Crops With Attitude

There's still some question whether transgenic crops are necessary, because seed companies are also getting promising results from conventional breeding, souped up by supercomputers and techniques like laser-assisted seed selection, which deploys laser beams to identify and boost the best genetic traits in crop seeds.

But agriculture experts overwhelmingly agree that conventional methods are not enough. With the earth's population set to tip 9 billion by 2050, farmable land is disappearing. Recent studies predict that developing countries could lose 135 million hectares of arable land over the next half century to erosion, declining water tables and encroaching settlement. That means farmers will have to grow more food on less land with less water. Gene splicing can achieve in a matter of weeks or months what takes decades for traditional cross breeding. "Look at where people are malnourished today—in dry, non-irrigated land, mostly occupied by small farmers," says Wellesley College political scientist Robert Paarlberg, author of "Starved for Science" on the biotech ban in Africa. "To feed these people, you need new technologies to use land and labor more productively. This is where GM will help feed the poor."

Even in the anti-GM strongholds of Europe, sentiment is turning. In Britain, where Prince Charles recently called GM foods "the biggest disaster, environmentally, of all time," the think tank Chatham House called in January for a reopening of the GM debate, saying that biotech is necessary to achieve "affordable food production." Terry Leahy, chief of Tesco, the big U.K. supermarket chain, recently hailed GM's "vital role" in feeding the planet. Europe still requires that imported GM food be labeled and separated along the supply chain, yet as more farmers in the big producing countries turn to GM crops, supplies of conventionally grown food and grains are shrinking. And Europe is falling behind. Before the European Union banned GM foods in 1996, grain yields mirrored those in the United States, but they have since lagged by 1 to 2 percent a year, according to Oxford economist Paul Collier. The key reason, he says, is Europe's refusal to plant GM seeds.

The corporate hubris that sparked anti-GM protests seems to be easing. Monsanto—under pressure from scientists and green groups—has pledged not to use its so-called terminator technology, which essentially rigs seeds to go sterile after one harvest, stopping farmers from replanting them. In recent years, a number of companies such as Syngenta, BASF and Dupont Pioneer have also agreed to share their technology with poor nations. Developing-world investment in GM has also helped buff GM's image. "People tell me that they don't want GM, but they do want virus-resistant plants," says Rikus Kloppers, senior plant pathologist for Pannar. "When I tell them we're an African company, they warm to the idea."

Africa—the only continent where poverty and malnutrition are on the rise, thanks largely to primitive farming—needs help in many ways, both hi-tech and low. Yet only one nation on the continent—South Africa—has licensed a GM product for sale. The new strain of MSV-resistant maize has yet to be approved for crucial field tests, because of continuing opposition in some government quarters. And only a handful of African countries—Burkina Faso, Egypt, Kenya, Ghana and Uganda—have joined South Africa in experimenting with biotech at all. The lingering resistance no longer makes sense.

With Manuela Zoninsein in Beijing

© 2009