by CEI Staff
February 1, 2008

Prepared for the U.S. State Department conference,

Agricultural Biotechnology and Developing Countries, May 21, 2003

Advances in plant molecular biology and recombinant DNA techniques hold real promise for advancing the food security interests of poor farmers and consumers in less developed nations. To date, however, a variety of factors have limited the ability of those farmers to take part in the biotechnology revolution. In part, these limitations stem from the unaffordability of patented gene sequences and technologically sophisticated laboratory equipment. A far bigger problem, though, is overly restrictive public policies in both industrialized and less developed countries, which needlessly raise the cost of research and development and make it difficult or impossible to introduce bioengineered varieties.

By now, many readers will be familiar with the story of Zambian president Levy Mwanawasa who, last autumn, rejected some 23,000 tons of U.S. food aid in the midst of a two-year-long drought that threatened the lives of over two million Zambians. Mwanawasa’s public explanation was that the bioengineered corn from the United States was “poison.” But other Zambian government officials conceded that the bigger concern was for future food exports to the European market. If even a little of the corn were diverted to seed stock, it could potentially threaten the exportability of the entire Zambian corn crop and much corn-fed livestock for many years to come (Neuffer 2002).

What readers may not know, however, is that Zambia is not unique. European biotechnology restrictions have had other, similar, consequences throughout the developing world. Thai government officials have been warned by European food importers not to authorize any bioengineered rice varieties in that country, and the Indian government recently halted its research program on bioengineered basmati rice before the first field trials could be conducted (Economic Times 2003). Uganda stopped funding research on bioengineered bananas and postponed their introduction indefinitely (Thurow, Mitchener, and Kilman 2002). Even China, which has spent the equivalent of hundreds of millions of dollars funding advanced biotechnology research, has refused to authorize any new bioengineered food crops since the moratorium began (Paarlberg 2001).

Clearly, European public attitudes and government policies have played an integral role in keeping new bioengineered crop plants out of the hands of farmers in less developed nations. This was a key talking point for US policy makers in the wake of the United States governments’ recent decision to file a complaint with the World Trade Organization against the de facto EU moratorium on new bioengineered crop varieties (USTR 2003). But problematic restrictions extend far beyond the EU moratorium. They include overly precautionary regulation and labeling requirements in Europe and other industrialized countries, the intentional export of EU-style regulatory policies to other countries, and a public opinion war that has extended to some of the poorest nations on Earth.

International Barriers to Biotechnology Adoption

The European Union’s moratorium on new variety approvals is the most overt barrier against adoption of bioengineered crops in countries across the globe—both industrialized and less developed. The EU, for example, has approved just two bioengineered crop varieties for human consumption (one each of corn and soybean) and has not approved any others since 1998, even though many have successfully completed internal scientific reviews. In practice, this means that countries such as the United States, Argentina, and South Africa have been willing to commercialize only the same variety of soybean, so that soybean growers in those countries can continue exporting to the European market. But, because the United States has approved more than a dozen different corn transformation events for commercialization, practically no U.S. corn at all may be shipped to western Europe. The moratorium has made those and other countries understandably nervous about approving new bioengineered crop varieties that have not already been approved by the EU.

Consequently, bioengineered varieties of some of the most important export crops—including rice, wheat, coffee, fresh fruits and vegetables—cannot be introduced without automatically forfeiting European markets, a price many Asian and African countries cannot afford to pay. For example, even though several insect-resistant, pathogen-resistant, and herbicide-tolerant rice varieties have been developed by Asian, North American, and European scientists using rDNA methods, not a single one of them has yet been commercialized.

