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Papaya problems in Hawaii (Monday, Sept. 13, 2004 -- CropChoice news) -- Below are two stories (the second much longer and quite in depth) into the situation with biotech papaya problems in Hawaii. 1. Beverly Creamer,Honolulu Advertiser, 09/10/04: The group, which leaders say includes as many as 100 small farmers, including conventional, backyard and organic farmers on three islands, is calling on UH to create a plan to prevent cross-pollination of their papaya trees as well as offering liability protection for growers if their markets are lost. The farmers say a new study they financed shows major contamination of their trees by genetically engineered plants that could potentially affect their ability to market papaya to Japan, deeply cutting into Hawai'i's export market of non-engineered papaya. The papaya industry is worth about $12 million annually. "They're bringing out technologies that are not functional for all farmers," said Melanie Bondera, who heads Hawai'i Genetic Engineering Action Network and has a small organic farm on the Big Island. "For farmers there's a loss-of-market issue. For papaya, our market is primarily Japan and Europe, and they won't accept any genetically modified organism." A top UH agriculture dean questioned the methodology of the group's research, but said the university would be happy to assess any scientific data they present regarding cross-pollination. "If they're willing to explain their methodologies then we could have a conversation about the validity of the information about contamination and how it got there," said Andrew Hashimoto, dean of the College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resources. "Since 1998 there's been 100 million pounds of transgenetic papaya in the state - the Rainbow and Sunup papaya marketed ... so a lot of people in Hawai'i and on the Mainland have been eating this product with no documented health consequences." The issue is one being felt worldwide as organic farmers and citizens concerned about the effects of genetically engineered or altered food worry about long-term health effects. Japan does not allow Hawai'i's genetically engineered papaya to be imported. Neither does the European Union, which has banned all modified products. Meanwhile, the American Medical Association has reported that the action of genetically modifying plants does not adversely affect health any more than natural breeding methods do. Dianne Ley, deputy director of the state Department of Agriculture, said the genetically modified papaya have been certified by the U.S. Department of Agriculture as well as the federal Food and Drug Administration. "The issues of coexistence (of different types of farming) are really challenging, particularly with an issue as complex as genetically modified organisms," said Ley. Hashimoto said there would be no papaya industry in Hawai'i without research that created genetic modifications in 1996 to create a plant resistant to the ringspot virus that was decimating Hawai'i's papaya crops. "Our papaya industry would not be here if not for transgenic papaya. Without that the papaya industry would be totally defunct." Pieces of the virus were added to the DNA structure of the plant in order to protect it against the virus in the wild. Kenneth Kamiya, an O'ahu papaya farmer, said he would be out of business without genetic modification. "We don't have any other choice because of the virus pressure," said Kamiya. "In the future, when the virus subsides, maybe we can go back. But without the genetically modified plant we won't stay in business." But organic farmer Toivo Lahti on the Big Island said he recently had to destroy his 170 papaya trees because they had been cross-pollinated with the genetically modified strain, and he can't sell his fruit as organic. "They were contaminated, we found out," said Lahti. "I had to cut them all. "The problem is if you sell that papaya and they take the seed and plant it, then you're spreading the genetically modified seed. You don't have any idea which seeds are contaminated or not." In doing their cross-pollination study the groups solicited papaya from all geographic areas of the Big Island, said Bondera, taking 300 seeds from each of 60 papaya. The seeds were lumped together in one composite pile and tested for cross-pollination by genetically engineered fruit. She said there was 50 percent contamination. In Puna the genetically modified papaya fruit are being used as a buffer around nonengineered trees, said state officials, and so far that has been working well to prevent the ringspot virus from attacking the nonengineered trees. But even so, opponents to the genetic engineering say unless something is done, cross-pollination will continue to occur due to everything from bees and birds to wind and farm workers. Source: http://the.honoluluadvertiser.com/article/2004/Sep/10/ln/ln11a.html 2. Plenty Papaya Problems "Would it surprise you to know that saving a crop from a virus helped save a
community from disaster?" began a full page ad in the National Geographic
last year. The ad was about Hawaii's papaya crop, which allegedly was
"saved" by a genetically modified papaya containing a transplanted protein
from the Papaya Ringspot Virus. "This healthier plant not only kept Hawaiian farming communities in
business, it also resulted in an increase in papaya production. And it's
just one example of how crops enhanced by plant biotechnology could one day
help feed an ever-increasing world population," claimed the ad, paid for by
the Council for Biotechnology Information. Dennis Gonsalves, who headed the team that created the genetically modified
papayas, recently received the prestigious Alexander Von Humboldt Award for
Agriculture for his role in having "saved the $47 million Hawaiian papaya
industry from ruin by the ringspot virus," according to a Cornell press
release. He has been named to head the U.S. Department of Agriculture's new
Pacific Basin Agricultural Research Center, whose $18 million "Phase 1"
buildings are scheduled for groundbreaking at the UH-Hilo Research Park in
December. But in lower Puna, the heart of the state's papaya industry, some farmers
aren't so sure that the patient has been "saved" just yet.
