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The Three Mile Island of biotech? Saturday, Dec. 14, 2002 -- CropChoice news) --
John Nichols, The Nation, 12/30/02: Hamilton County, Nebraska, is where food comes from. You can visit the
Plainsman Museum on Highway 14 to learn about "farm life from the 1880s
to the 1950s," or you can just drive on up the highway and learn about
farm life in 2002 at any of the dozens of family farms that still grow
corn and soybeans on fields that some families have worked since their
ancestors homesteaded here just after the Civil War. For more than a
century, farmers in this fertile stretch of a state where folks still
refer to themselves as "cornhuskers" have planted food crops each spring
and trucked the harvest in the fall to towering grain elevators on the
edge of the bustling Great Plains town of Aurora. Those grains become
the cereals, the breads, the cake mixes and the soy patties that feed
America and the world.
This fall, however, the predictable patterns of Hamilton County and
American food production took on the characteristics of a dystopian
science-fiction story. An area farmer, who a year earlier had
supplemented his income by quietly planting a test plot with seed corn
genetically modified to produce proteins containing powerful drugs for
treatment of diarrhea in pigs, this year harvested soybeans for human
consumption from the same field. He trucked them off to the Aurora
Co-op, where they were mixed with soybeans from other fields throughout
the county in preparation for production as food. Just as the soybeans
were about to begin their journey to the nation's dinner plates, a
routine inspection of the test field by US Department of Agriculture
inspectors revealed that corn plants that should have been completely
removed were still growing in the field from which the soybeans had been
harvested--raising the prospect that the pharmaceutical crop had mingled
with the food crop.
Suddenly, as they say in Aurora, all kinds of hell broke loose. In
November, USDA investigators swooped into town to order the lockdown of
a warehouse filled with 500,000 bushels of food-grade soybeans that had
been contaminated by contact with the beans containing remnants of the
pharmaceutical corn. Aurora Co-op managers quietly secured the soybeans.
But when word of the incident leaked out, Greenpeace campaigners climbed
a tall white elevator to unfurl a banner that read: "This Is Your Food
on Drugs!" Agitated officials of the Grocery Manufacturers of America
expressed "concerns about the possible adulteration of the US food
supply." Consumer groups made unfavorable comparisons between the
incident in Hamilton County and the last great genetically engineered
food debacle, which occurred two years ago when GE StarLink corn that
had been approved solely for animal feed turned up in taco shells, chips
and other food products.
Biotech industry groups and the government agencies with which they have
worked closely to promote the increased use of genetically modified
organisms in food crops rushed to assure consumers that all was well.
Anthony Laos, CEO of ProdiGene, the Texas biotech company that has made
Aurora ground zero for experiments in putting drugs into food, and that
faced a possible $500,000 fine and the loss of its testing permit,
promised to cover the $2.8 million cost of the contaminated crops. Jim
Rogers, a spokesman for the USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection
Service--which has been criticized for lax oversight of pharmaceutical
crop experiments, commonly known as "biopharming"--said, "It's isolated,
it's in one location, it's not being moved." That same week, however, it
was revealed that ProdiGene had been ordered, just two months earlier,
to burn 155 acres of corn from an Iowa field where stray biotech plants
had "jumped the fence" and contaminated conventional corn crops.
But there is no two-strikes-and-you're-out rule at the USDA. ProdiGene
got off with a $250,000 fine and a promise to follow regulations better.
The company kept its permit to plant experimental crops, and biotech
promoters continue to push for policies that could allow as much as 10
percent of US corn production to be devoted to pharmaceutical crops by
2010. "The future of biopharmaceuticals has simply never been brighter,"
said Laos. Farm and food activists worry that the events of fall 2002
will be little more than a bump in the road to the brave new world of
biopharming.
"This is the Three Mile Island of biotech," says Mark Ritchie, president
of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, comparing this fall's
incidents to the near-meltdown of the Pennsylvania nuclear power plant,
which led to a dramatic shift in public attitudes about expansion of
that industry. "The biotech industry says that because some soybeans
were quarantined at the last minute, no one should worry. Well, at Three
Mile Island, they contained things. But that didn't mean it wasn't a
crisis, and it certainly didn't mean that people should have said, 'Oh,
everything's fine now. Let's just let these guys get back to business as
usual.'"
Richie says it's crucial to seize the moment--this is possibly the last
chance to prevent the disasters that are all but certain to occur if
biotech corporations are allowed to continue on their current course.
