Pass the Potatoes, But Hold the Vitriol

by Marshall A. Ledger
June 2002

We’ve heard about the polarized debates over genetically modified foods. What would consensus look like?

At my neighborhood farmers’ market last month, the leaves of the romaine lettuce were especially upright, raising suspicion in a nearby customer who decided--insisted--that this product had been genetically altered, although experts don’t know of any such romaine for sale.

In a natural-foods grocery store, a manufacturer of canola oil has posted a sign: His canola oil is not genetically modified but comes from hybridization, “a very different process.” When I got home, I checked my dictionary, which confused me by defining hybridization as a crossing of genetic lines. For clarification, I went on the Internet, only to find lots of competing claims, most put forth with dubious authority.

Even so, what if these foods have been genetically modified? Are they better for it, and for me? Should it make a difference?

I’m not alone in my quandary. Americans don’t know much about genetically modified (GM) foods, according to a 2001 survey by The Mellman Group and Public Opinion Strategies:

We are ill-informed:

• Only 44 percent heard a “great deal” or “some” about GM foods or biotechnology in food production; 55 percent heard “not much” or “nothing.”
• 60 percent thought that less than half of the food in grocery stores contains GM ingredients. Some 14 percent said more than half--and were closer to the truth: Says the Grocery Manufacturers of America, up to 70 percent of our processed food has GM ingredients.

So we’re already behind the awareness curve:

• Only 19 percent of Americans felt they have eaten GM foods; 62 percent said they had not.

And we don’t know what we’re putting into ourselves:

• 46 percent did not know whether GM foods are basically safe; 25 percent felt they are basically unsafe.

Yet we have opinions:

• 58 percent of consumers (66 percent of women, 50 percent of men) oppose the introduction of GM foods into the U.S. food supply.

But our opinions are malleable

• When informed that up to 70 percent of processed food sold in stores contains GM ingredients, 48 percent of survey participants decided that GM foods are safe. (Twenty percent from the “unsafe” category changed their minds.)

We’d like to know more:

• 65 percent favor research into GM foods.

Because it’s important:

• 75 percent want to know whether their foods have been genetically altered.

But not vitally important:

Genetic modification and biotechnology ranked 5th and 6th in consumer concern about food safety (freshness, poisoning, salmonella and chemicals/fertilizers are more worrisome).

Meanwhile, as I dither over whether it’s okay to make a salad dressing from canola oil or drizzle it on that romaine, many of the world’s people have genuinely urgent food needs, to which genetic technologies may be a blessing--or a curse.

The experimental GM rice known as “golden rice” produces beta-carotene, an ingredient not found in regular rice. If “golden rice” can eventually be made to produce enough beta-carotene, it might help prevent blindness in up to 3 million children a year, or prevent death from vitamin-A deficiency in 1 million children a year--or not, if opponents of biotechnology successfully prevent this and other GM foods from being developed and distributed, or if they manage to change the climate of the debate enough so that companies and philanthropic groups pull the plug on this kind of research.

In 1999, a cyclone in the coastal Indian state of Orissa left as many as 15 million homeless. Relief organizations distributed a U.S.-donated GM corn-soy food. Critics argued that Indians were being used as “guinea pigs.” Their critics countered that the U.S. “doesn’t need to use Indians as guinea pigs, since millions of Americans have been eating genetically modified food for years now with no ill effects.”

As with my personal concerns, it is not easy to find reliable, balanced guidance to form opinions about someone else’s life-and-death issues. And if we can’t evaluate the information and its sources, and our understanding of GM remains clouded, how can public policy, or our humanitarian impulses, do the right thing regarding this important technology?

Addressing these two vital issues--the knowledge vacuum and policy recommendations--and helping to create an atmosphere in which fact-based arguments control the spin (rather than the reverse) is the work of the Pew Initiative on Food and Biotechnology, a project of the University of Richmond with Trusts support of $11.9 million.

The Initiative, whose principal office is located in Washington, D.C., advocates neither side of the GM wars but rather a wiser, more thoughtful exchange of ideas about biotechnology’s multi-nuanced issues.

Executive Director Michael Rodemeyer puts it this way: “Genetic manipulation is simply a tool, like any other technology. It makes a lot more sense to talk about how we use the tool than either the goodness or badness of the tool itself. There are applications with potential benefit and those that are probably questionable. We should have a public debate about particular applications. But we often get very lost in the technology itself and try to characterize the merits of the technology.”

