out The Bizarre, Modern Coalition of Anti-Science Forces. He didn’t cover every kind, but he delves into several of them including anti-GE forces, anti-global warming activities, and the antiscience-of-the-year, it seems, Anti-vaccination. In the comments section a reader confirms exactly what he is talking about.

In the blog discussions that ensued while the voting went on, a few fights broke out over one issue or another, but a very strong sentiment was expressed by several people – they had some reservations about one aspect of genetic engineering or another, and felt that the accusations of ‘antiscience’ were unfairly being applied to them. Perhaps there was a bit of miscommunication going on.

To be antiscience on a particular topic, for one reason or another you reject solid knowledge derived through the scientific method in favor of some other satisfying belief. Saying that “scientists were wrong once on nutrition so I shouldn’t believe what they say now,” is an antiscience sentiment. A person who says this clearly expresses that they believe that they have just as much of a chance of being right or wrong if they ignore the science as if they listen to it.

Saying that “I have concerns about the social impact of this technology, or about intellectual property rights issues” is not an antiscience sentiment. It is a statement about values and their concern for how those play out in an issue. Nor is having a disagreement about a particular scientific detail necessarily a mark of antiscience. Certainly, not everyone who doesn’t like genetic engineering is antiscience – but some people are.

In practice, sometimes it can be hard to distinguish antiscience from other concerns about science. What do we make of someone that argues that we don’t know enough about the long-term consequences of say, GE crops, to consider them safe to eat? How much is enough? Do they have a clear idea of how much that will be and will put that on the table to be convinced, or each time a more detailed study comes out will they move the goalposts even further?

How about this one. Recently, Greenpeace India campaigned for Nestle to promise never to have GE ingredients in their products in India. On the FAQ page of safefoodnow, a Greenpeace campaign site, they made this claim:

Greenpeace believes that GM food cannot be introduced until every stringent scientific test has established that they are 100% safe.

This is at the very least an unscientific statement. If there is one thing to know about science it is that it NEVER deals with 100% certainty: science deals with data from which we calculate statistics and form conclusions. No scientific study ever finds that something is 100% anything, so what they are effectively saying here is that science must prove something that in essence it cannot. Does this reveal an antiscience position? I am reminded of creationists that often say there must be one more transitional fossil before they accept evolution, only to ask for further more when one is discovered.

You could go to their FAQ page to read this statement in its context, but after I quoted it in a discussion at Genetic Maize, this telling statement disappeared from the Greenpeace site. Thanks to the Ecology to Economics blog for copying the entire thing, and I will reproduce it here so it won’t disappear down the memory hole again.

So what do you want me to do?
On August 2009, Greenpeace India wrote to about 20 major food companies in the country and asked them to declare their stand on GMs publicly. While some of them had a policy on GMs such as MTR, the others did not even reply to us! We have collated all this information for you and put it together in our safe food guide. You can find it at www.safefoodnow.org. It will give you a quick snapshot of the GE free food brands in this country. You can even download it from our site and print it to take it along with you the next time you go grocery shopping. You will also find detailed information and other resources on this site. You have every right as a consumer to ask all then companies to declare what they are putting in your food.
And what about Nestle?
Global food giant Nestle India, wrote back to Greenpeace saying that they are in favor of using GM technology in food! Greenpeace believes that GM food cannot be introduced until every stringent scientific test has established that they are 100% safe. Second, it should be completely the choice of the person who eats it to know what they are eating and to reject GE products if they want to. Therefore, we are running a campaign right now urging Nestle India to initiate, formulate and strictly enforce a GM free policy in this country.
You cannot become a lab rat for these experiments in food!

I have also just found a textbook example of antiscience with regard to genetic engineering. In an article titled, Why Do GM Scientists Lie? by Devinder Sharma, he suggests that there is a global network of ‘liars’ known as, well, scientists.

Every time I meet an agricultural scientist, especially those who are engaged in Genetic Engineering, I am shocked at the blatant manner in which they lie. They are not even remotely ashamed of telling a lie, although they know they are not speaking the truth.

I thought telling a lying was a prerogative of the agricultural scientists alone. But over the past few years I am noticing that molecular geneticists, whether they work for the Royal Society in London or Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi or even the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, have picked up the art (or should I say science) of lying, and that too right through their nose.

