Plant Biotech Blog

Norman Borlaug and Jimmy Carter, two Nobel Laureates, lauded the past 50-year phase of Green Revolution as the most productive period in global agricultural history, that kept more than one billion people from hunger, starvation and death (The Wall Street J.).This achievement would have eluded us without the ingenious innovations in science and technology that were needed to a) double the area under irrigation, b) develop high yielding, pest and disease resistant varieties, c) restore soil fertility, d) develop chemicals to control pests and diseases, and e) improve farm machinery.

By the year 2050, the world needs to double agricultural production to nine billion gross tons to feed an anticipated population of nine billion, without increasing the land base and produce it within the consuming countries. As the conventional technologies cannot achieve anything near these targets, we need new innovative strategies in agricultural science and technology, where modern agricultural biotechnology holds a great promise.

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Recently, Graham Brookes and Peter Barfoot published a new study ‘GM Crops: The Global Economic and Environmental Impact–the First Nine Years 1996-2004‘. The main message is that a) farmers have gained $27 billion in incremental net income from biotech crops since they were first introduced in 1996, b) reduced pesticide applications by 378 million pounds, c) reduced fuel consumption by 1.8 billion liters, and d) reduced greenhouse gas emissions by 10 million metric tons. The report covers all transgenic crops under commercial cultivation in different parts of the world.

With amazing alacrity GM Watch (10/13/05) found arguments against every benefit from GE crops, highlighted by Brookes and Barfoot. The report is trashed also on the basis that a) Monsanto has commissioned the report from PG Economics Ltd., b) the report was written by the company’s directors Graham Brookes and Peter Barfoot, c) Barfoot also heads an organization called Bioportfolio which has the motto: ‘Serving the biotechnology industry’, and d) both Brookes and Barfoot have a long and controversial history of producing reports that do exactly that. None of these points is relevant to be the basis for rejecting the report, but enough to make the anti-tech lobby happy in the belief that the report is shredded.

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The principle of Substantial Equivalence (SE) has been crucial in the debate whether genetically engineered (GE) plants might contain unexpected and potentially undesirable changes in their overall metabolite composition, on account of GE. In course of time, two opposing positions have emerged, on the adequacy of SE in determining the safety of GE products as food and feed.

SE has been a routine and stringent criterion of the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in ensuring the safety of foods and drugs marketed in the US. Efforts are made to demonstrate that a GE variety and its products are ’substantially equivalent’ to its conventional variety and its products, but for the trnsgenes in the new variety and the consequent expected products of the transgenes. Once SE is established, the FDA requires no further regulatory review. Under the ‘provision for voluntary consultation’, the US biotech companies seek SE certification by FDA, of all GE varieties and their products they intend to market. The product developers submit to the FDA, voluminous dossiers on the safety and risk analysis of the GE varieties and their products developed by them. These data are usually confined to the comparative study of proteins, carbohydrates and other components of nutritional significance. The focus is on determining whether the new GE varieties and their products are toxic or allergenic. If some GE products contain miniscule quantities of a few additional components that are a) broken down during food processing or digestion or b) if they occur below acceptable independently determined threshold levels, the products are regarded as ‘Generally Recognized As Safe’ (GRAS).

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