As for the Initiative, he says: “We provide information on all sides of the issues so that people can look at the merits of the various positions and make their own decisions. We’re trying very hard to not be promotional of the technology. We call ourselves technology ‘agnostics.’” One example of the information is the survey mentioned earlier, which indicates that the issue is “still up for grabs,” as Rodemeyer puts it.

Being perceived as balanced on an issue as contentious and confusing as GM cannot be easy. Industry, which did not initially do a good job of explaining GM’s benefits, retreated when criticism began to roll in; at last year’s annual meeting of the Biotechnology Industry Organization, Wyatt Andrews, national correspondent for CBS News, criticized the industry for failing to “engage the debate.”

Engaging the debate on such a contentious issue poses a challenge for the balance-seeking Initiative. DJ Nordquist, its director of communications, acknowledges the problem: “The typical Washington approach is: Either you’re with us or against us. If you’re not promoting our agenda, then you’re something we need to worry about and try to manage.”

She continues: “Neutrality is a tough job, and we struggle with it all the time. Essentially we know we’ve done our job when both sides say good things about us, or when we get the complaint calls from both sides--which we do.”

“The guy in the middle,” Rodemeyer muses: “Well, the Washington adage is, ‘The only thing that’s in the middle of the road is road kill.’ Seriously, I really see this as kind of a unique effort in a very polarized political environment, to try to see whether a middle voice can exist and help change the nature and tone of the debate. It’s a work in progress.”

Even as the Initiative was being planned and getting under way, GM made national headlines that showed the need for the Initiative’s work and methods. One incident pinpointed the need for solid scientific information and informed media reporting. In 1999, Cornell University researchers wrote a letter to the journal Nature, saying that monarch caterpillars could be killed by the Bt protein--a toxin intentionally produced by GM corn to stop the corn borer, a significant pest. Anti-GM protests stimulated public concern.

In September of 2001, however, research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences concluded that Bt corn did not, in fact, harm the monarchs. One of the ironies, said the lead researcher, Rick Hellmich of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, was that pesticides “are far more indiscriminant insect killers” than Bt and also threaten water supplies. “Growers want to be good stewards of the land,” he added. “They would very much like to reduce the insecticides they are using.”

The other incident, in the fall of 2000, a few months before the Initiative was launched, showed the pivotal role of good policy and effective, trustworthy regulation. It involved StarLink, a brand of corn that, via GM, produces its own insect-controlling protein. Because one unknown is whether the protein causes human allergies, the Environmental Protection Agency approved StarLink for animal use only. Nonetheless, food products containing the corn showed up on grocery shelves, partly because it proved impossible to keep StarLink separated from other lots of corn.

No conclusive evidence of harm to humans surfaced, but StarLink was recalled, amid widespread publicity. The contamination undermined consumer confidence in the adequacy of the regulatory system, especially since an activist group, and not the government, had detected the violation. A post-StarLink poll by the Initiative showed 45 percent of Americans are “not confident” about the regulators. The incident also led to costly testing and to questions of liability throughout the food marketing chain. And it threatened corn exports to major trading partners like Japan and South Korea, which have taken a slower, more cautious approach to approving GM foods.

The crisis had other repercussions. Attention to the contamination issue led to the discovery that it is virtually impossible to find any corn supplies in the U.S. without at least a trace of GM corn. It also split the former political unanimity of the agricultural sector’s support of biotechnology. Farmers like the technology and want to use it (for example, GM soybeans now take up 74 percent of total soybean acreage, up 6 percent from last year; GM corn, 32 percent of corn acres, also up 6 percent; and GM cotton, 71 percent of cotton acres, up 2 percent), but they want to be sure that they can keep customers.

Roundup Ready wheat, a Monsanto Company variety, exemplifies this conundrum for growers: They want the benefits of the technology, but are concerned about losing their overseas market, since about half of the U.S. wheat crop is exported. Farm and food groups began urging biotechnology companies to go slow in commercializing new products until they first win consumer acceptance; the companies, picking up the cue, have shown a new willingness to reassure customers.

But the regulatory failure remains unanswered: What regulations were in place to prevent the mixup? What agency was responsible for monitoring compliance and assuring that the regulations were effective? As Rodemeyer notes, Americans depend on the government to assure the public’s safety, and StarLink demonstrated some problems in the government’s oversight of GM crops.

