Glusosino-What?

There has been considerable interest in investigating the composition of foods to determine what parts of them can contribute to our health. (And what detracts from it too.)  Broccoli and other cruciferous vegetables have garnered considerable attention for their effects on the development of cancer. Research has revealed an important class of compounds called Glucosinolates, particularly one known as Glucoraphanin. When this sulfur-containing compound is metabolized by a plant enzyme called Myrosinase, it becomes one of two different compounds: Sulforaphane and Sulforaphane Nitrile. These two Isothiocyanates have been found to have preventative effects against cancer, and Sulforaphane is by far the more potent of the two. And this year, an important paper found that even the precursor, Glucoraphanin, also has important effects.

I apologize for the dizzying array of chemical names. So let me see if I can make them easier to understand. Glucosinolates include many similar kinds of compounds, and Glucoraphanin at the top of the picture here is one example. It gets the Gluco- from having a glucose sugar molecule bonded to it, which is that ring on the right hand side. Isothiocyanates are another class of compounds, and the main example is Sulforaphane. You can distinguish them by that N=C=S group on the Sulforaphane above. There are many Glucosinolates and Isothiocyanates important for this topic, so rather than bring up so many names I’ll only talk about the groups (end in -ates) and the two specific ones I mentioned (Glucoraphanin and Sulforaphane both have -raph- in them).

How do they work? Well, there is a huge amount of research on this topic, and while I could send you on a journey through a google or PubMed search, there are a few clear things that we know. Broadly speaking, cancer is uncontrolled cell growth that usually happens with DNA is damaged, but there are other causes as well (such as cervical cancer being caused by papillomaviruses). Chemicals that damage DNA are known as mutagens, as they can alter the string of letters in the DNA to read differently, and since the mutations they cause can also cause cancer, they are also called carcinogens. We encounter carcinogens in our everyday lives, from artificial chemicals we’ve produced for one reason or another, to the oxidative stress caused by normal cellular respiration, to the UV light naturally emitted by the Sun. Carcinogens are also found in our food.

Yes, our food produces carcinogens. More specifically, there are chemicals naturally present in our food, that when eaten, can become carcinogens. Since plants cannot run away from their predators, they have evolved to defend themselves using chemical and biological weapons, while animals have evolved enzymes and other ways to protect against those defenses. We produce a host of enzymes in our livers that detoxify chemicals that we eat in our food every day, and they are classified as Phase I and Phase II ‘xenobiotic’ metabolizing enzymes (there are also Phase III but we won’t get into that). Phase I enzymes take a foreign chemical and add or expose a functional group that Phase II enzymes can then add a molecule to, which allows the modified chemical to be excreted from the body. However, sometimes the chemicals produced by Phase I enzymes turn out to be carcinogens, which can cause damage before the Phase II enzyme is able to safely destroy it. Some chemicals that are known to have carcinogenic activity are among the Coumarins, Flavonoids, Glucosinolates, Isothiocyanates, and Phenols found in many plants – including broccoli.

Some of these compounds can also affect the activity of Phase I and Phase II xenobiotic enzymes, and often both. A chemical that induces the first class might cause more carcinogens to be produced, while one that induces the second class would more quickly eliminate them from the body before they can cause damage. Sulforaphane was discovered in 1992 to selectively induce the second, and not the first. And the more Sulforaphane you consume, the more it induces this activity. What this means is that consuming Sulforaphane will increase your body’s ability to protect itself against many forms of cancer. Indeed, and although some early research on Glucoraphanin suggested it might be harmful because it induces Phase-I enzymes, the new 2011 paper indicates that it upregulates cytochrome p450 along with Phase-II enzymes and therefore also contributes to the anti-cancer properties of broccoli itself.

You may have noticed that since Sulforaphane is an Isothiocyanate, and Glucoraphanin is a Glucosinolate, that they are members of two of the classes of compounds I mentioned above that have known carcinogens among them. Breeding for enhanced levels of one could affect the levels of others, so there is a great deal more complexity to this issue than I have described here. In addition, some Phase-I enzymes eliminate carcinogens, and some Phase-II enzymes create carcinogens as well. There are other compounds present in cruciferous and other vegetables that contribute in other ways as well. But on the whole it is true that these compounds have a beneficial effect, despite these complexities. And since Sulforaphane is produced from Glucoraphanin in cruciferous vegetables such as broccoli – then eating broccoli that is higher in Glucoraphanin will protect against cancer even more.

To top it off, a paper published this year found that Sulforaphane also inhibits the activity of two enzymes in cancer cells, leading to cell death. So its benefits may not be limited to preventing, but perhaps fighting certain kinds of cancers.

Breeding Better Broccoli

Now the question becomes, how can we get broccoli on our dinner plates that has more of these beneficial compounds? There is considerable variation in the amounts of Glucoraphanin and other Glucosinolates in broccoli, and this review paper by E.H. Jeffrey et al discusses what is known about this variation. They show that Glucoraphanin and other Glucosinolates can vary from as little as one tenth to as much as three times the amount found in your average broccoli. Not all broccoli is bred the same.

Differences in the levels of these compounds can be caused by genetics, environment, interactions between the two, and post-harvest storage and processing. It turns out that in one study for Glucoraphanin and other similar aliphatic Glucosinolates, 60% of this variation is genetic, while only 5% is environmental. 10% is due to an interaction between genetics and the environment, which is like saying that one variety makes more in one environment, while another variety makes more in another environment. Genetics comes out as a clear winner if you want to improve the anti-cancer properties of broccoli, and where there is genetic variation for a trait like this, a plant breeder can select for plants that have that trait and improve it over generations.

Plant breeders at the John Innes Center in Norwich, England, and Monsanto’s vegetable seeds division used the genetic variation for Glucoraphanin levels in wild broccoli to breed for higher levels in a modern, commercial broccoli. This is accomplished by crossing cultivated and wild plants, and in successive generations selecting for plants that have higher levels of Glucoraphanin as well as the traits you want in a modern broccoli. They report that by testing in 23 locations against other leading commercial broccoli varieties, that their new Beneforté broccoli variety contains an average of about 2.7 times as much Glucoraphanin as your average broccoli. Since the effects increase with dosage, this means that you would be expected to gain more cancer-protective benefits by eating it. How much benefit, however, is not clear.

The environment it is grown in and what happens to the broccoli after it is harvested still matters, however. As Glucosinolates contain sulfur, fertilizing the soil with sulfur can quite understandably boost their levels. And while organic growing methods can affect some minor Glucosinolates both positively and negatively, Glucoraphanin is unchanged by this practice. How the broccoli is stored and processed also affects what levels remain in the vegetable, and finally, how you prepare it also matters. The enzyme Myrosinase that converts Glucoraphanin into Sulforaphane does this when the broccoli is chopped and chewed, but only if the broccoli is uncooked. Cooking destroys the enzyme’s activity, and also reduces the levels of Glucosinolates. Either eat them raw, or blanch them briefly! And since Myrosinase activity can be affected by the climate and season, there can still be an important environmental factor to this trait.

And one final note about breeding. While Glucoraphanin is the most abundant Glucosinolate in broccoli, it is part of a complex pathway and a complex trait, so breeding for the levels of one compound may affect levels of the others. The best breeding program will look at a broader array of Glucosinolates and other effects that breeding, environment, storage and packaging will have on the final product. Indeed, since some genotypes will do better in particular environments than others, and some may hold onto their chemicals during storage better than others, these downstream effects can inform the breeding process significantly.

Other genetic tools are helping to develop traits such as these, as this paper demonstrates that you can predict levels of Glucosinolates you will get when you made hybrid broccoli.

The Beneforté website indicates that this particular variety of broccoli is grown in a particular location in California, rather than in many places around the country. While you may not like the idea of produce shipped thousands of miles, this does mean that they have essentially fixed the Genotype by Environment interaction. In non-breeder terms, this means that they picked the best environment for the best variety of broccoli to get the highest levels of Glucoraphanin, amongst other traits. This suggests that they also took the environmental contributions into account when developing the Beneforté. The entire process took them about ten years.

While the exact amount of benefit to be had by eating the Beneforté broccoli is unclear, it does appear that it is likely to help in the area of cancer prevention. Keep in mind I am no dietitian, nutrition researcher, nor doctor, however the prevailing scientific literature indicates that it should. It would be nice to see some data published on this and other broccoli varieties, more information about other Glucosinolates in this variety, and perhaps a feeding model as well, but if I saw the Beneforté and I had the cash to get it, I probably would. The story of its breeding is almost reason enough besides the Sulforaphane!

Andy Bellatti

Back to Bellatti

Now that you know all you ever wanted to know about Broccoli and what we know about how its chemical composition prevents cancer, it is time to return to Andy Bellatti’s ill-informed piece purporting to “Bust” the Beneforté Broccoli.

The first point that Bellatti takes issue with is with regard to growing conditions.