Complicating matters further is the fact that most bioengineered food products that do make it to market have to be labeled in the European Union and certain other industrialized countries, including Japan and South Korea. This makes bioengineered foods, and companies who sell them, easy targets for anti-biotechnology campaigners. Curiously, the biggest problem with labeling has neither been one of added cost (which is not insignificant) nor one of consumer rejection per se. Despite a seemingly widespread concern about so-called “genetically modified” foods throughout western Europe, some affirmatively-labeled bioengineered products can still be found on supermarket shelves. And where both bioengineered and non-bioengineered products are sold, there does not appear to be any price premium for non-bioengineered foods. Indeed, most consumers must actually have the “GM” label pointed out to them before they reject those products (Noussair, Robin, and Ruffieux 2002). Thus, while the deep resentment of, or ambivalence toward, bioengineered food that shows up in consumer surveys may in fact be real, it appears to be an attitude not so deeply held that it actually impacts purchasing decisions.

A much bigger problem in the European market, then, is not that consumers have rejected labeled bioengineered foods, but that major producers and retailers have. With Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth campaigners so eager to protest against supermarket chains and food processing companies who use bioengineered ingredients, it is understandable that few firms are willing to put their hard-earned brand reputations at risk. And the bigger the companies, the less willing they seem to use biotechnology in a way that subjects their products to the labelling mandate (Kalaizandonakes and Bijman 2003).

For example, labelled cans of processed paste from the Zeneca company’s bioengineered tomato variety sold well in British grocery stores until retailers were hounded by anti-technology activists to disavow biotech foods (Gaskell et al. 2000). The product, which was sold under various retail “store-brand” labels, contained about one-eighth more tomato paste than competing brands at the same price and reputedly held a 60 percent market share up until the day it was taken off store shelves. Even in the United States, the few food companies that have voluntarily removed bioengineered ingredients from their products under Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) pressure are market segment leaders—including Gerber baby foods with a 70 percent market share and Frito Lay with a 60 percent market share (Kalaizandonakes and Bijman 2003). Thus, convincing major food companies to adopt bioengineered ingredients, and convincing government regulators to permit them, will likely prove to be the two most important keys to opening the European market.

Then, of course, we must deal with the problem of NGO scare campaigns. Not satisfied to scare wealthy and well-fed Europeans and North Americans away from eating bioengineered foods, NGOs such as Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, and the European-dominated and funded Third World Network have set out to scare consumers and farmers in less developed countries as well. In Zambia, for example, anonymous NGO officials have accused the United States of using Africans as guinea pigs to prove that bioengineered foods are safe to eat. Rumors were circulated among the locals that women would become sterile and people would get AIDS, if they ate the corn donated as food aid (Thurow, Mitchener, and Kilman 2002).

Of course, it is easy to vilify food that comes from major multinational corporations headquartered in the United States and Europe—“Mon-Satan” makes an attractive whipping boy. But even many public sector developments are similarly ridiculed by NGOs that try to scare poor farmers about their provenance. Thus, even Golden Rice, developed by public sector scientists in Europe, with primary funding from the New York-based Rockefeller Foundation, has been ridiculed as a “Great Yellow Hype”—another ploy by multinational biotechnology corporations to get the world hooked on bioengineering (Pollan 2001).

It’s instructive to note that Golden Rice has been condemned both for having too much beta-carotene and for having too little. And those attacks by American and European NGOs have influenced public policy in less developed countries. Golden Rice is now trapped in a politically motivated regulatory maze. Co-inventor Peter Beyer laments how governments are requiring battery upon battery of tests for nutritional equivalence, bioavailability, digestibility, and toxicity—as if beta carotene were something entirely new to the food chain (Beyer 2002). More recently, the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines, which has been assigned the task of field-testing Golden Rice, has indefinitely postponed its plans for environmental release in the Philippines, fearing backlash from NGO protestors (Paarlberg 2003).

Accusations that industrialized country consumers are not actually eating bioengineered crops grown there, but rather exporting them to less developed countries for experimentation are pervasive. The result is widespread unease manifested among consumers and “opinion elites” alike. And, in the absence of any organized pro-technology response, the natural reaction by governments is to erect stifling over-regulation at home (Alvarez-Morales 2003). These regulations make it prohibitively expensive for public sector and charitable institution scientists to test new bioengineered crops outside laboratory or greenhouse environments, and make it all but impossible to commercialize them.

Domestic Barriers to Entry