ENVIRONMENTAL SAVIOR OR SABOTEUR?
Debating the Impacts of Genetically
Modified Food and Biotechnology
Monday, February 4, 2002

MR. RODEMEYER: Good morning. My name is Mike Rodemeyer. I'm the Executive Director of the Pew Initiative on Food and Biotechnology, a non-partisan and nonprofit project funded by the Pew Charitable Trust funded through a grant through the University of Richmond.

I'd like to welcome everybody here this morning, and also welcome to those who are watching on the Web today. This is being Webcast, and in fact we'll be getting some questions from Webcast viewers that we'll be getting to later on today.

Few new technologies have spawned the kind of emotionally charged debate that we have seen with genetically modified food in agricultural biotechnology. On the one hand, technology developers see biotechnology as a way to improve food quality and nutrition, to reduce the environmental impacts of conventional farming, and to make it easier for farmers around the world to grow food and fiber to meet human needs.

Critics, however, charge that the technology creates food safety and environmental risks and increases the dependence of small farmers on technology developed by a few large multinational corporations. The Pew Initiative on Food and Biotechnology was established to help promote dialogue and a better understanding of the issues surrounding Biotechnology and to be an independent and objective source of information. It's our belief that the public and their representatives will be best served by an open and robust discussion of both the potential risks and the potential benefits of this new technology.

To that end, today the Initiative is very pleased to host our third policy dialogue on the potential environmental impacts of agricultural biotechnology. In prior sessions we've addressed some of the ethical and religious concerns associated with genetically modified food, as well as the trade tensions generated by the differing policies of the United States and the European Union. For those who are interested, a video archive of those previous dialogues are available on our web site which is at www.pewagbiotech.org. Future policy dialogues are being planned.

Environmental concerns about releasing genetically engineered plants or animals into the environment have been around since scientists first learned how to move genes from one kind of organism into another back in the 1970s. Despite years of discussion and debate and significant real world experience, those controversies are still very much with us today. And as a public opinion poll we are releasing today shows the American public appears to be relatively evenly divided on the question of whether the potential environmental risks outweigh the potential environmental benefits.

Nationally, about 40% of consumers polled indicated initially that they supported -- that they believed that the risks outweigh the benefits. After being read a list of both benefits and potential environmental risks, there was a slight shift where approximately ended up 38% believe the risk outweigh the benefits and another 38% believed the opposite.

More detailed information about the poll and the results are in the packages on the table and also being released on our website this morning.

To help us navigate through these issues this morning, we're very pleased to have as our moderator, Margaret Warner, Senior Correspondent with the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. She's no stranger to controversial topics both in her eight years with the NewsHour and her prior career in print journalism. She's covered Whitehouse and presidential politics for Newsweek Magazine, regulatory, congressional, and business issues for The Wall Street Journal, and everything from State House politics to murder trials for the San Diego Union in California that Concord Monitor in New Hampshire.

Ms. Warner's reporting has been recognized with numerous awards including the prestigious George Polk award which she shared with other News Week reporters and editors for coverage of terrorism, and most recently during the 2000 presidential campaign she won two Hess awards for her coverage of campaign issues. Graduate of Yale University, Ms. Warner is married to a lawyer and lives in Washington, D.C., and I'm very pleased now to turn over the proceedings to her for this morning. Thank you, Margaret.

MS. WARNER: Thank you. I'm on a remote mic here, can everyone hear fine?

May I ask our response -- first of all, I want to thank Pew for sponsoring this very important issue and we've got a fabulous panel here to discuss and debate the issue. Could I ask that we all get glasses of water. I have a feeling over the course of an hour and-a-half we may need them, so on behalf of all of us I'm going to ask for that.

As Mike said, this issue has really heated up in the last five or six years. Agbiotech products, or agricultural biotechnology really only started commercially being used in 1995, and already in that very short time it's really transforming our food supply. Two-thirds of all the packaged foods sold in supermarkets today have at least one genetically modified product, usually corn or soy or some other grain in it, and that's because the growing fields of America and the world are being transformed.

In 1995 only four million acres in the world were planted in genetically modified crops. By 2000, the year 2000, it was 109 million acres which is 16% of all the acres under cultivation worldwide. And 70% of the acreage in genetically modified crops that comes as no surprise is in the United States.

So far, the genetically modified products that we're seeing and the crops are mostly -- the genetic modifications, I should say, have been mostly designed to make life easier for the growers. That is, they are modifications designed to make the crops more resistant to herbicide and pesticide in particular. But coming down the pike, sooner rather than later, are -- is at least the promise of genetic modifications that are actually going to affect the products in a way that would affect consumers with health benefits such as, for instance, rice that might carry Vitamin A, or bananas that might carry the vaccine for Hepatitis-B. All this means that we are going -- that this transformation of the way we grow our -- the crops that go into our food is going to change dramatically and the focus of our inquiry today is what impact that's having on the environment.

What we'd like to look at is, is one, what impact is it having now on our environment; and, secondly, with the assumption, so we'll debate that assumption, that this is going to continue, are there ways to maximize the benefits and minimize the risks.

To explore all that, we have a panel of people with a lot of experience and I would also say a lot of passion on the subject, and I'll start from left to right. There are very full biographies in your kit, so I'm going to just very briefly.

Professor Martina McGloughlin is director of the University of California's system-wide biotechnology research and education program and she spent ten years working with the UC-Davis biotech program.

Next to my left is Chuck Benbrook, an environmental consultant based in Idaho. He used to work on the Hill as a staffer dealing with pesticide and agriculture issues, and he was for many years executive director of the National Academy of Science's Board on Agriculture.

Immediately to my right is Peter Raven who's a botanist. He's director, the longtime director of the Missouri Botanical Garden and also a botany professor at Washington University in St. Louis. He's currently president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a rotating position.

And finally, on the right, Carl Pope, a longtime environmental activist and the president of Sierra Club for the past ten years.

So we're not going to have any opening statements. We're going to jump right into the debate and we're going to talk, debate and discuss for about an hour or until about 11:00, and then we're going to go to your questions and also questions that we hope to be getting from the live Webcast.

So Martina McGloughlin, just starting with you. You're an enthusiastic proponent of agricultural biotechnology. What are the benefits, environmentally, that you see?

PROFESSOR McGLOUGHLIN: Well, I've a long career [Inaudible] on my hands and knees and I think -- I think if we look already at the huge reduction in chemicals that are used for our crops [Inaudible].

MS. WARNER: Carl Pope, you're from the other camp. Make your case that the risks are too great.

MR. POPE: Well, I want to begin with a sound byte, but I want to emphasize that the sound byte has been very carefully chosen and the words they didn't matter.

What we have here is an Enron-style regulatory structure creating a Frankenstein industry, and the two words I want to emphasize are create, it's not the technology itself which poses Frankenstein-like problems, it's what the regulatory system is creating, and it is the industry which is the problem, again, not just the technology because we are seeing in this present legal and regulatory context many of the same social, public health, and environmental problems that are associated with biotechnology also cropping up in agricultural where there is no genetic engineering, so that biotechnology is simply the most dangerous and the most extreme form of the way in which the present economic and regulatory context for agribusiness creates enormous environmental risks. And as to the question of whether the present generation of genetically engineered agricultural crops pose enormous environmental risks, one way of answering the question is neither I nor anybody else at this table nor anybody else in the world could possibly know. It is unknowable because nobody has gone out to do the science to find out.

Now, one way of doing that is to say well, we don't know if there any risks, and another way of looking at that is to say the risks are enormous because we actually have no scientific base of understanding what's happening, with one exception. We do know that each of the assumptions on the basis of which regulators proceed, the critical assumptions on which these technologies were licensed and permitted have proven to be incorrect. We know, for example, that although we were assured that genetically modified genetic material would not find its way into the wild diversity of species in major plant areas because we wouldn't plant genetically modified corn, for example, in the home region where wild corn cultivars are found, that in fact we've now found in Mexico. We were told it was reasonable to license certain products which we thought weren't safe for human beings because we could keep them out of the food chain. We discovered that in fact that wasn't true, that corn that hadn't ever been licensed for human consumption made its way into the human food chain. And we should were assured that inserting genetic material into plants would not result in modification of the underlying genetic code of the plant, it would just be a little piece that would fit there and nothing else would change, and we now know that in at least one case that assumption wasn't true.

