Omaha World-Herald | January 5, 2000 | By Bill Hord
From corn growers to biscuit makers, businesses with an economic stake in U.S. food production have rallied together to defend genetic technology.
Caught unprepared by a tidal wave of negative publicity in the United States last year, the agribusiness industry has regrouped and now is trying to convince everyone from President Clinton to grocery shoppers that genetically modified organisms, GMOs, are safe to grow and to eat.
The outcome of the biotech debate, commonly referred to as an "international food fight," will have a profound impact on food companies, pharmaceutical makers, farmers, retailers, processors and others.
For instance, of the $15.5 billion in U.S. agricultural exports to Asia in 1998, $4.8 billion was GMO crops.
The controversy, which pits environmentalists and food purists against progressive scientists and industry, jumped from Europe to the United States in 1999 like a forest fire jumping a stream.
But these flames were licking at public opinion, not trees.
"The fire caught on the edges, but it is under control," said Gene Grabowski, vice president for communications with the Grocery Manufacturers of America, a nationwide group of name-brand food companies.
The fire brigade in this case was the Alliance for Better Foods, formed in June to pull together 38 organizational members devoted to thwarting the rhetoric of those who are trying to halt the spread of genetic manipulation.
Even though Europeans have long protested genetic manipulation and used the innovations in crops and livestock to create trade barriers, the technical advances had a virtual free lunch in the United States until last May.
Then, Cornell University scientists reported that pollen from Bt corn, a genetically modified seed designed to fend off corn borers, killed monarch butterfly larvae after being dusted onto milkweed plants in the laboratory. The European Union cited the study in halting its approval process on GMO crop varieties.
The Alliance for Better Foods is made up of a variety of groups, large and small, representing bakers, farmers, peanut growers, cracker manufacturers, pasta makers, soft drink makers, pet food companies, snack food makers, grocers and others.
"We've created a virtual umbrella for groups that would have acted on their own," Grabowski said. "We've done a good job in six months."
The coalition gives a peek at just how widespread the use of GMOs has become in the United States since the Food and Drug Administration approved the first biotech food - a tomato called Flavr Savr - in 1994.
In fact, genetically altered food products are commonly present in vegetables, fruits, potato chips, beer, processed foods, pharmaceutical products, milk, cheese, corn syrup, soy oil and allergen-free rice and peanuts.
Long ago, canola oil went from a lubricant to an edible product through genetic manipulation.
The FDA developed its policy on GMO regulation in 1992, requiring pre-approvals only if the new product is significantly different than an earlier food product.
FDA biotechnology teams - including experts in chemistry, molecular biology, toxicology, nutrition and environmental science - reviewed the herbicide-tolerant and corn-borer-resistant crops offered by Monsanto Co. and Ciba-Geigy Corp. before pronouncing them safe.
By 1999, 57 percent of soybeans, 65 percent of cotton and 38 percent of corn grown in the United States were genetically modified.
With the wave of controversy in 1999, the sale of GMO seeds is expected to drop by 20 percent or more in 2000, as farmers worry about whether they will have customers who want to buy their grain.
With so much of the present, as well as the future, tied up in genetics, businesses have taken their defense of the technology on the road. Representatives testified at three recent GMO hearings of the Food and Drug Administration as hecklers shouted from the audience, and demonstrators carried signs calling biotech foods "poison."
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which represents 3 million businesses and organizations of every size, recently joined the fray by becoming a member of the alliance and launching its own attack on the anti-GMO rhetoric.
"We are trying to raise the awareness of the business community that if you permit an assault on this technology, you are really opening the door for an assault on all technology," said Bill Kovacs, the chamber's vice president for environmental and regulatory affairs.
Tom Donohue, chief executive with the U.S. Chamber, gave an impassioned speech at the World Food Prize ceremony in Des Moines, calling GMOs one of the saviors of the world population explosion.
"By 2035, we will have approximately 3.5 billion more hungry mouths to feed," Donohue said.
Donohue said the battle to feed the world will be fought in labs and research facilities and in the public-policy arena.
"Hysteria must not conquer science or make the use of new technologies so expensive through mandates and labels and other encumbrances that no one will be able to afford them," Donohue said.
An immediate concern of the business interests is the push among anti-GMO forces to gain approval for mandatory labeling of any food that has a genetically-manipulated product.
In a letter to President Clinton, the Grocery Manufacturers of America group said special labeling could mislead consumers into believing that there was evidence that the foods were unsafe.
Grabowski of the grocery manufacturers' trade group said the greatest argument for GMOs is that no such evidence exists.
"The reason the FDA is trusted is because we label food based on scientific study and on nutritional composition, not for whim or referendum," Grabowski said. "The reason that anti-biotech groups want to label now is to kill the technology."
In spite of the controversy of today, Grabowski said, biotechnology will bounce back.
"There's no way you can stop it," he said. "It has too much promise."
Copyright 2000, Omaha World-Herald, Neb., Knight Ridder/Tribune, All Rights Reserved
