Winnipeg Free Press | December 18, 1999
Laura Rance writes that they met to discuss the potential consumer issues arising from a cereal crop disease called fusarium head blight. But the scientists and grain industry workers huddled in a tiny downtown meeting room last month ended up talking about biotechnology. To make a long story short, says Rance, the consensus was that the unchecked spread of this disease in farmers' fields poses potential public health concerns. But they don't want any gene jockeys riding to the rescue, at least not right now.
It's not that this group, which was meeting as part of a national workshop held in Winnipeg recently, views biotechnology as inherently unsafe. It's just that the products of this new science have, according to Rance, been launched so badly, even its potential for helping to control crop diseases would be viewed with suspicion. This disease has cost Canadian farmers and processors more than $1 billion over the past seven years due to lost yield, lost quality and the cost of increased handling aimed at keeping the dangerous mycotoxins it produces out of the food chain. The more scientists learn about mycotoxins such as deoxynivalenol (DON), the more imperative this becomes. These may be "natural," but they are far from healthy.
Ingested in high enough quantities, they make animals and people sick.
Long-term exposure, even at relatively low levels, is now considered risky because of the toxin's immuno-suppressing qualities. As well, Norwegian scientists have linked increased risk of miscarriage in female farmers and higher rates of cancers in men to ongoing exposure to fusarium-damaged grain. All options should be on the table in the search for ways to tame this disease. Yet a hostile public may prevent that. It's an odd conundrum, says Rance. The threats posed by fusarium head blight are real and mounting.
The case against science which could form part of the solution is based on fear of the unknown which doesn't make it any less real. The fact remains, opponents of biotechnology are says Rance, asking some darn good questions that proponents can't answer. Which brings us to another problem. Although scientists have assembled enough genetic material (through traditional plant-breeding approaches) to begin releasing fusarium-resistant varieties within the next three years, their ability to respond to this challenge is limited by huge gaps in their understanding of how the disease operates.
"Climate could explain some of this, and all sorts of practices could explain some of it, and you could put all of the good explanations together and you are still only explaining maybe 10 or 20 per cent of the increase," said Andre Comeau, a research scientist with Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada in Quebec. "What is the 80 to 90 per cent missing knowledge about? We are highly vulnerable to an enemy we don't understand." The whole scenario raises the question of whether, in all the excitement over biotechnology's potential, research has become too focused on the "technology" of fixing problems and not enough on the "bio," science aimed at understanding why the problems exist in the first place. This isn't an either/or debate; it's about finding the balance between both.