“Similar growing conditions” — there’s an interesting tidbit. For all we know, then, Beneforté’s glucopharanin content could pale in comparison to that of organic broccoli.(sic)

Actually, if Bellatti did his research, he would know that organic growing methods do not significantly affect the levels of Glucoraphanin (which he misspells as glucopharanin), as I indicated above. The growing methods described on the Beneforté website appear to be describing climatic factors rather than the organic-conventional dimension. And it is quite odd that he takes issue with a straightforward and scientific manner of studying and reporting differences under similar growing conditions, which is necessary for comparison. But rather than try to find out the facts and report an analysis of them, he goes off the organic health halo to make what is an empty quip.

Next, he criticizes the focus on Glucoraphanin.

Of course, this obsession with glucoraphanin is a silly and myopic distraction. Broccoli, by virtue of being a vegetable, is healthful and does not need to be improved upon. None of the myriad of chronic health issues affecting millions of Americans are due to “faulty broccoli” with low levels of glucoraphanin.

Again, proper research would have prevented him from making a categorical double-error such as this. Being a vegetable does not automatically make something healthy. What is a vegetable but an edible non-reproductive part of a plant? Being healthy is not part of its definition. But more importantly, his ignorance of plant genetics betrays the second error. There is genetic variation for healthful aspects of vegetables, which means that you can have vegetables that are more or less healthy than each other, all on account of genetics. As I put it above, no two broccoli’s are the same. He is enjoying vegetables that are the result of a long plant breeding process of genetic improvement, and his suggestion that ‘This is as good as it gets’ is way off. In the case of broccoli – given that it is the same species as cauliflower, cabbage, and Brussels sprouts which vary widely in their content of Glucoraphanin, that means that the very broccoli trait in question is likely the result of human improvement already. Plant breeding is a continual process of constant improvement that should not stop.

He has also contradicted himself here – by suggesting that organic may be an improvement over conventional (which it is not in this aspect), he is suggesting that vegetables as most people eat them can and should be improved upon. If the mere virtue of being a vegetable was enough, then conventional non-organic broccoli should be enough for him.

Chia, hemp, flax. "Magic bullets" of Omega-3.

Now I will address the more important point, and that is that focusing on Glucoraphanin “is a silly and myopic distraction.” Granted there are more complexities to the cancer-preventative effects of broccoli compounds as I described above, but Glucoraphanin is still the most important part of it. But, some people have food philosophies that focus more on changing what specific foods people eat rather than changing the composition of those foods. To understand his comment in context of his food philosophy, I took some time to read his blog.

He is a vegan, who in his own words “approaches nutrition from a whole-foods, plant-centric framework.” Still, I do not see how improving the genetics of broccoli does not fit into this philosophy. You are still eating a whole plant food. Perhaps, still, the specific composition of those foods does not matter to him?

However, his blog posts reveal a different story. He is in fact quite concerned with the specific composition of foods, ranging from listing the nutrients in each of his posted recipes, to complaining how he had to learn about how food service establishments work instead of the compositional differences of chia, hemp, and flax seeds. As a matter of fact these seeds show up an inordinate number of times in his recipes – and I daresay that “none of the myriad of chronic health issues affecting millions of Americans are due to not eating enough chia, hemp, and flax seeds.” Of course it would be silly to expect these seeds to be magic bullet cure-alls, but that is the standard that he held the broccoli to, so fair’s fair.

So it becomes very clear that Andy Bellatti is highly concerned with specific nutritional compositions of and differences between foods. In fact, the hypocrisy reaches levels that will bust everyone’s irony meters. While Bellatti tries to give enhanced levels of Glucoraphanin in the Beneforté broccoli a bad ‘raph, he is quite delighted to advertise such chemicals as important reasons to eat cruciferous vegetables in the first place!

In this blog post extolling the virtues of broccoli rabe, Bellatti says the following,

For example, it offers high amounts of isothiocyanates, compounds that fiercely battle carcinogens in the body.  High isothiocyanate consumption has been shown to significantly reduce risk of developing breast, esophageal, lung, and prostate cancers.

Compare that to what he said about the Beneforté:

Of course, this obsession with glucoraphanin is a silly and myopic distraction.

Andy Bellati: Eat it for the Glucoraphanin! Err...

Apparently Bellatti is quite familiar with silly and myopic distractions himself. He gives completely opposite opinions of these compounds depending upon the end goal of his argument. It is apparent from his blog that his food philosophy includes focusing in on these nutrients, and so by rejecting the nutrient-focus of this broccoli, he is also rejecting what seems to be his own nutritional philosophy.

Politics, Politics, Politics

He then proceeds to reveal what I think is the real reason for his distaste with the Beneforté, that it is made by Monsanto.

The biggest irony of this product lies in Monsanto’s claim that Beneforté “help[s] maintain your body’s defenses against the damage of environmental pollutants and free radicals.”

Environmental pollutants? As in, the ones that have have increased exponentially as a result of genetic engineering?

He cites The Organic Center’s 13-year report on pesticide use, which we have already discussed here and noted that it compared pesticides of wildly different impacts on human health and the environment as being equivalent by weight. In other words, one pound of a nasty herbicide such as atrazine equals one pound of roundup, which is far less nasty. Genetically engineered herbicide tolerant crops have caused a shift in herbicide use from sprays such as atrazine to safer ones such as glyphosate – which are physically heavier have a lower environmental impact quotient (EIQ) per pound, so The Organic Center reports it as an increase in herbicide by weight even though it is a safer one. The study’s author, Charles Benbrook, is well aware of this problem. The report also demonstrates that GE has reduced insecticide use, but minimizes the actual impact of this by subtracting the pounds from the total. His approach makes math easy, but misleads about the overall picture.

Andy Bellatti also cites the Environmental Working Group page on herbicides, which only reinforces this point. What examples of nasty herbicides do they use to talk about health effects? Why, atrazine! One of the one’s that genetic engineering has replaced with roundup on many farms. While he was trying to catch Monsanto in an irony, he fell into one himself.

And, above all, let’s not allow Monsanto to get away with gimmicky healthwashing.

The real reason that Andy Bellatti set out to criticize this broccoli variety was not because it was a bad idea, but was because it was an idea held by a company that he dislikes. Actually, considering that Monsanto only just bought Seminis Vegetable Seeds in 2005 to form the company’s vegetable seeds division, it was probably an idea already set in motion before Monsanto had anything to do with it.

That’s a ‘Raph

Rather than base an opinion of the Beneforté broccoli variety on a consistent nutritional philosophy, a consideration of the scientific evidence, or even basic research that both his degrees in Journalism and Dietetics should have prepared him for, Bellatti decides to instead base it on his opinion of the company that is marketing it. How much of his dietary advice follows the same pattern, I am left wondering? Are clients hiring a dietitian or a food policy activist?

He completely missed an opportunity to discuss what we know and don’t know about Glucoraphanin and the precise details about how it interacts with our bodies, and then express an opinion about the relative merits of this improvement. But he rejected even the idea of learning anything about it before uttering a cynical burp of bad sulfurous broccoli breath.

There are more things to think about that I haven’t even gotten into. Would the promise of a greater benefit lead to more broccoli consumption, or perhaps less? Are there other interactions that this trait might have for better or for worse with people’s health? What standards ought there to be for health claims based on achievements in plant breeding? There is certainly room for discussion below, but I saw this as an opportunity for everyone to learn more about a health-oriented crop variety which is one of the first in many that are sure to come. The real facts about the biochemistry, genetics, breeding, and marketing are far more interesting to talk about.

The graph above shows the relative production of these major US row crops comparing the years 1993-1995 (just prior to the introduction of biotechnology enhanced crops) and 2008-10 (the most recent available data which covers a a span which comes 12-15 years after biotech.  Soybean production has expanded 47% in this time-frame while corn is up 58% (far more than the quantity now being diverted for biofuel).  Both of those crops are predominantly planted to “GMO” varieties, while the various segments of the wheat crop remain non-GMO.  Until 2004 it looked as if North American growers would also get to plant biotech wheat, but a vigorous campaign led by Greenpeace succeeded in blocking the technology.  Many major European and Japanese grain buyers were concerned about potential consumer push-back (based on Greenpeace efforts), so they made a coordinated threat to boycott all North American wheat exports if any commercial GMO wheat was planted in the US or Canada.  This was based on the “precautionary principle.”

The wheat industry, particularly the Canadian Wheat Board, asked Monsanto and Syngenta not to go ahead with their plans to sell the improved wheats, and so those often vilified companies put their programs on the shelf at the request of their customer base.  GreenPeace then declared Victory.

The Traits That Didn’t Happen

Monsanto had been developing a “Roundup Ready” version of wheat which would have helped the wheat growers who have grass weed issues.  It was also shown to increase yields and it would have aided in conversion to no-till, and  increased genetic purity for specialty uses.  Syngenta was developing wheat with resistance to a disease called Fusarium Head Scab.  That particular fungus is difficult to control with fungicide sprays, but it can severely hurt yields, and it can diminish the value of what grain is harvested by contaminating it with the mycotoxin, DON or “vomitoxin.”  A major reason that farmers include less wheat in their crop rotations than would be optimal is because of the risks associated with this disease.  The fact that these traits would have increased grower income and reduced a dangerous toxin in the food supply were listed in the Greenpeace internal literature of the day, not as “pros,” but as “campaigning challenges.”