Canada recently opened its market to genetically modified papayas, but much
of the world, including the lucrative Japan market, still remains closed to
them. Farmers complain about depressed prices for the genetically modified
fruit. Many have gone out of business or switched to other crops. And while
the two commercially available genetically modified varieties, "SunUp" and
"Rainbow," have helped control the virus, farmers have found themselves
fighting a new plague, papaya blackspot fungus, to which the genetically
altered varieties appear more susceptible than the most common "natural"
papaya. And a new study has raised questions about whether the altered genes
in the new papayas could be allergenic to humans. The County of Hawai'i website states that this island, which produces 96
percent of the state's papaya, currently grows only $20 million worth of the
fruit annually - well under half of the "47 million-dollar industry" claimed
in the Cornell press release. According to Hawai'i Papaya Industry
Association President Delan Perry, " I think we're expecting a little less
than 40 million pounds this year. The actual production peak was in the
early 80s, about 70 million. In the early 90s, prior to the virus, it was
around 50 million pounds." So at best, so far, Gonsalves and his team can only claim to have saved a
fraction of the papaya industry.
The industry also faces complaints about spray drift and unsafe practices
from some neighbors who frankly wish that it had died. A rapidly growing
counter-movement is advocating that the papaya industry stop acting so -
well, industrial. Miracles and Monsters Gene-spliced crops are such a new development that there isn't even a
commonly agreed upon name for them yet. Sometimes they're called
"genetically engineered (GE) or "genetically modified" (GM). Some
agronomists who work with them prefer the term "transgenic." But all such
crops have one thing in common: genes from another organism have been
artificially transplanted into their DNA. The result is a revolution potentially as powerful as the invention of the
printing press or of the computer network. Like those earlier revolutions,
this one deals with accessing, handling and transmitting information. But
the transgenic revolution handles information at perhaps its most profound
level for life on earth: the information contained in a creature's cells,
which define its very functioning and identity. Like any powerful tool, gene
splicing has the potential for both enormous good and great harm. It can
prevent diseases and birth defects, increase crop yields and generate
enormous wealth. It could also create literal monsters, spread
life-threatening allergies, and place control of the world's food supply in
the hands of a few powerful corporations, through patent ownership of that
food supply's genes. Last February, Kona played host to two different meetings on the topic in
successive weeks. The first, held in Kailua-Kona on Saturday, February 8,
was organized and sponsored by the University of Hawaii-Manoa, which has
developed a huge stake in the future of genetic technology: not only did it
help develop the transgenic papaya; its researchers also hold basic patents
on cloning techniques. A week later, local activists held their own
three-day workshop to organize opposition to the rapid spread of the
technology. In the weeks that followed, at least two fast-growing anti-GE
groups have sprung up on the island: the Hawaii Genetic Engineering Action
Network (HI GEAN), centered in South Kona but with island-wide membership,
and an as-yet-unnamed Puna community forum, which meets weekly to discuss GE
and related topics at an organic farm near Kalapana.
