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"Frankenfood" Coming to a Plate Near You
Tuesday, January 21, 2003
Most of us in Chatham-Kent have had the experience of eating food of the farm. I'm of a generation where that is changing. More and more food is processed beyond belief. Yogurt from colourful plastic tubes is much more fun for youngsters than apples or pears. But still there is nothing like tasting fresh sweet corn from the field. "Farm fresh" even in the age of processed food still has resonance.Increasingly though, what we once knew about food is no more. Add biotechnology into the mix and the brew gets even thicker. Some folks call it "Frankenfood".. All of this is happening in a world where farmers are gobbling up biotech ideas up like they are manna from heaven. So far, society has only had a few close scrapes. A few taco shells with traces oa banned genetically modified corn caused some allergic reactions in Washington DC last year. And to that, America yawned.
The reaction in Canada hasn't been much different. Consumers appetite for "cheap food" in this country is as voracious, if not more so than our American cousins. I've heard it said in Ontario, there is no such thing as Bt sweet corn. Bt corn is gentically modified to kill European Corn Borer, a real pest in more corn fields. But of course most swee corn producers know Bt sweet corn is the best looking and most favoured by consumers. I guess, what they don't know won't hurt them. So far nobody is glowing in the dark.
But are we farming or are we pharming? I've said it a million times. So far all biotechnology has done has made the big companies richer. Everybody has cleared the way so some big corporate interests will sell more herbicide or in some cases, sell more snake oil. But what we really needed was some biotechnology which would cure cancer or attack the common cold. If we could do that, consumers would be lining up to subsidize agriculture. It would be seen as an extension of health care.
So far that hasn't happened on a wide commercial basis. What seems to make sense hasn't yet translated into tangible results. In other words, on the way to the forum, the wheels are falling off. Case in point was a recent experiment in the American midwest first documented by the Washington Post. It is an example where there were a few hiccups on the way to therapeutic heaven in our fields of dreams.
In Iowa there has been some "medicinal" crops grown. Medicinal crops are grown for their theraputic qualities. For example, corn was grown which was genetically altered to produce a drug that might prove useful for people with the life-threatening ailment cystic fibrosis. This was part of a growing trend where fields of food plants would become living factories able to whip out as many as 400 new drugs and industrial enzymes. Jobs would be
created. New laboratories would be needed to purify the drugs. The investment could ultimately be worth billions. It's almost exactly the type of thing we could use in Chatham-Kent.
Unfortunately, there has been slow progress largely due to human error, but also to the inexact science of agriculture. Oversights by a small biotech company in College Station, Tex., called ProdiGene Inc. have called into question the whole idea of growing drugs in food crops, seeming to vindicate years of warnings from environmental groups and more recent concerns from big food companies.
In a nutshell, ProdiGene lost control of the technology because of volunteer pollen, volunteer plants, humans making mistakes and sloppiness. In other words, these "frankenplants" spread and got out of "control." ProdiGene got some of these "pharm" crops mixed up with other "farm" crops. The results of this has sent everybody scurrying. One of the solutions offered is to grow these "pharm" crops in more marginal areas where there is less risk of polluting conventional crops which proliferate in traditional growing areas.
That is not to say growing biotech crops for medicinal purposes won't work. I think it is a noble goal and one worth pursuing. But you must admit this example shows the early critics weren't all wrong about biotechnology. In the early days of biotech I wrote about Greenpeace who talked about mutant crops and genetic pollution. When you look at the Iowa example, that is exactly what they were running into. The costs inherent with some of these problems are scaring off private capital which might have been interested in getting into the medicinal biotech game.
There are simliar types of experiments in Canada, but we're still a long way from biotech heaven. Case in point is Roundup Ready corn. This is gentically modified corn which farmers can use to lessen their weed control costs. The tough part for people who choose to grow it is almost nobody wants to buy the stuff. You can feed it to an animal but you can't burn it in a car or drink it out of a whiskey bottle. In other words, farmers can
sell it only into the feed market where pigs and cattle eat it, eventually turning up on your dinner table. That doesn't really add up, but that is the nature of our new biotech planning horizon.
It's happened this way because for the most part biotech's corporate boosters ignored consumer's needs. Consumers in essence were being forced to accept some of these flawed corporate decisions. A lot of consumers said no, and it has led to a segregated market where Roundup Ready corn can only be fed to animals.
Whether our corporate world has learned any of these lessons, I don't know. When I look at 2003, I see more of the same. Everybody has a new biotech feature for sale, enticing farmers for another day. But the problem is , it's not about technology, it's all satisfying consumer's needs. Maybe someday, if consumers insist on it, our corporate world will get it right.
Philip Shaw, farms 830 acres near Dresden, Ontario. He holds a Masters of Agricultural Economics and Business Degree from the University of Guelph and is a well-known commentator on agricultural issues in print, on radio and over satellite in Canada and the United States. In the Chatham-Kent Times, Phil will use his frank and forthright writing style to address political and economic issues from the local to the international stage. He is a keen observer of political life at all levels, reads widely and has travelled the world to gather fodder for his column. See what's At Issue this week.
