Early-stage venture capital, private equity, near equity, angel, and other capital resource providers offered insight over the course of a four-hour session. The fund I represented, Maine-based CEI Community Ventures, or CCV, was one of a handful of early-stage equity providers, and one whose charter includes a focus on investment in rural communities in northern New England. Three private equity funds were in the room—late-stage investors such as these often back or own manufacturing companies located in rural communities. The question posed to the group: How can we (the feds and the private sector) collaborate to direct capital to regions that have not typically been high priority for the risk capital community?

The USDA has an understandable interest in leveraging rural markets’ natural assets to serve high-growth sectors such as renewable energy. Additionally, the agency has long supported value-added food and agriculture ventures, sectors in which CCV has made three VC investments since 2005. Biofuels, both waste agricultural stock and newly grown agri-fuel sources, were top of mind for the secretary.

Vilsack asked what the federal government could do to improve access to capital in rural areas. As one might imagine, different capital providers brought different perspectives to the question. Private-equity folks spoke about regulation (less of it) and access to credit markets (more of it). Early-stage VC funds wanted to see the feds make more capital and tax credits available to spur private-sector investment. All early-stage funds present advocated for support of the agency’s Rural Business Investment Companies, or RBIC, program, an initiative funded out the 2002 Farm Bill as a partnership between USDA and the Small Business Administration, or SBA. RBIC was modeled on SBA’s 2000-2001 New Markets Venture Capital, or NMVC, program, which licensed six funds—including CCV—to commit high-risk capital and a unique grant pool to underserved and distressed communities in targeted regions. The RBIC initiative licensed only Meritus Ventures (an early-stage fund based in Kentucky) before program funding was withdrawn in 2005.

From a risk-capital perspective, the rural scene is challenging. Early-stage funds seeking high growth with proven teams are hard pressed to find them laying low in the woodlands, lowlands, or mountains of rural communities. But for a handful of experimental—and so as yet unproven—funds focused on rural and underserved communities, the early-stage equity market has gravitated, for logical reasons, to urban markets. Rural challenges include limited high-growth investment opportunities in sectors that attract capital, few experienced VC management teams, and difficulty attracting management talent to rural communities. It’s not that potential CEOs and senior managers don’t want to live in great livable cities like Portsmouth or Manchester, but they often have to consider what their options are if the venture doesn’t work out and they’ve moved their family to a rural area with fewer fallback opportunities than in a metro area like Boston.

A similar problem exists in finding experienced VCs who want to play in rural markets. A fund targeting rural markets is likely to find few similar funds with whom to co-invest. Small funds do not afford managers the capacity to attract the best talent, let alone continue to support its investments through multiple financing rounds. For this reason, I made a case to USDA to be cognizant of a minimum fund size ($25 million) that can support a fee structure and follow-on investment capacity.

Like many in the room, I supported Vilsack’s case for focusing on renewable energy, though noted that biofuel-based business models are challenging for their commodity nature and regulatory uncertainty. Many venture capital and growth equity funds supported biomass early in its evolution and—having been burned—are not so enthusiastic to double down in this post-recession environment. Biomass is a challenging sector in that its supply source and its end product are commodities, products that compete on volume and thin margins, not a great combination for venture capital.

I and others offered strong support for the value-added producer segment, which can bring higher growth rates and gross margins to rural areas. For example, the fund I manage has had a good run so far in support of food plays, including Pittsfield, New Hampshire-based Rustic Crust. But mine was a qualified endorsement, given that this, too, is a field with limited co-investment support. Risk capital tends to be biased toward high-margin, high-growth web businesses like Facebook and Groupon. This paucity of co-investment capital increases the risk of failure, since a processed food company will find it challenging to support growth through the early stages of development. Companies fail for a lot of reasons—access to growth capital is a pretty important one.

There’s no easy answer to Vilsack’s aim to see greater funding flow into rural markets, but it’s great to see this traditional agency reaching out and looking at how innovation tools like equity can address the short- and long-term challenges of rural economies.

Michael Gurau is president of CEI Community Ventures and is raising a new fund (Clear Venture Partners) to focus on early-stage ventures in secondary rural and small metro regions in New England. You can reach him at mg@clearvcs.com.

But there is an alternative hypothesis that is at least as well supported. It is that pathogens are likely to arise and jump species boundaries in environments where there is a lot of genetic and species diversity, where species have intimate contact with one another, and where climate and available nutrients support rapid turnover of microbial populations. This is the hypothesis that was popularized a few years ago in Richard Preston’s book The Hot Zone.

This hypothesis would suggest that we do well to isolate herds of domestic animals from wild relatives. This strategy is particularly relevant for controlling the spread of avian disease, since wild birds can travel long distances in a relatively short span of time. The alternative hypothesis also implies that we should also limit the amount of contact that animals have with human handlers. Both criteria make current methods in industrial livestock production appear sound. But which hypothesis is true?

Who knows? Possibly both. There is enough complexity in veterinary pathology to support active research along both lines, and there is no logical incompatibility posed by multiple mechanisms for the incubation of viral or microbial pathogens.

But the policy implications are incompatible. One points to more extensive livestock production systems in open air, while the other points toward intensive systems with greater environmental control. This is not an issue that is likely to be decided on scientific grounds alone. The way that people feel about these alternative livestock systems is as important as the scientific evidence on the incubation and spread of zoonotic disease.

There are many excellent reasons for thinking about reforms in animal production that have nothing to do contagion. Getting the science right sometimes means striking a balance between disingenuous skepticism and over-interpretation of weakly supported scientific results. We need not be shy about expressing our ethical predilections in the realm of caring for animals but we should be cautious in presuming that those predilections are supported by science.

Paul B. Thompson is the W.K. Kellogg Chair in Agricultural, Food and Community Ethics at Michigan State University.

Today, we’ve posted the first two commentaries on this important issue. Paul B. Thompson of Michigan State University asks, “Can Agricultural Biotechnology Help the Poor?” It can, he argues, but progressives need to step back and look at the philosophical underpinnings of development strategies in order to fully comprehend the issues at stake. As well, Doug Gurian-Sherman of the Union of Concerned Scientists looks at the proposed Global Food Security Act of 2009 and interrogates why it singles out “genetically modified technology,” as opposed to other methods, as a way to boost crop yields. “Genetic Engineering Comes Up Short,” when compared to conventional techniques, he argues.