The two sides, pro and anti, are not entirely aloof from each other. When
Richard Manshardt, one of the developers of the transgenic papaya, came to
Kona for the UH conference, he stayed afterward at the home of HI GEAN
activist Nancy Redfeather. He also gave HI GEAN some samples of a new test
that would allow farmers to check on whether their papayas contained
genetically modified materials or not. In doing so, he may have unwittingly helped galvanize an anti-GE movement in
Puna. So far, two papaya growers have discovered that plants they thought
were organic were actually transgenic. A Seed in the Wrong Place... One of those farmers was John Caverly.
"This is what I've done all my life," said Caverly a week after the news,
standing on his lush farm in lower Puna. "I've worked the land. I've never
used chemicals." The farm had a very different look from the huge, regimented squares of
papaya that appeared on most plantations. The papaya here grew in smaller
patches, separated by groves of mangos and interspersed with patches of
lettuce, coconuts, citrus and rolennia (a relative of custard apple and
soursop), so that any pests or infections could not spread as easily from
tree to tree as they did in large, single-crop fields. Caverly said he had brought some of his papayas to a potluck community
meeting where HIGEAN members gave a presentation, and volunteered a fruit
for the gene test, little suspecting the results. Caverly believed the genetic contamination may have come from some papayas
that his partner had bought at a farmer's market, before the Federal
Government's strict new rules governing organic certification had gone into
effect. The trees grown from that seed were cut down after developing a
fungal disease called phytophthera. But some of the pollen from those trees
may have drifted to other trees on the farm. Under strict new federal regulations, transgenic crops cannot be labeled
organic. To make sure the GM strain is eradicated, Caverly said, the farm
would be cutting down all its producing papaya trees, destroying thousands
of seedlings, and starting anew with non-GMO seed obtained from the
University of Hawai'i, and planting them in a different field.
"I'm not into getting into a confrontation with those big chemical
companies..." he mused. Instead, he advocated a non-confrontational
approach: "I think it's better to try to correct what we're doing, work with
the community, and educate people so that we hopefully have some control
over our environment to protect our children and our grandchildren." The Fungus Among Us Ironically, susceptibility to phytophthera and other fungal diseases may be
one indicator that papayas are genetically modified. UH researchers knew the
new SunUp and Rainbow strains were more susceptible to phytophthera when
they released the new seed to the public. UH Agronomist Steve Ferreira told
the Journal about that susceptibility in April of 2001. "It's a serious problem," he admitted, then. "Before the virus broke out, it
was probably the most serious fungal disease problem for papaya....In fact,
we're working on a transgenic solution for phytophthera, but that's probably
a few years away."