So fundamentally, we have no idea what the environmental consequences of what we are doing will be, and I would suggest that we should not be doing it on millions and millions of acres without any knowledge.

MS. WARNER: Peter Raven?

MR. RAVEN: Well, I think that I can't be said to be in either camp, really, I'm a life-long student of plant evolution and genetics and have spent I guess the last 35 years in plant Conservation around the world, and in studying plant populations I've been led to various conclusions.

I guess from my text, I would take the last point of a study by the Royal Society in London which was released today and which is available on their website, The Royal Society.org which is that although there are many factors involved in this issue, sound science has to be at the basis of our conclusions about it, it's possible to make many kinds of assertions but ultimately the question is going to be whether the science does or does not support those assertions because there are some many of interlocking factors many, many, many kind of bald statements have been made but those statements are all subject to investigation and verification in the scientific literature.

I would say most of the ills, and Carl briefly passed this one into his remarks, most of the ills that are attributed to genetically modified crops are really ills of agriculture. Agriculture which is cultivating an area the size of South America and pouring out about three million metric tons of pesticides worldwide is extremely damaging to biodiversity, there is no doubt about that at all.

MS. WARNER: You say currently?

MR. RAVEN: Agriculture, any agriculture is extremely damaging to biodiversity, so I think the question before us today is what is it that genetically modified crops add to agriculture that might change the environmental balance, and to me, they change it in three ways.

The most important environmental positive effect is that they greatly reduce the use of pesticides, that's why farmers use them, and pesticides are increasingly toxic and there is no more important environmental problem in the world than poisoning ourselves with pesticides.

Assertions that they contaminate genetic systems and reduce genetic diversity do not have a basis in science and I'll be glad to discuss those further as the morning goes along.

MS. WARNER: Chuck Benbrook, back to the myth -- first of all, where do you see the balance? And for people in the audience who may not be completely experts in this field, if you would, outline what the purported risks are.

MR. BENBROOK: Okay. Well, most of the -- about two-thirds of the genetically engineered crops that have been planted and are being planted around the world today have been engineered to tolerate or resist the application of herbicides over the top of the crop for the control of the broad spectrum of weeds, which is a technology that simplifies weed management greatly and in the U.S. and, indeed, worldwide soybeans is by far the major crop.

We have 65 percent of the U.S. soybean crop last season planted to so-called Round-up ready soybeans, we'll use that term a lot today, Round-up ready crops.

A Round-up ready crop is one that's had a gene inserted that makes the crop impervious, not affected by applications of a herbicide that, you know, will kill the grass, the trees, the rose bush, really basically any plant that's growing. So it's a tool to improve the efficiency, simplicity etcetera of weed management. But the other third of GMO crops or genetically engineered crops that have been planted around the world, have inserted in them a bacterial toxin from the bacteria Bacillus thuringiensis, or so-called Bt, so you'll hear Bt crops. Well, those crops are genetically engineered to express basically their own natural insecticide, inside all the cells of the plant, the leaf issue, the pollen, the grain, the roots typically. So those are the two crops, and I think the whole subject matter of agricultural biotechnology, it's like talking about the field of biology and agricultural together, it's so enormous that, as Peter says, I mean agriculture definitely has some very adverse affects on the natural environment. I mean the moldboard plow has probably done more harm to the terrestrial ecosystems of the world than anything.

And so yes, agriculture does come at a cost to the environment, and for us to have a meaningful discussion of the pros and the cons, the risks and the benefits of agricultural biotechnology, we have to be specific and talk about what the real world applications are that are on the market that are being planted because that is what really matters. So we have to talk about herbicide tolerant crops and Bt crops. And we now know after just five years of experience with these crops that yes, they change farming systems and yes, they have some of environmental benefits, but they also have some new -- they pose some new environmental risks and some food safety risks, and we're learning more and more that there may be some real changes in the ecology of food systems and production systems that lead to problems down the road that may be more serious than the reasons that the farmers adopted the technology in the first place.

So I think we need to focus on the technologies that are out there, and we need to try to reach a balance in both the new kinds of risks that are being caused by them against the older ones, and I think in many cases we will be able to agree that there might some sort of softer ways to go about improving agriculture productivity than today's applications of biotechnology.

MS. WARNER: All right. Let's look a little more closely at the claimed benefits, and Carl Pope, let's focus just on that if we could for a minute.

Do you agree with the claims of the advocates that it has reduced in the areas where it's used with herbicide or pesticide use or not?

MR. POPE: Well, to understand the benefits, environmental benefits of the use, for example, of Bt in planted corn or potatoes, you have to look at the whole system and you have to look at the right time scale. It may be the case that for the first few years that we used these crops, the farmers who used them reduced their applications of the kinds of pesticides and there does seem to be some data for that and that taken in isolation is a good thing. But that's not really the test.

The test is what happens over time, what happens to the whole system. Monsanto who is on record which makes many of these crops is saying that it believed that within 30 years as a result of market penetration of these crops, the pests which is currently controlling will no longer be affected by Bt, so that in fact this naturally occurring pesticide which is heavily relied upon by organic farmers will no longer be useful because just as we've done with antibiotics, we will have built super pests, we would break super pests.

Monsanto says they expect this to happen, and you have to say well, what really is that the problem with using Bt if it's such an effective pesticide the way organic farmers do and have been for a very long period of time, and the answer is it requires different kinds of agricultural practices on the part of farmers. It's not that it doesn't work. It does work. That's why it's being used. But the reality is we have some other options that will enable us to continue to use Bt to control pests for hundreds of years, Bt is a very environmentally benign pesticide. Instead of doing that, in the interest of sustaining our present agribusiness structure, we are using up the effectiveness of Bt for the benefit of this generation. I don't think that's an environmental benefit.

MS. WARNER: Martina McGloughlin, take on that point.

PROFESSOR McGLOUGHLIN: I think insofar as a Bt is concerned, if in fact that the only problem so far that's ever been encountered with Bt has actually been the organic component because the spores of Bt itself contains many, many more genes than the actual genes that's used to protect crops. The particular one that's used to protect crops is called Cry gene, the crystalline proteins that are pro-toxins than just turn into the toxin in the stomach of specific insects. But interestingly enough, there was a study in France using the applied spore portion where a
gene --

MS. WARNER: Martina -- I'm sorry. Let me interrupt you. Were getting a --

PROFESSOR McGLOUGHLIN: A little technical? Okay.

MS. WARNER: If you could just keep on the issue about the danger that the use of genetic modification is going to create, for instance, super pests or super weeds that are ultimately resistant and will contaminate normal crops.

PROFESSOR McGLOUGHLIN: Using any technology no matter what you use to control pests and weeds, you are putting what's called selection pressure on the pests to overcome this and this is true that any system that's used over time. Biology is infinitely capable of being able to respond to what we used to try and control it, so with biotechnology single genes over time are not going to be the most effective way to control pests and disease, and that's why we are focusing very specifically on developing what's called a current approach; that is, taking genes that work in very different ways so in effect you are introducing these pests to -- well, it's like crop rotation, it's a rotation environment so that the probability of any single pest overcoming any of those -- all those genes is pretty much close to zero.

And we're also focusing on modifying what's called the chloroplast, these are distinct [inaudible] organelles within the cytoplasm of the plant, they're not in the nucleus, so in
-- by modifying these they have their own DNA. The DNA stays in the mother plant; that is, it will never be expressed in the pollen because it is inherited through the cells, only the female parts of the plant contains -- when the plant is replicated, it would be like when the plant is being reproduced, it just stays in the female part. It doesn't get into the pollen, it can't get out there, and the genes cannot be transferred. It is a very effective way of controlling the genes.

This also means they're expressed at very high levels so when you turn on these genes at very high levels, you are effectively reducing the selection pressure that cause the probability of these pests being able to overcome a high level of expression is very low so you're diluting out, you're diluting out the resistance gene.