U.S. agriculture assistance abroad should provide a full spectrum of agricultural choices to increase food production without contributing to water pollution and other environmental harm amid global warming. These choices should favor agricultural techniques such as conventional seed breeding as well as breeding enhanced by our increased understanding of seed genomes, both of which are proven to increase yield. Favoring agricultural genetic engineering instead makes no sense.

That’s a shame because this legislation, introduced by Sen. Richard Lugar (R-IN), generally reflects the growing public recognition of the increasing challenges to produce enough food with limited resources such as fresh water and non-renewable energy. Climate change today, along with increasingly severe weather, will make it harder to grow our food at the same time that rising population will require greater food production. At the center of this overlapping set of crises is the issue of crop yield-producing enough food from available land and resources. How we resolve these crises will determine our success in ensuring that enough food is produced in coming years.

This effort requires emphasizing methods that work best rather than more impressive-sounding technologies like genetic engineering. The agricultural biotechnology industry, which produces genetically engineered crops, has naturally seized upon the threat of inadequate crop yield to promote its vision for agriculture. Genetic engineering involves inserting into the genetic material of a crop one or a few genes from an organism such as a bacterium—that may not be able to share genes with the crop through traditional breeding—using laboratory-based methods.

The industry has a big stake in promoting genetic engineering as an important solution for increasing yield. It has invested billions of dollars in the infrastructure needed to produce genetically engineered crops. And the ability to control the use of genetically engineered seed through U.S. patent law changes in the 1980s makes genetic engineering especially attractive to these companies. In the United States, the biggest market for GE seed, farmers cannot save patented genetically engineered seed as they previously could with traditional seed varieties from most crops, but must buy new seed every year.

From the beginning, proponents of genetic engineering have made bold claims about the revolutionary potential of the technology, from reducing the environmental footprint of agriculture to making foods more nutritious, and from boosting the ability to raise crops under drought conditions to raising crop yields. But it is this last claim—to raise the yield of crops—which is especially important to the debate about producing enough food.

Increased yield has always been a major goal of U.S. agricultural research. Indeed, agricultural scientists have succeeded in producing a six-fold increase in corn yields since 1930 and soybean yields have increased by a third over the past 30 years. Because a large part of the world’s most productive agricultural land is already used to produce food, getting more food out of cultivated land will require continuing increases in yield. Otherwise, even more forests or grasslands will continue to be converted into cropland, with serious negative consequences for climate change and biodiversity.

The amount of land needed to feed a future global population, however, also largely depends on meat and dairy consumption. The reason: These foods use land much less efficiently than when crops are consumed by people. That means even greater crop yields will be necessary to produce enough food for immediate consumption and to feed the livestock we in turn will consume unless we reduce growing meat-consumption trends.

How successful has genetic engineering been at addressing the important question of improving crop productivity? In our recent report, “Failure to Yield,” the Union of Concerned Scientists found that for the two major genetically engineered food and livestock feed crops in the United States, corn and soybeans, engineered genes have not met the promises of their supporters despite 13 years of commercial production and over 20 years of research.

To better understand the performance of these genetically modified crops, we need to distinguish between two types of yield. Intrinsic yield is the maximum yield obtainable under ideal conditions. Operational yield is the amount of the crop obtained after pests and stresses such as drought reduce the intrinsic yield. Only intrinsic yield raises the ceiling of how much food can be obtained. Operational yield, however, is also important, since pests and stresses typically cause significant losses-especially in developing countries that often have fewer means to control pests and mitigate stress.

After a careful review of several dozen of the best studies in the United States—where much of the best peer-reviewed research has been conducted—we found that no genetically engineered crop increases intrinsic yield. The most widely-used traits, which confer herbicide tolerance to soybeans and corn, also provide no overall operational yield benefit. Several traits, called Bt, which are widely used in corn to control several insect pests, do increase operational yield in the presence of pests, but only modestly. Averaged over the whole corn crop, these traits provide only about a 3 percent to 4 percent yield benefit. Bt genes have not been used in soybeans, so no increase in soybean yield has occurred because of these genes.

These results compare unfavorably to ongoing yield gains from other agricultural methods such as traditional crop breeding, or breeding enhanced by our increasing understanding of crop genomes such as marker-assisted selection. These more traditional and improved methods boosted soybean yields by about 16 percent over the past 13 years. Over that same period corn yields have increased about 24 percent to 25 percent due to conventional breeding and other agricultural advancements.

The meager results of genetic engineering so far compared to more traditional agricultural methods are not for lack of effort. The experimental record over the past 20 years shows over 3,000 field tests approved for genes associated with yield. This represents a major investment of effort and funds with little to show.

What about the future? As the technology advances, scientists continue to discover new genes that may raise yields. Many of these new genes, however tend to interact with the plant genetic material in much more complex ways than the few genes such as Bt that have been successful so far. These complex interactions alter the function of many plant genes—often with unpredictable and sometimes harmful effects.

Case in point: a gene that otherwise shows promise for increasing operational yield through drought tolerance was found to also increase the susceptibility to several types of crop diseases. It is unclear whether this problem can be resolved. If not, we may pay for increased drought tolerance with reduced yield when the pathogens are present, or increased pesticide use to control disease losses.

The upshot: it will be challenging to make these genes work as intended without causing unintended harm.

By contrast, ecologically-based methods have been shown by the United Nations to more than double yields in hundreds of farmers’ fields in Africa and elsewhere, at low cost, and with environmental benefits. A joint World Bank-United Nations report that involved hundreds of scientists concluded that genetic engineering should take a back seat to ecologically-based methods such as organic farming, infrastructure development, and farmer-assisted crop breeding in developing countries. These methods are usually ignored by the private sector because they do not provide a way to easily capture profits and are best developed through public research initiatives.

One can only wonder, then, why the Global Food Security Act of 2009 includes a provision in a proposed amendment to foreign food aid law, requiring the inclusion of “genetically modified technology” in research funded by the legislation without mention of any other methods. The increasing need for food demands that we refocus our public resources on proven methods for increasing yields. That means promoting conventional breeding and demoting genetic engineering.