What The Farmers Thought

In the late 1990s, I had the opportunity to sit down with dozens of wheat farmers in Kansas, North Dakota, Minnesota, Indiana and Kentucky to talk about these coming traits.  These growers had experience with GMO soy and corn and were very much looking forward to these new products.  I was testing various “business models” for how the traits would be made available because, like soybeans, much of the wheat crop is planted with “Farmer Saved Seed.”

With non-hybrid crops, farmers have the option to simply save some of their previous grain harvest to use as seed.  Typically they buy new, “certified” seed every few years.  With Soybeans, Monsanto took the risky and controversial step of getting growers to sign a “technology agreement” in which they promised not to save the biotech seed but rather to purchase it new every year.  I, and many in the industry doubted that growers would be willing to do this or that the system could be enforced well enough to prevent free-loaders.  After a few, high-profile lawsuits, the new system was widely accepted and no mainstream soybean farmer even questions it today.

Much More Was Lost Beyond The Traits

Before biotech, the soybean seed industry existed mainly as a “price of doing business” for corn seed companies.  Much of the breeding advancement was still happening in Universities (though with precarious funding).  When soybeans became an every-year purchase, the overall investment in the improvement of that crop went up dramatically.  This helped extend the range of the crop into colder Northern regions and dryer Western areas.  We are also now beginning to see the pay-off of the investment in genomics and Marker Assisted Selection – biotechnology enabled updates on “traditional breeding.”  Roundup Ready soybeans were not a “yield trait” as such, but they were far more convenient for busy farmers and easier to “no-till” farm.  So now both soybeans and corn had become much more attractive options for farmers, and in many regions the “loser” has been wheat.

The Wheat That Was Not To Be

The expansion of corn and soy production in the first chart represents a combination of factors.  Growers planted more of their land to those crops, often using their better fields.  They often grew these crops with greater inputs of fertilizer, water because the economic risk was smaller.  In most areas there was a distinct change in the long term trends for these crops that corresponds to the pre-biotech era (before 1996) and the post-biotech era (after 1996).

One way to calculate the real “cost” of the Greenpeace wheat victory is to extrapolate what would have been the production of wheat if the earlier trend lines are extrapolated to 2010.  To do this I took the data from the USDA-NASS at the Crop Reporting District level (usually 9 districts per state) from the years 1984 to 2010.  This allowed me to fit lines for each crop/district covering the Pre-biotech years of 1984-1995 and then a similar 12 year time frame from 1999-2010 as a Post-biotech era.  By comparing what level of production each trend for predicted for 2010, the impact of the non-biotech nature of wheat in a biotech world could be estimated.  Example trend comparisons are shown below for single district examples of corn, soybeans and winter wheat.  Finally those differences are summed for all the districts where data is available over the 27-year time span (238 for corn, 173 for soybeans, 191 for winter wheat, 39 for spring wheat and 6 for durum wheat).

An example of one of many areas where corn productivity increased faster after the introduction of biotechnology through a combination of more acreage being planted and yield progress increasing.

A very typical example of an area where farmers began to plant a great deal more soy when it was improved through biotechnology.

An example of an area where wheat planting and intensity dropped in the biotech era relative to earlier trends.

Many Variables but Major Overall Outcomes

Exactly how trends changed for each crop and region varied widely, but in very few cases did the pre-biotech trend continue unchanged. For every crop some areas were up and some down, but the net effect was an overall shrinkage of US wheat production at a time when global wheat demand is constantly increasing.  The chart below shows that the biotechnology enhanced crop options saw substantial production increases vs earlier trends, + 437 million bushels/year for soy and a whopping + 4.03 billion bushels for corn. Winter wheat overall declined slower than it had prior to biotechnology for a net trend change of +35 million bushels.  Spring wheat, which was much more in the geographic path and time of year of the soy and corn “locomotives,” lost 315 million bushels of “potential” production.

Would Things Have Been Different With Biotech Wheat?

Would that have been different if Greenpeace didn’t “win?”  It is difficult to know because there were other factors in that time frame such as the Freedom to Farm Act of 1996 which changed the nature of government crop subsidies and set-aside programs.  Delays in biotech trait approvals for import to the EU and Japan altered global market dynamics as did the wide-spread pirating of Roundup Ready soybeans by South American farmers.

Would Monsanto and Syngenta have cross-licensed their wheat traits to allow an attractive package for farmers?  Would the transition away from a “saved seed” market for wheat have offset the declining public breeding support which continues even today?  It is impossible to know, but the wheat industry has now decided that they don’t want to be denied a technological advantage again.  National wheat grower associations in the US, Canada and Australia agreed to a simultaneous launch of any future GMO wheat so that the Europeans and Japanese could not blackmail them again.  Even so, it is likely to be at least a decade until that happens because the other thing that was lost in 2004 was the continuous years of breeding effort that it takes to incorporate a biotech trait in the complex world of wheat (winter, spring, red, white, hard, soft…..).

How Much Lost Wheat Is That?

The theoretical 315 million bushels of wheat not being produced as of 2010 represents 8.6 million metric tons (in the units of global trade).  That is roughly equivalent to the crop in each of the wheat producing countries Argentina, Egypt, or Italy.  It is more than the total wheat imports that go to each of these major, net wheat importing countries (Japan 5.8MMt, Algeria 6.9MMt, Egypt 8.3MMt, Italy 5.4 MMt, Indonesia 4.5 MMt, Brazil 6 MMt, Iran 5.2 MMt).

Putting This In The Context Of The Current Global Food Price Spike

We just finished seeing a severe spike in prices on the global food trade scene in 2007/8 and a new spike is underway and appears to be continuing - particularly for cereals like wheat which is now within 3% of the previous record (see chart below).  India is considering a wheat export ban this year.  Global wheat demand is expected to double by 2050.

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Then, just to add insult to injury, the US congress cut funding for the Global Wheat Genomics Center at Kansas State .  That happens as a new strain of the dreaded Wheat Stem Rust pathogen is threatening wheat crops in more countries every year.

We probably won’t ever be able to make up for what has been lost for one of the world’s most important human food crops.  The catch-up on biotechnology will not be in time to help many poor people survive or to prevent the political instability implications of food shortages.  These are the true “Costs of Precaution,” but they will not be borne by the Greenpeace activists in rich nations.  These very real costs will be borne by poor families in places where wheat can’t be successfully grown.  Greenpeace was happy to take credit for stopping this technology.  I wonder if they are willing to take credit for these consequences.

Norm Borlaug said:  ”If you desire peace, cultivate justice, but at the same time cultivate the fields to produce more bread; otherwise there will be no peace.”

I’d go with Norm’s “Peace” agenda, not that of Greenpeace.

Corporate involvement in public health is a sensitive topic, but one I am largely against.  It is pretty clear that corporations usually get the benefit of bettering their brand image (which is often largely unhealthy processed products) at a low cost of sponsorship of health campaigns.  See plenty of great/unfortunate examples on blogs such as Food Politics, Weighty Matters, and Appetite For Profit, or my own criticisms of the ADA/Hershey partnership as a specific case.  Such relationships, as well as how government aid alters our attentions on health matters have been also discussed in length in the literature (see this table for examples).

But what about the private nonprofit organizations pouring money into public health promotion? How much do personnel in these foundations that often overlap with public corporations influence public health decisions, and might these relationships sometimes prevent objective divisions of funding?

This is difficult to answer and less studied, but a new paper in PLoS Medicine by David Stuckler, Sanjay Basu, and Martin McKee* titled “Global Health Philanthropy and Institutional Relationships: How Should Conflits of Interest Be Addressed?” has examined some of these relationships and highlighted some worrisome connections between food (and pharmaceutical) corporations and the major nonprofit foundations from information gathered from the public domain. They suggest such potential conflicts of interest be scrutinized similar to direct corporate involvements in public health, even though their missions are stated to be philanthropic instead of profit oriented.

Follow the Money

Of 100,000+ private nonprofit foundations in the US, controlling about $569 billion in assets, the authors analyzed the money trail of the top 5 “wealthiest US private grant-making foundations contributing to global health funding”: the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (which they note has more money than the entire World Health Organization budget), the Ford Foundation, the J Paul Getty Trust, the W K Kellogg Foundation, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. Their summary table can be found below (click for original):

As a definition for a potential conflict of interest, they use the World Health Organization’s (emphasis mine):

A conflict of interest can occur when a Partner’s ability to exercise judgment in one role is impaired by his or her obligations in another role or by the existence of competing interests. Such situations create a risk of atendency towards bias in favor of one interest over another or that the individual would not fulfill his or her duties impartially and in the best interest of the RBM Partnership. A conflict of interest may exist even if no unethical or improper act results from it. It can create an appearance of impropriety that can undermine confidence in the individual, his/her constituency or organization. Both actual and perceived conflicts of interest can undermine the reputation and work of the Partnership. [23]

They answer these following questions in some detail for these foundations (mainly the Gates’), which I summarize and heavily quote from below:

In the sociology and political science literature, aid organizations have typically been studied by examining at least three sets of observable questions about powerand financial relationships, with the intent of ‘‘following the money’’ [33–39]: (i) Where does money come from and with what conditions?; (ii) Who decides? Who sits on the board of directors, and what are their histories, relationships, and interests?; and (iii) Who benefits from these decisions? Where are these funds distributed and which entities derive income from that expenditure?

