- guardian.co.uk, Sunday January 23 2000 00.52 GMT
- The Observer, Sunday January 23 2000
Consider the tomato - so much a part of everyday life that we hardly notice it. Yet it has a murky past, and it is one that scientists should note carefully.
In the nineteenth century, the tomato was known as the wolf's peach, and Europeans and Americans believed it was deadly poisonous. In 1820, New York forbade its consumption and only relented when Colonel Robert Johnston announced that he would eat an entire bag of them outside the courthouse in Salem, New Jersey. Two thousand people turned up to watch him die, while a band played a funeral march. But Johnston ate the lot and announced: 'This luscious, scarlet apple will form the foundation of a great garden industry.'
For such prescience, Johnson deserves canonisation as the patron saint of hothouses, though his story has far more than historical importance, for it shows there is nothing new in misplaced hysteria about food.
As David Aaron, US Under-Secretary for Commerce, warned a conference on 'Biotechnology: The Science and the Impact' in The Hague last week: 'Last century it was the tomato, this time it is biotech food.'
But there is a crucial difference today. We no longer have the time to indulge in fantasies and misconceptions about food, and in particular about gene foods. One billion people - more than the combined population of the United States and Europe - now survive on $1 or less a day, and are starving.
The UN has pledged to halve that number by 2015, a startlingly ambitious goal - for it means farmers will have to match mankind's entire food production of the past 10,000 years in the next one and a half decades.
There is only one way to achieve this dramatic goal, experts warned delegates, and that is by exploiting biotechnology, the science of manipulating the genes of living organisms.
However, this route is now being seriously hindered by Western consumers who, with increasing vehemence, are rejecting biotechnological products, mainly GM foods, and blocking their testing and funding.
These are the killer tomatoes of today, they claim. 'Unfortunately, consumers think products like genetically modified foods pose risks and offer no benefits,' said Sir Robert May, the Cabinet's chief scientific adviser. 'It is the attitude of a privileged élite who think there will be no problem feeding tomorrow's growing population.'
Such prejudices form the background for this week's international talks in Montreal when nations will discuss imposing limits on the safe handling, transfer and use of genetically modified organisms that could have an adverse effect on the environment. At issue is the fear that the US and its partners are trying to monopolise trade in GM crops, a bid that has made many other countries, includ ing Third World nations, suspicious of such products.
The irony is that without biotechnology, there will be no salvation for developing nations, delegates heard. To save 500 million people from starvation, they will have to increase meat production by an estimated 114 per cent, and milk output by 133 per cent.
For mighty conglomerates, that would be a tall order. For poor smallholders, the main providers of Third World crops, it would be impossible without the geneticist.
The aim is to develop techniques best suited to the Third World, ideas that include modifying crops so that their stems, used as animal feed in developing nations, are more nutritious, thus boosting livestock quality, or adding genes that will improve the vitamin content of maize or rice.
A perfect example of this type of technology was provided by Tony Irvin, of the International Livestock Research Institute, who has discovered a breed of sheep called the Red Masai, herded by East African nomads.
'These animals have developed a unique resistance to parasitic worms,' he said. Such parasites take a terrible toll of sheep in farms throughout the world, and Irvin and his colleagues believe they can develop techniques to transfer resistance to other breeds.
But this raises other headaches. How can politicians ensure the Masai people will benefit? Will they not suffer the fate of other indigenous peoples whose products have been pilfered and exploited without financial return?
Consider another fruit: the Chinese gooseberry, grown for centuries by Chinese farmers. Then a group of wily New Zealanders adopted, marketed and renamed it: the Kiwi fruit. They made a fortune. Chinese farmers got nothing.
There are scores of other examples, with developing countries accusing Western corporations of trying to patent the genetic codes of dozens of their native plants, including basmati rice, turmeric, black pepper, cotton - even the 'sacred' neem tree.
And such cases worried Irvin, as well as the World Bank vice-president Ismail Serageldin. 'We have got to make sure this does not happen with the Red Masai,' said Serageldin. 'Perhaps we will have to license the gene and use the proceeds to set up a trust fund for the Masai. Whatever else, we have a moral obligation to these people.
'Essentially, we are seeing a scientific apartheid being established between the Northern and Southern nations. It is not the science that divides them but the intellectual property rights that underpin products. We have got to find ways to make these available - perhaps by shortening the lifetime of patents from 17 to five years, or only asking for low, flat fees for access to technologies.
But there were encouraging signs, the delegates heard. Pharmaceutical giant Merck recently gave away its river blindness drug to the Third World, as did Novartis with its leprosy medicine.
Far more important for the question of feeding the world, however, has been the development of 'golden rice', a genetically modified strain that can impart doses of vitamin A, which standard rice lacks. 'Four hundred million people suffer from serious vitamin A deficiency, of whom one million die every year,' geneticist Chris Somerville of Stanford University told delegates. 'However by using genes from the daffodil, we have created rice that is not only yellow, but contains vitamin A. That crop was created with Rockefeller Foundation cash and will be distributed throughout the Third World in the next couple of years.'
But Somerville added that it took 12 years to develop golden rice. In that time, the world's population increased by another billion to its current six billion.
'In other words, if we want to make breakthroughs we are going to have to develop a lot more products like golden rice and do it a lot more quickly than we are doing at present.'
Yet the West, and in particular Europe, is now dragging its heels more and more in the face of intense customer hos tility to genetically modified foods, the continent's killer tomatoes.
'I think Europeans are going to have to carry a very heavy moral burden over their attitude to biotechnology,' Somerville added.
In the end, what is needed is a glamorous GM product that would change the image of biotechnology, May concluded. 'We need a GM apple that will make you thin and wicked. I suspect that would do the trick.'