Doug Gurian-Sherman is a Senior Scientist in the Food and Environment Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

The benefits consist mainly in improving the productivity of cropping systems used in the developing world. The risks address biodiversity, health, and poor farmers’ economic vulnerability to the viscitudes of climate and world markets. The question of what biotechnology actually is, however, becomes the more contentious issue for those following this path.

The proven successes among transgenic crops are pest-resistant crops that produce their own Bt pesticides and crops resistant to chemical herbicides. The latter are of little use to resource-poor farmers, though they have been widely adopted by commercial soybean farmers in Latin America. The pest-resistant crops protect against only a limited range of caterpillars, but Bt cotton has been taken up by many cotton farmers in India, where it has also been deeply controversial.

Imagined crops include the nutritionally enhanced “Golden Rice,” still in development ten years after the initial hoopla, and so-called “terminator crops” that produce infertile seed, limiting farmers’ ability to save and sow seeds in successive years. Though the terminator technology is proven in principle, biotechnology companies deny having actually released any varieties containing this genetic construct. Anti-biotechnology activists assert that the terminator is in use.

Other disputants note that biotechnology is broader than genetically modified organisms, or “GMOs,” and assert that the most useful applications involve the use of genomics and genetic markers in selective breeding programs, or noncontroversial methods of cell culture or clonal propagation that can be described as laboratory enhanced extensions of the “cuttings” method used by home gardeners. Opponents have not yet taken this bait, except to see these alternatives as a Trojan Horse for GMOs. Thus goes the give and take along this rather well-trodden path.

I submit that dropping back and considering some more general tenets in the philosophies of development and of agricultural science is a more useful way to understand what is at issue. This is the less-traveled path, but perhaps the more useful in this debate. Here, too, however, there are broadly “pro” and “con” perspectives.

Although the lines of thinking here are complex, the “pro-biotech” perspective can be summarized in terms of three main themes. First, developing agriculture is the most effective and least objectionable route to achieving the goals of sustainable development. Second, improving the biological productivity of developing country farmers is critical to agricultural development. Finally, genetic enhancements (by whatever means) have been and remain critical to improvements in biological productivity. Each theme is both complex and potentially controversial in its own right, so succinct characterizations (such as I am giving here) are clearly simplified.

In the 1950s and 1960s the noted agricultural economist Theodore W. Schulz undertook theoretical and empirical studies of economic development in the least developed nations, concluding that the then-dominant strategy of promoting manufacturing and urban infrastructure was mistaken. It was far better, Schulz argued, to start where people already were, which was in rural areas, and to build upon expertise they already had, which was in farming. Relatively small gains in farm income would create room for household savings, even among the poor. This minimal capital could, with investment in skills and education, provide the basis for a bottom-up strategy that would pave the way for gradual expansion of developing economies from the inside out.

Though Schulz won the 1979 Nobel Prize in Economics for this work, it caught on slowly. Today, adaptations of Schulz’s ideas are viewed as responsible for the success of Pacific Rim nations such as Taiwan or South Korea, where investments in agriculture indeed paved the way for a more broadly based national development. What is more, in its focus on improving the capabilities of poor people this approach to development anticipated much of the re-thinking on international development strategy that occurred in the 1980s and 1990s.

Even today it is estimated that 50 percent to 70 percent of the world poverty exists in rural areas where the strategy of improving farm incomes could both lift many from extreme poverty as well as stimulate a more broadly distributed and enduring trend of economic growth. Yet the means for improving farm incomes in the developing world is itself a complicated matter.

It is generally conceded that developed world farm subsidies and negotiated terms of trade place developing farmers at an unfair economic disadvantage. Many agricultural scientists would add that the basic biological productivity of developing country farming systems places them at a disadvantage, too. On this view, the present-day competitiveness of developing country farmers depends on the relatively low return to labor. When compared as biological systems alone, developed country farmers are able to squeeze far more total production of farm commodities out of their soil, water, seed, and other purchased inputs than are farmers in the developing world.

This theme needs careful qualification on a case-by-case basis. It would not apply, for example, to crops that thrive only in tropical climates. Some economists would argue that biological productivity matters little, in any case. Fluctuations in oil prices could also make energy-intensive developed world farming methods less competitive. Yet these complicating factors notwithstanding, improvements in the underlying biological productivity of farming systems have been critical to all technological revolutions that have sparked significant economic growth, both within and beyond the agricultural sector. A powerful and persuasive argument for this claim can be found in A History of World Agriculture from the Neolithic Age to the Current Crisis, by Marcel Mazoyer and Laurence Roudart, published in 2006.

It should be clear in any case that few agricultural specialists, including economists, would dispute the need for new crop varieties, new farming methods and new tools that increase farmers’ net yields, once losses suffered to pests, in harvest or in transport, have been taken into account. Thus, the third tenet, that genetic improvement is critical to improve yields, becomes critical, as well. This tenet has both direct and indirect support. Rice varieties developed by plant breeders at the International Rice Research Institute in the 1960s and 1970s produced a higher output of grain as a result of improved genetics, making them attractive even to farmers who were not using amendments such as chemical fertilizer.

But fertilizers were not useful on traditional varieties, which would simply grow so tall that they fall over or “lodge” during heavy wind or rain. Shorter or “dwarf” varieties needed to be bred in order to make the addition of fertilizer practical. Even mechanical technologies such as harvesters require crops with uniform heights or that ripen at uniform times—traits rarely found in wild-types or traditional varieties grown by small-scale farmers prior to the agricultural revolutions of the 19^th and 20^th centuries.

As such, virtually all technological improvements in agricultural production methods that have occurred over the last 150 years have relied upon genetic improvements in the crops farmers were growing. As such, there is a widespread belief among the agricultural scientists who populate ministries of agriculture and the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations that future breakthroughs in productivity will require the best available tools for genetic improvement. Today, that means biotechnology.

An “anti-biotechnology” view might also track along three broad themes. First, many opponents of biotechnology in the developing world have been strongly influenced by critiques of development theory that were launched in the 1970s and 1980s. They are skeptical of whether so-called development processes truly benefit the poor. This skepticism can be reinforced by the agriculture-specific analysis of the “technology treadmill”—productivity enhancing technologies hurt the poor and lead to concentration in the ownership of land.

