2002 Biotechnology Predictions Highlighted

Dennis T. Avery

WASHINGTON, DC – I confidently predict that the world’s intense debate about genetic engineering will continue in 2002. My top twelve predictions on biotech:

1. Genetic engineering will be praised in the New Year for providing a potential new cure for cancer. (Human trials of a new tumor-killing molecule are scheduled to start next spring.)
2. However, the same technology that is praised in human medicine will be ruthlessly attacked, as activists with no science credentials claim genetically engineered food crops threaten our health and the environment.
3. I predict consumers will not be offered access to low-fat French fries, made possible through biotech potatoes with denser starch granules that absorb less cooking oil. The potatoes exist, but McDonald’s and the processors won’t risk a consumer boycott led by Greenpeace and “environmental” groups
4. Further news on potatoes: Millions of pounds of chemicals will have to be sprayed in the potato fields next summer to kill crop-destroying aphids and Colorado potato beetles. The sprays shouldn’t be needed since we’ve also engineered pest resistance into our biotech potatoes.
5. The people of South Asia will not be protected from hunger by blight-resistant rice. Bacterial blight has caused many past rice crop failures and millions of hunger deaths. Blight-resistant biotech rice has been created, but not released to farmers. Politicians won’t take on the scaremongers over seeds that nobody’s ever had and so don’t know what they are missing.
6. I predict at least one major new biotech food scare will hit the headlines in 2002—although last year’s biotech food scare (StarLink corn taco chips) was a bust. Dozens of people claimed they’d had allergenic reactions to StarLink, but none had antibodies to the StarLink protein in their bodies. Whatever upset their stomachs wasn’t StarLink, which is at least 500 times less allergenic than peanut butter.
   All the biotech food scares over the past 15 years have been busts. But we’re easily frightened of the unknown. Many people were even frightened when we began to pasteurize milk to protect ourselves from deadly diseases like tuberculosis.
7. Activists will continue in 2002 to dress up as butterflies. TV cameras like butterfly costumes. Never mind that field tests show Monarch butterflies are safer in biotech cornfields than in conventional cornfields that must be protected with pesticide sprays.
8. European countries will continue to oppose biotech foods, while the European Commission tries to approve new ones. The Commission’s staff looks at the science. European politicians, however, are enslaved by their own myth that only ‘natural’ foods produced on small traditional “peasant” farms are good enough for Europe. Never mind that traditional peasant cows spread TB and foot-and-mouth disease or that the “natural” copper pesticides used on Europe’s organic farms are more toxic to people and wildlife than today’s synthetic pesticides.
9. Europeans may concede in 2002 that it’s all right for poor, hungry countries to use biotech crops. But Europe will continue to demand that its food and feed imports be biotech-free. Namibian cattle raisers thus won’t take the chance of feeding South African biotech corn; it might block beef exports to Europe that earn scarce foreign exchange.
10. Thai rice farmers will continue to let their kids suffer severe vitamin A deficiencies (and their wives severe iron deficiency anemia) rather than plant the famous Golden Rice that would eliminate both problems. Planting genetically engineered rice anywhere in the country might threaten vital rice exports to nervous consumers in Europe, Japan, and South Korea.
11. Kenya may defy Europe in 2002 and start field trials of virus-resistant biotech sweet potatoes, which promise 30 to 50 percent higher yields for that important staple food. Researchers have also produced virus resistance for cassava, the “famine crop” that is vital during Kenya’s frequent droughts. But virus-proofing the cassava might anger Europe, and Europe is a major source of aid money.
12. India will finally approve a biotech crop for its huge agriculture in 2002. Last year, severe insect attacks destroyed much of India’s cotton despite repeated applications of costly chemicals. One big set of cotton fields was left untouched and thriving. It turned out to be illegally planted pest-resistant biotech cotton. The cotton was legal in the United States, China and other countries, but not yet approved by the creaky Indian bureaucracy. India’s farmers are now politically overwhelming the activists, demanding the right to buy cotton seeds that defy insects.

The world will need nearly three times as much farm output by 2050, to provide high-quality diets for a peak population of 9 billion people and their pets. We’re already farming more than a third of the world’s land, most of it with high-yield seeds, fertilizer and pest protection. How can we save room for wildlife if we cannot utilize higher-yielding new farm technology?

Make a New Year’s resolution to ask a Greenpeace member that question in 2002.

This article was published by Knight Ridder Tribune

Dennis T. Avery is based in Churchville, Va., and is director of global food issues for the Hudson Institute of Indianapolis.