Since their widespread introduction, the new varieties have been afflicted
with a new plague: blackspot fungus, forcing farmers to spray their field
frequently with expensive and hazardous fungicides. Kapoho Solo, the most
common variety of non-GM papaya, is highly vulnerable to ringspot virus, but
fairly resistant to fungal infections. "I know that Rainbow is probably a little more susceptible to phytophthora
than is Kapoho Solo," Richard Manshardt told the Journal. "The reason is
that Rainbow is a hybrid. One of them [the parent plants] is Kapoho, the
other is SunUp, which is genetically engineered, which is very susceptible
to phytophthora." Why farmers got a fungus-vulnerable hybrid instead of a GM version of Kapoho
Solo was a matter of chance. Gene-splicing is not a matter of inserting new genes with a tiny scalpel at
a precise point on a DNA chain. The virus resistant (but fungus-vulnerable)
SunUp papaya was created with a device called a "gene gun," which propels a
metal disk toward a screen at roughly the speed of a rifle bullet. When the
screen stops the disk, the disk releases a spray of one-micron-thick
tungsten balls coated with DNA proteins. The tiny balls act like miniature
shotgun pellets, penetrating the outer membranes of target plant cells to
release the proteins, which may then attach to the DNA of the host cell. The result is not an exact science. In any given cell, the new proteins may
or may not attach, and once attached, may or may not activate in the way the
scientists want. Scientists must rely on statistical probability that if
they shoot enough cells, eventually one will turn out right. "In this genetic engineering process, it frequently comes back to selection
among hopefully a large number of genetically engineered individuals, some
of which act the way you hope, if you're lucky, and some of which don't,"
Manshardt told the Journal. "So you're back to screening for some that
behave the ways that you hope to have them behave." According to Manshardt, the UH-Cornell team simply didn't get a working
anti-viral Kapoho Solo cell. But the transplant did work in a variety called
Sunset, which unfortunately was very susceptible to phytophthera. So the
team cross-bred the transgenic Sunset, which they renamed SunUp, with Kapoho
Solo to create Rainbow, which is more fungus resistant than SunUp but less
resistant then Kapoho Solo. "There are now Kapohos that are genetically engineered to resist the virus,"
noted Manshardt, but added, "Those are not commercial yet. They're still
being tested." Allergenic Ante While farmers were worrying about the fungus in their fields, another worry
was cropping up over a possible health risk for papaya consumers. The
Institute for Science in Society, a London-based anti-GM organization,
published a Web article entitled "GM Papaya Scandal," by Joe Cummins,
Professor Emeritus of Genetics at the University of Western Ontario. In it,
Cummins alleged that a transplanted protein in GM papayas might provoke
allergic reactions in humans, but that the Environmental Protection Agency
had allowed them to be released without investigating that possibility. "...As part of the approval process, potential allergens have to be
identified before the crops are released commercially," Cummins wrote. "But
the GM papaya was approved despite a recent report showing that the papaya
ringspot virus coat protein is a potential allergen because it contained a
string of amino acids identical to a known allergen." Cummins cited a scientific paper by two Dutch biologists, Gijs A Kleter and
Ad ACM Peijnenburg, who tested a number of proteins, including the ringspot
virus coat protein in the transgenic papaya, and found that the proteins
contained strings of up to six or seven amino acids - the chemical building
blocks of proteins and genes - which matched those found in known allergens. "The positive outcomes of this approach warrant further clinical testing for
potential allergenicity," concluded the two scientists. Cummins contacted
the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency about Kleter and Peijnenburg's
findings. "The EPA's public information stated that coat protein of papaya ringspot
virus and the genetic material necessary for its production had been granted
"an exemption from the requirement of tolerance" in 1997, which essentially
means it is exempt from safety assessment, based on the belief that the
material was safe for consumption by humans and animals," he reported. The "exemption" Cummins referred to was a 1997 EPA regulation that
"eliminates the need to establish a maximum permissible level for residues
of Coat Proteins of Papaya Ringspot Virus and the genetic material necessary
for its production." Both Manshardt and Cornell Prof. Dennis Gonsalves, who headed the team that
created transgenic papaya, told the Journal that they argued for the
exemption on the grounds that human beings were already eating ringspot
virus coat proteins-in fact, that humans were eating the whole virus. "It's in vegetables such as squash and zucchini, and people eat those all
the time. Whether people are getting sick from that, it certainly hasn't
come to anybody's attention," said Manshardt. "At that time we had not compared amino acids and so forth," admitted
Gonsalves. But he noted, "When Hawai'i was in trouble in the 1990s, and all
of Puna was infected, many of the papayas were eaten." He also noted scientific projects in Brazil and Taiwan, in which fruits were
deliberately infected with weakened viruses, much as weakened viruses are
sometimes used as human vaccines. In fact, he said, "I was involved in a
project where we deliberately infected papaya with a mild strain of the
virus. This was in the mid-1980s.... A farmer wanted to utilize the
technology. So he utilized the techniques, and then sold the fruit on the
market." But Gonsalves said no follow-up was done to see if any of the consumers who
bought had suffered any ill effects.