Genetic Engineering has surely come of age. It has become synomenous with lying.

Questioning the integrity of individual scientists is one thing, but now he is questioning the whole scientific enterprise. My humble suggestion is that maybe – just maybe – if the information being provided by agricultural scientists across the world does not square up with your personal beliefs, that perhaps your personal beliefs are wrong. A consensus amongst scientists about solutions to global food issues is a lot more parsimonious than assuming a global consensus of lying scientists!

It is not just agricultural scientists that are his target, he really does mean science as a whole.  After spending some time misreading the Royal Society, he lays down the punchline:

I am so glad my children did not pick up science in their graduation.

This is little different from what we might hear from a young-earth creationist, or an “Al Gore is in on the climate conspiracy” global warming denier. When science is seen as a threat to something you hold to be true, the choice is often to attack science itself as the enemy.

Not everyone who is skeptical of genetic engineering is antiscience, nor are they necessarily anti-technology. Nor is someone who is in favor of it necessarily pro-science or pro-technology. Many just have not spent the time understanding the science in its proper context, and still more have issues not with the science but with the social, economic, or philosophical implications of it.

In what forms have you seen antiscience in the debate over geneic engineering? What other common patterns do you see between its different forms? Or does the antiscience label instead apply to very few of the partisans and should be used very sparingly in this discussion because it alienates moderates? On the other hand, we know that real antiscience beliefs influence people, so would ignoring their existence be even worse?

Last week, a day into the final voting week, we received a comment on our entry from Megan Westgate, the Executive Director of the Non-GMO Project. I will reproduce it in full:

Biofortified Pro GE?

Although you say here you are not pro GE, on your own homepage there is a link to “Other Pro GE Blogs” implying that yours is one, too. And there is no link to anti GE blogs (which would be a requisite if you really were committed to balanced representation). You even have a link to “Monsanto According to Monsanto” (the industry blog), but no link to the powerful documentary “The World According to Monsanto.” Given these facts, how can you really say that you are offering both sides? Your entry here doesn’t seem honest.

Anastasia and I both pounced on the comment, pointing out that nowhere in our entry to we “say we are not pro-GE,” and asked her to retract her statement and pledge not to engage in dirty politics. Making stuff up is totally not acceptable tactics (misreading isn’t very good either).  Later that day, she did just that, which I applaud her for. Let the contest be about who can gather the most support over the internet, not who can misunderstand the other side the most. Here is her response in full, which I selectively quoted yesterday (to address further misunderstandings without talking about the dishonesty claim).

I appreciate the responses to my comment and am grateful for the opportunity to discuss further. I apologize for my misunderstanding, but stand behind my sentiment that there is room for confusion based on the wording of your entry. You say here that with your site “Discussion is two-way,” but all the links you have up are pointing one way only: towards GE. I am sorry for saying that you present yourselves as “not pro GE,” because you’re right, you don’t say that anywhere. Based on your responses, it seems you agree with my comment that you are not about presenting both sides, and I appreciate that clarification. I think my confusion is understandable. Might I suggest that if you wanted your entry to be completely clear here, you could directly say that your site is pro GE. You’re absolutely right that I am the Executive Director of the Non-GMO Project, and as such take a strong interest in what other organizations are doing to educate and inform the public. We believe that people have the right to avoid GMOs if they want to (and they also have the right to eat them if they want to as long as it doesn’t negatively impact others). I think that a blog like yours could be a really useful complement to our labeling program IF it actually was a two-way discussion that gave just as much coverage to the cons as the pros. If your site did that, even I might vote for it! I join you in your pledge to be civil and respectful, thank you.

This morning, Biofortified got a huge plug from PZ Myers at Pharyngula, with Yum, genetically engineered plants! At about 8-8:30 in the morning (US Central Time, -5 GMT), our votes started to crawl up. Then they started to climb. Then they started to fly. Within an hour, we surpassed the Non-GMO Project, and rocketed upward with no signs of stopping. We were very pleased to see such a huge upwelling of support for our blog in this contest, and we could only wonder what the anti-GE folks that populate the Changemakers site and other interested parties would think. The Non-GMO Project is based in California (two hours later), so they probably had a bit of a surprise when they woke up in the morning!