"This is not the point to back off; this is the point to move very
aggressively to get a handle on what is happening, and to control it,"
he says. "We're at the earliest stage of the attempt to genetically
engineer corn plants to make them factories for producing powerful and
potentially dangerous drugs, and already we have examples of
contamination of food crops. This is scary stuff." [See Mark Schapiro,
"Sowing Disaster?" October 28.]
How scary? Britain's Royal Society has expressed concerns about allergic
reactions that could result from ingesting, inhaling or even touching
biotech crops, while a new study by GE Food Alert, a coalition of
health, consumer and environmental groups, details scientists' concerns
about the prospect that eating crops containing biopharmaceuticals could
weaken the immune system.
No one, not even the top scientists with the USDA, the Food and Drug
Administration or the Environmental Protection Agency, can say with
absolute certainty that the Iowa and Nebraska incidents are the only
cases in which experimental pharmaceutical crops have jumped the fence
from test plots and mixed with food crops. An expert committee of the
National Academy of Sciences this year came to the conclusion that just
as residue from more traditional GE cornfields has contaminated
neighboring organic fields, so "it is possible that crops transformed to
produce pharmaceutical or other industrial compounds might mate with
plantations grown for human consumption, with the unanticipated result
of novel chemicals in the human food supply."
The potential public health threat creates another threat--the health of
American agriculture. Says Iowa State University agriculture professor
Neil Harl, "If consumers take on the belief that corn products are being
contaminated with products designed for vastly different uses--like HIV
vaccines or hepatitis B vaccines or any of a variety of other things
that are being discussed--and if they think this contamination poses a
threat to them, that's going to create the risk of a negative reaction
to corn grown in the United States. And consumers are kings. If
consumers start to have doubts about US corn, farm-state economies are
going to be in very serious trouble."
That prospect frightens Keith Dittrich, a corn farmer from north of
Aurora who has shied away from offers to plant biopharm test plots.
"This is being sold to farmers as a new specialty crop that could make
them a lot of money," says Dittrich, the president of the American Corn
Growers Association. "But if these experiments end up costing farmers
markets in Europe or the United States, we could be looking at a
short-term profit that turns into a long-term disaster." According to
research by the ACGA, US corn farmers have already lost more than $814
million in foreign sales over the past five years as a result of
restrictions on genetically modified food imports imposed by Europe,
Japan and other countries.
"When it comes to what is being proposed, and what is actually happening
with regard to genetic modification of food crops, we're absolutely
navigating uncharted waters at a high rate of speed. And we're being
pushed to speed up by people with dollar signs in their eyes and no
concern whatsoever for farmers or consumers," says Nebraska Farmers
Union president John Hansen. "There may be a television program here or
an article there about what's happening, but I don't think most
Americans have any idea of the extent to which things have been pushed
forward without the kind of research and precautions that ordinary
common sense would demand."
Biopharming represents the new frontier of biotechnology, where
agribusiness meets the pharmaceutical industry to explore a once
unimaginable prospect: manipulating the genetic code of plants to induce
them to generate AIDS vaccines, blood-clotting agents, digestive enzymes
and industrial adhesives. If their initiative works, the corporate
promoters of biopharming predict, expensive laboratories and factories
will by the end of this decade be replaced by hundreds of thousands of
acres growing pharmaceutical corn and soybeans that will allow consumers
to realize ProdiGene's promise that you can "Have Your Vaccine and Eat
It, Too!" And those corporations will yield huge returns--ProdiGene
predicts billion-dollar markets for products it has patented.
The dream of a biopharmed future is still presented as the noble cousin
of GE cash-crop schemes. To the extent that Americans discuss genetic
engineering, they usually refer to the process by which genes and
segments of DNA that do not naturally occur in a particular food crop
are added to it in order to make it easier, cheaper and more profitable
to raise--such as the splicing of an antifreeze gene from flounder to
produce a cold-resistant tomato. Biopharming pushes the limits of
genetic engineering to a new plateau, where scientists re-engineer crops
to produce drugs that can be extracted from kernels and beans far more
cheaply than they can be produced in factories.
