Returning home after a long trip, Bob Hope once joked: “I’ve been to almost as many places as my luggage!”
I know how the man felt. The last month for me has consisted of one trip after another. I’ve attended the Crop Life International meeting in Brussels, the World Ag Forum in St. Louis, the International Food and Ag Trade Policy Council in Washington, D.C and the Farm Foundation in Portland.
People from all over the world participate in these gatherings--folks from every inhabited continent. Every walk of life is represented, from farmers who work in the dirt to sales people who sell our products to professors who write scholarly papers in ivory towers. In fact, as I write this, approximately 20,000 people are attending BIO 2005 in Philadelphia.
Despite this incredible diversity of backgrounds and occupations, I heard the same thing again and again: Agricultural biotechnology is moving forward everywhere. There’s simply no turning back the clock.
This is of course a milestone year for biotech. In early May, a farmer planted the world’s one-billionth acre of biotech crops. Sometime this fall, that acre will be harvested. Not long afterward, it will be consumed--perhaps as corn on the cob, or something to eat from a box or can that has been enhanced with a soy ingredient, or maybe as a juicy papaya.
The details hardly matter. The overarching fact is that biotech is “conventional”. It is becoming standard operating procedure for the food industry. China is about to release a form of genetically enhanced rice, perhaps as early as next year. Once that happens, I don’t know how even the most committed anti-biotech activists can do anything but concede a defeat of massive proportions.
There are, of course, important pockets of resistance. Europe continues to toss up walls of protectionism, but these are not as high as they once were. Most of the Europeans I know believe that it’s only a matter of time before many of the holdouts give up. The EU’s self-conscious preening on this issue will be seen not only as scientifically and environmentally unsound, but also morally backward. One recent editorial amusingly described how “the fatties” of Europe were trying to deny healthy food to starving people.
For a continent that often likes to behave as if it were the world’s conscience, this style of mockery eventually may force it to reconsider whether it makes sense to let Greenpeace activists dictate policy on food and technology.
Another significant problem area for biotech involves wheat. Several major American crops-- corn, soybeans, and cotton--increasingly take advantage of what biotechnology has to offer. But wheat continues to stand apart, unable to use what science may have to offer.
Much of the difficulty stems from attitudes abroad, especially in Japan, which currently says it will buy no biotech wheat for reasons that mimic the irrationality found in Europe. This attitude may change as well, because Japan is a technologically sophisticated country. What’s more, its rice culture probably won’t ignore the rice revolution that’s arriving in China.
In the meantime, however, many wheat farmers in the United States are slowly retreating from family traditions and switching to corn and soybeans because they want to take advantage of what biotechnology can offer.
There’s much biotech might offer wheat farmers as well, especially in terms of drought tolerance. Most of America’s wheat crop is grown in parts of the United States that receive relatively little rainfall. Wheat is a hardy plant, but even it could use some help during the worst dry spells.
Unfortunately, the hostile climate overseas has slowed the research into this promising technology. It’s getting pushed off into the future not because of scientific challenges but political obstruction.
The thing that may finally sweep away the last remnants of opposition to biotech food is consumer demand. Up to now, the driving force behind biotech adoption has been the agronomic traits of crops--i.e., qualities that most directly benefit producers, such as higher yields and a decreased reliance on pesticides.
In the future, however, biotechnology will mature to the point where we can grow heart-healthy, cholesterol-reducing crops. That’s something everyone will want--even the Europeans and Japanese.
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Returning home after a long trip, Bob Hope once joked: “I’ve been to almost as many places as my luggage!”