GM Watch in the UK, however, was not pleased. It was simply not possible that we could get 100 votes in an hour without someone pulling the strings for us in an improper fashion. Only eighteen minutes, ahem: Eighteen Minutes after we took the lead, GM Watch posted these ‘Tweets’ to their Twitter account:

I didn’t notice them until an hour later, that GM Watch was accusing the “Biotech Industry” of “fixing the competition!” the only thing that could possibly explain our new votes was that Big Bad Biotech (cue B-movie scream) was somehow manipulating the contest from its sinister lair. Well, what was their evidence?

Biofortified – http://www.biofortified.org/ – is a blog run by some well known GM promoters, like Aussie heavyweight GM lobbyist, David Tribe, for example. It’s a blog the GM industry smiles on. Look, for example, at the links to biotech blogs on this Monsanto website: http://blog.monsantoblog.com/monsanto-according-to-monsanto/ and you’ll find not only Biofortified at the top of the list of ‘Biotech Blogs’ they recommend but links to several other pro-GM blogs by the people behind Biofortified (eg  GMO Pundit).

Fallacy of guilt-by-association, check.

The Council for Biotechnology Information is a GM industry front group – see its members such as Monsanto here:
http://www.whybiotech.com/about/members.asp

This group has been putting out the following messsage on Twitter: “Vote for Biofortified in Ashoka Changemakers contest”.

Yes, as Anastasia mentioned, the CBI twittered a “vote for Biofortified” message last week, long before we started to gain votes. I think I saw another one over the weekend, but that still doesn’t explain how this proves anything of the sort. They apparently didn’t notice that they endorsed us over a month ago on their blog, with no apparent humonguous effect. This still doesn’t seem to fit the facts.

A Monsanto PR operator has discreetly done the same and now the votes for Biofortified have suddenly exploded, more than doubling in a matter of hours in a completely unprecedented pattern.

It took us half a day to figure out what this ‘discreet’ PR operation was. Apparently, one of the folks in the Monsanto PR department plugged us in her Twitter account on Friday:

Interesting dialogue by science bloggers at Biofortified. Ag tweeps check it out & show support 4 science-based disc. http://bit.ly/3dl1EQ

Obviously, there must be a global conspiracy. As people have been pointing out, since when does posting a message to Twitter count as discreet?

The winner of the Chagemakers competition gets a cash prize of $1500 and a conversation with New York Times food writer, Michael Pollan, but above all cudos.

If you think the GM industry trying to fix this competition stinks, then please vote for one of the anti-GM candidates in the Changemakers contest.

Something sure stinks, and it’s coming from GM Watch. I immediately sent them a message asking them to retract their outrageous claims and pledge not to continue these gutter politics. And when I was done with that, I got on the phone and called out to California – Surely the Non-GMO Project would join me in condemning GM Watch’s tactics?

Megan Westgate answered the phone, and we had a pleasant conversation for about 7-8 minutes about GM Watch’s claims, and about the contest. She sure seemed surprised about the recent voting, and said she could understand how they would suspect such a thing, and finally agreed with me to ask GM Watch not to make such baseless claims. I also explained that when my website stats update tonight that I can send her the data about hits to show how many people were coming from our supporters to remove all doubt about voting shenanigans. Although I have no evidence that Biotech companies were not fixing the vote, more importantly GM Watch has no evidence that they are.

While I was reading the part about Biofortified being run by well-known GM promoters, I joked, “I’m not well-known!” Megan laughed and said, “Now you are!”

When news of this sudden reaction reached PZ, he went and posted a second post cheekily wondering where his check from Monsanto got to, and re-emphasizing the ongoing contest. GM Watch’s shallow attempt to muster votes against us by making things up did not go unnoticed.

Although they did not directly accuse us or anyone else of “cheating,” the definition of “fixing” a contest is “to influence the actions, outcome, or effect of by improper or illegal methods.” So although it is not identical to an accusation of cheating, it is very very close, in that the only out is that the votes were obtained ‘improperly,’ whatever that means in this case. Just for the sake of argument, lets say every employee of Monsanto voted for us in the contest today, would that actually be improper or breaking the rules? And strangely focusing on David Tribe in the attempt to tie us all to the ‘industry’ does attack us indirectly. I’m not sure if they should apologize to us, to the ‘industry,’ or if I should instead thank them for giving us a timely example of how little fact-checking GM Watch is capable of? (See how easily Google finds PZ’s post)

What else have they written that has no basis in fact?