Finally, a systems-based view of agricultural science has challenged assumptions of the genetics model in agricultural science. Advocates of the systems view have been critical of the way that mainstream agricultural science has neglected system-level impacts of industrial farming methods at both the farm and ecosystem scale.

I will not provide detailed discussion of the arguments developed by skeptics of development. At the same time that Schultz was doing his work, analysts such as Gunnar Myrdal, Denis Goulet, Paul Streeten, and Samir Amin were showing that so-called development often made victims of the poor. In some respects, at least, Schultz’s agriculture-focused “human capital” approach anticipated these critiques, yet it is clear that Schultz’s affiliation with the University of Chicago meant that he was not viewed sympathetically by those who, in the 1990s, began to attack the free-market orientation of the so-called “Washington Consensus.”

Suffice it to say that liberals and progressives have ample reason to be skeptical of any claim that an economic development program will actually benefit the poor. The intellectual gap between Schultz’s emphasis on agriculture and the progressive critics of neo-classical economics still yawns. David Crocker’s recent book Ethics of Global Development reviews the critics of mainstream development thinking, but he does not discuss Schultz or agriculture.

The technology treadmill is more directly pertinent to agriculture, in any case. Adopters of productivity-enhancing agricultural technology have lower production costs, but because demand for food grows slowly, at best, the market response is usually a drop in the price of agricultural commodities. Farmers are just running harder (producing more) to stay in the same place (have the same income). One can be skeptical about whether productivity increases really benefit farmers at all.

What is more, early adopters reap windfall prices while the market prices still reflect the production costs of older methods, but late adopters go broke. They cannot recover their still-high production costs at the new, adjusted prices they receive for their crops. The windfall of the early adopters gives them ready cash to purchase the land of failing late adopters. Thus, new technologies fuel a process where better-off farmers get bigger, and worse-off farmers must leave the land.

The logic of the technology treadmill is amplified further when new technologies must be purchased as inputs for the farming process. Marxist social theorist Karl Kautsky noticed as early as 1899 that when farmers had to purchase technology, they were effectively sharing the return on agricultural production with the capitalist owners of machinery or chemical companies that supplied these inputs. The treadmill logic ensures that farmers may have little choice about purchasing and adopting these new tools. Failure to adopt the most efficient technology means certain bankruptcy. But the net effect is a loss of farmer autonomy and a deeper and deeper dependence on capital and decision making that resides in the manufacturing sector of the economy.

Combined with a general skepticism of development processes, the technology treadmill has given many advocates of the poor reason to doubt whether new agricultural technologies are the answer for developing country farmers. The final nail in the anti-biotechnology coffin is supplied by critics of the genetics-focused philosophy of agricultural science that has dominated agricultural universities and government research stations for the last century. This critique is also somewhat complex in its details. One line of argument can be found in the work of Sir Albert Howard, a British scientist who worked especially in India. Howard developed and improved a composting method for animal manures, and railed against the effects of synthetic fertilizers on beneficial soil microbes. This work has earned him an epithet as the “father of organic agriculture.”

But Howard also attacked what he regarded as the excessive reductionism that was taking root in mainstream agricultural science during the 1930s and 1940s. In contrast to detailed laboratory work on plant physiology and genetics, Howard argued that agricultural research could not achieve valid results unless it was conducted in the context of a working farm.

Here, he thought, pest problems and declines in soil health that he associated with chemical-intensive methods would be more obvious. Subsequent researchers noticed system-level effects beyond the farm gate. In 1962, environmentalist Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring brought widespread public attention to ecosystem impacts of agricultural pesticides, though Carson’s work would face hostility within agricultural research institutions well into the 1980s.

In fact, much of the science that began to recognize adverse environmental consequences of farming came from outside agricultural research institutions. Advances in organic farming methods were made mostly by farmers themselves, and were shared at organic farming conferences or through the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements. With the exception of limited programs of biological pest control, it is only quite recently (and partly as a result of anti-GMO protest) that mainstream agricultural research has begun to utilize ecological research methods and to take the system-level implications of agricultural technology seriously as a research methodology.

Speaking specifically of international agricultural research, such systems-oriented research as existed in the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research centers had been phased out by the end of the 1980s in favor of genetics-based approaches and biotechnology.

The upshot is that skeptics of mainstream development and mainstream agricultural science have powerful reasons to believe that it is time to look at an alternative approach. They may not have a persuasive vision of the alternative, but the jaundiced view they take on the agricultural technologies of the 20^th century means that they are unlikely to take claims of promised benefits by the boosters of agricultural biotechnology very seriously.

This skepticism has very little to do with the use of genetic engineering, concerns about “playing God” or “yuk factor” responses to GMOs. It does not even rely particularly strongly on risks that biotechnology poses for biodiversity. It is a mindset whose pivots are found in the way that agricultural science has abetted technology-driven processes that lead to more and more concentration of ownership. The fact that biotechnology has become embroiled in controversies over patents only heightens a concern about concentration and control that exists independently of intellectual property conventions or the idea of “owning life.”

So what should progressives think about the prospects for using biotechnology to improve the lot and prospects of poor farmers in the developing world? I believe that there is space for rethinking the putative tensions between Schultz-style agricultural development and contemporary development ethics. Furthermore, we should not dismiss the way that burgeoning processes of development in India, China, and the Pacific Rim had their roots in agriculture—even if these development processes were plagued by unevenness that sometimes victimized the poor.

At the same time, my cautious prepotency does not mean that we should open the door to agricultural biotechnology companies who see the developing world as a playground for developing biofuels and who moralistically portray “ending hunger” as a cloak for making inroads into local seed and supply markets.

It is, in fact, past time for progressives to discard simplistic thinking on agriculture in general, as if were a domain of quaint rusticity and guileless rubes. No blanket endorsement or condemnation of biotechnology makes any sense at all. Each proposal will have to be evaluated case by case. But doing that will require a discourse that is capable of following an argument of some sophistication and complexity. And that, in turn, will require a bit more literacy in the methods, purposes, and history of agriculture and agricultural science.