The EPA accepted the argument that consumers were already eating plant
viruses. But Japan hasn't been as easy a sell. Gonsalves and others have
been continuing research on the allergen question in order to meet Japan's
more exacting requirements.
"We followed the standard criteria that people use in checking for the
possibility of allergens," Gonsalves told the Journal. That criteria, he
maintained, was to look for proteins with 35 percent of their amino acids in
common with a known allergen, then to look for strings of eight or more
amino acids that matched strings in the known allergen.
Manshardt believes the Dutch study is "pretty nebulous and not important. It
should be checked out but it's not a waving red flag. It's not a sure sign
of any allergenicity."
Former Indiana University GE researcher Marti Crouch, disagrees. "In fact,
very small changes in a protein can increase the allergenicity
dramatically," she wrote in an e-mail to the Journal "Some of the drugs made
by genetic engineering, such as human insulin, are many times more likely to
cause allergies, and it is thought that subtle differences in the sugars
attached to them, or a single amino acid difference, may be responsible for
the increase in allergies," she said. Who Owns the Food? One factor motivating many anti-GMO activists is not safety, but a broader
issue: who controls the world food supply?
"Genetically modified seed - you can't save it. It's against the law," notes
Redfeather. "Farmers or gardeners who use it would have to sign a technology
agreement to lease this seed for the year." GM seed is patented. GM seed patent holders have sued a number of farmers in
the U.S. and Canada - including one papaya farmer in Hawai'i - when GM genes
were discovered in their fields. Some of the sued farmers have claimed that
drifting pollen from nearby GM fields contaminated their plants. Redfeather
points out that for thousands of years, farmers improved their crops,
adapting them to local climates, soil conditions and pests, by saving seed
from the best plants in each field and using that seed for the next year's
crop. The introduction of commercial hybrids has limited that practice,
leading to the extinction of thousands of local crop varieties. Widespread
GM crops, pollen drift and the threat of being sued over unlicensed genes
could threaten traditional seed-saving even further.
The problem of pollen drift has organic farmers especially worried. Under
the strict new U.S. law on the labeling of "organic" foods, no GM plant
qualifies as organic. But GM plants and food products are not required to be
labeled, and farmers have no way of knowing if the field next to them is
growing GM crops. Manshardt argues that there's no pressing need to label GM crops just
because they're GM.
"...If the thing you put in there changes the character of the product - if
it expresses something that was never in the product before, you have to
label it," he argues. "If there were, for instance, a 60 percent drop in
Vitamin A or a 40 percent increase in Vitamin C, you would have to label
that, if it were a significant deviation from papayas in general. So I think
that the public's being protected from things like that...[but] if it
doesn't deviate significantly from the unmodified papaya, then what are you
telling people?
Manshardt says that the Cornell-UH team did conduct a preliminary test on
pollen drift, in which fruit from non-GM fields adjacent to and 1/4 mile
downwind from a 1-acre GM tract were examined for cross-pollination. 1000
seeds from 85 fruit were examined. No cross-pollination was found.
"That's not definitive by any means, but it does give some indication that
under commercial conditions, there isn't going to be significant gene flow
from transgenics to non-transgenics." But critics argue that the sample in Manshardt's test was too minuscule to
be significant. An acre of papaya can contain thousands of fruits, and each
fruit can contain around 500 seeds. And a relatively small organic farm
surrounded by GM papaya fields could face considerably more chance of
contamination than the fields tested for drift from a one-acre test plot.
The tests conducted by HI GEAN have already yielded two positives for GM
contamination of what were thought to be natural papayas: one in Puna and
one in Kona. Manshardt also argues that if an occasional case of pollen drift occurs, the
fruit can still be sold as organic if the contamination was accidental. He
cites a clause in the Preamble to the "Applicability" section USDA National
Organic Program.