We do our best on this blog and on our own blogs to be as open and honest as we can be, to describe scientific issues to the best of our knowledge and to show you how we got that information with references. We are open to criticisms and will correct mistakes if they are pointed out. It is ironic that the day after I wrote about various sources not checking their facts that our vote surge would be hit by a similar fact-free claim from another such site. A vote for Biofortified is a vote for honesty and open debate, and a vote against cheesy gutter politics.

Thank you everyone who has linked to us and voted for us, we feel like a part of a large community of science bloggers and blog fans! It is not over yet, so if you haven’t yet voted please take a couple minutes to navigate through the Changemakers site and vote for us. At the time of posting, we are at 654 votes to their 267. Let’s see if we can hit 1,000 by Wednesday!

I wonder, will GM Watch remain linked as a reliable source on the Non-GMO Project website?

Despite the fact that Biofortified is maintained by students and professors on a volunteer basis, and the fact that none of us are compensated by any company or organization for our blogging efforts, GM Watch has decided that we are “a blog run by some well known GM promoters”. I don’t know if using peer-reviewed evidence to make decisions about genetic engineering counts as promotion, but it’s nice to be well known!

GM Watch seems to be upset that Biofortified is currently ahead in the GMO: Risk or Rescue competition at Ashoka Changemakers. They claim that tweets to vote for us by industry caused our abrupt increase in votes, but that’s actually not the case at all.

A simple search on Twitter for “Biofortified” shows that my friend Mike tweeted about us 4 days ago. Then, the Council for Biotechnology Information and Mica from Monsanto tweeted about us 3 days ago, back when were were still behind in votes. It wasn’t until this morning when a truly well known blogger and scientist helped us out with a mention that our votes started to increase. Subsequent mentions by other well known skeptic and/or scientist personalities have kept our vote count going up all day!

Going by this evidence, one could argue that we are a scientist-backed blog, not an industry backed blog, which I think really says something about us. The fact that GM Watch lies rather than engaging in dialog really says something too.

Thanks to everyone who’s voted, and please continue to ask your friends and colleagues to support a science-based discussion of genetic engineering. They can find instructions on how to navigate Changemaker’s site right here on Biofortified.

Is anyone else bothered by the fact that our primary competition is actually industry connected but their supporters are making up industry connections for Biofortified? I guess it all depends on which industry you’re involved with (or supposedly involved with).

One of the reasons why we started a group blog to talk about plant genetics and food is because of the many opportunities it allows for dialogue, of several kinds.

First, it allows scientists to start talking about their work and the work of others in a manner that people without a background in genetics can access. Most people in this country, and many around the world, have access to a computer that is internet-capable and can read about it. Scientific Journals are the primary go-to place for the latest science and the most complete summaries of knowledge and issues, but these are often behind a registration wall that limits its access to only a small part of the population. On a science blog such as Biofortified new research can be presented where almost anyone can access it, and in a language common to non-scientists.

But more importantly, it allows those members of the public to be able to respond with comments, criticisms, and write their own blog posts linking back. Now the one-way flow of information can be two-way, which is how most people discuss issues they find important. This is the second type of dialogue that we hope to encourage.

Third, dialogue between scientists who agree on these topics can also occur in a place such as Biofortified. We currently have four bloggers who are scientists lending our time and energy to writing what we each independently think about the field. But now with an open forum to bounce ideas back and forth, it allows for new opportunities for us to discover things that we each hadn’t considered, and collaborate on turning those new ideas into reality.

Fourth, scientists who disagree can be a part of this dialogue. By email, I am currently interviewing a scientist who is critical of genetic engineering about a recent report they wrote. It is not yet finished, but there is ample opportunity for scientists who are supportive and critical of genetic engineering in agriculture to discuss issues on this blog. We often seek out guest posts from other people we can think of, but what many of you may not know is that anyone can write a guest post – all you have to do is contact us about your idea, and send it along! Even those critical of genetic engineering can apply – but so far there have been no takers.

