GM research: is there no alternative?

Some strange juxtapositions lately. On the one hand, we have Bruce Stutz writing in the Yale Environment 360 that private companies working on GM crops remain reluctant to allow independent research on their products. On the other we have Pamela Ronald and a colleague opposite the editorial page of the New York Times, saying that we need lots more GM, preferably in the public domain.

I don’t know enough about the intrigues around independent research to say more than that it seems pretty rum that scientists can’t get their hands on the stuff they need to assess GM crops for themselves, as opposed to for the manufacturers. Pamela Ronald’s arguments are, however, a lot more filling. And a lot less convincing. For example, she talks about engineering sorghum resistant to drought and to the parasitic weed Striga. Before we worry too much about drought-resistant sorghum, though, might it not be a good idea to just help farmers move from their very thirsty maize crops to the altogether more frugal sorghum? And is there really a need to engineer Striga resistance when a locally proven simpler technology already works perfectly well and tackles more than one pest, in more than one crop? It isn’t glamorous. But it works. Now. Not at some unspecified time in the future. Golden rice puts in an obligatory appearance, and there are cameo walk-ons for high-protein potatoes and high zinc sorghum. In other words, the usual suspects.

What is novel is that Ronald, who engineered flood resistance into rice, and her co-author James E. McWilliams, devote most of their space to the papaya engineered to resist ringspot virus, which saved the papaya industry on Hawaii. They say that:

The real significance of the papaya recovery is not that genetic engineering was the most appropriate technology delivered at the right time, but rather that the resistant papaya was introduced before the backlash against engineered crops intensified.

I don’t think that is its real significance at all. I think its real significance is that it shows what a dedicated individual researcher — Dennis Gonsalves — can do when not working for The Man. I know this not from Gonsalves himself, but from a blogger’s write up of a talk Gonsalves gave, which we nibbled here a couple of weeks back. There are some interesting insights there into the differences between public and private research, which is why I found this paragraph from Ronald and McWilliams so interesting:

As it now stands, opposition to genetic engineering has driven the technology further into the hands of a few seed companies that can afford it, further encouraging their monopolistic tendencies while leaving it out of reach for those that want to use it for crops with low (or no) profit margins.

That really is one of those nice counterfactual propositions. Why is it out of reach? Because of the cost of regulation? In which case, could it be that the cry of the private companies against the time and cost of regulation is really crocodile tears? Maybe it really suits them, because only they have sufficiently deep pockets. I wonder whether public opinion would be more favourably disposed to genetically engineered crops if they were produced as public goods, to be distributed at cost to the deserving poor? Is it just profit that makes GM crops unacceptable, no matter what people might say about health or the environment?

Papaya ringspot resistance might be OK, because there is no alternative. But for “problems” where we already have perfectly good solutions, I don’t believe it matters whether that research is in private or public hands. The pure financial cost is too high, especially when we haven’t invested enough in the alternatives.