TITLE: The Heartland Wrestles With Biotechnology
SOURCE: The Washington Post, USA, by Justin Gillis

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...2003Apr21.html
DATE: Apr 22, 2003

The Heartland Wrestles With Biotechnology

By no means does the opposition movement command unanimous allegiance
in farm country -- the issue has split farmers, farm organizations and
legislatures in at least four states and two Canadian provinces, with
the pro-biotech side plausibly claiming majority support among farmers
in most of those places.

But the strength of the opposition has provoked a rollicking debate.
Roundup Ready wheat is emerging as a key test of whether the
biotechnology industry can take charge of the destiny of a major crop
used primarily as food, something it has yet to accomplish despite
successes in other crops.

And the fight is becoming a prime symbol in another way, too. As
genetic science creates opportunities to manipulate the plants and
animals people eat, associated battles are migrating out of
Washington. In the next few years, state and even local governments
will confront new kinds of crops, as well as gene-altered animals and
even a genetically engineered salmon. Some of these products require
state permits before they can be commercialized, and many state and
local governments will hear demands to keep them out. The new biology,
in other words, is coming soon to state legislatures and county
commissions across the land.

The change is already evident in North Dakota and neighboring states,
where legislators and some ordinary citizens now speak knowledgeably
about such matters as genetic drift and pollen flow. The movement has
fed on the deep suspicion of corporate ethics sparked by recent
scandals. Pollestad, that Halliday farmer, captured the mood in a
letter to the editor of the Grand Forks Herald. He noted that Monsanto
was continuing to press for quick federal approval of its wheat
despite its go-slow promises, and he called on North Dakota
lawmakers to give citizens a voice in the decision.

"Or, we could let Monsanto decide," he wrote. "And maybe we also could
get Enron to run our utilities and Arthur Andersen to keep the books."


Recouping an Investment

The crop technology that many companies, led by Monsanto, are pushing
to develop these days is an outgrowth of the vast genetic knowledge
pouring from the world's research laboratories. Scientists are
becoming increasingly adept at manipulating plants and animals in a
way nature does not, moving genes across species to confer new traits.

Most research suggests such organisms are safe to eat, but a host of
theoretical questions remain about the environmental risks, such as
the possibility of creating new types of weeds or pests. That concern,
plus lingering uncertainty about health effects, has led to a broad
opposition movement, particularly in Europe and Japan.

In the long run, the technology offers potential benefits consumers
may want, such as foods to cut the risk of heart disease or cancer.
But the crops that have come to market first are primarily designed to
benefit farmers by giving them greater control over weeds and insects.

Monsanto has been in the vanguard, developing varieties of corn,
soybeans and cotton that resist worms and other insects. The company's
biggest success, though, has been with crops designed to exploit
another of its products, an herbicide called Roundup. This popular
chemical kills weeds efficiently, does no harm to people or animals
and readily breaks down in the environment.

But Roundup kills conventional crops as well as weeds, so farmers
mostly used it to prepare their fields for planting. Monsanto
scientists set out in the 1980s, using genetic engineering, to develop
crops resistant to Roundup. "Roundup Ready" crops have proven wildly
popular, saving farmers labor. Monsanto competitors brought similar
products to market.

Not long after the crops were commercialized in the United States, in
the late 1990s, a European backlash began, featuring "Frankenfood"
headlines and warnings about manipulating nature. American farmers
lost corn sales to Europe, but growing demand in other markets took up
the slack. Neither corn nor soybeans is primarily a human food crop --
corn is largely fed to farm animals, and after the oil is squeezed
out, so is most soybean meal. Cotton, of course, is used to make
cloth.

Despite these successes, Monsanto has yet to recoup its huge
investment in biotechnology, so the company needs new products. It is
trying to conquer the fundamental cereal of Western diets -- wheat.

On past experience, the company counted on ready farmer acceptance.
But wheat farmers are highly dependent on foreign markets,
particularly Japan, and follow them assiduously. And wheat, as it
happens, is grown in a part of North America with a long tradition of
political activism among farmers, who battled banks and grain
monopolies early in the 20th century, a populist tradition that
persists.

Moreover, the people who run Monsanto had never met Tom and Gail
Wiley.


Money-Minded Opposition

The Wileys are wheat, soybean and cattle farmers who live on a
windswept farmstead at the end of a long gravel road in southeastern
North Dakota. They met in Berkeley, Calif., many years ago, and Tom
Wiley confesses to some counterculture dabbling in his youth.