The butterfly and StarLink episodes qualify as discrete events, but GM raises many ongoing, unresolved issues: for instance, food safety, labeling, international trade, religious and ethical issues, benefits vs. risks (for instance, improved yield, nutrition and quality against unknown and unpredictable long-term environmental or human-health effects), socioeconomic disruption, reliable testing, new forms of transactions between farmers and the seed companies, susceptibility to allergens and toxins, gene migration, buildup of resistance to pests and weeds, ecological implications, the cultural relationship of a people to its foods, biological boundaries, trans-species breeding, GM-produced vitamins and pharmaceuticals, patents, seeds as intellectual property, licenses, antitrust litigation, sustainable agriculture, and GM as a new process or not.

All of this, and more, is within the scope of the Initiative, part of whose mission is to provide balanced, objective information to the media, public opinion leaders, policymakers and the American public at large. Among its means: the monthly publication Agbiotech Buzz, with interviews and point-counterpoint articles; case studies (such as a forthcoming report on transgenic fish); and “framework” reports--documents intended to improve the level of debate rather than to simply wrap it up. The first report described the current regulatory system for agricultural biotechnology products and identifies concerns that various groups have raised.

The second report was Harvest on the Horizon, which described some of the genetically engineered products that industry and university scientists are developing, not only on such large-scale crops as corn and soybeans, but also on plants, trees, grasses, animals, insects and fish. Eventually we might have (among much more) vaccine-bearing bananas, bacteria sensitive to TNT to detect buried land mines, GM pig organs suitable for human transplant, and bulletproof vests made from goat milk. The point was not to raise eyebrows but to emphasize that “the debate is important because the technology is important,” says Rodemeyer. Knowing the direction and potential uses of GM research must be critical part of the public’s decision-making process. After all, he adds, whether the public ultimately accepts GM products will depend on developers’ ability to address environmental and public-health concerns as well as on making products that respond to marketplace demand.

The Initiative also sponsors polls, policy dialogues (for instance, on the religious approach to GM), symposia for the media, issue briefs, fact sheets, pertinent news and links to relevant Web sites, all available on its own site at http://www.pewagbiotech.org.

Impartiality has paid off. The Web version of Harvest has been reviewed 13,000 times since its release last September. The first policy dialogue (“Are the U.S. and Europe Heading for a Food Fight Over Genetically Modified Foods?”) has had nearly 37,000 viewers since it was first broadcast. Initiative staff have answered queries from all the various interest groups as well as invitations to brief congressional committees, government agencies, and agencies from various states and other countries. They have also briefed diplomats-in-training for the U.S. Foreign Service.

The Initiative has also brought entrenched interests to the table in order to develop policy recommendations. Ongoing issue discussions take place among environmentalists, industry executives, consumer and other public-interest advocates, farmers, agriculture professors, and scientists in what is called the “Stakeholders’ Forum.” The point, says Rodemeyer, is to get past conflict and build consensus, with the goal of making recommendations about oversight of GM technology.

One example of the group’s work follows Harvest on the Horizon: Given how GM as a whole might develop, what recommendations might adequately anticipate that future? To explain this function of the Forum, Rodemeyer goes back to 1986, when Congress determined federal policy toward biotechnology regulation: Commercial food products would be regulated on the basis of their composition and intended use--not on how they were produced--an assumption (he explains) that biotechnology is a process that does not pose special risks.

Federal oversight authority would be shared among the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and the Department of Agriculture (USDA), but no explicitly “biotech” statutes were passed at that time. Each agency would cover food biotechnology by applying existing statutes created for another purpose. For instance, the USDA’s plant quarantine statute, which prevents plant pests from entering the United States, covers GM plants. At the same time, the agencies agreed to reexamine GM issues periodically to see whether the regulations had to be either strengthened or reduced.

“The agencies have done a good job of using their statutes to review the products that have come along so far,” Rodemeyer continues, “but essentially there are only two traits out there in the marketplace right now: herbicide resistance and insect resistance. As we get into more complicated traits and products, they’ll pose additional challenges to the system.” Complicating matters, he adds, is that the federal government has potentially conflicting roles as protector of the public and promoter of the export of American agricultural projects.

New products such as transgenic fish that grow more quickly than conventional fish illustrate the food-safety and environmental issues within the regulatory structure. Rodemeyer summarizes the problem: The FDA has been asked to approve a GM salmon that grows to normal size two to three times faster than its non-GM counterpart. There seem to be economic benefits. But these fish are grown in aqua-culture pens. What happens if they escape and breed with native salmon in the Atlantic Ocean, where salmon are already endangered? The genes of the transgenic fish could mix with the genes of the native salmon, potentially reducing genetic diversity.