(i) Where Does the Money Come From?

For The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the majority is from Bill Gates’ personal fortune and stock in Berkshire Hathaway.  Almost half is invested in corporate stock, which includes many food companies, and half of this is in Berkshire Hathaway, which is even more heavily invested in food companies.  See the distribution table below (click for original):

Warren Buffett has committed his Berkshire Hathaway shares to be gradually transferred to the Gates Foundation, thus it:

will soon be the largest stakeholder of Coca-Cola and Kraft in the world.

Among the 4 other foundations listed above have their money in similar companies:

The invested companies included, to name a few, Coca-Cola, Kellogg (a leading producer of snacks and breakfast foods andthe main investment of Kellogg Foundation), PepsiCo, Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline, McDonald’s, Nestle (a company with 6,000 brands mainly in food and beverage including coffee, water, chocolate, confectionery, ice cream, ‘‘health-care nutrition’’, and frozen foods, among others); NovoNordisk, YumBrands (the world’s largest restaurant company, operating Pizza Hut, KFC [Kentucky Fried Chicken], and Taco Bell, among others), Johnson & Johnson (main investment of Robert Wood Johnson Foundation), and Sanofi-Aventis, in addition to several mining, petrochemical, and alcohol companies.

The Ford Foundation, W K Kellogg, and Rockefeller foundations all directly or indirectly invest in tobacco corporations as well.  The Gates Foundation used to, but Bill and Melinda:

“… have defined areas in which the endowment will not invest, such as companies whose profit model is centrally tied to corporate activity that they find egregious. This is why the endowment does not invest in tobacco stocks.’’

However the authors note that:

The Foundation had invested in Philip Morris bonds prior to a New York Times report on the matter in the year 2000 [28].

If media attention is what forces a change, we can only hope this paper will be widely reported on and they will reconsider their investments in food companies that make ultra-processed products as well.  After all, the food industry increasingly parallels the tobacco industry.

(ii) Who Decides

As funding decisions in these foundations are private, we can only look at member relationships with corporations.  They authors note that the Gates Foundation’s policy for conflicts of interest for employees (emphasis mine):

states that an employee has a potential conflict of interest when “He or she or any member of his or her family may receive a financial or other significant benefit as a result of the individual’s position at the foundation; The individual has the opportunity to influence the foundation’s granting, business, administrative, or other material decisions in a manner that leads to personal gain or advantage; or The individual has an existing or potential financial or other significant interest which impairs or might appear to impair the individual’s independence in the discharge of their responsibilities to the foundation.’’

In light of the bolded sentence, it is especially disturbing that they do not appear to adhere to their own policies for board members, as:

Several of the Foundation’s members of the management committee, leadership teams, affiliates, and major funders are currently or were previously members ofthe boards or executive branches of several major food and pharmaceutical companies (see the commercial network of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in the interactive map tool at http://mapper.nndb.com/start/?map=12051; see also Figure S1 for more details), including Coca-Cola, Merck, Novartis, General Mills, Kraft, and Unilever (one of the largest global consumer goods companies owning product brands in food, beverage, and personal and home care), among others [59–62].

They dug deeper into the histories of some of these members:

The Foundation is described as ‘‘led by CEO Jeff Raikes and Co-chair William H. Gates Sr., under the direction of Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett.’’ Warren Buffett, the second-largest donor to the Foundation and a board member, was a member of the board of Coca-Cola from 1989–2006 (Figure S1; his son, Howard Buffett, is on the board of Coca-Cola Enterprises and ConAgra Foods [one of North America’s largest packaged food companies], which is invested in modern seed technology, as are other members of the board of Berkshire Hathaway). Warren Buffett is the chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway (and Bill Gates is a director on its board). Jeff Raikes, who replaced Patty Stonesifer in May 2008 (currently a senior advisor to the trustees), retired as the president of Microsoft business division to join the Foundation. Both Raikes and William Gates Sr. are on the board of Costco Wholesale Corporation (a membership warehouse club, selling bulk-packaged products at very high volume and low prices—the third largest retailer in the US).

These relationships get so convoluted when you look at the big, tangled web that results. And the authors used an interactive mapping tool called NNDB Mapper to do just this. Here is a static screenshot of their results. If you click on the image, you can zoom into the map, and each of the links can be expanded to represent in total thousands of people:

(iii) Who Benefits? Where Does the Money Go?

The bulk of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s financial transfers in global health have been to programs developing medical technologies [24]: more than 97% of its financial disbursements are directed to infectious diseases, and less than 3% to chronic noncommunicable diseases [16].

Only 3% go to diseases in which ultra-processed foods are associated with, yet these diseases are a bigger problem now than infectious diseases in low- and middle-income countries.

Several grants are linked to companies that are represented on the Foundation’s board among its investments. The Foundation has established partnerships with the Coca-Cola Company, which, in the words of the Foundation, are intended to‘‘create new market opportunities for local farmers whose fruit will be used for Coca Cola’s locally-produced and sold fruit juices’’ [63]. The program is a four-year, $11.5 million partnership for ‘‘mango and passion fruit farmers to participate in Coca-Cola’s supply chain for the first time,’’ with a $7.5 million grant provided by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to TechnoServe, $3 million provided by The Coca-Cola Company, and $1 million by bottling partner Coca-Cola Sabco. This could reflect the recent comments of Melinda Gates in a webcast, ‘‘What we can learn from Coke,’’ suggesting that government agencies and non governmental organizations (NGOs) could learn from the manufacturer to promote global health in low- and middle-income countries [64]. In addition, many of the Foundation’s pharmaceutical development grants may benefit leading pharmaceutical companies such as Merck and GlaxoSmithKline [24], for example via partnerships to test pneumonia and rotavirus vaccines (such as the ROTATEQ partnership and the Merck Vaccines network partnership with the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunizations network), experimental malaria vaccines (through Medicines for Malaria Venture, an NGO), cervical cancer vaccines (through PATH, anNGO, and Merck’s vaccine Gardasil), and HIV interventions (through the Africa Comprehensive HIV/AIDS partnership). Johnson & Johnson has entered a clinical partnership to develop new HIV-prevention technology, noting ‘‘the work between Johnson & Johnson and the Gates Foundation is a strong, strategic, comprehensive relationship’’ [65].

Investments in Coca-Cola, former/current board members with relationships to the foundation on Coca-Cola, and promoting developing nations to partner with Coca-Cola: clear conflicts of interest.  And that is just one of a likely great many examples.

What about Monsanto?

Monsanto is one of the companies the Gates Foundation invests in, but the authors specifically state in the discussion that they did not examine this closely closely. Luckily, Karl Haro von Mogel here at Biofortified wrote an excellent piece on the issue last year.  Be sure to read the discussion too- commenters even brought up the Foundation’s investments in food companies back then.

Conclusions

The authors are clear in the limitations of an analysis such as this; they can map the web of connections but cannot prove that they influence decision making.

They leave us with some strong statements and suggestions:

A private foundation clearly has the legal right to spend money however it wishes within the limits of the law; yet, in an environment where private foundations influence the future direction of, for example, what programs will be introduced into a foreign community, in a manner that does not necessarily involve directorship or voting from the community members themselves, it is reasonable to subject the decision-making processes of these entities to public debate, especially if these funds were to have otherwise been collected for public redistribution through federal taxation.

Possibilities to resolve some of these potentials for conflicts of interest put forth by the authors:

(1) Divestment.  Private foundations have been advised to not invest in companies that stand to profit from the tax-exempt foundation’s agenda or in those that produce products such as tobacco, salty foods, or sugary drinks that have well-established connections to global health epidemics [71]. Such investments may counter these foundations’ purposes of promoting global health. Similarly, foundations must be wary about investing in pharmaceutical and food and beverage companies that could gain market share and enhanced publicity, and could benefit as a result of the foundation’s grants. For example, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation held stock in Merck at a time when it developed partnerships with the African Comprehensive AIDS and Malaria Partnership and the Merck Company Foundation to test Merck products. As another instance, which may reflect aligning interests, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has played a leading role in promoting anti-tobacco products and maintains Smoking Cessation Leadership Centers and programs [72], although its endowment is mainly invested in Johnson & Johnson, a leading manufacturer of cessation products, and some board members have been represented on both the Foundation’s and the company’s boards [53].