MS. WARNER: All right. Let me let Chuck Benbrook jump in. I think I'm reading his body language and he disagrees with you and thinks there is --

MR. BENBROOK: You know, I do. This concept that the biotechnologists have come up with pyramiding or stacking multiple genes, it's an approach to one of the problems of biotechnology Tennessee Ernie Ford would relate to and I remember a line in his song 16 Tons, if the right one don't get you than the left one will.

So yes, I mean we -- biotechnologists can keep moving genes into plants and multiple genes in an attempt to keep up with the evolution of the organisms that they're trying to control, but it just may be that there's a fundamental flaw in how we carry out agriculture in the U.S. and in a lot of the developed nations in that we have this notion that a pest is an organism that's not wanted in an agricultural field and the way you deal with the pest is you find a poison to kill it with or something to kill it with. And what biotechnology has made possible is sort of -- it's a new delivery system for a new range of toxin, so it really hasn't changed in any fundamental sense, the approach to managing pets, and I completely disagree with Martina that problems with Bt have been caused by organic farmers so that this implication, that the problem with any insecticide is if it's used repeatedly, the organisms against which it is used are going to eventually adapt resistance.

There is complete agreement in the pest management community that Bt crops are planted on a significant amount of the acreage in any major parts of the world resistance will eventually develop despite the best efforts to develop what's called a resistance management plan. So this is a problem that's going to happen and many people feel that sacrificing Bt in a -- I guess Carl said, in the generation, it's kind of like burning up antibiotics in 20 years. You know, Bt is a critical part of the natural ecosystem in moderating the populations of a wide range of insects, and if all of a sudden Bt doesn't work anymore, it wouldn't be all of a sudden, it would take time, but over time if that were to happen, it would have a profound effect on evolutionary change, and might -- and Peter can relate to this, it could kind of tip the balance out there in the real world in some ways that might adversely affect farmers and society.

MS. WARNER: Peter Raven, take that on.

MR. RAVEN: Well, I really can't support that at all. First of all, Bt -- we talk about it as if it's a particular thing. As Martina began to get at, it's a whole series of different proteins that can be targeted in different ways and what you have to realize is that many authors analyzing this have pointed out that when you just spread Bt, for example, you pour it over gypsy moth infested forest, you kill off -- you not only kill off all the moths and butterflies to begin with but you are generating resistance in a whole array of insects whether they're target insects for that particular application or not. When you actually engineer Bt producing a particular protein into a particular plant, you're targeting the particular pests that are attacking that particular plant and not just sort of bathing the whole environment. It's kind of lurid and exciting to say well, by doing that, you're changing the whole nature of life on earth, but there isn't really any scientific basis for that.

Agriculture, I want to come back to this, has changed the whole nature of life on earth. There are half a million tons of pesticides put on crops in the United States every year. They kill an estimated 70 million birds. They kill tens of billions of insects. They generate resistance to each and every one of them on an ongoing basis. Is it not logical to use modern tools to produce more precise ways of controlling the individual pests that are actually attacking the crops that we're talking about in order to get away from it. We all want to get away from applying chemicals to the extent that we can. Whatever chemicals are applied are going to generate resistance and then we need to go on to other generations. It is very much like antibiotics, the fewer of them we use and the less toxic ones we use, the better off we are, but to me, that's a description of agriculture and has little or nothing to do with modern genetic modification which doesn't really in a more precise, dependable and adaptive way which can produce safer cultivation of crops.

MR. BENBROOK: I mean I think there's a scientific question here and I don't think, with all due respect Peter, that we have the answer to it and I would suggest that we shouldn't be doing this experiment until we have the answer.

You're arguing that in fact using Bt in the way that we currently are that there is actually fewer insects are being exposed to it than the way we were using it before. I suspect that is not true, although I might be wrong. I agree with you more of the -- and we should find out. We should find out before we turn over all of America's farmlands and potato crops to these new crops.

We should find out whether, in fact, I think it's undoubtedly true the number of species that are being exposed are smaller. It is more prevalent in that sense, but it is in fact the species we are most concerned about in an agricultural sense which are being targeted, so that's got its downside, too.

We have not done ecological science to be able to answer the very basic question which you and I are debating, and I simply want to say I think it would be smart to do the science before we do the roll out.

MR. RAVEN: I just like one quick point. Simply saying over and over again we haven't done the basic science and by doing that ignoring thousands of papers and analyses that have been done on this in peer reviewed literature doesn't make it true. No matter how much literature or how much analysis or how many experience have been done, it's possible just to say over and over again we haven't done the basic science.

The question is not whether we say that or whether we believe it, the question is a scientific one, have we or haven't we. The peer reviewed literature is available as a way to tell, and by studying it each and every one of us can reach their own conclusion. I could say for effort we have done it, having looked at these papers and studies it and thought about it that we've done a great deal about it. Carl can say forever we haven't done the basic science and neither one is necessarily true.

The literature is there for each one of you and anybody interested to study and draw their own conclusions from.

MR. BENBROOK: And Peter, what you've read is, let me ask you a question, which is can you tell us by what proportion the exposure of insects to Bt has declined as a result in the last 20 years since we -- what's happened to the actual number of insects who ingest Bt, if you have this data we could share it with us.

MR. RAVEN: I'll stick with the point that you agreed with that the kinds of insects that are exposed to it is now very specific and the individual pests, whereas by broadcasting in large amounts and perpetuating the myth that nothing will ever become resistant and that way because in some way it's nature's way, but that just isn't true. A few target insects now get exposed to it instead of all the tens of thousands of different kinds of insects that get exposed to it when you just dust it around.

MR. BENBROOK: And they would become resistant --

MS. WARNER: All right.

MR. BENBROOK: -- I think is the conclusion.

MS. WARNER: Let me get this side --

MR. BENBROOK: But Peter, you know that Bt is specific to only Lepidoptera insects, moths and certain types, it doesn't --

MR. RAVEN: No.

MR. BENBROOK: Well, there's other kinds of Bt's but --

MR. RAVEN: It depends on which protein you're using.

MR. BENBROOK: -- it's not a broad spectrum insecticide like a synthetic pyrethroid or an organo-phosphate or these ones that we've talked about, and you also know that the problem with conventional Bt sprays is that both, you know, conventional vegetable farmers, it's a very important insecticide to them and organic farmers, the problem is that it lasts for 12 to 24 hours in the environment, sunlight breaks it down, I mean, so sometimes farmers might have to spray it every five days. Now, it's a very safe application, it's not a terribly expensive application, but it just doesn't stick around very long and it affects just a few insects, but when you take that gene and move it into the plant all of the leaf tissue of that plant is expressing that toxin the full growing season and any insect, including the target insects, that feed on that plant are being exposed and the quantity of the toxin that is put into the environment in a Bt crop is 10's, 20's, hundreds time greater than the very low amounts that a farmer will do in a spray. So there's a lot of really complicated empirical issues here and I'm one of the people that's buried my head in the data and there really has not yet been any significant reduction in pesticide use on GMO crops with the exception of Bt cotton where there has been, I think a significant and important one, but in terms of the rest, it's a myth. It just hasn't happened and with herbicide tolerant crops it probably never will.

MR. RAVEN: Bt cotton is the only widespread genetically modified crops so that's not surprising.

MR. POPE: What about soybeans, Peter?

MR. RAVEN: The only wide spread pest controlling one.

MS. WARNER: All right. Clearly, I'm going to go back to Chuck Benbrook on this because we need to move this along a little bit, but this is a fascinating debate.

Proponents will say look, farmers have been altering the genetic composition of crops for centuries through crops breeding. What makes it, in your view, is it more dangerous to do it through genetic modification than the way it's been done for centuries and if so, why?

MR. BENBROOK: Well, I think the answer to that is clearly yes, and I would cite exactly the same scientific literature that Peter Raven would. Peter reads the literature and is reassured by it. I read a lot of the same literature and there's many scientists that are concerned that -- that the tools of agricultural biotechnology what scientists have to use to force this foreign DNA from another organism into a crop plant, it's very invasive, it's --

MS. WARNER: It becomes a cross -- can it become a cross species?