Biotechnology can help the poor, but whether it will depends on people of good will taking the time to understand and consider the arguments in some detail.

Paul B. Thompson is the W.K. Kellogg Chair in Agricultural, Food and Community Ethics At Michigan State University.

Further Reading

Paul B. Thompson, Food Biotechnology in Ethical Perspective, 2nd Ed. (Dordrecht, NL: Springer, 2007).

Paul B. Thompson, “Shall We Dine? Confronting the Strange and Horrifying Story of GMOs in Our Food,” in Food and Philosophy: Eat, Think and Be Merry, Fritz Allhoff and Dave Mason, Eds. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 2007), pp. 208-220.

Weiss’s Notebook

CAP Senior Fellow Rick Weiss covered science and medicine for The Washington Post for 15 years, and now he brings his investigative eye to science policy. From cloning and stem cells to agricultural biotechnology and nanotechnology, Weiss examines the issues at the intersection of cutting edge research and public policy.

As my brother-in-law and I gazed upon the enormous, picture-perfect turkey glistening golden-brown on his cutting board last Thursday, we had the same thought—and blurted it out in near-unison: It looks just like the fake turkey that President George Bush delivered to the troops during that photo-op in Baghdad a few years ago!

Indeed, the big-breasted bird on his kitchen counter was too plump, too perfectly muscled, too marvelous to be true. And as I recalled some of what I’d learned over the years about how the once-wild American turkey came to be the magnificently mutated mass of meat that it is today, I couldn’t help but also think again about the Food and Drug Administration’s pending decision on whether to allow the marketing of foods from gene-altered farm animals.

Turkeys are not made by genetic engineering—not yet, at least. But no one can look at the modern Butterball (or, for that matter, the Amish-market free-range Amazon that my brother-in-law broasted) without facing the fact that the animals we eat today have little in common with their wild predecessors. It’s an argument that proponents of gene-altered food have made repeatedly, and one that is especially difficult to ignore on Thanksgiving: Whether by DNA manipulation or old-fashioned selective breeding, we engineer our food. Get over it.

As I’ve written before, I don’t fully buy it. But to be fair, let’s consider the turkey’s trajectory from sinewy forest fowl to succulent urban uber-bird.
The turkeys of Pilgrim’s pride were bigger than the average avian entrée of the day and so popular for special occasions, but they were small and scrawny by today’s standards. The modern turkey was not born until the 1940s, when scientists in Beltsville, Maryland, used conventional breeding to begat a definitively better bird—one whose feathers were white instead of the traditional camouflage green and brown. That took care of a longstanding aesthetic issue. When turkeys with colored feathers got processed, it turns out, the leftover roots and pigments from those feathers gave the meat a five-o’clock shadow. Understandably, that didn’t sit well with consumers.

The advent of the Beltsville White helped launch a major market for turkey meat, which in turn led to a big push for faster growth and bigger birds. Through a series of intensive breeding efforts that began in earnest in the 1980s, turkeys in the 1990s were achieving weights of about 35 pounds in as little as 20 weeks—a 40 percent improvement in heft compared to a decade earlier. Of course, that’s a trend we’ve seen in humans, too. But in this case we’re not talking about an obesity epidemic. The new birds have extremely efficient metabolisms that quickly convert feed into meat and not fat.

Today, more than a quarter of a turkey’s body weight is muscle, and most of that is breast, to satisfy U.S. consumers’ preference for white meat. The bones are oriented and muscled in ways that allow the birds to remain upright despite their teetering, cantilevered, Dolly Parton-ish proportions.

There was a price to pay, of course—for the turkey, that is. The birds’ internal organs are crammed together in what little space remains in the body cavity, which may help explain why the lifespan of a modern turkey is a fraction of what it used to be, even if it is lucky enough to get a Sarah Palin pardon. And sex is all but physically impossible, which is why virtually every turkey raised in this country today is conceived by means of artificial insemination. (I once met, in Beltsville, the guy whose job it was to get many of the semen samples used in this process. He did so by hand, using a technique that he referred to as “abdominal massage.” Suffice it to say that he did not have to call to the turkeys when he walked into a pen.)

My point is that this massive reengineering of the turkey by old-fashioned breeding is clearly more substantive than any of the changes that we might expect to occur through the insertion of a mere gene or two into a few members of the modern barnyard menagerie, such as the Aqua Bounty farmed salmon (gene-altered to make them grow faster) or the Canadian Enviropigs (gene-altered to make their manure more environmental friendly). So it is understandable, perhaps, that the FDA has taken a stance favoring the marketing of milk and meat from gene-altered animals, at least once they have passed some basic tests for safety.

The agency accepted public comments on the issue until just before Thanksgiving (virtually all of which, visible here, were negative, though for the most part not carefully reasoned), and a final decision is expected soon.

As the agency digests consumer sentiments and weighs them against the economic interests anxious to get their altered animals to market, let me just remind regulators and other readers of a few facts that should temper any decision to commercialize these critters too quickly.

1. Breeding happens slowly. Genetic combinations that result from sexual recombination and that don’t work well tend to get weeded out over time and are unlikely to get to a consumer’s mouth. That safety margin can be compromised when genes are crammed into massive numbers of creatures that are then sent on the fast-track to grocery shelves.
2. Genes can behave differently in foreign species than they do in their home turf. An experiment a few years ago involved the transfer of an ordinary gene from a bean into a pea plant. In the bean, the gene coded for the production of an ordinary, non-allergenic protein. In the foreign genomic environment of the pea plant, however, the innocuous bean protein attracted a coating of other molecules that made the protein potentially dangerous to people with certain food allergies. Such unexpected results in cross-species recombinant DNA experiments undermine the idea that genetic engineering is just like regular breeding but more precise.
3. Eating is intimate. People have emotional relationships to food. Even if the health risks to consumers and the animals themselves are low, producers and regulators would be wise to open the new agricultural approach to some degree of public inspection as a way of fostering all-important consumer trust. In other words, make the approval process more transparent than what the FDA has proposed so far.
4. Remember our far-flung food importers. Even if we in the United States decide we are okay with food from engineered animals, our trading partners around the world may not be. In fact, history has shown many of them to be more than a little queasy on this topic. Whatever cost savings may be had from a faster-growing salmon must be weighed against the potential losses in confidence and, ultimately, sales, caused by our move into what others might see as the realm of phony food.

