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For biotech foods, a dwindling appetite
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Andrew Pollack NYT
Friday, May 21, 2004
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LOS ANGELES As a research scientist at the world's largest vegetable seed company, David Tricoli used genetic engineering to create a virus-resistant melon, something that conventional plant breeders had been unable to develop.
But the company, Seminis, dropped the melon project and other work on biotech vegetables because of the high costs of obtaining regulatory approval and perceived consumer resistance.
"There are things that growers need and want, but it's just too difficult to get them out," said Tricoli, who left Seminis in 2001 after the cutbacks and now works at the University of California at Davis. "In biotech, we have a solution to the problem, but it's just sitting there."
The melon is emblematic of a problem in agricultural biotechnology: the small number of crops that are genetically engineered.
Agricultural biotechnology continues to spread in the United States and worldwide, and proponents see signs that the crops are being more accepted. On Wednesday, as expected, the European Commission decided to allow imports of a genetically engineered sweet corn developed by the Swiss company Syngenta, ending a six-year EU moratorium on the approval of biotech food.
But to the extent biotechnology is growing, it is in a narrow range. Some 99 percent of the crops are grown in six countries - the United States, Argentina, Canada, Brazil, China and South Africa. And virtually all the worldwide acreage is devoted to only four crops: soybeans, corn, cotton and canola.
With these four, genetic engineering caught on before consumer resistance gathered force a few years ago. These crops are also largely used for animal feed or clothing or to make oil and other ingredients for processed foods rather than eaten directly - something that has helped them gain acceptance.
But recent attempts to move genetic engineering to other crops have met resistance, or at least fear by food companies and farmers of consumer resistance. And these days, many experts say, the time and money involved in clearing regulatory hurdles make it uneconomical to apply biotechnology to any but the most widely grown crops.
Just last week, Monsanto shelved plans to introduce the world's first genetically modified wheat because some U.S. and Canadian farmers worried that European and Japanese buyers would shun not just the modified wheat but all of their wheat.
In April, California officials rebuffed a request by Ventria Bioscience, a small company based in Sacramento, the state capital, to increase its acreage of an experimental rice crop engineered to produce human proteins for use in nutritional supplements. Some rice farmers had also worried about the effect of such a crop on exports to Japan.
And the current edition of California Agriculture magazine laments a sharp drop in efforts to develop genetically engineered fruit and vegetables - small crops compared with corn and soybeans.
The first genetically engineered crop introduced, in 1994, was a tomato, and some genetically engineered papayas and squash are on the market. But the number of field trials in the United States involving biotech fruit and vegetables plummeted to about 20 by 2003 from about 120 in 1999, an article in California Agriculture said.
The situation allows both supporters and opponents of gene-altered crops to claim victory. The supporters point to the increased acreage and the recent moves by Brazil, a leading soybean grower, toward allowing farmers to plant genetically engineered soybeans.
Opponents can say that the narrow range of biotech crops is a sign that the technology has stalled. Not only are there just four crops, but they are still limited to two main traits introduced by genetic engineering: insect resistance and herbicide resistance.
"Fifteen years ago, I would have predicted far more diversity in products based on what companies were saying and what scientists were saying," said Jane Rissler of the Union of Concerned Scientists, a group skeptical of genetic engineering. "It's quite surprising it's limited to these two traits."
The narrow range of crops means that biotechnology may not realize its full potential. On Monday, for instance, the Food and Agriculture Organization, a UN agency, issued a report saying that the technology, despite its promise, was not yet doing much to help feed the world's poor because it was not being applied to the sorts of crops grown in developing countries, like potatoes, cassava, rice, wheat, millet and sorghum.
Some U.S. farmers also fear that their crops will not benefit from the latest technology. Even as some expressed relief last week when Monsanto shelved its transgenic wheat, others formed Growers for Wheat Biotechnology to push for genetic engineering.
There is also a question of how much the agricultural biotechnology industry can continue to expand without new crops, or at least new traits for the same four crops. In the United States, more than 80 percent of soybeans and nearly that share of cotton is already genetically engineered.
The pace of new product introductions has fallen sharply. In the past three years, only two crops a year have been the subject of consultations with the Food and Drug Administration before marketing. In the late 1990s, it was not unusual for a dozen crops to go through this process each year.
And the new developments are mainly variations on the same themes.
"Within the regulatory pipeline, there's not a lot that looks dramatically new that we're aware of," said Michael Rodemeyer, executive director of the Pew Initiative on Food and Biotechnology, a research organization.
The New York Times
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