I wish I could say that Biofortified is still in the lead in the Changemakers contest, but we are not. A last-minute entry appeared on Tuesday before the contest deadline: the Non-GMO project. This is an organization that was founded by non/anti-GE companies such as Nature’s Path, Seeds of Change, Organic Valley, etc. The purpose of the organization is to provide a means for producers to voluntarily label their products as not containing genetically engineered ingredients, and to have a certification system in place to guarrantee that to the people that really really don’t want to eat them. There are some good things to say about the Non-GMO project, which I will be certain to get to soon, as well as some questionable ones. But the function of this organization is not to raise the standard of dialogue about genetic engineering at all. If you ask them, it’s about democracy, but at the same time its very much about marketing. Whole Foods recently made a big announcement that they are using the non-GMO project’s standards to certify their products.

The executive director of the Non-GMO Project, Megan Westgate, has left a prolific number of comments on our entry page, raising various questions. I will talk about the most troublesome one in another post, but I would like to elevate part of this comment of hers about dialogue for everyone to see:

You say here that with your site “Discussion is two-way,” but all the links you have up are pointing one way only: towards GE. (…) I think that a blog like yours could be a really useful complement to our labeling program IF it actually was a two-way discussion that gave just as much coverage to the cons as the pros. If your site did that, even I might vote for it!

The links she was talking about are the links in the sidebar. Although her comment was trying to clear up a misunderstanding of a different kind, in this comment she made a different misunderstanding – linking to sites that play fast and loose with the facts to achieve a sort of ‘link-balance’ in the sidebar is not dialogue. Nor is inviting someone who doesn’t know what they are talking about to be a member of the blog – I would like to point everyone to my hilarous April-Fools prank this year, where the blog was taken over by a fictitious mouthpiece for Greenpeace and wrote several posts promoting common fallacies and falsehoods. I even had the people at the Monsanto Blog fooled for a while!

There is a reason why you don’t see a link to, say, Jeffrey Smith’s site – The Institute for Responsible Technology in the sidebar. When I set up the site initially, I realized that just sending people over to a site written by someone who frequently makes statements that have no basis in fact would be irresponsible – without having some information on this site to warn readers about this tendency. There are indeed a great many anti-GE sites out there, as well as a bunch of pro-GE sites that have not been added, but before we add them to the normal sidebar we want to take the time to see how responsible the writing of those sites is. This isn’t Crossfire.

(Why not add some ‘balance’ to the Scientific Journal section, too, anyone want to offer up some anti-scientific journals?)

For the first year, we’ve just been trying to blog, with our tight schedules as they are, but in the background we are sifting through resources getting ready to build up the extensive information resource pages we have only just begun. There’s going to be a lot more here than mere links!

It is not to say that there aren’t pros and cons involved in genetic engineering, or that we are ignoring the cons, either. But there is a difference between the real cons and the made-up cons. For example, Guest Blogger Raoul Adamchak wrote a post for us about the restrictions on research that come with the patents on GE crops. Anastasia has also written about issues with Genetic Use Restriction Technologies, and I have made critical comments about some stuff at the BIO conference as well. There are real issues involved in genetic engineering, and one of the things we hope to do here is move the discussion to discussing those issues that are real and are being ignored due to other distractions. If we were going to talk about whether or not GE soy caused soy allergies to skyrocket in the UK, that would fall under a different category (and post) – Debunking.

To close in talking about dialogue, I would like to point out that we have recently added a new way for people to talk about these and other issues – the Biofortified Forum! Anyone can register and start a discussion about whatever they want. This is something that you will not see on the non-GMO project website, nor Jeffrey Smith’s operation.

Case-in-point: NJ Jaeger, Smith’s PR person, has a blog, and when I posted a comment that demonstrated that what she was saying in her blog post was demonstrably false – it was deleted. So I tried again, this time saving a screenshot. (Hover for the date.)

Days later, I checked back, and my comment was gone again.

Tell me, who is committed to dialogue here? I take it as a compliment that Megan Westgate is holding Biofortified to a higher standard than her own organization, or those it links to.

The current vote tally is as follows: Biofortified is at 66 votes, and the Non-GMO project is at 150 votes. The voting ends Wednesday at 6pm Eastern time, so there is still time to turn this around! Go here to register, and here to vote for Biofortified in the name of dialogue. For more details, see Vote for Biofortified.

THE introduction of a Genetically Modified (GM) wheat variety with frost tolerance could potentially flood the world wheat market and drastically lower its price and profitability, according to Network of Concerned Farmers WA spokesperson Julie Newman.

