Why the world worries
about our corn and beans
International activists are blockading Midwestern grain. Prince Charles is concerned. And Illinois farmers have had to become diplomats with visitors from France and Japan.
by Bill Lambrecht
C
entral Illinois farmer Doug Wilson needed to be part scientist, part diplomat and part booster for his trade when a visitor from France asked him pointedly: "If the public said they didn't want genetically modified crops, would you still grow them?"
That's a dilemma faced by farmers in Europe and other parts of the world where a debate is raging over genetically engineered crops. The debate has been muted in the United States, but the risks in growing transgenic seed crops must be weighed by Illinois farmers who rely on income from exports. About 40 percent of this state's corn crop is exported; closer to half of the state's soybeans are sent overseas. Nationally, farmers planted about 40 percent of their soybeans and about 25 percent of their corn this year in varieties engineered for herbicide tolerance-which allows more liberal application of chemicals-or for insect resistance, in which the plant, in effect, produces its own insecticide. And while there are no firm numbers, Illinois farmers may have surpassed the national average with engineered soybeans and fallen a bit short with modified corn, according to estimates.
That's a vast change from just four years ago when the acreage of transgenic grain crops planted commercially in the United States was zero. A change that some hope will only accelerate. In fact, the St. Louis region and Illinois are becoming what some hope will be the Silicon Valley of plant sciences. The University of Illinois is among the
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partners in a $150 million plant science center planned for St. Louis that will conduct broad research into genetic engineering related to crops.
We don't hear much about this change in farm methods and the genetic makeup of the food supply, but it's one that may be recalled a few decades from now in the same breath as the computer revolution. Of course, a lot depends on whether multinationals and their allies down on the farm can sell a technology that much of the world regards as sorcerers' work.
Midwestern farm leaders hope by inviting the Europeans and the Japanese to tour their fields, they can quash suspicions that pose a very real threat to exports. And Illinois farmers are doing their part to make that happen.
Twice this year, Wilson hosted visitors from France, a country where some farmers are so hostile to genetic engineering they destroyed a cache of modified seeds earlier this year. So Wilson, 40, who farms 1,300 acres in rich black soil near the central Illinois town of Gridley, had an answer for his French visitor's question about genetic engineering.
"I said that back to ancient times, ever since they crossed a bull and a cow to get something better, farmers have been manipulating animals and plants. That's how we got our hybrid seed corn. And as technology has improved, we've gone from our crude ways to much more sophisticated methods," Wilson recalls.
That may be true, but Wilson clearly skirted his visitor's question, which had to do with public acceptance of modified foods and farmers' response. It is that question, being asked often these days around the world, that is forcing Illinois farmers to pay closer attention than ever to overseas markets and to decisions by foreign governments. It is also a question that critics in the United States, among them Consumers Union, publisher of Consumer Reports, are beginning to ask as the amount of genetically engineered foods in our diet increases. "Maybe I did tap dance around the question," Wilson says. "I think the bottom line of what I told him was that these things are coming, and they're good."
Wilson could get plenty of argument about the wisdom of growing transgenic crops-or GMOs (genetically modified organisms), as they're known outside of the United States. His French visitors could tell a story that would bring shivers to farm suppliers in Illinois.
Earlier this year, near the town of Toulouse in southwestern France, Rene Riesel and nearly 100 fellow farmers raided a warehouse owned by Novartis, the Swiss company that had been given permission by France for the first commercial planting in the 15-member European Community. The seed was engineered for insect resistance by incorporating a gene to produce Bacillus thuringiensis, which occurs naturally in the soil. It is called Bt corn, and it is much like the corn Illinois farmers grow.
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What Riesel and his raiders did helped assure that Europe's first commercial planting was a bust: After slashing bags of the seed corn with pocket knives and dumping their contents onto the floor, they snatched fire extinguishers from the wall and sprayed the mess with foam.
"It was no longer natural anyway, so we wanted to perfect the denaturalization," Riesel, 41, a sheep and grain farmer, recalled defiantly later at a Paris cafe. He and two allies were ordered to pay damages of $80,000. But Riesel became a celebrity, speaking to European crowds of 10,000 and more.
