Gene-Modified Crops Provide
Benefits But Also Liability

By David Bowser

It's fall in the Texas Panhandle and time for Lewis Davis and his family to harvest their corn.

Wayne Coleman climbs into the cab of the big green John Deere combine. Lewis Davis, driving a tractor pulling a grain cart, follows him into the circle of irrigated corn while Davis' wife, Debbie, and their son, David, turn the full grain trucks toward Tejas Feeders.

Like much of the corn grown in the Texas Panhandle, Davis' crop will end up in a feedyard where the golden grain will be turned into red meat for the world's dinner tables.

As with most corn farmers these days, many of Davis' fields of corn are genetically modified. The genes in the seed have been altered to repel insects and disease. Some of the fields, however, were planted to conventional seed.

The reason, Davis says, is that there is a danger that insects and diseases could become resistant to the new strains of corn, so the old corn is planted along with the new.

Although there has been some resistance by consumers in Europe and Asia to the genetically modified corn, Davis says he thinks the altered corn is safer for the environment. Because of the corn's genetically altered state, no pesticides are used on those fields. That means less spraying, and less chance of pesticides making their way into the environment at the local level. It also means less pesticide being manufactured and shipped, which translates into less chance of environmental problems from such chemicals nationwide. It's as though a magic button had been pushed to trigger the plant's own immune system.

Other producers say the new corn isn't all that different from what has been developed in the past. Previous corn varieties, as well as other plants and animals, are results of genetic selection. Instead of keeping and replicating plants through a number of generations, however, the genes — the basic building blocks of the plants — were altered in the lab.

Any public resistance to genetically altered corn could also indicate future perception problems for other plants and animals.

At a recent USDA Agricultural Research Service meeting, Chuck Schroeder, chief executive officer of the National Cattlemen's Beef Association, said the products of genome research have the potential to aid beef producers.

Schroeder said such products would affect food safety, the environment and marketplace economics. Knowledge and products from genomics research hold potential in productivity, production efficiency, improved and predictable quality traits, product safety and environmental protection and improvement.

"It is timely for us to stop and consider one of the most complex and, in some dimensions, high-risk opportunities facing agriculture and our partners in public and private sectors," Schroeder said. "The products of genomics research have already become controversial in international trade as well as domestic debates, but the issues we need to address are even more fundamental than politics and attitudes."

Noting that the world now has six billion people to be fed, Schroeder pointed to declining amounts of land for agricultural production, demands on food safety and demands for higher standards of environmental protection and quality.

Meeting food quality and safety demands of the marketplace, as well as human needs for adequate nutrition, while satisfying a politically active public, he opined, requires aggressive generation and exploitation of knowledge in plant, animal and microbial genomics.

The cattle industry has spent about $2 million in gene mapping research projects since 1991, Schroeder noted. More may have to be spent, not on the science, but on the perception of the product it produces.

The National Corn Growers Association has formed a Biotechnology Task Force to assist growers to investigate the regulatory side of the question and study feed efficiency and protocols for feed customers.

The task force was formed to define the program for an NCGA biotechnology roundtable earlier this year in Kansas City. That gathering brought together corn industry stakeholders to talk about biotech issues.

"The entire industry has been impacted by divergent issues relating to biotech corn," said NCGA president and task force chairman Lynn Jensen of Lake Preston, S.D. "We are working to enable growers to continue to have available the technology, yet protect the growers from bearing the cost of this technology."

Jensen cited several reasons for his concern, including radical resistance in Europe and Asia to biotech food ingredients, niche market premiums offered by grain processors for conventional "genetically enhanced-free" grain, proposed or real processor contracts that place unjustified liability burdens on the growers, rejection of biotech grain by certain U.S. food processors, and misinformation campaigns by activists who oppose technology and sound science.

The NCGA wants to alleviate any concerns, Jensen said, but he's also concerned about contracts some producers have with food processing companies.

"We have a lot of concern out there with some of the contracts that are being offered," Jensen explained. "Obviously, there are some liability issues out there in terms of what that producer is liable for. We have tolerance levels that are set at zero, and growers are required to sign contracts that there is no bio-tech germ plasm in the grain they've delivered. We don't know that's verifiable."

He's also concerned about when that liability ends.

"Is it going to be as you dump the truck, or are you going to be buying that whole barge load?" Jensen wondered.

He said his organization is encouraging growers to be careful about what they sign or what they say when they get involved in these contracts.

"Right now, we're trying to evaluate what the role is in terms of standard tolerance," Jensen said. "When you look at a tolerance issue, it's almost accepting that there's something wrong with this, that there's foreign matter of some sort. But obviously, if there's going to be a niche out there that's going to require some type of conventional seed versus genetically enhanced, we're going to have to have reasonable tolerance standards that can be met by an average person who's doing a reasonably good job of keeping his grain segregated. We will be working with that very closely as it moves forward."