MR. BENBROOK: It pushes barriers. All organisms, in order to sustain our integrity as a species, we have got to keep out viruses and bacteria and foreign DNA and, you know, the vast majority mutations are deleterious, so all organisms have to have mechanisms to cope with this on a daily basis, and the job of the biotechnologist is to, you know, overcome those natural mechanisms and trying to preserve the genetic integrity of organisms. And what really worries a lot of scientists is that the tools that we are now using to do that, and I submit they're crude and that they will get better, but the tools that we are using are very indiscriminate, and they actually, you know, while some people say that it's precise, it's really not so precise in some ways, and it also, it's very clear that some of the viral vectors and the promoters are moving in the soil, in the gut of animals, in many other parts of the environment, they're moving around in bacterial communities in ways that is actually accelerating the rate of evolution and in changing its direction among the wide range of bacteria, and this I think is the biggest concern of people that somehow this set of science is a going to tilt the evolutionary advantage towards bacteria and we will get new bugs and more virulent bugs emerging faster, whereas humans we have many years in a generation of humans so we adapt much more slowly.

And I think the analogy to antibiotics that came up before is a good one. There is no question we are losing the war with bacteria in terms of antibiotics. That is the consensus opinion. Now, maybe there's new generations of drugs out there that are going to be found, we better hope there are because the bacteria are continuing to evolve. So I think there's some really profoundly important questions about what these tools are doing to bacterial evolution that yes, it's increasing biological diversity, but maybe not in ways that are entirely benign.

MS. WARNER: All right. Martina McGloughlin do you share that concern at all?

PROFESSOR McGLOUGHLIN: No. I think we've already done the dangerous signs 50 to 100 years ago. I think what a lot of people don't realize is that we have been modifying at a very growth level the DNA of plants for the last 50 years using systems like chemical and radiation mutagenesis, maybe you don't know all the spaghetti you eat has been produced using a radiation mutagenesis where they us a cobalt fixing source producing ACA torabacrals [sp], that's a hell of a whack of radiation, to basically fry the genome and then pull out the characteristics that you want the plant to produce and the characteristics you want. That's true also of all the Asian pears, every Asian pear you produce has been produced through radiation user genesis to be resistant against black spot disease, and I'll give you an example of a wide cross which illustrates this point as well.

As you know, we like tomatoes in California, we eat a lot of pizza, and for processing tomatoes there is a component called soluble solids that are very important to processors, they want high levels soluble solids so that you get more tomato paste for your buck. Now, the normal tomato it doesn't produce very high levels because it's what's called hexose accumulator. Now, there's a wild variety of tomato, but those produce a very high level of soluble solids because its what's called a sucrose accumulator. Now, all potatoes and tomatoes come from the Andes and they're all members of the deadly nightshade family and this wild variety of tomato is not alone and has a lot of negative characteristics, it has small size, poor yield, bad taste and it's toxic, so it took 18 years of back-crossing to the good parents to get rid of all the toxins from one that we were just trying to introduce trace that's the high soluble solids.

You don't know at end what's left. You don't know how much of the toxin -- toxic genes might still be in there. Now, using genetic engineering, which we achieve the exact same affect by just turning off a gene, using what's called anti-cistern technology to switch off an enzyme that made the modern tomato a hexose accumulator because it would have been a sucrose accumulator before that, so just putting that one gene in there you turned off this step.

Now, if I was to ask you which of those are more substantially equivalent to the tomato we eat every day, the one that might probably still have a toxic genes from the deadly nightshade ancestor or the one that was produced using genetic engineering where you have not introduced any novel genes, and that's just to give an example of the type of research that we have been doing and have been accepted for the past 100 to 50 years.

Likewise, if you look at the viral promoters that Chuck was talking about --

MS. WARNER: Let me try to get Carl Pope on this because on this issue about is it intrinsically more dangerous, more potentially damaging to the environment to do crossbreeding through genetic engineering than it is through time honored methods?

MR. POPE: Well, I think that depends on how you do it because the one has -- gives you greater, more options and I'm prepared to believe in the premise that this technology can do some good things. I'm also prepared to believe that it would be very surprising if this technology could only do good things and, therefore, I think that Texas has set up a regulatory and an economic structure in which we get the good things and the bad things as we have, and one of the fundamental problems is the industry talks as if when they put a single gene into a plant they only do a single thing, but the fact is we know that genes, at least in many organisms, code for many, many proteins. There's a gene in the inner ear of a chick that codes for 576 proteins, and at the present time we are not saying okay, we put a new gene into cotton, so let's take something we eat like soybeans, let's go out and do a complete assessment of what are the new proteins that we've created. We don't do that.

We don't take that particular crop and feed it to generations of animals to find out if we could -- whether there's anything harmful there. Maybe we don't really care what all the genes are, we just want to know if they're harmful. What we would normally do with a new food or a new food additive is we feed it to generations and generations of animals, it's not a perfect approach but it would tell us a lot more than what we're doing now which is saying well, we take the protein that we wanted to express in the plant, the protein that makes the plant able to tolerate Round-up and we just test that one protein and if it's okay, then we say oh, the plant's okay.

I don't think in most cases we have any idea how many new proteins we're introducing into these plants, and many easily expressible proteins in nature are toxic. For example, there's a protein that's expressed in a weed that's commonly found with mustard in South Asia which is a very slow acting irreversible, largely undetectable and ultimately fatal neurotoxin called lathurism. Nobody is testing these new plants to see whether any alkaloids like the alkaloids that creates lathurism is being expressed in them. We are not doing the tests.

MS. WARNER: So Carl how would you change the way regulatory structure? I mean if you could be king for a year, how would you change the way this technology is being permitted?

MR. POPE: I think the single most important thing you could do would be to reverse the assumption the FDA made on the basis fundamentally of no science that a genetically engineered organism is simply the organism which was modified plus the protein you intended to add it is in all other ways equivalent. I would say this is a new plant, it's a new crop, you got to test it, you got to go through the same things you would have to do if it was a new food additive. You would have to test these things as new organisms because they are new organisms and we don't understand all the links in which they're new organisms.

MS. WARNER: All right. Peter Raven, what's wrong with that approach? Or maybe you don't think there is.

MR. RAVEN: Well, I made the point before that just simply saying no science doesn't cut it. You can always say this is going to change the course of evolution or make some other very broad statement, but I would point out to you that this is not consistent with the studies of tens of thousands of molecular biologists and students of bacterial evolution throughout the world who are working constantly on how evolution behaves. To make a statement like every species is trying to maintain its integrity is absolutely preposterous in evolutionary terms, no one would have taken a statement like that seriously since probably the 1920s.

What I would urge you all to do if you want to take this seriously, is not to take a bunch of scare assertions, but to try to dig into the literature and find out how do genomes of organisms really operate.

MS. WARNER: Let me interrupt you, though. In terms of looking at it as a product, what is wrong with the approach that Carl Pope laid out just in terms of the kind testing that the government would require before products could be sold?

MR. RAVEN: First of all, let me say very clearly that I agree completely with Carl that the government process of testing these and company revelations about what they're doing needs to be transparent, public, and completely accessible to everyone.

MS. WARNER: Do you think it is now?

MR. RAVEN: It can always be improved.

[Laughter]

MS. WARNER: Go ahead, explain.

MR. RAVEN: All right. The Royal Society in the statement that I issued today -- that they issued today which I say is available on their website, agrees with the findings of men, all scientific bodies that have studied this for the past two or three years which, are among other things, no evidence that GM foods on the market are harmful, no evidence that GM foods cause allergic reactions, risk to human health from specific viral sequences are negligible, consumption of DNA poses no significant risk. Reduction in pesticides accompanying these crops means that they're likely to be very useful in achieving sustainable agriculture worldwide.

What I want to ask is, how are we going to get back to the basic analyses of scientists throughout the world who are working on the facts involving this, taking with due respect the assertions that ca be made about the dangers and look at them, look at the facts. In fact, molecular biologists, people who work with this, and Martina's a very fine one, do not believe that there's anything unusual about putting individual genes into individual organisms, the affects, the properties of those organisms and well-studied, since the Asilomar Conference was held in the 1970s on risks of transferring genes from one organism to another, scientists have agreed with one important principle which is look at the characteristics of what you produce, the way you produce it is not the important thing, the ways that we're producing it now are precise, they will get better and better, they are not broad brushed confused ways like we've had in the past and we can and should improve them.

