Gates Foundation Gets into Genetically Engineered Food Fight

"Day 253/365 - Beware of Falling Fruit" from our SunBreak Flickr pool--thanks, Great Beyond!

The Seattle Times found on the PCC website the local flashpoint in the conflict over genetically engineered food: A letter came in from Dennis L. Weaver: "I caution the organic community to be watchful of this NEW Green Revolution, especially since The Gates Foundation science and technology efforts are led by a former Monsanto researcher."

PCC included an editor's note:

The Gates Foundation apparently is pushing genetically modified crops on African farmers. It named a 25-year Monsanto veteran, Rob Horsch, to be the senior officer for a program in sub-Saharan Africa. The foundation also reportedly gave $42 million to a project (believed to be Monsanto’s) involving genetically engineered (GE) corn...

Monsanto is of course a fighting word in organic and food cooperative circles, not least for its championing of recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH). Actually, it's a long list of things if you get into it, including Agent Orange.

Farmers themselves are also suspicious of a company that develops seed "terminator technology"--which would require farmers to buy new seeds each year. (Monsanto responds: "Sharing many of the concerns of small landholder farmers, Monsanto made a commitment in 1999 not to commercialize sterile seed technology in food crops.")

Briefly, this is why the Gates Foundation's hiring of a Monsanto executive would raise hackles. Monsanto has a "trust gap."

Genetically engineered food would seem to show such promise, on the face of it. Texas A&M's Normal Borlaug, winner of the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize, had an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal over the summer, promoting advancements and bemoaning the fact that "some elements of popular culture romanticize older, inefficient production methods and shun fertilizers and pesticides, arguing that the U.S. should revert to producing only local organic food."

Not all the opposition reeks of stinky hippiedom. Even Michael Specter, who thinks such risks as there are are worth taking, describes in his book Denialism how in 1995 Pioneer Hi-Bred "placed genes from a Brazil nut into a soybean...to make beans used as animal feed more nutritious." So far so good, but Specter adds that if someone allergic to Brazil nuts ate something made from that soy, "the results could be deadly."

And why would they think their soy had Brazil nut in it? Back of the label ingredients lists are tiny enough as it is, without adding any and all genetic interpolations.

But beyond safety concerns and the knotty issue of how much of our food can be patented, the most interesting thing I can see here is the use of talking points to frame the pro/con genetically engineered foods debate. You see a surreal flip-flop here, as a conservative movement that has resisted stem cell research and scientific evidence of climate change links arms with those on the bleeding edge of GMO experimentation.

Why? It turns out that regulation of greenhouse gases and genetically engineered foods have something in common: They both, allegedly, make life harder on poor people so that the liberal elites can enjoy their dangerously romantic utopian visions.

Solidarity with the economic interests of the poor of sub-Saharan Africa has not often made the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal, but it does now. It's of a piece with George Will arguing that climate change will be great for people who can't afford to heat their homes. Could save thousands of lives.

Food for thought.