In their race to patent and market pharmaceutical crops, ProdiGene,
Monsanto, Dow Chemical and various universities have quietly obtained
permission from the USDA to have farmers plant open-air test plots
across the United States; on these plots, the corporations are
attempting--with some success--to turn corn, soybeans, rice and even
tobacco into "plant pharmacies" that can provide edible vaccines for
everything from hepatitis B to diabetes. Though biopharming is still in
the experimental stage, the experiment has already seen twenty
corporations and universities conduct more than 315 open-air field
trials in undisclosed locations. These plots have brought thousands of
acres--virtually all of them in the vicinity of fields growing
traditional food crops--into biopharm production.
The race to the fields has sped up in recent years, in part because the
biotech industry has many allies in the Bush Administration and a
Republican Congress that prefers "voluntary regulation" by industry to
real regulation by the government. And these firms are actively
recruited by state officials and university chancellors who believe that
a biotech boom could turn Wisconsin or Iowa into a version of Silicon
Valley. (ProdiGene was recruited to Texas during George W. Bush's
governorship.) As a result, calls for limits on biopharming are often
met with cries of "no way" from farm-state politicians.
"Nature is not a pharmaceutical factory. It was never meant to be. But
we have reached the point where it may be possible to make it that, and
that prospect excites politicians and corporate executives who see this
as a new way to make money," says Bill Freese, a policy analyst with
Friends of the Earth who wrote GE Food Alert's groundbreaking report on
the dangers of manufacturing drugs and chemicals in traditional food
crops. "They talk a great deal about the benefits for society. But it's
really the economics that attract them. They think they can grow drugs
more cheaply and have lower production costs than if they were produced
in factories. Also, if a drug goes well, they can just scale up the
acres involved in production. If the drug is a bust, they can just fire
the farmers."
ProdiGene press releases describe the firm as being "well positioned to
capitalize on the opportunities in the large and expanding recombinant
protein markets." ProdiGene promotes itself as "the first...company to
produce and market a recombinant protein product from transgenic
plants," and it maintains a portfolio of ninety current and pending
patents--including one to use plants to develop vaccines that can be
eaten rather than injected. As a seed company and pharmaceutical
industry executive, ProdiGene CEO Laos has for decades preached the
bio-utopian "future of farming" gospel. To a greater extent than other
biopharmers, he is determined to continue using corn as his company's
preferred pharmaceutical plant. "We have looked at many different
alternatives, and the best system available today for this technology is
corn," he says.
And ProdiGene is getting lots of help. Its research on an edible AIDS
drug is funded by the National Institutes of Health, and it recently
developed a partnership with Eli Lilly. ProdiGene has collected more
permits to initiate biopharm field trials than any other corporation in
the United States--eighty-five, while the next most active experimenter,
Monsanto, has just forty-four. Half of ProdiGene's permits are for
fields in Iowa and Nebraska--the state that, according to the USDA, has
been the site of the largest number of open-air field trials. And many
of those fields are in Hamilton County, where Laos lived before taking
charge of ProdiGene.
Laos has allies in the Corn Belt. In December, after the Nebraska and
Iowa incidents, the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO) backed off
a proposal to temporarily stop growing GE drug- and chemical-producing
crops in major corn-growing states after the plan encountered noisy
opposition from Iowa's Democratic Governor, Tom Vilsack, and other
farm-state politicians, who still see biopharming as a boon. Many
farmers in Hamilton County have planted test fields at the behest of
seed salesmen associated with Laos and ProdiGene. The salesmen offer
small premiums--$600 for planting an acre of experimental corn and
another $300 for managing it in the year after the experiment is
done--along with the promise of bigger bonuses when the biotech train
leaves the station. "They tell you: 'Once this gets going, the farmers
who are in on it are going to make a lot of money growing these crops,'"
says Mike Alberts, an Aurora-area farmer who this year turned down an
opportunity to grow a ProdiGene test plot. "Farmers around here have had
it hard for a long time, and a lot of them don't want to miss out on
something they're calling the future of farming."
Critics of the biotech industry say that the federal agencies that
should be strictly regulating burgeoning biopharm experimentation--the
USDA, the Food and Drug Administration and the Environmental Protection
Agency--are still too busy promoting GE crops as the cure for what ails
American agriculture to recognize that they could turn into a curse. The
USDA continues to hail GE crops as a boon for farmers, gleefully
promoting biopharming with a website that features such headers as:
"Animal Urine--A New Source of 'Pharmed' Medicine?" Even now, the agency
allows agribusiness firms to withhold details about the nature of their
experimental crops and the locations of test plots from the
public--including neighboring food farmers--by declaring the data
"Confidential Business Information."