There is an important future for engineered animals as sources of food, medicines, plastics, high-tech fibers and perhaps even organs for transplantation into people—all applications researchers are now pursuing in an array of U.S. labs. But if companies insist on working through an FDA approval process that, as currently proposed, would allow essential details to be kept under wraps forever as “confidential business information,” then they shouldn’t be surprised if they are lambasted as, well, turkeys.

Rick Weiss is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and Science Progress.

Americans get the importance of science and technology.

Because the American people are not dense. Despite all the news stories about the last-ditch efforts to keep creationism in our public schools, Americans know which side their bread is buttered on, and that side is science and technology. They can see on television that science and technology are fueling the economies of Europe and Asia. Science and technology will create the good jobs in the United States and will maintain the country’s preeminence in the 21st century. That is why the fact that our kids are falling behind the rest of the world in science literacy is viewed with alarm and a fair degree of nervous joking—Americans get the importance of science and technology.

The public also understands that solutions to some of the major challenges this nation and the entire world face—affordable fuels, global warming, controlling highly infectious diseases, growing sufficient and nutritious food, reducing pollution, cleaning up the oceans and improving transportation, all depend on science and technology. And while the public may not fully appreciate the fact that there have been breathtaking bursts of knowledge in areas such as genomics and neuroscience resulting from heavy taxpayer-supported government funding, they can easily understand that it would be foolish not to make the resources and incentives available to move this new knowledge into practical application in terms of jobs and better health as rapidly as possible.

So in the spirit of three is about as far as you can get (but cheating a little to cover all the areas I am hoping to get on the next administration’s radar) here are six things: three in health and three in science and technology that the next administration ought to argue for vigorously and fund generously during its first term.

Health

Modest but ethically important reform

Most discussions of our strained health care system focus on proposals for single-payer systems, universal health care, and the value of markets and choice. But consider this: the American health care system accounts for about 17 percent of our gross national product, and this inordinate expense is straining industrial productivity and cannot be justified in terms of what we get for our money.

Healthcare expenses affect every level of U.S. industry. For large corporations health care costs mean higher prices on our products along with massive “legacy costs” to insure retired employees. For small business owners healthcare expenses make it impossible both to hire candidates they would otherwise take or to sufficiently incentivize inefficient workers to move on, damaging productivity. Some economists maintain that as many as 42 million U.S. jobs are “susceptible” to offshoring in a future where technology allows the more efficient transfer of jobs and employee health care costs are far less.

As nearly every politician recognizes, something must be done. But the new administration needs to understand that a drastic overhaul of the gargantuan, money gobbling, bloated mess that passes for American health care is not going to fly. There are just so many stakeholders in the hugely inefficient, highly inequitable, but incredibly lucrative broken system that we now have to change it quickly.

The new president should talk boldly but move slowly. Praise the drive toward some day achieving universal coverage, but accelerate change by focusing political momentum on children—the group most likely to command ethical empathy across the political spectrum. The new administration should come up with a proposed basic package, including dental, hearing and eye care, for every American child. Prenatal and post-natal care for every mom ought be there as well.

Of course we need universal coverage for basic health care, but the place to start in practical terms is with those under eighteen years of age. Millions of American children lack health insurance. Not only do they deserve it, but they are the moral key to insuring the rest of us. Show success with kids and the rest will follow.

Stem cell research is great but…

Way, way too much political energy has gone into the embryonic stem cell issue. Working with embryonic stem cells is a very exciting area of biomedical research but it is hardly the only area; nor is it the one that will have guaranteed practical payoffs any time soon. All the new president needs to do is flip the Bush administration restrictions on federal funding, which are inconsistent and wildly unpopular; gin up a new federal panel at the NIH to make sure that oversight of all stem cell research is comprehensive, including all early animal and human trials public and private, transparent, and standardized among the states; put some Federal money into the pot; and get out of the way. The stem cell scientists—adult, fetal, embryonic, induced, and cloned—will take it from there.

America needs much more funding of basic research in genomics, proteomics, and bioinformatics. The “ics” hold the future in terms of mining the little we now know about a whole lot of genes. Without that investment, we will be stuck with half-witted, premature schemes to map our individual genomes—what we can call spitomics—spit-in–a-cup DNA testing. This rapidly growing sector is riding an ill-grounded wave of hype that makes weak, next-to-useless correlations between gene markers and disease states without really having much idea what to tell its customers to do about the risk information that testing companies find.

Fix public health

Our public health system is a wheezing, uncoordinated, underfunded eyesore. It needs to be rebuilt to face the challenges that 21^st century living poses to health, ranging from asthma, to diabetes, to the flu. City and county health departments need federal help across the board. Proactive public health is a key element of our national security. The next administration should demand that Congress pay for it.

So how are we going to fund all this glorious new research? In reality the price tag is not all that big—we hardly spend very much now as a percentage of gross domestic product on basic research in health, technology, and science, especially if you don’t count defense related research. But for those who want a new idea as to funding, here is a bonus suggestion for the next president: It is time to revisit the National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation budgets and see whether a twist on the Bayh-Dole Act that gives universities incentives to work with industry makes sense.

The NIH budget does not grow in hard times. Congress won’t go there in times of deficit. Private companies wait to see what tax-payer funded basic research looks promising and then develop that, only to sell it back to the taxpayers (you and me) who originally funded the work at high prices. So why not put a 3 percent tax on all products that are generated from NIH, NSF, or other government-sponsored basic research? Keep the core budget there and adjust it to rise in response to inflation, but let American science and the American people really benefit from breakthroughs. In that way the incentives are there to translate basic research into practical products, while at the same time allowing the NIH budget to grow more rapidly without having to whine for more money from Congress every year. Here is a real incentive to universities, think tanks and academic scientists—make real and useful breakthroughs and watch your budget for future research grow!