But the Wileys are conventional, not organic, farmers, and have been
more or less comfortable using pesticides and other aspects of modern
farm technology since they began working Tom Wiley's family homestead
in the 1970s.

In the late 1990s, events unrelated to the biotechnology industry
politicized the Wileys. The federal government promulgated a
crop-insurance program and then changed the payout rules after farmers
had already bought their policies, a bait-and-switch that infuriated
the Wileys. They led a farmer coalition that sued the government, won,
and eventually got an act of Congress passed to correct the problem.

As that battle was winding down, the Wileys began hearing about
Roundup Ready wheat. They'd already had one bad experience with
biotech crops -- some high-grade soybeans they grew to make tofu
somehow got adulterated with a small amount of Roundup Ready soybeans,
probably from a neighbor's field, and buyers overseas balked.

What would happen, the Wileys wondered, if Monsanto commercialized
Roundup Ready wheat and foreign buyers suddenly grew skittish about
the American crop amid fears of adulteration? They talked to other
farmers. Even if falling prices led growers to abandon the Monsanto
product, the reputation and marketability of U.S. wheat might be
permanently damaged, the farmers reasoned.

A political movement was born. At lightning speed, it won a huge
victory when the lower house of North Dakota's Legislative Assembly
passed a moratorium in 2001 on Roundup Ready wheat. Shocked, Monsanto
and pro-biotech farm groups descended with lobbyists, and the state
Senate turned the moratorium into a mere study. But when the company
and farm groups began surveying major buyers of wheat, they found
strong resistance to the biotech crop, especially overseas.

Sitting in their farm kitchen not long ago, the Wileys recalled their
surprise as they built alliances with environmental outfits like
Greenpeace that have traditionally taken a dim view of conventional
farming. "I think all my life I've been an environmentalist," Gail
Wiley said, her voice dropping as she added, "even though you don't
say that too loudly around here."

If environmental factors influenced the Wileys' thinking, other people
in North Dakota looked at the issue in strictly dollars-and-cents
terms, and came out equally opposed to Roundup Ready wheat on the
grounds the marketplace just was not ready for it.

As the rebellion grew, Monsanto bowed to political reality, pledging a
slew of steps that the company contends will protect existing markets.
Meeting all the milestones will effectively delay Roundup Ready wheat
to 2005, if not later. Assuming Monsanto keeps its word, the farmers
have gained a two-year moratorium without having to pass one into law.

Doane, the Monsanto industry-affairs officer, has plied North Dakota
on the company's behalf. At his suggestion, a group of skeptical
farmers, not including the Wileys, boarded a Monsanto plane in
December and flew to St. Louis to talk to company leaders. The
discussion was mostly calm, but Louis Kuster, a grower from Stanley,
N.D., and a member of a state commission that promotes wheat sales,
said he took offense when a company executive, Robb Fraley,
seemed to imply that farmers opposing Monsanto might be advancing the
agenda of radical environmental groups.

"At that point I countered, and I did raise my voice a little bit and
I was a little bit angry, and I looked right straight at him and he
was only about five feet away from me, and I said, 'You're not talking
to the Greens here today,' " Kuster recalled. " 'We're money people.
We need to make money, too.' "


'Who Can You Trust?'

Gripping the wheel of his pickup truck on a chilly North Dakota
morning, an affable man named Terry Wanzek pointed with pride to the
several thousand acres of fields that make up his family farm. Wanzek,
squarely in the pro-biotech camp, acknowledged that the market risks
cited by opponents are real. But as he showed off his farm's spotless
grain-handling system, he declared the problems manageable.

Besides, Wanzek said, what kind of message would it send to a biotech
industry investing billions in new technology if the very customers
the companies are trying to benefit, farmers, respond by kicking them
in the teeth?

People on Wanzek's side of the issue generally take the view that
Monsanto's go-slow promises can be believed, and they also take
seriously a decade of rulings from the Environmental Protection
Agency, the Food and Drug Administration, and the U.S. Department of
Agriculture declaring biotech crops safe.

"If you can't trust EPA and you can't trust FDA and you can't trust
USDA," Wanzek said as his truck crunched its way down gravel roads,
"who can you trust?"

This is Monsanto's position, too -- that federal regulators will make
the right decisions. But the company has been forced to acknowledge
that, whatever Washington and Ottawa decide, the risk of overseas
rejection is real. Monsanto has lately papered the Great Plains states
with brochures outlining how it will proceed.