(2) Transparency.  Given that there is a limited pool of specialist expertise that can be drawn upon, it is possible that situations may arise where some persons who sit on the boards of, or advise, philanthropic foundations, will also have links to corporations. It would be unreasonable to demand that foundations refuse to engage with those who have corporate links, so denying themselves the best advice in some fields. Many authors have stated that a solution to this issue is to adopt full disclosure, or transparency, and to ensure that all individuals on foundation boards recuse themselves from decisions related to their affiliate companies [16]. However, achieving transparency and appropriate recusals is not always easy. Indeed, while the information we collected to conduct this case study is all in the public domain (and thus transparent), it required considerable time and effort to assemble in a manner that can be publicly interpreted, thus limiting full transparency. Furthermore, there is an inevitable time lag between decisions being made and information onthe relationships among those making the decisions becoming available, which again limits transparency. Nevertheless this case study sets out the type of information that is required for observers to interpret global health financial flows and, we argue, offers a template for future disclosures to enhance transparency of not just individual employees but the full scope of potential conflicts of entire institutions.

(3) Aligning Aid with Community Needs.  It is important to align aid with community needs. However, despite numerous declarations to align aid with the preventable burden of disease, private foundations tend to operate in ‘‘silos,’’ focused on a core set of issues that their founder or governing director decides isimportant [73]. Extra-budgetary contributions, earmarked by donors, are a major factor in creating the observed imbalance between patterns of expenditure by global health institutions and the current burden of disease [17]. Major funders can have a significant impact on overall financial flows; International Monetary Fund (IMF) economists are advising that countries divert aid to reserves because of concerns about its unreliable and unpredictable nature, and the desire to privatize health care services rather than perpetuate state-run health care operations [74,75]. A recent study found that when countries are borrowing from the IMF more than 98% of aid is diverted to reserves or displacing government spending on health [75]. Working toward global health financing that aligns with the disease burden will remain elusive if foundations and financial institutions operate as distinct bodies while influencing communities that are receiving numerous disparate and poorly coordinated funds. Thus, foundation investment and program portfolios should incorporate representation from the intended recipients of its support.

In a perfect world, public health bodies and efforts would be free of all outside influences and be able to objectively evaluate public health needs and distribute funds accordingly.  But this is a pipe dream.  A rigorous analysis of more of these relationships that potentially alter our food/health environment so much is clearly needed, and the template used by these researchers is novel and important.

Reference

David Stuckler, Sanjay Basu, & Martin McKee (2011). Global Health Philanthropy and Institutional Relationships: How Should Conflicts of Interest Be Addressed? PLoS Medicine : 10.1371/journal.pmed.1001020

*Ironically Martin McKee has been on advisory boards for Merck & Co and Johnson & Johnson, received funding from the Rockefeller Foundation, and the school he resides at receives funding from the Gates Foundation.

This post was syndicated from Nutritional Blogma You may comment here or on the original entry.

However, not everyone views the Gates Foundation’s involvement in the developing world as a good thing. Eager to shape foreign agriculture in a less technological way, critics have objected often to any use of fertilizers, pesticides, genetically engineered traits, and even hybrid crops. Arguing that agricultural aid should be limited to organic techniques, anything that smells of technology (which is strange because organic is a specific set of technologies) is immediately associated with big business interests in developed countries like the US. For years, the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation was associated with the likes of Monsanto, and criticized as just working for their interests. The premise is strange, though, that a 33 billion dollar charitable organization would feel it necessary to work for the business interests of any corporation over their own stated aid goals. The chatter in the social media up to this point was that Bill Gates wanted to rule the biological world with patented seeds after taking over the computer world. Or that Bill Gates was going to help Monsanto do it instead, well, because the conspiracy just seems to make sense to those who are so inclined to believe it.

Recently the discussion has taken a bit of a turn, as the Seattle Times reports that the Gates Foundation purchased 500,000 shares of Monsanto stock, worth about $27.6 million. Immediately, several organizations and individuals from the Organic Consumer’s Association to La Vie Campesina, to Jill Richardson of La Vida Locavore denounced the purchase, while at the same time cheering that they now had an argument that the combined Gates-Monsanto Evil Empire™ was real. Several letter-writing campaigns were started to lobby the Gates Foundation to drop its new financial holding in Monsanto, arguing it is a conflict of interest. Is it, and in what way exactly? What exactly does this purchase mean in terms of this philanthropic org being able to achieve its goals? Should the Gates Foundation sell its stock in Monsanto?

Trust the numbers

First, the Gates Foundation as a rule does not discuss the specifics of its financial investments, so I don’t expect that we would hear much of a statement, if any, about this purchase. I imagined that they have countless investments all over the place and that the reasons for specific investments are made for financial reasons. Turns out, according to the foundation’s website, they hardly make decisions themselves on what to invest in:

In October 2006, our trustees created a two-entity structure. One entity, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, distributes money to grantees. The other, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Asset Trust, manages the endowment assets. This structure enables us to separate our program work from the investment of our assets.

How the asset trust works

The asset trust holds the endowment, including the annual installments of Warren Buffett’s gift, and funds the foundation. Bill and Melinda are the trustees for the asset trust, and the endowment continues to be managed, as it has been for more than 10 years, by a team of outside investment managers.

Already, this removes the decision to buy Monsanto stock from the part of the foundation that decides where the philanthropic money goes. Perhaps the ‘team of outside investment managers’ heard about the stuff that the philanthropic arm of the organization is doing related to biotechnology, and thought, hey, this sounds like this could make money, and bought a chunk of it. In the extreme version, perhaps those investors thought that the Gates Foundation’s efforts to expand and develop modern crop varieties would grow the market for companies like Monsanto, which could in turn make the foundation more money.

“Our biggest concern is that the foundation is invested in Monsanto so they’re looking for Monsanto to make a profit,” said Travis English, of AGRA Watch. “What they’re doing is opening up new markets in Africa for Monsanto to monopolize the seed market.”

Glenn Beck educates us on the money behind the conspiracy

Let’s examine this extreme hypothesis by the numbers. The investment was worth $27.6 million, however, just one research project that the philanthropic arm invested in cost them $42 million. From the Seattle Times article:

The Gates Foundation gave a $42 million grant to the African Agricultural Technology Foundation to develop new varieties of drought-tolerant maize in a partnership with Monsanto. The new varieties are expected to be available in about seven years and will be royalty-free for small-scale farmers in Africa, the Gates Foundation spokeswoman said.

So the investment managers thought that by buying $27 million in stock, they could make money off of a $42 million grant for drought-tolerant corn that might benefit Monsanto if a lot of commercial-sized growers in Africa adopt the varieties they develop? (Note that small farmers will not owe royalties.) The Monsanto stock price would have to increase by 150% merely to recoup the ‘losses’ of that grant alone! It doesn’t sound like there’s much math to support this outlandish idea. (I assume that investment managers can do math, of course.) I seriously doubt that they would base their decision on such pennies-on-a-dollar considerations.

The price of Monsanto stock is another interesting thing. Every time there is a dip in the price, the anti-GE social media lights up in applause. Even the Non-GMO Project frequently tweets about dips in prices, while others joke about now being a good time to buy into biotechnology. (I wonder if any of them have decided to buy any?) They seem to know a lot more about biotech stock prices than I do. Apparently, MON stock has been at a relative low, and while future prospects look good, the current outlook for revenue is not so good. It was probably a good time to buy.

While some will use this investment as an argument that the Gates Foundation will cow-tow to Monsanto’s interests, there is another aspect to stock ownership that is worth bringing up. Stockholders get to vote on board elections, and 500,000 shares brings 500,000 votes. Could it be that Bill Gates is trying to wrestle control of Big Biotech to bend it to philanthropic goals? It could be just as likely, or rather unlikely as the other case. Keep in mind that $27.6 million is less than one thousandth of the total foundation’s assets, and half as much of Monsanto’s total market value. You may see the dollar amount of the stock purchase in future campaigns against the Gates Foundation, just remember how few drops it is in the $33 billion bucket.

Glenn Beck educates us on the money behind the conspiracy

Competing interests

Does the Gates Foundation having a financial stake in Monsanto present a conflict of interest? In order to be a conflict of interest, the goals of one must be different from the goals of another. If, for example, a nonprofit organization stated as its goal to stop the hunting of whales, but invested in a Japanese whaling company – you would have a clear difference of goals. In order to achieve the goal of the nonprofit, they would have to harm their own financial interests. In the case of the Gates Foundation, their agricultural goals include:

Working with a wide range of partners, we are seeking to enhance the complete agricultural value chain—from planting the highest quality seeds and improving farm management practices to bringing crops to market—while protecting farmers’ natural environments.

They continue.

Science and technology: We are exploring the development of a diverse range of crops that can thrive in different soil types and are resistant to drought, disease, and pests. We also support the creation of crops that have enhanced nutritional value to combat chronic vitamin deficiencies. Our partners employ a range of tools and techniques, from traditional breeding to the newest biotechnologies, in the search for solutions that will help small farmers.

Indeed, their third overall guiding principle states that “Science and technology have great potential to improve lives around the world.” So as companies like Monsanto and others also use science and technology with breeding, genetic engineering, crop protection methods, etc, there is no inherent conflict of interest in this area. If they had as a stated goal that they would build the world’s agriculture without the use of these things, you bet that would be a conflict of interest! (The foundation also has an up-front policy on CoE if you want to take a look.)