Such sabotage is not rare. In Ireland, farmers and their allies twice have destroyed test plots of genetically modified sugar beets grown by Monsanto, the St. Louis company that has become the industry leader in bringing genetic science to the farm field. Sabotage and guerilla tactics also have become commonplace in Germany and Britain, where experimental tracts of transgenic crops are sometimes protected by armed guards. In England, an organization called Superheros of the Environment has its "Splice Girls" leafleting in British markets.
And prominent Europeans have joined this anti-GMOs crusade. In Ireland, cookbook author and television personality Darina Allen-the Irish equivalent of Julia Child-tells her millions of fans that companies should not "fiddle with genes." Even Britain's Prince Charles, the epitome of a mainstream European, accuses genetic engineers of taking "mankind into realms that belong to God and to God alone."
The reasons for these anti-transgenic sentiments are interwoven. To begin with, Europeans pay more attention than Americans to food and eating. As a U.S. Department of Agriculture official remarked, McDonald's could never have gotten its start in Europe.
Further, many Europeans recall with horror the genetic experimentation that took place in the Nazi years. They regard the engineering of crops as experiments rather than science with a proven track record. And in general, Europeans put less faith in scientists and regulators than Americans, partly as a result of the continent's long bout with "Mad Cow" disease that has only recently ebbed. Scientists had minimized the threat of feeding the carcasses of animals to livestock, but that practice is blamed for the outbreak of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), which led to at least 30 human deaths and the slaughter of more than 11 million cattle.
In addition, the European farm system is much different from ours. Farmers there, working smaller plots, have more restrictions and are more heavily subsidized, thus limiting incentives for innovation. U.S. farmers like to say their European counterparts fear competition, and there may be some truth to that.
More to the point, though, there already is an abundance of food in Europe that consumers regard as affordable. So why, they ask, do we need a technology we don't trust?
Lastly, anti-American sentiments are stirred in Europe and elsewhere when citizens sense that U.S. corporations are forcing something on them. In the 1950s, the French took to the streets chanting "coca-colonization" when Coca-Cola showed up in Paris. These days, Europeans, and developing nations as well, blanch at efforts by U.S. companies to export the world's most business-friendly patent system along with their products.
In the United States, the public hears plenty about Dolly, the sheep replicated in Scotland, and the ethics of cloning humans. Seldom do American news organizations carry accounts of this worldwide debate over the drive by companies to alter the genetic code of the food supply.
But American farmers pay attention to these debates, especially to those in Europe, an affluent and vast market of 390 million people.
For Midwestern farmers, an incident on the Rhine River in Switzerland last March underscored the perils of operating in an unsettled climate. Two motorized barges were impounded by the prosecutor in the Swiss city of Basel, near the German border, and ordered by the Swiss attorney general to leave the country without unloading. Each carried 1,100 tons of gluten pellets, a Midwest-made corn byproduct that is fed to livestock.
Tests by two Swiss labs showed a strain of genetically altered corn other than the sole variety that had been approved at that time. How did it get there? In the United States, where gene-altered corn is legal, it was mixed with other varieties at a Midwestern co-op before being processed and shipped down the Mississippi River toward Europe. Greenpeace, the international environmental group, accused the United States of trying to "force-feed" gene-altered products to Europe.
Illinois farmers like to say that "corn is corn, beans are beans," regardless of new genes incorporated into seeds. But sophisticated equipment deployed in Europe can detect wisps of suspicious DNA in a load of grain. And the livelihood of farmers is riding on those barges, especially in years like 1998 when corn and soybean prices are depressed.
France's refusal this year to sign a European Commission document during a protracted dispute over GMOs blocked the sale of $200 million worth of shipments of U.S. corn to Spain and Portugal. And Europe is not the only venue for controversy. In Brazil, where Greenpeace blockaded an arriving U.S. ship laden with soybeans last December, a federal judge issued an injunction in September against the first commercial planting of modified soybeans. Among the Brazilian opponents to genetic engineering are farmers intent on supplying a line of GMOs-free soybeans to Europe. Like his counterparts in Illinois, soybean grower Jarbas Machao was thinking of his markets when he observed near his farm in southern Brazil in September: "Europe is very interested in receiving grains that are not transgenic. This is a good opportunity for us."