Science and Technology

A New Push in Agricultural Research

We need safer, healthier food that has far less of a footprint on the environment. Science and technology can help but we need presidential leadership to get us there. To reduce the burden of chemically based farming that depends on fertilizers, herbicides, pesticides and huge amounts of irrigation, we need to apply the genetic revolution to agriculture. Let’s break the link forged by big agribusiness between the “old” chemically based agriculture and genomics and drive forward with a biology-based agriculture that uses genetic knowledge to screen foods and insure their safety; engineers them to make them heartier, more healthful and less oil and chemically-reliant; and creates the next generation of creative farming in cities, estuaries, empty government lands and national forests. And, for those who see creative possibilities in new forms of organic farming and alternative modes of agriculture— working to achieve the “natural” control of pests, better pollination through diversity and using less water through better soil management—give them a bit of money to let them show what they can do as well.

Clean Water

The president needs to understand that clear, drinkable water is going to be a major political issue both in this nation and worldwide very soon. If we have the technology in place to use less, to get more from the oceans, to recapture more from our current industry and farming uses, and ways to identify, track and get rid of microbial pollutants in lakes, rivers, and oceans, we will hold a key foreign policy card. Nanotechnology, micro-sensing technology, better semiconductor technology, and even improved synthetic biology are the tools to get us where we need to go. We just need a president committed to getting us there. If the new president wants to make fast friends in China, the Middle East, India, and Africa he could do worse then by promising to fund and share the science that will lead to more clean water.

Synthetic Biology

The next president and his administration can’t let human hubris about how wonderful our bodies and genes are fool them. We love to think that it is the science of human genetics and human biology that holds the key to our better future. But the fact is, microbes are usually easier to work with than human beings, and are just as useful for making gains in human health, well-being, safety, and security. That means the government should put more money into research in synthetic biology aimed at fighting diseases, making synthetic fuels, eating pollutants, cleaning the oceans and our arteries. As HIV and pandemic flu show, you cannot ever underestimate a microbe. By developing the microbial and synthetic biological science to manipulate these tiny critters, the next president can go a long way toward solving a host of our current headaches.

Keep It Real

In health care and in science and technology, the new administration can make a huge difference by keeping its eye both on what is practical and what is likely to provide the greatest return on investment. These have not always been the watchwords of health and biomedical science policy in the past. There is no need for administrations elected on a promise of “change” to let history repeat itself in the future.

Arthur L. Caplan, PhD is an adviser to Science Progress and the Emanuel and Robert Hart Professor of Bioethics, chair of the Department of Medical Ethics, and director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania.

Christopher Doering of Reuters reported Tuesday that the “FDA and USDA have said it is impossible to differentiate between cloned animals, their offspring and conventionally bred animals, making it difficult to know if offspring are in the food supply.”

AP/Jason Turner

Offspring of cloned dairy cows.

In January, the FDA released a report giving two thumbs up on products from cloned cows, pigs and goats (the FDA didn’t make a recommendation on sheep because there wasn’t enough information), stating in a 968-page “final risk assessment” that food from cloned versions of these animals doesn’t pose any harmful health risks. The milk and meat from cattle was deemed safe, as well as meat from pigs and goats. The day after the FDA report was released, the USDA requested that U.S. farmers not sell food products from cloned animals, citing a need to first harmonize rules with trading partners and to build acceptance.

Consumers in many countries, including in the United States, have said they oppose food from clones or their offspring because of health and safety issues and because of concerns for the health of the clones themselves. Ethical issues are also being considered by the European Food Safety Authority, which is funded by the European Union to provide risk assessments on food. It’s their opinion that “considering the current level of suffering and health problems of surrogate dams and animal clones, the EGE has doubts as to whether cloning animals for food supply is ethically justified.”

Center for American Progress Senior Fellow Rick Weiss, who was then a staff writer at the The Washington Post, reported in January the FDA doesn’t require food companies to label products containing cloned livestock. But the agency may allow other companies to label products that do not contain cloned meat or milk.

In May, Nancy Scola reported in Science Progress on the disarray of the federal food safety system. With several recent food recalls and government agencies constantly placing blame on one another, Scola wrote that the food safety system is so complicated it “verges on the absurd.”

“When we had the spinach episode, everyone acted like it was a great surprise,” former FDA Commissioner Lester Crawford, a Bush-appointee and long-time federal food safety official, told Scola, “But the likelihood of something bad happening [with the food supply] is always quite high.”

The number of cloned animals in the country is low—only around 600, with cattle being the majority—but offspring are unaccounted for, and the size of the second generation is unknowable, especially since a single male clone can sire countless offspring through mail-order semen sales. Indeed, clones are too expensive to slaughter for the meat market, so for most farmers the business plan is to use them to breed high-quality offspring. Alex Seitz-Wald of NewsHour Extra says one breeder in Kansas has been selling his cloned cattle’s sperm for years. According to Seitz-Ward, cattle experts believe that food products from the offspring of clones already exist in the American food supply.

Great Britain, which put a blanket ban on all GM crops in 2004, is now beginning to grant new applications for field trials of bioengineered crops, and British scientists are pushing for allowances to conduct even more GM research. A policy shift among European Union member states would be particularly significant, as most of the global food trade is affected, directly or indirectly, by European regulations. An EU move towards acceptance of GM foods would undoubtedly inundate global markets with bioengineered crops, much to the chagrin of the many protesters in both the United States and abroad.

AP

Scientists can engineer seeds that are drought resistant, can withstand harsh chemicals, or that contain extra vitamins.

The debate about the safety of GM foods isn’t going to end any time soon, in Europe or the United States. Here at home, though, debate over the benefits and potential pitfalls of the technology must be framed around the fact that engineered seeds have to pass through the screening procedures of three different agencies, a more rigorous testing procedure than any other food undergoes.

In 1986, the United States established the Coordinated Framework for Regulation of Biotechnology, which describes what safety requirements each agency is accountable for monitoring and the intricate detail in which the agencies must work together. The U.S. Department of Agriculture evaluates the seed’s agricultural safety, while the Environmental Protection Agency assesses hazards the new crop might hold for the environment. The Food and Drug Administration ensures that the crop (with its newly engineered protein falling into the “food additive” category) is safe to eat.