"As long as an organic operation has not used excluded methods and takes
reasonable steps to avoid contact with the products of excluded methods as
detailed in their approved organic system plan, the unintentional presence
of products of excluded methods should not affect the status of an organic
product or operation," the Preamble states.
Eileen O'Hora-Weir of the Hawai'i Organic Farmer's Association (HOFA)
disagrees.
"The Preamble is not the law. It's the explanation of the law," she
contends.
The actual regulations of the National Organic Program require that the
organic farm protect and document its seed source, according to an "organic
system plan" spelled out by an organic accrediting agency such as HOFA.
"Given the fact that we have genetic contamination of the papaya crop in
Hawai'i, we require that the farmers document their seed source," noted
O'Hora-Weir. "If the papaya tested positive for GM genes, "the certifying
agency would then conduct an investigation to determine the source of the
contamination. If the source of contamination was not a result of actions
taken by the producer, the producer would not lose his certification."
But whether or not the farm would be allowed to sell the fruit," she said,
would be "a case by case call." Education and
Counter-Education On a Wednesday evening in early March, some 70 community activists met for
their weekly forum at La`akea, a "permaculture education facility" in lower
Puna. The crowd ranged from Hawaiian sovereignty movement elders to
anti-vaccination crusader/conspiracy theorist Len Horowitz. The catalyst
that had brought this grassroots movement together was transgenic papaya.
But papaya was only the tip of a much larger iceberg. Most of those present
believed in small-scale, sustainable agriculture. They saw GM products as
only the latest threat from a corporate-controlled, industrialized
agribusiness system that was strangling the way of life they loved. "This is a direct threat to our freedom," said co-facilitator Sarah
Sullivan. "That's the common thread that's binding us together. We want to
be self-reliant. We want to be sovereign. We want to be free."
"That's really scary to me to think that we can't even grow our own
vegetables because somebody might come in and take it from us, or make us
pay them for it," one participant commented.
"What Monsanto was telling the people is with so much poverty and famine, we
cannot afford to not to have genetically modified foods," remarked veteran
author-activist Alicia Bay Laurel. "But if you have only a little of this
[crop] and a little of that, you don't have to have all the spraying and you
don't have to have genetically modified crops.... The industrialization of
farming is what's causing the worldwide famine."
Another noted that for most of the history of the world, every farm had been
organic. "The word 'organic' associated with a farm is a symptom of a
corporate world," that speaker maintained.
Hawaiian kupuna Sam Kalalaleiki agreed. "This is the way we did it until
America came and broke up the units," he said. "I think all of us - we're on
the right path." Former Na'alehu School librarian Eden Peart told of attending a conference
where a corporate-sponsored school curriculum unit on genetic engineering
was discussed for Hawaii schools. One proposed question dealt with the
extinction of native birds because their red feathers were prized for
ornamentation, and asked students how genetic engineering could help solve
the problem.
"The 'right' answer was, 'Genetically engineer the bird so it has a
different color of feathers,'" she recalled.
The group is working on its own strategy of counter-education. On April 11
and 12 at La`akea, they plan a two-day event. HI GEAN will supply a limited
number of the new GM tests, so farmers can find out if their papayas have
been contaminated with the artificial genes. Participants will tour each
other's farms and do a "work trade to see each others' strengths." But while some saw GM plants, industrialized agriculture, and even
vaccinations as a global corporate conspiracy, others cautioned against
villainizing the other side.
One activist recalled an encounter with GM researchers: "These people said,
'Well, there's starvation all over the world, and I just want to do what I
can. And there was this light of love in their eyes...."
"It's so important that we look at everyone as a potential ally, instead of
making everyone out to be an enemy," Sullivan told the Journal later. "I
think building community with everyone involved in this issue is most
important to me. All of our problems are only a symptom of a lack of
information." Source: http://www.hawaiiislandjournal.com/stories/4a03a.html | |