MS. WARNER: All right. Let me get to this side of the table. If you could, if you want to weigh in on one foot, particularly is the regulatory structure adequate, if not, what needs to be changed? And don't assume everybody here knows what it is to start with.

MR. BENBROOK: I'd like to follow up on Peter's comments. The environmental impacts of genetically modified foods as they are being used in the real world, in cotton fields, in Bt corn fields and in soybean production in the U.S. and Brazil, it's affected not just by the molecular tools that are used to transform that plant, but they're also affected by the other profound changes in the cropping systems that are -- go along with planting that particular kind of variety.

If you plant Round-up ready soybeans, you are paying six, seven, $8 an acre more for your seed for that trade, and you're going to Round-up herbicide. Here, we have the first major agricultural biotechnology in terms of acres planted in the U.S., we have oh, about 100 million acres of it already planted when in late 2000 in the prestigious Journal of Agronomy Society, a team of scientists from the University of Arkansas published the first evidence that lo and behold Round-up is sprayed over Round-up ready soybean fields retards the root development of Round-up ready soybeans and depresses the fixation of nitrogen by natural bacteria in the soil which is the single biggest environmental benefit of soybeans in the big picture of roll crop agriculture and, you know, this was stunning. I mean how could, you know, despite all the, you know, the in depth regulatory review and all the so-called science being done on the environmental impact of GMOs, could we go in the U.S. for four years before anybody bothered to look at the impact of the herbicide that's being sprayed over soybeans on this key beneficial bacteria that helps fix nitrogen.

This is an example of this enormous gap in the regulatory infrastructure because nobody thought to ask that question.

MS. WARNER: Is that because it's no one's responsibility? Is it not the EPA's responsibility? Why isn't that done?

MR. BENBROOK: Well, regulatory agencies have brought to the regulation of biotech a mindset that reflects the past food avenues, the Food and Drug Law, the Pesticide Act, you know, is it toxic can we set a tolerance and --

MS. WARNER: And this falls in between the cracks?

MR. BENBROOK: Well, there's been not a single piece of national legislation of changing or establishing a new regulatory infrastructure for this very different technology, and one of the reasons we have so many problems in the regulatory arena is that we really cobble together a framework and we're trying to ask and answer a whole new generation of questions coming from an old paradigm it just hasn't worked very well.

MS. WARNER: Martina?

PROFESSOR McGLOUGHLIN: I think how Chuck presents that is what he sees is what is the cost or risk of doing it, but let's look at the cost/risk of using the alternative technologies that were available before Round-up ready.

MS. WARNER: Before you make that -- do you think that the regulatory structure is adequate?

PROFESSOR McGLOUGHLIN: Okay. I do because I actually think what you're using from a regulatory point of view is it's very scientifically based, and the Nebraska study was done in the absence of any herbicides, but guess what, if you don't use any herbicide you don't get any soybean crop to grow because you won't have sufficient level to be able to produce enough to meet micro requirements, and by relying on these old technologies, as I said earlier, you have an incredible complex cocktail of some really nasty herbicides, several of them in fact have water supply warnings, and if you look at the reduction in the Illinois Water Review Board from the watershed, which I'm happy to give to anyone, you've got now down the levels of these runoff into water of these herbicides with water science is negligible, you can't even measure it anymore, because in fact these herbicides not only damaged the roots of the soybeans, they also damaged the crop and the soybeans themselves.

Farmers are incredibly wise people, they're not going to use something that's going to reduce their profit in the long term and by switching from these old herbicides and, in fact, they succeed is not only in improving the environmental protection, but actually increasing the volume of soybeans that are produced, they're reducing their amounts of time that they need to grow them. They're reducing the amount -- increasing the amount of no till, that is reducing the amount of soil erosion using the older system, the plowing into the soil. Now, you don't plow into the soil, you're allowing beneficial insects to come back into these fields, beneficial plants are coming back into these fields. There are a far more sustainable ecological system than they were in the past when we were dependent on the old-fashioned herbicides and far less costly to the farmers, and really the honest truth is that's what the farmers are going to look at, if it saves them over $250 million per year rising to -- they expect this year it may even rise up to $700 million, and saved two [inaudible] who are switching from the older, complex, less safe method.

MS. WARNER: Chuck Benbrook, let me just see if I can understand. It's your view that -- is it possible that Martina McGloughlin's right that, in fact, this would be more sustainable method, it's just we don't know, or is your view that the risk of it, the risks that you've laid out make it just too dangerous to go down this path?

MR. BENBROOK: We are going down this path and we must continue because agriculture biotechnology, it's a set of scientific tools and there's no doubt that we are learning much more about how genes affect the performance and traits of a plant, we're understanding how to improve classical breeding or conventional breeding, we can do it quicker and more precisely in ways that don't bring in a lot of these other risks that I've spoken about and others have spoken about. I think that given -- the reason that we have herbicide tolerant crops and Bt crops and that there have been 100 million hectares planted in this past year, is that these were the first technologies that a set of large companies were able to do that they felt they could get a market for.

There were some problems with soybean weed management yes, there were, but was it the most pressing problem of American agriculture? Heavens no. Bt corn to help control the European corn borer, was the first big Bt technology for corn that came along. It was the secondary pest in corn, still is. Most farmers didn't spray for it, but because they knew how to do it, that was the technology that was brought forward. I think that a lot of the problems with today's applications of agricultural biotechnology is that they've been developed and marketed sort of in the framework and the mindset of old chemical intensive types of agricultural where there wasn't a lot of emphasis put on prevention pest problems, and I think the next -- hopefully, the next generation of agricultural biotechnology will be different in two ways.

One is that both technologist and companies and farmers won't expect so much from a single technology because that really sets the stage for ecological problems. And secondly, these new technologies will be used more selectively, more judiciously and in combination with a number of other cultural management, other biological practices and what we call integrated pest management systems so that you -- the idea is to spread around the pest management burden, and if we do that, a lot of the problems that are already evident with Round-up ready soybeans and Bt cotton, simply won't emerge in the real world to anyone near a significant degree and I think farmers will definitely be better off and so will the environment.

MS. WARNER: We want to go to questions. Peter Raven wants to jump in here. I'm wondering -- just a minute. Do we have questions from the Webcast?

All right if someone will bring those up. And in terms of asking questions here, do we have a microphone? We don't really need one, but right over -- well, maybe -- why don't we move this microphone a little closer over so that people don't have to cross over, if someone can do that. Peter, basically, I'm going to -- a lot of hands are up already.

MR. RAVEN: Yeah. It follows from what I've already said that I absolutely want to endorse what Chuck just said that what we really need is a sustainable agriculture and anybody who thinks that genetic modification is a cure-all for agriculture or that as a method it will save it, in any other context with building a sustainable agriculture is wrong.

The second point I would like to make is that any crop that's introduced ought to be subject to the same kind of review. The methods of genetic modification in the view of the world scientists in themselves pose no harmful potential, but what the crop is, that's what you need to examine. If we can stick to examining the products, seeing how they perform then we will find good choices and bad choices.

MS. WARNER: All right. I think now we're going to go to questions from the audience right here in the white shirt, and if you could, even though we can all hear you, would you mind coming to the mic for the Webcast?

And the other thing I can do is repeat your question for you. Go head, if there's someone specifically you'd like to direct it to do.

MAN: We hear that the use of GMOs reduces the use of chemicals put on crops and yet, as I understand, Bt -- or Round-up ready it just makes crops able to have chemicals put on them, so how is that reducing the levels of pesticides or herbicides? And then beyond that, what's the next generation look like, is it going to be -- are we really going to be able to reduce overall herbicides and pesticides put on crops through GMO?

MR. POPE: Well, since I've published in the Royal Society of chemistry on this issue Peer Review Journal, Round-up ready technology does not reduce herbicide use. Round-up is a relatively high-dose herbicide, it's applied at about three-quarters of a pound of the active ingredient per acre, and most acres of GM soybeans are treated about twice, so there's about a pound and-a-half of
Round-up that goes on, and there's also a need for residual grass herbicide which usually goes on at about a pound per acre. So your typical acre of Round-up soybeans is treated with two and-a-half to three pounds of herbicide.