That injunction may or may not be lifted in time to meet Brazil's November planting season. And
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Illinois farmers could be affected-this time positively. Because Brazil is the world's second-biggest exporter of soybeans behind the United States, a decision that inhibits its plantings over time lends a competitive advantage to grain producers in the Midwest.
In June, Switzerland defeated a referendum to ban genetic engineering and sales of modified products of any sort. In July, France relented and signed the document that will have the effect of allowing imports into the European Community of certain varieties of modified corn. But many barriers exist in Europe, particularly in northern European nations. One of the most threatening to American farmers is the wide demand for labeling genetically modified foods.
Labeling pressure also is mounting in Japan, a prime export market. In India, a country of nearly one billion people, multinationals have begun a new campaign to soften anti-GMOs sentiments.
Every uprising, every shift in public opinion, can directly effect Illinois farmers. A lot has changed since the days when Illinois farmers swapped information from tractors pulled alongside the fence row. To keep up on world events, Doug Wilson of Gridley watches two computer screens-one with Internet and the other with a satellite feed from DTN (Data Transmission Network) reporting farm news from around the world.
At times, the pressures from abroad can be overwhelming. Tim Seifert experienced one of those times in September when he took a delegation of Japanese soybean "crushers" to dinner at a Springfield steakhouse.
Crushers are the people who process soybeans into oils, meal and any of the host of products that end up in 70 percent of processed foods. Just before dinner, while touring Seifert's farm near the central Illinois town of Auburn, one of the visitors had asked Seifert if he would be willing to separate his grains so that he could provide a GMOs-free line for export.
Seifert, 40, is a somewhat excitable fellow to begin with, and now, after planting every inch of 900 acres in genetically modified soybeans, he was being asked why he doesn't grow something else. Seifert recalls the conversation at dinner: "I said, 'You people tell me what you're afraid of. Go on, tell me. You, of all people, are saying you're afraid of technology. If we had been afraid of your technology, we'd still be using sundials,'" referring, he said, to computer chips for clocks. "I finally said, 'Yea, I'll go non-GMOs, but you'll have to pay me a premium to do it.'"
Seifert also entertained visitors from Germany and Brazil this year, and there have been moments when he could barely listen to more worries about genetic engineering. "There are people in these countries that are taking a crazy outlook; they think we're out to kill the world," he says.
Mark Lambert, spokesman for the Illinois Corn Growers, says the conversation with farmers visiting from foreign nations shifted noticeably about a year ago. "They still want to see farms and climb on tractors and combines. But one of the first questions out of their mouths is: 'Do you have genetically modified crops?'"
Arnold Foudin, a U.S. Department of Agriculture official who monitors farm trends worldwide, sees acceptance occurring neither swiftly nor slowly but on a pace he describes as "a medium-track." Trends are hard to predict. This year's depressed grain prices worldwide do not provide an environment conducive to experimenting with biotechnology. By the same token, farmers may be seduced by the potential of cutting costs for farm chemicals and turning to transgenic seeds if permitted.
"It takes a while, but usually governments and organizations do come around," he says.
Meanwhile, Greg Guenther of Belleville, president of the Illinois Corn Growers Association, uses a Global Positioning System to monitor the yields of his transgenic corn and beans. He also watches global positions that have a huge bearing on how he farms. And like many Illinois farmers, he's taken to calling what he grows "genetically improved" rather than genetically engineered or modified.
"It's important to know your market, and in Illinois, we are particularly vulnerable to barriers that result from genetically enhanced seeds. In Illinois, we are very, very vulnerable," he says.
Bill Lambrecht, a Washington correspondent for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and an Illinoisan, traveled to Europe twice and to South America recently to cover trends in biotechnology.
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Sam S. Manivong, Illinois Periodicals Online Coordinator Illinois Periodicals Online (IPO) is a digital imaging project at the Northern Illinois University Libraries funded by the Illinois State Library |