For starters, the company said it will wait until the United States,
Canada (the nation's largest competitor in selling wheat) and Japan
(its largest customer, most years) approve the crop. And the company
said it will help institute "appropriate grain handling protocols" to
keep biotech wheat separate from regular wheat. Monsanto acknowledges
that total separation of the crops in fields, combines and grain bins
is impossible but argues that adequate separation can be achieved.

Doane, the industry-affairs director, said Monsanto will honor those
commitments. "We've put it in black and white," he said. But distrust
of Monsanto runs deep enough in the Great Plains that politicians who
support the company can pay a price.

Wanzek isn't just any farmer -- he was, until recently, the Republican
chairman of the Senate agriculture committee in North Dakota's
citizen-legislature. His committee was largely responsible for killing
the biotech-wheat moratorium in the last legislative session. He was
defeated by a Democrat last November in a campaign in which his
support for biotech crops became a major issue. "The wheat deal, I
think, did cost me some votes," he said.

Wanzek's opponent, April Fairfield, was one of at least three
legislative candidates to use opposition to Roundup Ready wheat as a
signature campaign issue. All won.

Fairfield has failed so far to win a moratorium. Lawmakers also turned
down a related measure to shift legal liability to companies like
Monsanto if their crops taint nearby farms. Similar legislation has
stalled in Montana, South Dakota and other states where wheat revolts
are underway. Republicans, many of whom initially supported the North
Dakota moratorium, have closed ranks to defend the technology, largely
because of Monsanto's promises.

Passions remain high. As Fairfield described her winning campaign and
her losing attempts at lawmaking, in an interview in the basement
cafeteria of the North Dakota Legislative Assembly in Bismarck, a
fellow named Lance Hagen, executive director of the North Dakota Grain
Growers Association, ambled by. "Biotech or bust, baby!" he declared.
"That's our motto."


Unlikely Allies

Past midnight on a summer's evening three years ago, Larry Bohlen
walked out of a Safeway supermarket in Silver Spring toting $66.32
worth of taco shells and other corn products. By the time Bohlen,
director of health and environment programs at Friends of the Earth,
and his allies in the environmental movement were done having the corn
products tested for adulteration, they had forced American food and
biotech companies into a recall costing hundreds of
millions of dollars.

A biotech corn called StarLink, meant only for animal consumption, had
made its way into the human food supply through sloppy grain handling.
The incident foreshadowed another mishap last year, in which corn
genetically engineered to grow a pig vaccine nearly made its way into
food.

The problems have made large American food companies exceedingly
nervous about biotechnology. More than half their products in the
United States contain biotech ingredients, particularly lecithin or
protein made from Roundup Ready soybeans, and they live in fear that
some contamination incident will provoke a U.S. consumer backlash.

"Right now, public acceptance of biotechnology in America is
relatively high," Betsy D. Holden, co-chief executive of Kraft Foods
Inc., said in a recent speech in Arlington. "But how many more times
can we test the public's trust before we begin to lose it?"

The food industry has been publicly skeptical of Roundup Ready wheat.
Behind closed doors, according to three people privy to the
discussions, the industry has been far blunter with Monsanto and its
biotech allies. "Don't want it. Don't need it," one person said the
message has been.

The food companies have been killing smaller biotech crops like
potatoes and sugar beets for several years. Knowledgeable people say
the food companies have essentially told Monsanto they will try to
kill Roundup Ready wheat if the company moves forward, asking
suppliers to accept only conventional wheat.

At the same time, the food companies are under political pressure from
biotech supporters on Capitol Hill not to come out publicly against
gene-altered crops. That makes for a volatile situation where it is
hard to predict exactly what the food companies will do until the
wheat is approved.

Out on the Great Plains, farmers skeptical of the crop are hoping the
food companies come down as allies, but they are not counting on it.
Their efforts stalled in state legislatures, the farmers recently
petitioned the Agriculture Department for a full environmental and
economic assessment of Roundup Ready wheat before the government
grants approval.

Some farmers acknowledge that Monsanto will probably win approval
eventually but say they're looking for any stalling tactic they can
find.

"I feel that we have accomplished something, in that it's slowing up
the process so that more thought can go into it," said Kuster, the
farmer from Stanley, N.D. "The slower it goes, the more chance it has
of getting done right."