There's a lot of herbicides on the market used by soybean farmers, some of the ones that Martina spoke about that are more potent that go on at a tenth of a pound per acre. There's a couple that go on at a hundredth of a pound per acre. So, clearly, the purpose of Round-up ready soybeans wasn't to reduce herbicide use measured in pounds applied, it hasn't and it never will, so that's just not there. In terms of the Bt cotton --

MS. WARNER: I'm sorry, let me -- because we have so many questions let's just answer the question.

Martina, briefly what is the case, then, Round-up ready?

PROFESSOR McGLOUGHLIN: I think it's the point I think I've made a couple of times already, that Round-up in fact is a very benign herbicide and the ones that it is replacing, as I complex cocktails of some less than positive herbicides that has environmental water advisories are now being removed from usage because the farmers find it easier to just have to apply once for post-emergence as opposed to applying many, many times very expensive cocktails of herbicides over the whole growing season.

So Chuck is right if you're just looking at this as a way of reducing total herbicides, that's not the way to look at it. What the way to look at it is to improve the management using the benign systems in a sustainable manner and that's what Round-up ready soybeans allow.

MS. WARNER: I think just from a layman's perspective the way I would explain it and correct me if I'm wrong which I may be here, is that Round-up is considered less, as Martina said, I think less toxic and therefore a farmer can go ahead and rely on Round-up, of course that's awful nice for the company that makes Round-up, I'm setting that aside, and not have to use the more toxic chemicals to, for instance, prepare the whole field even before they plant and so on. That's the case. Yes, sir, you in the darker shirt?

Oh, good, we have -- oh, okay. Then why don't you come forward and you go ahead.

WOMAN: Thank you very much. Carl Pope mentioned the fundamental assumption behind the regulatory framework is supposed to be guiding us here, and one of those principles is something known as substantial equivalence which holds that GMO crops are the same as conventional crops, and I'd like to actually Peter Raven to say if there is indeed compliance to back up this concept of substantial equivalence, and Chuck Benbrook to say if there is not.

MR. RAVEN: There is. Well, I've already read the statement from The Royal Society which pretty well summarizes -- I mean the conclusions on those points which pretty well summarizes the conclusions of all scientific bodies that have been examining this question that they are a substantially equivalent.

Whether they are or not needs to be the subject of continued investigation and testing, no doubt about it. The FDA is in a position where they don't want to distinguish things that are substantially equivalent because it amounts to a false advertising premise on the other side. Scientific evidence has not broken the hypothesis of substantial equivalents.

MAN: Food, we're talking about food.

MS. WARNER: Carl, I'm going to pull on you to answer this.

MR. BENBROOK: Well, if this was true, we would have scientific studies which analyze protein by protein genetically modified crops and the crops from which they were derived. We don't.

MS. WARNER: And then show that they were --

MR. BENBROOK: We show that they are the same. We show that they're -- the proteins which are different are not of concern. We don't even have such study -- we don't know how many proteins are different. The statement that something is substantially equivalent when you haven't measured it strikes me as being [inaudible] science.

MR. RAVEN: We do not have studies showing that the set of proteins in any two strains of any crop are equivalent or not equivalent, the question is whether there's any reason to suppose that there would be any dramatic difference here and there is not.

MS. WARNER: Yes, sir? Sir, you?

MAN: I'd be interested in hearing some comments from a farmers point of view in terms of acceptance of the technology. Millions of farmers in the U.S., Canada, Argentina have adopted this technology. In China, it's been adopted in probably a dozen crops. To date there are farmers in Brazil growing the crops on millions of acres prior to government approval. The same thing is happening in India, farmers there are growing the crops prior to government approval. It appears to be happening in Mexico as well. Any comments about why -- are farmers stupid, why are they using this technology, why are they adopting it so readily?

MR. POPE: Well, let me respond quickly by taking on something Martina said. She said farmers won't use a tool that will lower their long-term profits. I think that any realistic examination of the fate of the world's major agricultural producing regions would suggest that that is not the case.

If you look at the irrigated lands of Mesopotamia, if you look at the tobacco lands of the American South, history is full of examples of farmers using tools which in fact absolutely destroyed long-term productivity. On the other hand, I think it is a fair statement, farmers are very reluctant to use tools which lower their short-term profits. Farmers, and I'm not blaming them, it's the nature of the business they're in, the markets they face, the capital stocks they have, cannot afford to lose productivity verses their competitors for very many years or they cease to be farmers. I think it is clear that in the short term farmers believe that these products are increasing their profits. I assume they're not stupid about that. I assume that is a correct statement, but that doesn't answer the question of what are the long-term agricultural impacts or the short-term public health and environmental impacts which I think is where we need to focus. I'm assuming farmers are being economically rational in doing that, but that doesn't mean that these other problems don't exist.

MR. BENBROOK: I think it's-

MS. WARNER: I'm sorry, Chuck. I hate to interrupt you, but since we have one opponent make that point, if one of the advocates -- we have so many other questions, do you want to take that on? Peter?

MR. RAVEN: Well, I've already said and agreed with Chuck that what we really need to be striving for is sustainable agriculture, and that involves integrated pest management, better control of soil erosion, and if we're striving for that, then we see this in context that it's a valuable modern tool that can be used to promote sustainable agricultural. No one pursues sustainable agriculture intuitively, in fact, we need scientific measurements that will help us to do it. But what we're talking about here is what's different about GM crops.

MS. WARNER: All right. Question over here. And would you please identify who you are?

JEAN ROUND: Yes. I'm Jean Round with Green Peace. My question has to do with the experience in Canada. Canadian canola farmers conventional or organic have found that their fields are contaminated with weeds that are now resistant to the Round-up herbicide as well as another herbicide, Liberty, and have -- conventional farmers have been using even more toxic herbicides to deal with that infestation of genetically contaminated weeds. Similarly, organic canola farmers in Canada recently announced a lawsuit against Monsanto for genetic contamination of their fields arguing that they can no longer grow organic canola, how would the panel respond to that?

MS. WARNER: Martina McGloughlin?

PROFESSOR McGLOUGHLIN: Actually, the lawsuit I think you're referring to is with Mr. Schweitzer, I think his name was -- well, with him what they found out specifically was the individual every single row of his crops had the gene in there and for that to occur using the suggested method of gene --

MS. WARNER: What about the larger point I think she's raising which does have to do with contamination and the evidence that this is occurring?

PROFESSOR McGLOUGHLIN: Right. That's the point I had made earlier with respect to what's called chloroplast transformation where the genes will be introduced into organelles in the actual cell that are only transferred through the maternal line, they cannot get into the pollen and they cannot escape from the plant.

MS. WARNER: So are you saying that yes, it's occurring now but the next generation it will not?

PROFESSOR McGLOUGHLIN: Well, actually, there isn't any specific evidence that it is occurring without selection pressure on the actual potential out-cross itself. It has occurred with some Brassica species but this has not been found within the fields themselves, it has been found in outlying areas beyond the field.

MS. WARNER: Chuck?

MR. BENBROOK: To the question, you know, of why are farmers --

MS. WARNER: I'm sorry, but could you first stick on the question about is their contamination occurring.

MS. BENBROOK: There is gene flow occurring in those GM crops were there are related weedy relatives, canola is an example. There's great concern about the outflow of the Round-up ready gene in weeds which is a technology that may or may not be approved in the next year or two because we like canola have related weed species that are part of the landscape where Round-up ready wheat will be grown.

GMO farmers in Mexico are not legally planting GMOs, there are none approved. There is a great controversy right now about the consequences of some outflow of the Bt gene and whatever in Mexico from U.S. Feed Grain that's been imported to Mexico and some people have planted it because Mexico is the home of sort of the genetic diversity, it's where corn, the original corn varieties came from. So there's a lot of concern about this. It's not as Peter will say, it's not a new issue. Plants have been exchanging genes and pollen has been flowing for a long time, but there's certainly some new pragmatic factors here because most of organic certifiers around the world have adopted policies that say that if you use GMOs or if GMOs have contaminated your crop, you can't be certified as selling into the organic market, so these organic canola farmers are suing the companies that have taken away their ability to sell into a market that some of them worked for a good part of a lifetime to develop, and there is similar lawsuits in the U.S.