While this battery of evaluations is by no means foolproof, it does ensure that genetically engineered foods that make it to our tables are at least as safe, by any testable standard, as other foods on the market. Critics of genetically modified crops, however, raise other issues. They point out that most of the genetically modified seeds that are sold are engineered to be resistant the high levels of pesticides or herbicides. This use of such technology only furthers the interests of the corporations who produce the seeds and, invariably, the chemicals for which they have resistance. It also encourages farmers to use a heavy hand when applying these toxic chemicals to their fields.

Others worry about the lack of definitive tests to ensure the safety of genetically modified foods. The concern is that the engineered crops could produce surprising toxins, or that the spliced-in DNA might escape the digestion process in our stomachs and fuse with our DNA or the DNA of our gut flora, causing mayhem. The list of concerns goes on, and every blog or news outlet will provide a different spin.

Certainly, there are issues to be addressed by policymakers. Foods containing GMOs are not currently labeled, and it is thought that as much as 70 percent of all processed foods on the shelves in American grocery stores contain GM ingredients. Some groups have suggested that there should be some system requiring labels for these products to enable consumers to make informed choices about their food purchases.

Before that could happen, though, there would need to be a better system for keeping engineered seeds from infiltrating organic crops. One of the biggest contentions farmers have with engineered seeds is their tendency, like any other seed, to drift. Many organic farmers have found high percentages (frequently over 20 percent) of their crops to be contaminated with GM seed. One solution might be to establish GMO-free zones, like those in place in California, to allow organic farmers to raise their crops without worry of contamination from nearby farms.

While U.S. farmers, the media, concerned parents, and all the other interest groups continue to go back and forth on this issue, there is a global dimension to the debate that policymakers must also weigh. In small areas of Africa, farmers have introduced seeds engineered to increase the crop yield and the nutrition of those yields. These crops can be a huge source of relief in parts of the developing world where malnutrition affects over 800 million people, a number that will only continue to increase with the rapidly growing global population and the skyrocketing costs of food.

Plants that are engineered to have higher levels of essential vitamins or nutrients help children develop properly and help adults keep their immune systems healthy. Crops engineered to be drought resistant or have higher yields can help stem the global food shortage while bringing much needed income to poor farmers. The first step in any long-term solution to the food crisis is to increase the self-sufficiency of starving populations. This can be partially accomplished by giving farmers access to improved seeds.

At the heart of the matter, the debate over genetically modified crops is really two separate issues. Much of the genetic engineering done on crops in the United States improves the crops’ ability to withstand powerful chemicals. The genetic engineering that could contribute to the malnourishment problem in the developing world improves crops’ ability to feed people. Thus the debate over GMO foods should be conducted as two debates.

The first: whether chemical companies are using biotechnology to sell more of their product and maintain a stronghold on seed technologies and thus agricultural production. And the second: whether supporting the use of biotechnology is an appropriate means to help solve an urgent humanitarian problem that will continue to grow if the global community doesn’t act aggressively. After all, the majority of processed foods in the United States contain some genetically modified ingredients that over the past two decades have not resulted in any immediate adverse health effects, but malnutrition kills ten million people a year. The seeds of this biotechnology have already been sown; it is now our responsibility to make sure we utilize them for good.

Yesterday, the New York Times looked at the precipitous decline in agricultural research since the early 1990s, as more people around the world have more resources to spend on food and diets are shifting:

Now, a reckoning is at hand. Growth of the global food supply has slowed even as the population has continued to increase, and as economic growth is giving millions of poor people the money to buy more food.

With demand beginning to outstrip supply, prices have soared, and food riots have erupted that have undermined the stability of foreign governments. World leaders are scrambling to respond. On May 1, President Bush asked Congress for an extra $770 million to pay for food aid and to help farmers improve their productivity.

But cuts in agricultural research continue. The United States is in the midst of slashing, by as much as 75 percent, its $59.5 million annual support for a global research network that focuses on improving crops vital to agriculture in poor countries.

Last month, an international panel of agricultural researchers released the massive International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD), which made it clear that more investment from international partners is necessary: “Achieving development and sustainability goals would entail increased funds and more diverse funding mechanisms for agricultural research and development and associated knowledge systems.” David Dickson, Director of SciDev.Net lauded the report’s “demand for more public investment in agricultural research” and lamented declining international donations, which has left the issue in the hands of private sector companies.

Andrew Revkin, writing at Dot Earth on the parallel between food and energy research, points to another NYT article on the business opportunities that may appear with rising food prices, opening the window for solutions driven by private enterprise. But investors won’t drive research if the price spikes are temporary.

Going forward, we have to make sure that a growing world population can feed itself in a sustainable manner, particularly as ecosystems continue to change as a result of global warming. One part of that project will be investing in agricultural science, technology, and tech transfer.

The Seed Vault is a major attempt to preserve existing biodiversity. The underground storage facility will freeze seeds from all over the world, shielding them from blight, climate change, seed bank mismanagement, and war. (The bunker was designed to withstand a nuclear explosion.)

Sequencing the maize genome represents another big step forward in agricultural genetics. Funded by the NSF, the USDA, and the DOE, the genome map can facilitate the production of hardier, higher-yield breeds that carry specific traits university or agribusiness researchers are looking for.

Genetically modified food doesn’t carry the same stigma in the United States as it does in the EU, but Alexis Madrigal, writing at earth2tech, raises the point that in the U.S., farm bill subsidies support corn growing, GM or not. And one possible application of this new genetic knowledge is the ability to manipulate corn genes so the plant might produce oil. Agricultural subsidies for oil-bearing corn would only make it harder to move biofuel conversations past the resource-intensive crop and on to the next generation of biofuels.

And questions about access to genetic resources necessarily raise the issue of intellectual property. Andrew Revkin points to some of the problems raised with the Svalbard approach–and centralized seed banking in general–including the fact that it takes genetic resources out of the hand of farmers, “the world’s original, and ongoing, plant breeders,” in the words of Grain.org. (For more on that, see the New Yorker‘s extensive back story on the vault from last summer.) With respect to the corn genome, the latest work could prompt discussion of gene patenting in industrial agriculture; as the AP points out, agribusiness giant Monsanto helped with the sequencing and will be able to license the fruits of the research for its products.