"The regulatory system isn't working. It looks like we've got
pharmaceutical chaos in the fields," says former North Dakota
Agriculture Commissioner Sarah Vogel. "I'm not sure that some of these
people in Washington or the corporate boardrooms quite understand the
threat these incidents tell us are being created for food safety and the
future of American agriculture." Part of the problem, according to Jean
Halloran, who directs Consumers Union's Consumer Policy Institute, is
that technological advances have outpaced not just regulations but basic
questions of whether biopharming should be allowed at all. "What's
infuriating is that there has been no public debate on whether we should
be proceeding to this technology. They just went ahead and did it,"
Halloran says of an industry that, for the most part, is policed only
with vague guidelines and threats of action if, as in the case of
ProdiGene's plots, something goes really wrong. "We're in the middle of
an official comment period on a set of guidelines--not regulations, just
guidelines--at the same time that we are learning that we've got these
problems with the testing. Doesn't that sound like we've missed a step?"
After the near-disaster in Hamilton County, there may be some scaling
back of the explosive growth in the number of biopharm test plots in
corn-growing states. ProdiGene and USDA officials talk of "isolating"
the firm's open-air test fields, just beyond the edge of the cornbelt in
Nebraska's Sand Hills or perhaps in the Southwest. But independent
observers who know about farming and food safety are skeptical about
this kind of self-regulation. They note that roughly 20 percent of the
nation's corn production--including that of much of Nebraska--occurs
outside the "drug-free zone" that BIO advanced and then abandoned. More
significant, they argue that open-air test plots are not necessarily
"isolated" by distance from traditional food crops.
Iowa State's Harl explains that even an isolated field can be hit with a
tornado or heavy winds that will drop a kernel of corn far from the test
plot. "Birds, deer, runoff from fields into rivers--it's hard to list
all the ways that seeds and kernels can be carried substantial
distances," says Harl, who adds that because of consumer confidence and
liability concerns, "ultimately, I think we are going to conclude that
we have to produce a zero-contamination rule. That requires us to
control the total environment--and that means in a greenhouse."
Federal regulators have begun to feel pressure to tighten regulation of
biopharm experiments and production, and not just from environmental,
consumer and grocery industry groups, which have long been troubled by
the prospect of drug crops contaminating food crops. In November Senate
majority leader Tom Daschle and Agriculture Committee chair Tom Harkin
wrote Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman to ask "whether existing
procedures and safeguards are sufficient to ensure that similar
incidents do not occur in the future." A more energetic push came from
the National Food Processors Association, whose president, John Cady,
said the USDA and the FDA "should impose a stringent and mandatory
regulatory framework to ensure protection of the US food supply and US
food exports from any inadvertent or even intentional contamination by
plant-made materials that have not been approved for human food and
animal feed purposes." At the same time, however, farm groups allied
with agribusiness--chief among them the American Farm Bureau
Federation--issued a statement reaffirming their faith in biotech crops
and essentially asking federal officials to continue encouraging
biopharming.
Harl, who has served on the USDA's Advisory Committee on Agricultural
Biotechnology, says federal agencies are going to have to fundamentally
alter their approach to biopharming. "This is part of a broader
regulatory phenomenon that has not been faced yet. If we are going to
allow this type of production, then we have to ramp up the regulatory
regimen," he says. The USDA, the FDA and the EPA must resolve turf wars
over which agency is in charge of regulating not just test plots but,
potentially, wide-scale production of pharmaceutical crops. That will
require development of a regulatory regimen that makes public the
details about where biopharm fields are planted and where biopharm
products are being processed, and that insures regular testing through
all the steps of food processing to assure that pharmaceutical crops are
not being mixed with food crops. "We won't have discipline until we have
testing at every point of commingling," Harl says. "We have some tests,
but they are not what they must be: fast, easy and cheap."
Before any of these steps occur, however, Jean Halloran of Consumers
Union suggests a more fundamental move. "We should ask whether
pharmaceutical products should be engineered into food plants in the
first place," she says. "Our view is that the answer to the question
should be no." She notes that the drugs that biopharming promises to
deliver can be gotten through other means. "The practical aspects of
trying to keep these pharmaceutical plants separate from the regular
food plants is an insurmountable problem," she says. "It just can't be
done. It can't be done because of the fallibility of human beings. It
can't be done because you can't control pollen flow. It can't be done
because you can't control mother nature that way. And if you can't
control mother nature and fallible human beings, we've come to the
conclusion that you shouldn't try." | |