MS. WARNER: Briefly.

MR. RAVEN: Corn is a plant that has been produced by human beings over the last 6,000 years in Mexico and has a highly modified genome and constitution that's as different from its wild relatives as a Chihuahua is from a wolf, and there is gene flow between species of plants. The question, as always, is not whether a trans gene gets into a wild plant, but what would be the effect. You can use it as a scare story or you can think about what it would be.

As to super weeds which is sort of the extreme of this, control of alien invasive species costs 120 to $140 billion in United States at the present time, it is a major conservation problem. Forty percent of the federally listed plant species in United States are endangered because of invasive aliens. There's not a single case of an invasive alien being produced by the hypothetical kind of crossing gene and a super originates that's being argued about and talked about and emphasized. It would be a lot better for us to get down to work on invasive aliens that are really a huge conservation concern than to get so wound up in the arcane details of what might theoretically happen when it doesn't.

MS. WARNER: Carl Pope, do you want to comment on that? Otherwise, I was going to get a question from the Web.

Okay. But you first. This is from Tina Hessman of the St. Louis Post Dispatch. How does the rate of developing resistance to herbicides and insecticides compare between traditionally bred crops and biotech crops?

In other words, is it much worse -- excuse me. Is the rate they're developing resistance just much of faster, is it as accelerated?

MR. POPE: Let me respond by saying I think the point is the rate of resistance is not controlled by how you got the crop, it's controlled by how you use the crop, that's why you have to look at the context.

If you were simply -- if using equals farmers in Bt sprayed and equal numbers of insects were eating them and you compared with insects eating the leaf structure of potatoes, as far as I know, there's no scientific evidence the rate would differ at all.

But as Chuck has pointed out, what is happening with these genetically engineered organisms is we are getting a single hugely concentrated Round-up resistance in 60% of our soybeans, so it is the concentration and the exposure at a single time of, frankly, rather primitive versions of this technology.

I mean Martina's talking about how well, we won't have some of these problems in the next generation of technology. Bully, I say, and so let's pull the present generation off the market and wait for something that's a better product.

[Applause]

MS. WARNER: We have another question from the web, I'm going to condense it, but it has to do with developing countries and the debate over whether this technology is something that's going to be helpful in developing countries because it's going to increase yield. For instance, you may have drought resistant crops, or the argument on the other side has to do with the so-called terminator technology. And for those of you who don't know what that is, these are seeds that essentially produce their own death; that is, can only be used for one generation, when in the developing world over 80% of the seeds are reused. So the question is, is this a good or bad technology for the developing world? And I'm going to ask my panelists to be brief because we're really running out of time.

PROFESSOR McGLOUGHLIN: I think the best way to answer that is to quote from somebody who actually lives with this every day and that's Dr. Florence Wambugu from Kenya who has said for developing countries this is packaged technology in a seed. We do not have to train our farmers in brand new culture or practices which we have tried for hundreds of years and have failed miserably at, because now you can get from a seed and that seed contains the capability to improve their quality of living.

What she said -- and she was specifically focusing on the European Union. She said, you know, how dare you tell us what we can and cannot do when your decision is what will I have for dinner, our decisions are will we have dinner. And this is, I think, an incredible technology that will allow them to introduce sustainability in the production of their agriculture. And the other comment she me is, when you ask us about using organic systems, she said well, we've been doing that for thousands of years and to us it's called subsystem farming and, unfortunately, many people have starved because of this method, but let's take an approach of integrated management, perhaps, as Peter has said.

MS.WARNER: Carl Pope, do want to take that on?

MR. POPE: Well, we have an article in our magazine next month an interview with the Minister of Agriculture of Ethiopia who takes diametrically the opposite view so we can all cite this, but I guess my answer would be I believe this technology can be a value agriculture in the Third World, but I believe it will never be a valued agriculture in the Third World in its present institutional context. I think we have to change four things.

First, we should eliminate patenting. Second, we should massively increase agricultural research and publicly accountable agricultural institutions including research on genetically modified foods but not excluding research on everything else. Third, we ought to do proper testing. And fourth, we ought to recognize that the model of agriculture we are looking for does require training farmers. For the Third World to say we will not train our farmers condemns us to never achieving the kind of sustainable agriculture that you were talking about because we know in this country we only managed to make an agricultural revolution in this country when we started training farmers.

So we need to do four things. If we do those four things, then I think we will determine what role genetically modified organisms have. If we don't do those four things, we're going to fail.

MS. WARNER: A question from the floor right here.

WOMAN: I'm a freelance reporter in Santa Cruz and this is for Martina and Charles. Martina, you mentioned the upcoming pyramid approach to new genes to deal with Bt resistance. I'm curious where those genes are coming from. I mean I just want to know what the plan is. I know in the case of the antibiotics everybody's made that analogy today, you know, we've managed to create pests that are resistant to a good number of antibiotics over the course of the last 50 years.

PROFESSOR McGLOUGHLIN: Yes, but with those antibiotics they are introduced all together at once in one system. Using pyramiding there's several different methods that's been used. One is actually modifying the Bt Cry genes using a system called molecular evolution and that's being done by a company here in the Bay area called Maxygen.

The other is to look at incredible different array of mechanisms that can be used to control insects. For example, one is a system being done by Dr. Bruce Hammock at Davis were he's introducing genes that modify the development of insects as they go through the different larvae periods. Another is to use a gene called syspatim [phonetic] it's a protein that's specific to another component of the development of these insect larvae. So there's a whole host of different ways to do it that are specific to very different components of an insect's life. For the probability of any one insect at any one time overcoming all of those approaches is pretty much close to zero. But as I said biology is infinitely variable, so you can never say absolutely zero.

MR. BENBROOK: You know, this concept of pyramiding and using sort of multiple genes to try to get a leg up on insects is, you know, it's got a certain intuitive appeal to it, but it's really an example I think of the flawed thinking about, you know, what is the underlying problem that we have here.

The problem is that there's some insect out in the field that wants to eat the crop before the farmer can harvest it, and the notion that the best way to deal with that, the cheapest way, the most sustainable way is to go find some foreign traits from other organisms and through genetic engineering techniques or conventional breeding move it into that plant, it's a flawed strategy. I don't care how many different genes are going to be used.

Whenever you make a genetic modification in a plant, hopefully, you bring about something desirable, but there almost always is some other impact typically which is not always positive. So we have to think, you know, instead of pyramiding genetically through putting lots of different traits in the crop, how can we pyramid several different control measures into that system. And I think in the developing world this is even more important because people in subsistence agriculture they are not going to have access to the support infrastructure that we have in the U.S. and in Europe to understand how best to use these technologies and how to manage resistance and how to deal with the other problems that will be associated with them. So I think that's very important.

And on terminator, terminator technology is very scary to a lot of people because it's using the tools of genetic engineering to put something in plants that make them sterile unless the farmer sprays something on or does something to trigger fertility or to restore fertility, and the thought is well, what if that gene escaped, holy gee, you know, it would be really a scary notion. And while, you know, Peter can say well, it's very remote that that would happen, you know, we have been wrong about a lot of technologies in our history. You know, it wasn't too many decades ago that people said nuclear power would be too cheap to meter. Well, you know, that didn't play out exactly that way, and it just may be that some of these biotechnologies end up being kind of difficult, expensive, unstable ways to accomplish things that are important to do but that can be done otherwise.

MR. RAVEN: We need your theory on how a gene that makes a plant sterile escape.

MS. WARNER: We have another question right here, but could you just stand and give your name?

MS. SAND: Mimi Sen, California Department of Food and Ag. (Biotech Advisory Committee)

MS. WARNER: Department of?

MS. SAND: Food and Agriculture.

MS. WARNER: Food and Agriculture.

MS. SAND: Mr. Raven mentioned that biotech crops should be subject to the same review as any crop. For those of you who do not agree with this point of view, what regulations do you have in mind?