“Our competitors will actually fare much better if we bring in GM wheat, because we can grow frost-tolerant crops now but they can’t because of the cold snaps,” she said.

“If you invent a GM wheat variety that has frost tolerance, it will open up all of the rich farming area in Russia and the Ukraine, and there will be a major glut of wheat on the world market.

“It would almost double global production and that means our wheat would be worth a fraction of the price.”

She said a clear set of rules needed to be established to ensure non-GM farmers were protected and retained their right of choice to not grow it.

“The reason you grow a crop is because you want to sell it, but if you can’t sell it, why grow it?

“There’s not much point growing GM wheat if it can’t be sold, because you will make a loss.

“Now that wouldn’t be so bad if it only affected the growers who choose to grow it, but the losses will also be forced upon the other farmers who don’t want to grow it.

“Bringing in GM wheat will force losses on everyone who grows conventional wheat.”

Let me get this straight: Julie Newman is worried that if a variety of wheat is genetically engineered to resist frost, then previously wheat-free northern areas would be able to grow this staple. And this is bad?

According to Newman, an increase in wheat production worldwide is a bad thing not because it will lower the price of wheat – it is bad because it will lower the price of non-GE wheat. Lowering the price of GE wheat is ok, but if it so much as drops the price per bushel one penny – it’s infringing on our rights!

This doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. I have read it no less than ten times, and I still cannot understand her reasoning. If you were to improve wheat to be more frost-tolerant through conventional breeding, that would also pose the same ‘threat’ of increased production and depressed prices. This would make it more difficult for other wheat farmers to economically choose wheat as a good crop to grow. It would not force farmers in non-frosty places to grow the frost-resistant wheat, any more or less than those farmers would be forced to grow a genetically engineered equivalent. There is no change in the ‘right’ not to grow the improved wheat whatsoever.

Faced with lower prices, wheat farmers may choose to grow something else to stay profitable. Note the key word: Choose. If a wheat farmer really wants to grow wheat when it is no longer profitable for them, they can do that, conventional or otherwise. But as the spokesperson for an anti-GE organization, the remedy for this future issue is to prop up local conventional wheat farmers as a special category to keep them afloat. No, not to prop up all local wheat farmers, only the conventional non-GE ones.

Take it out of context of the anti-GE argument, such as with the hypothetical conventionally-bred frost-tolerant wheat I mentioned above, and it is absurd. Or how about another thought-experiment: Let’s say someone finds a fertilizer or growing method that boosts yield – and some farmers don’t feel like using it. Should they be granted price supports to keep them in business while other farmers produce more? Or if a futuristic advanced organic production system produced twice as much yield as conventional farms, would it make any sense to subsidize farmers that just don’t feel like making the switch?

Under the surface of this plan there are several real issues at play. This is coming from an Australian organization, founded by 8 farmers, half of them who grow wheat. (I could find no information on total membership, if there are any more members than these 8.) And Newman is worried that farmers in Ukraine and Russia will start to produce a lot more wheat and drive Australian farmers to something else. (Or to GE wheat) It is difficult to tell what kind of rules Newman is talking about. She may be arguing for a government subsidy to elevate the price of Australia-grown wheat to combat increased production in other countries. This is pretty standard international politics when it comes to agriculture. Or it may instead be a suggestion for some sort of tariff, ban, or other way of blocking the slightly-more-than-hypothetical wheat from Asia from depressing the Australian market.

But this is coming from a group of farmers that is opposed to genetic engineering, so it takes two special twists in addition to the international issue. The first is that the support must be for non-GE wheat only. As the wheat farmers who founded the organization probably do not plan to grow GE wheat themselves, it is a self-serving advocacy in addition to promoting their cause. And in this case they would be using the potential for another nation to flood the market as an excuse to specifically benefit non-GE wheat farmers.

The second twist is of a form that I have begun to recognize in the international discussions over GE wheat – the tool of genetic engineering for crop improvement is being made a tool for international agricultural struggles that don’t necessarily have anything to do with genetic engineering per se. This is problematic because we need laws and regulations concerning GE crops to be based on scientific and ethical guidelines, not price protectionism. If it is necessary to support the price of local wheat in your country, do it and don’t drag this technology into that battle.