From the perspective of anti-GE (and anti-industrial) groups, however, it would appear to be a conflict of interest. This is because they believe that the best way to help the agriculture in developing countries is to avoid such applications of science and technology. In their view, if Gates really wanted to help those farmers, it would not be with hybrids, GE crops, or anything else like that. But this assumes that those farmers will not benefit from such crops. Often cited are lawsuits against farmers saving seeds, and the argument goes that if biotech companies gain a foothold in Africa, that they will just sue the small farmers into oblivion, and that the BMGF is providing that foothold. But remember something important from the drought-tolerance project quoted above: Small farmers (below $10,000/year I believe) will owe no royalties to Monsanto or anyone else for growing, saving, and regrowing seeds that come out of that project. These projects are specifically designed with the interests of small subsistence farmers in mind. While I understand that many anti-GE groups believe that anything related to Monsanto is against the interests of small farmers in developing countries, I think they are wrong in their assumptions, and they continually overlook the actual details of the intellectual property situations involved. You would think they would be happy to hear about the royalty-free situation, unless the IP arguments aren’t really the reason why they dislike it, and that is really just about some other issue with genetic engineering (as is often the case).

From the Seattle Times article,

Elise Lufkin, senior program director of Giving Assets Inc., a group that advocates socially responsible investing, said conflicts of interest usually arise when the programs a foundation funds are at cross purposes with companies in which they’re invested — an environmental organization opposed to oil drilling whose endowment benefits from oil company stock, for example.

The Gates investment is not necessarily a conflict of interest if the foundation and Monsanto share the same goals.

You could argue that there could potentially be a conflict of interest in a very specific situation. Let’s say that a Gates Foundation-funded project, such as the drought tolerance one mentioned above, found that the genetically engineered drought tolerant corn did not do so well. Let’s assume that they found that a non-GE corn was the most drought-tolerant, and that by adding the transgene that did the same, it did not make it any better. It would therefore be in the project’s interest to help needy farmers to scrap the GE trait and just go with releasing the non-GE variety, as the GE trait would be encumbered by biosafety regulations. This interest might not be shared by their private-sector partners, who may want to release the GE trait in the variety (although they actually might not for the same reason in addition to bad PR from a useless transgene release that would cost money).

But in order to argue that the Gates-funded project would be conflicted in their loyalties, you would have to make one more assumption about the financial connections. In addition to the assumptions above about the cause-and-effect connections between the philanthropic and investment arms of the foundation, you would also have to assume that the people in the project believe that they will benefit through the twisted path of money from commercial growers to Monsanto stock price increases to the 0.1% of the investment arm, to the philanthropic arm, and finally, to the project itself. You are welcome to believe that this is the case, but once you layer on so many assumptions, Occam’s Razor suggests that this is not likely to happen.

I am not saying that there is no conflict of interest, in fact, the next thing I will talk about is the conflict of interest that the foundation has generated through this purchase.

Public Perception and Communication

It through how this may affect the public perception of the mission and goals of the BMGF, and how they communicate those intentions that purchasing Monsanto stock generates a conflict of interest. At the same time as funding the needed research, the BMGF is also spending considerable effort explaining why this research is necessary and will be beneficial. Genetic engineering is one of the tools that they are funding, which remains contentious in many parts of the world, especially Africa. Trade relations with Europe and past issues with food aid have shaped their local politics to be fairly resistant to genetic engineering, but not intractable. South Africa grows them, and several other countries announced this year that they are considering them. Field trials are underway for crops such as the biofortified Super Cassava.

Monsanto, as a for-profit corporation, is interesting in making money through its business. There’s nothing wrong with making money, however when a company argues in favor of something that it can profit off of, whether it is Monsanto and GE crops or Whole Foods and Non-GMO Project certified products, there is an inherent bias. Are they advocating it because it is right or because they can make a buck? If is is because it is right, it will be difficult for people to separate it from the possibility of making a buck. I believe it was Monsanto that proposed the royalty-free idea for small farmers, thereby enabling the poorest to have free access to the technology. Yet, it seems that it is very difficult for Monsanto to do any good deeds without being punished for trying. (Remember what happened with Haiti?)

As the BMGF continues to be involved in world agriculture, they are figuring out what they believe is the right approach, and are promoting their reasons & decisions to the rest of the world. Owning stock in Monsanto may harm this effort for the simple reason that this connection will lead people to suspect that their intentions are not what they say. Various groups that oppose a second Green Revolution for developing countries will use this information in order to sow doubt about the genuine nature of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s goals and interests. In fact, those groups such as AGRA Watch and La Vie Campesina have already indicated how they intend to use this information. For example, they are trying to harm the image of wheat-related projects that the Foundation is funding at Cornell and Washington State University merely by associating it with the wheat interests of Monsanto.

Keep in mind that before the news of this development, AGRA Watch uttered Monsanto and Gates in the same breath. In fact, they were bending over backwards to go all Glenn-Beck-style linking Gates to Rockefeller to Monsanto. Check out this handy graphic that they published back in June (document file):

Kathleen Talbot educates us on the money behind the conspiracy

So they were not letting the lack of financial links get in the way of making the claim in the first place! The only arrow going from Monsanto to the BMGF is a single person.

So it is clear that when groups come out to oppose projects that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation s involved with, they will shift the discussion away from what the foundation is trying to accomplish and toward a discussion of the financial interests of Monsanto. Their argument, while tenuous before, is made to seem stronger by this proportionately small stock purchase. They will quote the dollar value and the number of shares, rather than the fraction of the BMGF holdings that it represents. Time will tell whether this argument will change any minds. But if the argument does make a difference, there is the risk that successful developments coming out of the BMGF’s scientific philanthropy could be curtailed in the political realm, and that should be avoided. A lot of this rests on how the BMGF communicates its goals effectively.

So should the Gates Foundation sell its stock in Monsanto? It all rests on what the eventual outcome will be. If this has no measurable effect on the public perception of the BMGF and its mission and the outcome of the mission itself, it won’t matter and they shouldn’t worry about it. But if this puts the future of the foundation’s ability to reach the neediest and most vulnerable people in jeopardy, maybe it would be a good idea to do so. What do you think?

Hilarious Glenn Beck chalkboard images generated at skinnymojo.

Supreme Court of the United States (Source: SupremeCourt.gov)

In what (for me) seemed like no time at all, the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) has issued its ruling on the Roundup Ready Alfalfa case. In a landslide 7:1 ruling (with one recusing), the high court has lifted the nationwide ban on planting genetically engineered herbicide-tolerant alfalfa. What does this mean for GE alfalfa and sugar beet plantings that have been affected by the courts?

Although the social media chatter over the case was mostly characterizing it as crucial to win to “stop” GE alfalfa, it was really more about what the proper course of action is for the GE regulatory process, and whether a court can issue an injunction against planting GE crops while the environmental impact statement (EIS) is being drafted, without having to provide evidence of harm. For more background information, read my previous post about the case. In essence, the court was considering whether the lower court was right in “remanding” the GE alfalfa back to the USDA to determine whether it was ok to plant, while also issuing an injunction preventing them from saying it was ok to plant until the EIS is complete.

SCOTUS ruled that the lower court acted wrongly by remanding and enjoining at the same time.

The District Court abused its discretion in enjoining APHIS from effecting a partial deregulation and in prohibiting the planting of RRA pending the agency’s completion of its detailed environmental review.

(…)

Most importantly, respondents cannot show that they will suffer irreparable injury if APHIS is allowed to proceed with any partial deregulation, for at least two reasons. First, if and when APHIS pursues a partial deregulation that arguably runs afoul of NEPA, respondents may file a new suit challenging such action and seeking appropriate preliminary relief. Accordingly, a permanent injunction is not now needed to guard against any present or imminent risk of likely irreparable harm. Second, a partial deregulation need not cause respondents any injury at all; if its scope is sufficiently limited, the risk of gene flow could be virtually nonexistent. Indeed, the broad injunction entered below essentially pre-empts the very procedure by which APHIS could determine, independently of the pending EIS process for assessing the effects of a complete deregulation, that a limited deregulation would not pose any appreciable risk of environmental harm.

This sort of ruling was suggested by reading the transcript of the hearing – it sounded like they were interested in the double-barrier that the lower court had erected. By sending the alfalfa back to the USDA the lower court was saying that the USDA needed to figure out what to do about the alfalfa and whether it can be planted in the future. But by also issuing an injunction the court was saying that the USDA could not decide what to do according to its procedures unless the EIS is fully complete, which means no partial deregulation, which would be allowing some RR alfalfa plantings to go forward. In a bizarre twist, the lower court also said that farmers currently growing it could continue growing it. So essentially the court was saying that the USDA could not decide to allow some farmers to grow it while the EIS is pending because of environmental risk, but the court could. The SCOTUS latched onto that contradiction in their ruling:

First, the impropriety of the District Court’s broad injunction against planting flows from the impropriety of its injunction against partial deregulation. If APHIS may partially deregulate RRA before preparing a full-blown EIS—a question that we need not and do not decide here—farmers should be able to grow and sell RRA in accordance with that agency determination. Because it was inappropriate for the District Court to foreclose even the possibility of a partial and temporary deregulation, it necessarily follows that it was likewise inappropriate to enjoin any and all parties from acting in accordance with the terms ofsuch a deregulation decision.

