Reuters | December 8, 1999 | By Barbara Hagenbaugh
WASHINGTON - U.S. farmers are not shying away from growing genetically-altered food despite an increasingly vocal and visible attack on biotechnology in the world's food supply, a U.S. farm group said Wednesday.
"Even though there has been concern and perhaps some hesitation and a great deal of consideration, it appears that they are not pulling back significantly," Rosemarie Watkins, senior director of government relations at the American Farm Bureau Federation, said.
Watkins and others speaking at a National Policy Association forum on biotechnology said that farmers are still making their seed decisions for the upcoming year so planting statistics are unavailable.
Attacks on the use of biotechnology on the farm from environmentalists, consumer groups and others have grown over the past year, culminating with a flood of protests in Seattle last week at the World Trade Organisation meeting.
The hostility against the technology, which has been developed to create plants that ward off pests, increase yields, resist natural disasters such as drought and even increase the amount of vitamins in food, began with consumers in Europe but has quickly spread across the globe.
Several nations, including Japan, have pledged to begin labeling food made from genetically-modified grains.
Japanese importers on Tuesday bought more than 150,000 metric tons of corn from the United States, provided that the grain was not genetically-modified. Japan's beer industry has vowed to stop using GM corn to make beer by 2001.
But DuPont Co. Executive Vice President Charles Johnson said that as the world's population increases and the amount of available land for farming dwindles, biotechnology is going to become more important to feed the world.
Some groups estimate that in 30 years, the world's population will grow from six billion people to nine billion.
Johnson noted that protesters who complain that the long-term health effects of biotechnology are still not known should be heard. However, he said farmers and consumers must take that risk to ward off the threat of starvation in parts of the world and the potential political instability that could go along with it.
"There's going to be a lot of noise and there are legitimate concerns that people have," Johnson said. But, "the risk of not doing it (biotechnology) is greater than the risk of doing it."
Farm and industry groups, saying that they were caught off guard by the massive assault on biotechnology, are crafting a plan to counter-attack, which may include a massive advertising campaign to stress the technology's role in providing food.
As the pro-biotech voices become louder and are heard by more people, consumer opinion will likely take a turn in the direction of the technology, Johnson predicted.
"As the discussion goes forward, the moderate middle will prevail," he said.
More than half of the U.S. soybean crop this year was planted with genetically modified seeds, with corn and cotton not far behind.