MR. RAVEN: Any kind of new crop --

MS. SAND: My question is for those of you who do not agree with Mr. Raven --

MS. WARNER: Carl Pope?

MR. POPE: Well, there is a question here which we heard earlier that eventually you breed corn to corn, you don't get a result which is different in kind from the result you get when you put a bacterial gene in the corn. If we had tested several hundred such experiments that might be reasonable science, we haven't tested yet a single one. So what I would say is until we have a lot more experience, we are, for example, when we have a new crop to do feeding studies on. If we can't do protein by protein genetic analysis, we haven't done those feeding studies. That's what we do with a new food additive, I think we ought to at least put the same protocol on a new genetically modified food crop as we do on a food additive.

Maybe if several hundred of them turn out that there is actually nothing going on here, then we might say okay, there's some good science there now and we can be a little more relaxed, but we haven't done that science yet, we should.

MS. WARNER: I'm going to go to Chuck Benbrook on this, but we also had another web question that's related also from
-- again Tina Hesman from the St. Louis Post Dispatch, and she asks whether similar safety tests should be required on crops produced by traditional plant breeding methods including cellular radiation that Martina had spoken about?

MR. BENBROOK: Well, there's a difference I think between traditional plant breeding and some of the quasi-high-tech things Martina talked about, and I think it actually would be a useful thing to take some of these things that are produced by radiation because in fact when you shoot a lot of radiation at a plant you get all kinds of changes and you don't know they're all safe, so we ought to be testing those things, too.

Mr. POPE: One of the, I guess, advantages of radiation and mutagenesis, these other methods of scrambling genes through classical techniques is you scramble the plant so much that you lose a lot of yield, it's infertile, so it's not too frequent that, you know, you have to be really careful in selecting out of that, but I think this is an important question that you've raised, and I think there is a growing consensus in Europe and in parts of the U.S. certainly about the new kinds of science that should be done. When biotechnologists move a gene into a soybean plant to make it Round-up ready, they are affecting a basic biosynthetic pathway in the plant that we know a lot about. That biosynthetic pathway isn't just the Round-up pathway, it governs a lot of physiological processes.

In particular, that pathway in Round-up ready soybeans governs the plant's response to a lot of stress including pest stress, drought stress. So what should have -- Peter's right, there's been a lot of science done, testing the soybeans, do the soybeans have the same protein content, mineral content, are the fatty acid profiles similar. Micro and macro nutrients. And while there's a few very minor maybe, maybe not specifically significant differences that have been detected in this kind of growth assessment of is a Round-up ready soybean different from a conventional soybean, what should have been done in addition is to look at the potential consequences on the plant from a genetic modification that changes the behavior of this pathway, and now scientists are beginning to look at that and lo and behold, that pathway according to Monsanto scientists publishing in the prestigious proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they call it the master control switch of the plant defense mechanism, that's what they said they did. They engineered this master control switch, and apparently when the soybean plant is subject to certain types of stress and it turns on this system, because of that genetic modification, that plant is responding in a different way and it's not substantially equivalent. It may not be dangerous at all, but we just don't know.

MS. WARNER: This is going to have to be the last question I'll ask, but the question has to be very brief and our panelists because we're already over time.

LISA: My name is Lisa [inaudible], independent film producer. Margaret, when you introduced the topic you spoke of the possibility of potential health benefits of genetically engineered foods. I have a question I guess which takes away from all the technical discussion and to what the general public out there has seen in terms of the advertising on television. They're advertisements that talk about golden rice, that it's going to cure a third of the world's blindness. In my research has come across something that's, you know, where you would have to eat 20 pounds a day of that golden rice to receive the required levels of Vitamin A for that to happen. So just in terms of the general public --

MS. WARNER: I'm sorry, but what is the question?

LISA: The question is -- I guess it's more to Martina in terms of what the general public is hearing in terms of health benefits and whatnot, what are to believe as the general public when we hear such and can you clarify something like that?

PROFESSOR McGLOUGHLIN: Well, with respect to the golden rice, what I think you're referring to was a report that came out looking at what would be the ideal amount relative to a Western standard when --

MS. WARNER: We need to explain what golden rice is. Golden rice is rice that's rich -- it's in development, but it carries Vitamin A.

PROFESSOR McGLOUGHLIN: Yeah. Well, actually, it would be beta carotene, but it can be toxic at high levels, so that's why they specifically put the beta carotene in there. And of course there's going to be an answer to all the problems that individuals in developing countries have, but what it is, is one other tool to allow these individuals to get access to a vitamin that is missing in so many diets where it does lead to over 100 million children going blind every year. The amounts that were quoted as to what you would need is the absolute maximum level. You can get way, way less than that to have an affect, and that's the point that was being made with respect to this rice. It's not just going to be the perfect crop, it's the first one out there, but the incredible potential that exists to modify the plant a the macro level, that's the proteins, fats, and carbohydrates, and at the micro level, the minerals, vitamins and other nutritional, what might be called nutraceutical components, that is, antioxidants that will protect us against cancer, etcetera, through the power specifically now of genomics the tools available to us through the human genome project, we're going to be able to modify plants in such a way as to make them far more helpful in the future.

MS. WARNER: Let me just interrupt. I think we really are out of time. I want to ask all four of you just quickly to close, and I'll start with you and we'll just go down the table here. Is this technology here to stay?

PROFESSOR McGLOUGHLIN: Well, I think that's without question, but I think what you need to look at is this technology as another tool in the massive toolkit we have for agricultural production, and I think it has incredible capabilities in the future to address issues just as you brought up with respect to improving the quality of life both for humans and animals, and also to improve the environment, to lessen the impact that agriculture now has in the environment. And I really think that having those tools is improving our ability to do all of these things as part of an integrated sustainable system, it's never going to be a stand-alone or a panacea, but it has incredible potential for the future.

MS. WARNER: Check Benbrook, here to stay or could opponents roll the clock back on this?

MR. BENBROOK: Well, I think the science is going to move ahead but the applications are definitely going to be I think changed in the future because regulators well ask you important questions and the answers are not always there, and sometimes the answers aren't so good, so I think we have a lot to learn about how to deploy this technology in a prudent and careful way so that we kind of learn to walk before we run. There's been an awful lot of hype and mis-statements and exaggeration on both sides of this debate and you've gotten your fair dose of it from the four of us, I must say.

[Laughter]

But we have to move forward, there's a lot of people that need to eat, and I think the most important message from someone like myself who has sort of studied the ecology of farming systems is that, you know, notwithstanding exactly how a GMO technology is created or what its inherent characteristics are, it's very important how and when and to what extent it's deployed out there in the real world in terms of the problems that it will cause us, not just the technology but it's how it's used.

MS. WARNER: Here to stay, Peter Raven?

MR. RAVEN: As one of the components of the sustainable agricultural that the whole world needs to build which has many, many dimensions as Chuck has just said, we should be using these modern tools as part of the whole mix. If they need to be developed and deployed in such a way that they can help to address the needs of the poor and hungry throughout the world, that involves legal mechanisms and many kinds of forms that are not really there yet, but as the UNDP has concluded, the United Nations Development Program has concluded, these techniques, these methods need to be made available to people throughout the world on terms where they can get them and make them a part of their own healthier and sustainable lives.

MS. WARNER: Carl Pope?

MR. POPE: Well, some new genetic material is out there and I suspect it's here to stay. I think the question is whether we can balance the Promethean instincts of modern scientists in a Midas-like trait of modern corporations which seem to have been perversely blended in this enterprise and put together a publicly accountable, publicly responsible and careful way of developing a new agriculture, and then if we do that and if that new agricultural finds useful tools in biotechnology great, and if it doesn't, also great because it will mean we have found other ways to do these challenges, but we need to look at the context not the technology. The challenges, the context in the system. The system we have right now will abuse any technology we put in its hands. This happens to be a particularly powerful one and therefore the potential for abuse is particularly powerful, but the [inaudible] lies in the system.

MS. WARNER: And on that note, we will close it. I thank our four panelists for a very rigorous and lively debate.

[Applause]