CU conference on transgenics and the poor brings new voices to GM debate

By Kate Becker

Early on a recent Saturday morning, nearly 80 natural scientists, economists and other social scientists sat in the McManus Lounge of Cornell's Hollister Hall examining a photograph of a mangled papaya, the victim of the ringspot virus.

Ten years ago this virus claimed half of the Hawaiian papaya crop. Today, the genetically modified (GM) Rainbow papaya, engineered by a team of scientists, including plant pathologists at Cornell's Agricultural Experiment Station in Geneva, N.Y., has saved the papaya industry from devastating crop losses.

Over the past decade Cornell laboratories also have produced transgenic squash, tomatoes and rice -- termed "frankenfoods" that threaten healthy societies by some, and miracle crops that benefit the developing world by others. The issue was debated at the conference "Transgenics and the Poor," Nov. 7-8 on campus.

"The rule seems to be that we're not serving the poor," said Rebecca Nelson, Cornell professor of plant pathology, about the unmet potential of GM crops to answer global nutritional and economic needs.

GM crops are bred to resist disease and pests with the goal of saving harvests and reducing reliance on pesticides and herbicides. Ronald Herring, the J.S. Knight Professor of International Relations and organizer of the conference, argued that independence from pesticides will protect the health of farmers and free them from a cycle of "debt bondage" to companies from whom they purchase these chemicals.

Herring acknowledged, however, that the relationship between farmers and seed producers, like Monsanto, may not be so benign, either. Recently, poor farmers have been thrust into the center of a costly intellectual property debate over the ownership of the replanting and breeding rights to transgenic seeds.

Impoverished farmers, Herring said, are sharply divided over GM crops. Many see them as part of a growing globalization that farmers are not equipped to fight. Citing his experiences in India's Kerala State, Herring described farmers' fears that multinational corporations that sell transgenic seeds will take from them "everything but the mud."

"Transgenics has driven yet another wedge" between parties in a potential coalition of the poor, said Herring.

Robert Paarlberg, professor of political science at Wellesley College and an associate at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University, argued that overregulation, not a fear of globalization, was to blame for the failure of genetically modified crops to take hold in the developing world.

Strict European Union regulations on the import of genetically modified crops "inadvertently pressure" the governments of developing countries to stick with traditional crops, said Paarlberg. These governments "are saying no to genetically modified crops, not for precautionary reasons," he argued, "but for commercial reasons."

Many conference participants expressed a belief that the risks of GM crops have been overplayed by health and environmental activists. "The science is inevitably incomplete," said Herring, but "some risks may be worth taking, if the risks of doing nothing are greater."

"There is no such things as non-GM [food]," said Martina Newell-McGloughlin of the University of California-Davis. "Everything we eat has been modified by the hand of man -- and very often the hand of woman" through generations of traditional plant breeding, she said.

Herring acknowledged that the long-term impact of genetically modified crops is unknown. "How much do we know about complex ecological systems? We understand little parts here and there," he said. Should unexpected damaging effects arise, he added, "The poor are ... the people who are most at risk in environmental degradation."

Presentations from the conference will be published in a special issue of the Journal of Development Studies, along with a book on the same theme.