SPECIAL TO THE POST-INTELLIGENCER
May 26, 2000
By R. JAMES COOK

As a plant scientist who has devoted a 40-year career to helping farmers manage their crop diseases without pesticides, I find no sense in the reasons given for rejecting biotechnology for food and agriculture.

One question I have heard repeatedly from consumers is "when will agriculture become less dependent on pesticides to produce our food?" While there are many approaches to reducing pesticide use, the ultimate one is to make the crop plant genetically resistant to its pests and diseases -- like immunization of people and animals.

Traditional plant breeding has made this happen for about 25 percent of crop diseases and no more than 10 percent of the insect pests of crops. Biotechnology offers the means to access all of nature's genes for pest defense and therefore greatly reduce agriculture's dependence on pesticides.

And, because the genetic changes are so precise, and also so small relative to the total genetic makeup of the plant, the typically modified plant looks exactly like its modified parent.

McDonald's restaurants is only accepting french fries from the russet Burbank or "Idaho" potato produced under the traditional pesticide-intensive system, rather than from the same potato with specific genes added for pest defense so that it can be grown with greatly reduced amounts of pesticide.

McDonald's has concluded that consumers do not believe that french fries from the genetically modified (GM) version of the russet potato are safe. In fact, surveys indicate that the great majority of American consumers trust the conclusions of the Food and Drug Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the National Academy of Sciences, all of which have reported over and over again that foods from GM plants are as safe as food from the same plants without these added genes.

In making its decision, McDonald's is forcing farm workers to again face the risks of applying these pesticides and working in fields that have been treated with these pesticides.

Several hundred million Asian people, who eat rice every day, are deficient in Vitamin A, a problem that can now be corrected by using biotechnology. Scientists in Switzerland have produced what is called "golden rice," a variety with three genes added to make vitamin A in the grain. At the same time, the popular press in Europe refers to food from plants with genes introduced by the new tools of biotechnology as "frankenfoods."

Earlier this year, my wife and I visited a farmers' market in Hawaii. I knew that the papaya industry in Hawaii, and elsewhere in the tropics, is threatened with extinction by papaya ringspot, a disease caused by a virus harbored harmlessly in the surrounding vegetation but lethal in papaya when carried to these vulnerable plants by plant-sucking aphids.

After all other attempts failed, the disease was brought under control by inserting a copy of a gene from the virus itself into the genetic makeup of the papaya. The method is like immunization, and it works almost universally for virus-disease control in all plants.

Since this farmers' market claims to sell organic, I asked about the papaya with the virus gene added for resistance to papaya ringspot. The answer was "we just say that it was grown without pesticides." How silly that they cannot refer to this papaya as organic, especially since the papaya fruits without the virus gene are infected with the whole virus. What could be more organic than papaya with its own built-in genetically based defense against this disease?

As a public servant dependent on tax dollars to support my work, I have watched budgets for agricultural research decline or remain flat, while the cost of doing research has continued to increase. Biotechnology has presented the private sector with incentives to make up the difference, but development of these crops requires deep pockets. Now I hear calls to limit involvement of the private sector in this research.

It seems to me that there is something backward in the logic that says we should fear GM foods. While the opponents of biotechnology are concerned about food safety, the environment and farm economics, it is a fact that keeping GM-free food in the marketplace will depend on continued use of the pesticides and other costly inputs required for growing these crops.

On the other hand, genetically modified crops make agriculture less harmful to the environment, and improve conditions for farmers while making food less expensive, more convenient, nutritious and safe for consumers.

I firmly believe there is great promise in the science and application of biotechnology. It is needed to help feed the 8 billion people projected to be on this Earth by about 2030, and in numerous other ways it will improve the lives of people worldwide.

R. James Cook holds an endowed chair in wheat research at Washington State University in Pullman.