Proponents of the GM salmon are sterilizing the fish so they can’t mate if they escape. Opponents argue that even a non-breeding species will compete for the same habitat and therefore have an impact. “So even if we take all the risk-management steps, the ecological effects are a complicated question,” explains Rodemeyer, “and the problem is that, for regulation, this is being reviewed by the FDA under a statute that was intended for reviewing new animal drugs--pharmaceuticals for animals. The FDA is the right agency for food safety and drug efficacy, but is it the right agency to look at the ecological consequences for an aquatic ecosystem? It’s not known as an environmental agency. So there are at least two questions: Not only do they have the capability, but do they even have the authority to make a decision about these fish?”

At this point in our interview, Rodemeyer and Nordquist are interrupted by a staffer who tells them that the National Academy of Sciences is prepared to release its report on the environmental effects of transgenic plants. After that conversation, Rodemeyer fills me in, because the situation parallels the FDA issue: The USDA is looking at some of these effects through its plant-quarantine statute. Is this the appropriate authority for looking at these effects? The Stakeholder Forum will also consider this issue.

“The question is ultimately going to be the credibility of the regulatory system to protect people,” Rodemeyer says. “And if they don’t have confidence in it, we may well find ourselves in a situation that Europe is in, where European consumers are rejecting genetically-modified foods, in part because they feel they can’t trust what either their scientific community or what their government regulators are saying.”

The Forum’s success depends, in the first instance, on its membership of so many interested parties. The selection process was pointed: Those for whom consensus is impossible were excluded, no matter whether they favor or oppose the technology. Says Rodemeyer: “We essentially asked each of the participants to agree with two starting propositions: that biotechnology is here to stay and that the regulatory system can use some improvement. We didn’t try to define those in any greater detail; those are pretty broad enough statements that I’m sure that people came away with varying interpretations. But it was a way of defining a middle that we could start with. If we can’t find a consensus in this middle group, then it’s going to be hard to find a consensus anywhere. We also recognized that, as part of their job, they would at some point need to go out and engage their broader constituencies.

“Our experience has validated the initial assumptions of this program--that there really was a need for a neutral place to convene these parties,” he says.

“We are Camp David of the biotech world,” Nordquist quips.

By September, the Forum will have had six full meetings, plus meetings of various workgroups, largely led by the members. Experts brief the stakeholders, since they all came with their piece of the picture without a grasp of the whole.

“That’s hard work,” says Rodemeyer, “but the really hard work of trying to get a consensus on these contentious issues remains ahead of us. Whether we’ll get there or not remains to be seen. Yet I think there really is enough common ground, which brought the stakeholders together in the first place, to get them to finish. The discussions have been very frank and productive, and I think they have a very strong sense that this is an opportunity to make a difference. If this diverse group can, in fact, agree on a set of policy recommendations, that will be very powerful.”

The Initiative is committed to support and promote the Forum’s work. “We’ll help make sure that the recommendations are heard and provide opportunities for people--their own constituencies, Capitol Hill, the agency communities and the public at large--to come and talk about them.”

Rodemeyer was a staff member at the U.S. House of Representatives in the mid-1980s, and he remembers the arguments about GM then. “In many respects,” he reflects, “it’s the same debate. In terms of public knowledge and understanding and attitudes about the issue, we as a nation really haven’t moved very much. It’s a bit discouraging that we haven’t made more progress in trying to resolve some of the concerns.

“That being said, what I would like to see at the end of our efforts here is, instead of what we tend to see now--the technology is going to either save the world or destroy it--we’ll understand that it’s a tool that has both potential benefits and risks. And that we need to find a way to maximize the benefits and minimize the risks.”

He appreciates the Initiative’s unique status as an honest broker in the debate. “Traditionally the way things are done here,” he says of Washington, “is to fund one side or the other and become part of the advocacy community, only with bigger guns.”

Indeed, the Initiative has heard from outsiders that it is even-handed, earning and maintaining a public perception of balance. This praise pleases Dan Glickman, the former Secretary of Agriculture who co-chairs the Initiative’s executive advisory committee. He notes, “I can’t think of any other place where that could have happened.”

The Pew Initiative on Food and and Biotechnology has its principal office at 1331 H Street, Suite 900, Washington, DC 20009. Its phone is 202.347.9044, and its Web address is http://www.pewagbiotech.org. The Web site offers free subscriptions to its monthly briefing Agbiotech Buzz, plus other up-to-date information.