And to sum it all up:

In sum, the District Court abused its discretion in enjoining APHIS from effecting a partial deregulation and in prohibiting the possibility of planting in accordance with the terms of such a deregulation. Given those errors, this Court need not express any view on whether injunctive relief of some kind was available to respondents on the record before us. Nor does the Court address the question whether the District Court was required to conduct an evidentiary hearing before entering the relief at issue here. The judgment of the Ninth Circuit is reversed, and the case is remanded for further proceedings consistent with this opinion.
It is so ordered.

So what does this mean about GE alfalfa plantings, can farmers just start buying and planting the herbicide-tolerant legume? No, what was lifted by the court was the injunction that prevented the USDA from allowing some farmers to plant GE alfalfa under partial deregulation. The court did not touch on the issue of whether it was right to re-regulate the alfalfa, or on the issue of whether an evidentiary hearing was required. What they did do was determine that the broad injunction was not justified by the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), and is saying that it is up to the USDA to assess whether it can partially deregulate the alfalfa should it choose to do so. Until that happens, no new alfalfa plantings can happen.

The dual remand/injunction nature of this situation has led to a lot of confusion in the first few hours of the news coming out. While the traditional news sources are getting it mostly right as lifting the ban, others are saying almost the opposite. The Center for Food Safety, the anti-GE lawyer group that led the legal battle in the first place, is also calling it a victory! Their statement has been carried through social media networks quickly. They said:

The Center for Food Safety today celebrated the United States Supreme Court’s decision in Monsanto v. Geerston Farms, the first genetically modified crop case ever brought before the Supreme Court.  Although the High Court decision reverses parts of the lower courts’ rulings, the judgment holds that a vacatur bars the planting of Monsanto’s Roundup Ready Alfalfa until and unless future deregulation occurs.  It is a victory for the Center for Food Safety and the Farmers and Consumers it represents.

“The Justices’ decision today means that the selling and planting of Roundup Ready Alfalfa is illegal.  The ban on the crop will remain in place until a full and adequate EIS is prepared by USDA and they officially deregulate the crop.  This is a year or more away according to the agency, and even then, a deregulation move may be subject to further litigation if the agency’s analysis is not adequate,” said Andrew Kimbrell, Executive Director of the Center for Food Safety. “In sum, it’s a significant victory in our ongoing fight to protect farmer and consumer choice, the environment and the organic industry.”

In the majority opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito, the Court held: “In sum…the vacatur of APHIS’s deregulation decision means that virtually no RRA (Roundup Ready Alfalfa) can be grown or sold until such time as a new deregulation decision is in place, and we also know that any party aggrieved by a hypothetical future deregulation decision will have ample opportunity to challenge it, and to seek appropriate preliminary relief, if and when such a decision is made.” (Opinion at p. 22).The Court also held that:

• Any further attempt to commercialize RRA even in part may require an EIS subject to legal challenge.
• The Court further recognized that the threat of transgenic contamination is harmful and onerous to organic and conventional farmers and that the injury allows them to challenge future biotech crop commercializations in court.

Uh oh… whenever you see an ellipses (…) check what was removed. Here is the full paragraph:

In sum, we do not know whether and to what extent APHIS would seek to effect a limited deregulation during the pendency of the EIS process if it were free to do so; we do know that the vacatur of APHIS’s deregulation decision means that virtually no RRA can be grown or sold until such time as a new deregulation decision is in place, and we also know that any party aggrieved by a hypothetical future deregulation decision will have ample opportunity to challenge it, and to seek appropriate preliminary relief, if and when such a decision is made. In light of these particular circumstances, we hold that the District Court did not properly exercise its discretion in enjoining a partial deregulation of any kind pending APHIS’s preparation of an EIS. It follows that the Court of Appeals erred in affirming that aspect of the District Court’s judgment.

The court did not rule that no RR alfalfa can be grown, this paragraph says that the court knows what the lower court ruled and its implications. So that’s nothing new. The whole previous section is filled with discussion of what exactly was meant by the lower court’s ruling, so this is a summary of that section. The court did not address whether the lower court was right in sending the alfalfa back to the USDA, from page 3 of the syllabus:

Because petitioners and the Government do not argue other-wise, the Court assumes without deciding that the District Court acted lawfully in vacating the agency’s decision to completely deregu-late RRA. The Court therefore addresses only the injunction prohibiting APHIS from deregulating RRA pending completion of the EIS, and the nationwide injunction prohibiting almost all RRA planting during the pendency of the EIS process.

As if that was not enough spin for the Center For Food Safety to use to declare victory, they also appear to have invented a new part of the ruling that is not even in there.

Any further attempt to commercialize RRA even in part may require an EIS subject to legal challenge.

The court did NOT rule on what would be required for partial regulation, in fact they emphatically declared that they were not ruling on that issue:

We do not express any view on the Government’s contention that a limited deregulation of the kind embodied inits proposed judgment would not require the prior preparation of an EIS.

(…) [note- you can check my ellipses if you want - nothing important left out]

Because APHIS has not yet invoked the procedures necessary to attempt a limited deregulation, any judicial consideration of such issues is not warranted at this time.(p19)

In fact, the ruling did mention in several places that a partial deregulation would involve an Environmental Assessment or EA (less involved than EIS). Page 9: (emphasis added)

In order for a partial deregulation to occur, respondents argued, the case would have to be remanded to the agency, and APHIS would have to prepare an EA “that may or may not come out in favor of a partial deregulation.”

And Page 10:

Nor is any doubt as to whether APHIS would issue a new EA in favor of a partial deregulation sufficient to defeat petitioners’ standing.

And most importantly, on page

If the agency found, on the basis of a new EA, that a limited and temporary deregulation satisfied applicable statutory and regulatory requirements, it could proceed with such a deregulation even if it had not yet finished the onerous EIS required for complete deregulation.

Keep in mind this is not the SCOTUS ruling that an EA is the appropriate action for partial deregulation though they seem to assume it, and they are certainly not saying that an EIS “may be required.” Granted, an EA could be challenged legally, but there is a difference between an EA and an EIS that goes beyond just how they are spelled.

I have left a comment on the CFS website asking for them to point out where in the decision they supposedly rule on this issue, but I expect, as before, that my comment will be moderated out of existence. Here it is for posterity:

Hi, I’m a little unclear about one statement made above about the SCOTUS ruling:
“Any further attempt to commercialize RRA even in part may require an EIS subject to legal challenge. ”
My reading of the ruling indicates otherwise – they said on the bottom of page 19:
“We do not express any view on the Government’s contention that a limited deregulation of the kind embodied in its proposed judgment would not require the prior preparation of an EIS.”
They also mention that a partial deregulation would involve an EA, not an EIS. Could you please point me to the passage in the ruling that supports what was included in your post?

Keep in mind, this press release was issued from the same lawyers that lost the case. As Mica Veihman from the Monsanto blog quips on twitter: “Wonder what Center for Food Safety’s statement would have said if the decision were the reverse. Hmmm…..” Still, you can’t fault them for being optimistic, just for making stuff up.

There is a silver lining for their side, however. The court did decide that conventional non-GE farmers and organic farmers have standing to claim that they can be harmed by cross-pollination of GE crops in court even if the cross-pollination has not yet occurred:

For example, respondents represent that, in order to continue marketing their product to consumers who wish to buy nongenetically-engineered alfalfa, respondents would have to conduct testing to find out whether and to what extenttheir crops have been contaminated. (p11)

Such harms, which respondents will suffer even if their crops are not actually infected with the Roundup ready gene, are sufficiently concrete to satisfy the injury-in-fact prong of the constitutional standing analysis. (p13)

While you could say they are harmed by doing additional testing, at the same time they are charging more for such ‘verified’ food via the Non GMO Project. As standing was necessary for the merits of the case to be addressed at all, it is a thin silver lining to those that want to use the desire of some farmers not to grow any GE plants at all as a means to prevent others from growing any at all. And the level of risk of harm was determined by the court not to be sufficient for an injunction.

So what other implications will there be for GE crops, like sugar beets? They, too, have been sent back to the USDA for a full EIS rather than just an EA. It appears that although the court in that case did not yet grant an injunction against the sugar beets, the judge indicated it was possible, which this could prevent . It could mean that farmers could continue to grow GE sugar beets under partial deregulation despite the fact that the USDA has to draft an EIS for complete deregulation of the beets. The alfalfa is nearer to approving its EIS than the beets, so as I said before the implications for the beets will probably be greater than the alfalfa.

Source: Wikimedia Commons

It seems that the USDA may change its policy of doing the Environmental Assessment before the Environmental Impact Statement, so if that is the case I doubt many other crops being affected by this sort of thing. Except, perhaps, if the CFS or someone else successfully gets a court to reject an EIS and send it back to the USDA, this ruling could probably affect partial deregulation in that case.

