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SERIOUS MISCHIEF


Recently, Britain's Labor Prime Minister Tony Blair ordered Prince Charles to shut down his royal Web site. The prince refused point blank the prime minister's command.

The Prince is speaking out about Monsanto's international PR and lobbying blitzkrieg on behalf of GM (genetically modified crops)--called GE in the U.S. (genetically engineered crops). He wants to encourage lively debate.

Monsanto is making $1.5 billion a year from bovine growth hormone, rBGH, according to Alexander Cockburn of the Nation, who says "the haul from Monsanto's Round-Up Ready soybeans, potatos and corn and its terminator seeds could be tens of billions more." The European Union has been opposed to allowing these products into its markets, but with recent arm wringing from U.S. politiicians such as President Clinton and V.P. Gore, the E.U. has relented.

Cockburn chided the prince's "cosmic holism and organic communitarianism" but that is another way of saying the prince may be seeing the big picture. Those qualities win him the Dendrite Forest Award for

RADICAL CONNECTIVITY

The Prince of Wales asks: Is genetically modified food an innovation we can do without?

A selection of your email responses appears below.

Professor Henry I Miller, of Stanford University, USA, said:
Plants and micro-organisms have long been genetically improved by mutation and selection and used to make biotechnology products as varied as yogurt, beer, cereal crops, antibiotics, vaccines, and enzymes for laundry detergents. For decades, genes have been transferred widely across natural breeding boundaries to yield common food plants including oats, rice, black currants, pumpkins, potatoes, tomatoes, wheat, and corn.
These "genetically engineered" plants are not those found in laboratories or test plots but are the very same fruits, vegetables, and grains that consumers buy at the local supermarket or greengrocer. The techniques of the "new biotechnology" - gene splicing, tissue cultures, and the rest - essentially speed up and target with greater precision the kinds of genetic improvement that have long been carried out with other methods. New biotechnology, according to a worldwide scientific consensus, lowers even further the already minimal risk associated with introducing new plant varieties into the food supply. The use of these sophisticated techniques makes the final product even safer, as it is now possible to introduce pieces of DNA that contain only one or a few well-characterized genes. In contrast, the older genetic techniques transferred a variable number of genes haphazardly. Users of the new techniques can be more certain about the traits they introduce into the plants.
Thousands of products from plant varieties engineered with the older techniques have entered the marketplace in the last three or four decades, and only three products (two squash varieties and one potato type) had unsafe levels of toxins; in addition, one celery variety caused allergic skin reactions in some farm and supermarket workers. But today's more precise gene-splicing techniques mitigate against any repetition. Even though the safety level is exemplary, a few anti-technology advocacy groups have pushed for labels that disclose the use of certain genetic engineering techniques. Such labels would add significantly to the costs of processed foods made from fresh fruits and vegetables. The precise costs will vary according to the product. But, for example, a company using a gene-spliced, higher-solids, less-watery tomato (which is more favorable for processing) would have the additional costs of segregating the product at all levels of planting, harvesting, shipping, processing and distribution. Labels would have to appear on vegetable soup, indicating the presence of any amount of gene-spliced tomato, potato or other products. The added production costs are a particular disadvantage to products in this competitive, low profit-margin market. Unnecessary and arbitrary regulation constitutes, in effect, a punitive "tax" on regulated products or activities, which, in turn, creates a disincentive to their development and use. Consumers, whose prices will be raised and choices diminished by this regulatory tax, would be better served by industry spending its resources on research and development to create new, safer products.
Time is on the side of the new biotechnology: virtually all of the tomato paste in the UK already is derived from gene-spliced tomatoes, for example, and thousands of European processed foods will soon contain derivatives of gene-spliced soya or maize. In a decade or two innumerable products made with the new biotechnology will be as much a part of our routines as microwave ovens and televisions are today.

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