Frankenstein Foods Are Not Monsters

All hail Doctor Frankenstein, maker of monsters. God is in retreat, skulking outside the laboratory while modern imitators of Mary Shelley’s mad boffin brew potions, splice genes and bring more new life forms into profitable being.

Ten years after the Prince of Wales accused genetic engineers of taking us into “realms that belong to God and God alone”, those who trespassed into the Kingdom of Heaven have emerged triumphant with a bag full of swag. Monsanto, the American corporation that brought us maize that makes its own pesticide, is thriving, rolling in cash, its stock price ascendant.

A decade ago, Europeans could sneer at genetically modified crops, deriding them as a US-food industry phenomenon, invented to service the food needs of America’s burger-chomping fatties and as attractive as mechanically recovered meat. While we sniffed in our bunkers, the seed barons were winning hearts, minds and stomachs in Asia and Latin America. By 2006, genetically modified crops were grown on more than 100 million hectares in 22 countries, with farmers in China and India clamouring for the seed. The driver is demographics, economics and plain old commerce. Food prices have soared, prompting government agencies to engage in panic buying of wheat. Land is becoming scarce as cities advance and companies such as Monsanto and Syngenta, its Swiss rival, make plants that repel predatory bugs and that use less herbicide. The promise for farmers is bigger yields at lower cost and, in a world that needs to feed an extra three billion people by 2050, the need is powerful.

These companies have won the commercial argument, making the right products at the right time, and have profited hugely. Syngenta’s share price surged by 50 per cent last year, while Monsanto’s grew by 140 per cent and the American company last week revealed that its net income in the first quarter had almost tripled to $256 million (£128 million). Its sales of seeds had risen by 23 per cent from the previous year because of soaring demand in Latin America, an astonishing achievement for a business that was almost on its knees in 2002, accused of poisoning the world for profit. So successful was the ideological assault against GM food that Zambia was persuaded to reject American food aid on the ground that it contained GM ingredients that might pollute Zambia’s biosphere.

The world has moved on. Food is no longer frivolous. It is serious and expensive and even if the price surges in wheat, rice and corn abate, the longer-term outlook for food is inflationary, with population growth and affluence stimulating demand for grain while climate change and high energy costs hinder farm output.

In Europe, however, we seem to inhabit a different planet, or is it another century? Last summer, the Soil Association was besieged by requests from its members, organic farmers, for permission to spray bordeaux mixture on potatoes. Torrential rain had created ideal conditions for potato blight, the fungus that was the original cause of the famine in Ireland in 1845. That disaster killed one million through starvation and disease, caused another million to emigrate and enflamed a war that has only just ended, a century and a half later.

Politics, in the end, turned a potato fungus into an Irish famine, but chemicals can stop the blight. Eschewing modern fungicides, about 30 per cent of Britain’s organic farmers last year took the Victorian option of spraying bordeaux mixture, a solution of poisonous copper sulphate on their crop.

Bordeaux mixture, like most of the chemicals in which our bodies are habitually drenched, has never been subject to such rigorous testing, but GM crops are treated differently.

Politics is still at work, injecting pulpit prejudice into the business of feeding the multitude. BASF, the German chemicals company, is carrying out trials of a blight-resistant GM potato in Britain, enduring periodic vandalism and pillory in the press. BASF says that its potato works and is safe, but it will take ten years of trials before the product is approved.

Europe imposes a regulatory nightmare. In order to approve a GM crop, a member state submits it to the Commission in Brussels, which then seeks an opinion from the Food Safety Agency. If favourable, it is submitted to a regulatory committee of member states. If that committee fails to agree, it goes to the European Council, where, if it fails to secure sufficient votes, it goes back to the Commission for a final decision. Several GM maize products and Amflora, another BASF potato developed to produce industrial starch, are seeking approval. There is no date for a decision and Stavros Dimas, the Environment Commissioner, seems to be prevaricating.

After more than a decade of consumption in the United States, there is no evidence that GM foods are harmful, but the fearful insist that a monster lurks - genetic contamination, despite a dearth of evidence. The prevailing attitude is if we don’t know, don’t do it. The organic option is a fair-weather solution for the affluent - our family ordered a weekly box from an enterprising milkman. The £11 consignment, which probably would sell for £7 in the market, deteriorated week by week over the soggy summer, ending in a mess of rotting spuds, carrots, swede and lots of beetroot. Who eats beetroot, asked my wife?

There were riots last year in Senegal over food prices. In France, José Bové is on hunger strike to force the Government to ban GM crops. In Europe, we have the technology, the funds and the minds to solve problems, but our hearts are lost in the past.

Tag Cloud

External Information

Additional Information

Where Am I?