Finally, as a 7:1 ruling, this is not a split-decision “blame Clarence Thomas for working for Monsanto 30 years ago” situation. (Which as a more legally-educated science blogger Ed Brayton confirms is not an issue.) This is an overwhelming ruling against the injunction preventing partial deregulation of the alfalfa, and it could set a precedent for lower courts on how they are able to determine what the USDA can or cannot do. The extreme measures of an injunction were ruled as not warranted in this case, which could affect others.

I hope this clears things up, and while the CFS continues to call their defeat a victory, I don’t think it will actually be added to their list of victories. The ban was defeated, not upheld.

It was so ordered.

More resources:

• Monsanto Press Release
• CFS Press Release
• BusinessWeek
• Reuters (on NY Times)
• Saint Louis Dispatch
• SCOTUS Wiki

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. This is not legal advice. Information purposes only and yadda yadda yadda. Please correct any misunderstandings in the comments.

Observers filing through to see a portion of the hearing. photo credit: Monsanto via Twitpic

There is certainly a lot of commotion about the first ever US Supreme Court hearing involving genetically engineered crops, which is being held today. The case is Monsanto Company v. Geertson Seed Farms, (SCOTUS Wiki) and depending on how this turns out, it could mean the end of genetically engineered alfalfa forever or the eventual destruction of all organic dairies, right? Well, no. So what is the court case about?

The court case is not actually about GE alfalfa, although this legal battle began with alfalfa. In 2006, several groups joined together led by the Center for Food Safety to sue the Secretary of Agriculture over the deregulation of roundup-ready alfalfa produced by Monsanto. The USDA had conducted an Environmental Assessment according to its GE crop approval policies and concluded that there were no big issues that they needed to investigate further. If they had found any in the assessment they would have moved on to the much more involved Environmental Impact Statement (EIS).

The court case over GE alfalfa was decided in 2007, with US District Court Judge Charles R. Breyer saying that the USDA should have done the full EIS, and placed an injunction on future plantings of GE alfalfa until such an EIS is conducted by the USDA. Farmers already growing the alfalfa could continue to grow it.

Since then, the case was appealed a couple times by Monsanto, leading up to the Supreme Court. The case is not about the specifics of alfalfa cross-pollination, organic farms, or export markets – it is actually just about the specific details of what is required to grant an injunction under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). At one point, an evidentiary hearing was part of the short list of issues, but that has been dropped and this is what we have left:

(1) Whether plaintiffs under the National Environmental Policy Act are specially exempt from the requirement of showing a likelihood of irreparable harm to obtain an injunction; (2) whether a district court may enter an injunction sought to remedy a NEPA violation without conducting an evidentiary hearing sought by a party to resolve genuinely disputed facts directly relevant to the appropriate scope of the requested injunction; and (3) whether the Ninth Circuit erred when it affirmed a nationwide injunction that sought to remedy a NEPA violation based on only a remote possibility of reparable harm.

So while this is a case involving GE alfalfa, in many ways it is not even about genetic engineering. I had an hour-long conversation with one of the lawyers that filed an amicus brief (in favor of the anti-GE side) and learned a bit about the process and the issues involved. Essentially, it is over whether a court can grant an injunction (based on the NEPA) without presenting evidence of future harm, or even relying on remote possibilities. I would like to point out a few interesting observations I have made about this case and what it will mean or how it is being presented by either side.

First, this will very likely not matter very much for GE alfalfa. The injunction that prevents planting new stands of Monsanto’s forage will be lifted when/if the USDA approves the new draft EIS, which was completed in November 2009. What did they find? Well, pretty much the same thing as the original Assessment, just 1476 pages long. If Monsanto loses the case, the EIS may go through and the alfalfa gets approved again. If Monsanto wins the case, the injunction is lifted and farmers can plant GE alfalfa again while waiting for the EIS. So while some people have framed the case in terms of “stopping GM Alfalfa” it will probably not ‘stop’ the alfalfa at all. One of these two paths to approval may just be slower than the other.

Second, if the Supreme Court rules in favor of Monsanto, then that may have profound implications for the GE sugar beet situation. The same process of EA —> injunction —> EIS is playing out, and if I understand the legal issues involved, the greater effect of this case will probably be that it could allow GE sugar beet plantings to continue. (There was apparently a bentgrass field trial affected by something similar, too.)

Third, there is talk at the USDA about requiring all GE crops to undergo an EIS right from the start, and if that is the case, then it may not matter much for future GE crop regulation. I think there will be greater implications for other cases involving the NEPA, but I do not know enough about it to have any prediction of which result would be good or bad. The idea of requiring evidence before action is appealing, but I suppose I could find an example where we don’t have evidence and we would want to pause and conduct further research before continuing. How would the (near-zero) likelihood of the Large Hadron Collider causing a black hole fare under either outcome if someone wanted to stop its operation? (If it was in the US, that is.)

There has been a slough of amicus briefs filed in support of either side, and I think it is kind of funny that each side only mentions the briefs filed in their favor. The Center for Food Safety’s “full list of amici” has only their own supporters in the list. (The same with Monsanto’s press release) The SCOTUS Wiki has everything.

Interestingly, one of the amicus briefs written by the Union of Concerned Scientists clearly states that GE crops have increased yields (3-4% in corn), while the Center for Food Safety’s page states that the UCS report found they have not. I left a polite comment on this page last week pointing out that the report Failure to Yield did in fact estimate a yield increase, and while I could see that comment for several days pending moderation, I no longer see it. It may have been deleted. Does the UCS know that the CFS disregards their research findings – even when they put those findings in an amicus brief filed in favor of the CFS?

It is also interesting to note that the Consumers Union poll that was misrepresented by the CU itself has also made it into some of these briefs as evidence that organic consumers would reject “contaminated” organic foods and that farmers would lose their markets. In reality, the biased poll showed the opposite – that most organic consumers do not care or care little. The lawyer I talked to that filed one of the briefs, however, did not read the references used as evidence in the brief, and was only representing the interests of their clients (Also had no personal stake in the outcome). So take the statements about genetic engineering in these briefs with a grain of salty soil.

A lot has been written about alfalfa and markets and such in the amicus briefs, and it is possible that the justices could decide to rule on things that are more specific to GE crops, such as who has authority in deciding what is appropriate regulation of crop releases.

Finally, I would like to comment on one of the controversies surrounding the justices themselves. Justice Breyer has recused himself because the judge that issued the ruling in 2007 was his brother. That’s a pretty cut-and-dry conflict of interest. However many anti-GE individuals have been calling for Clarence Thomas to also recuse himself from the case because he used to work for Monsanto… 30 years ago.

I know of no case where working for an organization for a few years (1976-79) would be a conflict of interest after 30 years of time has passed (Now 31). My entire life isn’t even that long. I do not think that Thomas should have recused himself from the case (and he didn’t) because of the huge amount of time that has passed. It’s different people, a different company, and different issues.

The calls for his recusal instead stem from an analysis of Thomas’s politics and his assumed likelihood of ruling in favor of Monsanto. The court is split 5-4 on the conservative-liberal continuum, and Breyer was one of the liberal justices. With his recusal, that would make it 5-3, which worries the anti-GE folks. When I attended Zelig Golden’s talk at the MOSES Organic conference (former CFS lawyer whose name is still on the case), he talked about this worry as well, specifically mentioning the political split. However, genetic engineering in agriculture, despite their best efforts, is not a very politically polarizing topic. Predominantly liberal groups that oppose GE crops have been trying to link it to G.W. Bush and G. H.W. Bush policies, while Clinton and Obama do not appear to be very different. Heck, Jimmy Carter, a Democrat, is an advocate of GE crops. So to base demands for Thomas’s recusal on a political analysis is problematic.

Indeed, as some of the interests that are against GE alfalfa are businesses themselves, the CFS might find Thomas deciding in their favor. Even some who call for his recusal point out that his vote is not automatic. And I’ll be the first to say that I have an immense distaste for Clarence Thomas’s politics, particularly his views on the Establishment Clause of the Constitution, Abortion, etc. But these are not good reasons to justify his recusal from cases involving those issues, as much as I would want him to.

I am no legal scholar or historian, but it seems to me that if conflicts of interest are to stretch back to employment that is older than three decades, it will reduce the ability of the highest court in the land to do its job considering that each justice is a lawyer and has worked for lots of places, and know a lot of people. How many years since employment is too close for comfort, anyhow? Have Supreme Court Justices recused themselves for more years, or not recused themselves for fewer?

One of the important things that the court does is discuss and deliberate amongst themselves, and needlessly excluding voices from that discussion reduces the number of innovative legal solutions that the court can offer. While this case may set legal precedent for other NEPA cases in lower courts, this debate over 31 years since employment as a conflict of interest risks setting a social precedent that could harm other cases as well.

Mica at Monsanto has also commented on the case, and here is the first Associated Press article about the hearing. Scuttlebutt in Twitter is that the Supreme Court is “going down a disastrous path” by suggesting that the USDA should be in charge of GE crops. Outrageous! Let the dire predictions begin.

The case is expected to be decided in early June.