Ecologist Wanted

The U. S. Forest Service's Hawaii office is advertising for a scientist to head its invasive species project. Those interested can check out the job description at http://jobsearch.usajobs.opm.gov/getjob.asp?JobID=78496077

FDA, DOA, EPA: No supervision for GMOS

From a Union of Concerned Scientists e-mail alert. This is one reason why we need a shakeup at the DOA:

Agencies rebuff congressional investigators
on engineered crops

Three federal agencies turned down a recommendation from congressional investigators to monitor genetically engineered (GE) crops after they are commercialized. In a recent report, the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the investigative arm of Congress, criticized the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and the Environmental Protection Agency for allowing unapproved GE crops to enter the food supply and recommended several steps they should take to prevent further contamination. However, the agencies rejected the GAO's most important recommendation—to monitor GE crops after they are approved for commercial production. Unapproved GE crops are known to have contaminated the food supply six times since 2000, not counting the most recent incident in which an experimental GE variety of cottonseed was allowed to contaminate animal feed. Read the GAO report.

"After two decades of regulating agricultural biotechnology, the federal government is still unable to protect the food supply from unapproved GE crops. We urge the incoming administration to overhaul the rules governing agricultural biotechnology and to adopt the GAO's recommendations." ~ Jane Rissler, Senior Scientist/Deputy Director

Sustainable Ag needs your help.

I just got forwarded an e-mail from a group called "Food Democracy Now!" with a list of endorsements for various candidates to fill important undersecretary posts in the Obama Administration's Department of Agriculture. The endorsements can be viewed online at www.fooddemocracynow.org . If the group is legitimate, and they appear to be so, then I think the people named are worth our support. The folks all appear to have a strong track record of supporting family farms and "sustainable agriculture." The list is weighted heavily with Midwesterners--but that's probably as a it should be. I hate to say it, but the Midwest is way ahead of Hawai'i in the area of sustainable agriculture--partly because sustainable ag never totally died out there to start with.

I should know. I grew up on a family farm. My folks owned 320 acres in Northwest Missouri; my grandparents owned another, 180-acre farm. Both practiced, to a great extent, what would now be called sustainable agriculture, though it was the norm for many farmers in Missouri in those days. My parents grazed cattle on the hilltops and grew corn, wheat and soybeans, roated with clover to renew the soil, in the bottom land along the two creeks that crossed our farm. They left the slopes along the creek valleys in timber to prevent erosion. We kept hogs and chickens (it was my duty to get up every morning before school and help feed the chickens, and to shovel corn to the hogs when I got home in the evening); a big garden plot next to the house supplied most of our veggies and grapes and strawberries. Fruit trees in the yard and in my grandparent's small orchard gave us plenty of apples, apricots and peaches; the woods and fence rows supplied blackberries, raspberries, gooseberries, elderberries, wild plums and pawpaws. In the spring, we'd range the woods looking for morels, the best of all mushrooms (sorry, truffles), then take them home, soak them overnight in saltwater, and then fry them up with home-made butter and a batter made from flour and home-grown eggs, which came from chickens raised mainly on oats and corn and wheat from our farms. Both we and our livestock ate mostly the produce we'd grown ourselves; sales of excess grain livestock and eggs fueled our tractors, bought what fertilizer and pesticides my dad used (he used both sparingly), mineral and protein supplements for the livestock, and whatever else we couldn't make or grow. The "egg money" bought a few groceries such as the Wonder Bread that my mom loved (having grown up on home-made bread, she regarded white bread as a delicacy. We kids, growing up on Wonder Bread, craved the home-made stuff). We were often below the poverty level, but that didn't matter so much because we never went hungry.

It was a good life but a hard life, and I figured out pretty early that I wasn't cut out to be a farmer; my talent was with words, not with keeping a cultivator's weed-rooting blades in between the soybean rows all through a hot, dusty early summer day.

I was grateful that I could choose a different path for my life. But my decision to leave helped to doom the farm. It wasn't just that the big agribusiness conglomerates were pushing enormous tractors and designer seeds and expensive fertilizers that only huge farms could afford, or that enormous corporate feedlots were operating on a cost of scale that drove down beef and pork prices below what small farmers could compete with, or that development pressure was driving the cost of land up and almost any business could afford to pay hired help more than family farmers could. Farming takes not just labor, but skilled labor. When I left, I broke the chain of knowledge. I took away from that farm an enormous number of folk skills, from how to repair a tractor to how to pluck a chicken to how to make the little twists in wire that are essential to successfully repair a fence.

As a Midwestern farm boy, when I came to Hawai'i, I was astonished at the horrible land management practices that the sugar plantations were engaged in--such as denuding several square miles of sloping cane fields at once, so that Hamakua's unchecked torrential rains could wash tons of soil out to sea in a single night--and then replanting again in cane without rotating in another crop to replenish the soil. This wasn't farming; this was soil-mining for profit.

My father, rest his soul, always talked about being a steward of the land, and leaving it more productive than he'd found it; the cane companies seemed to be bent on wringing every last calorie of profit out of their lands before they abandoned them.

Unfortunately, the same thing is happening on the mainland. When I left the Midwest, it was losing topsoil at such a rate that much of it would have been desert by the 2030s; I wrote some of the early articles about low-till and no-till agriculture techniques that farmers were starting to adopt to combat this problem. But no-till ag was even more dependent on expensive chemical pesticides than was standard cultivation--forcing operating costs for family farmers still higher and increasing their dependence on the agrochemical giants. Farmers were giving up at an alarming rate, and taking the knowledge of how to do it with them into retirement. Now I've heard that only three or four percent of the population is feeding all the rest of us. Sustainable farms aren't sustainable without farmers.

Over here, Hawai'i has millions of acres of worn-out cane land, and it's importing most of its food. Even if all that land isn't planted in eucalyptus for biofuel, it's going to take a lot more than the right DOA undersecretaries to make sustainable food production happen again. It's going to take legislation to remove ag lands permanently from development pressure, because farmers simply can't compete with golf courses and condos for available land. It's going to take legislation that makes agricultural subdivision--FOR AGRICULTURE!--cheap and easy, and to encourage the big landowners to engage in it, because family farms, by nature, need to be small enough that each can be run on a family's own manpower, but large enough to produce some excess goods for profit. In some cases, it's going to take massive soil rehabilitation programs. And above all, it's going to require knowledge and love.

Right now, many of the people here involved in the sustainable ag movement have the love, but they're struggling to regain the knowledge. A couple of years ago, for instance, I saw an notice on Freecycle Hawai'i from someone who wanted a fisherman's throw net for catching chickens. Chickens are designed to look out for threats from above; a throw net just ain't going to do the job. So I wrote the person, telling him how to make a chicken hook--a device made of heavy wire, that looks a little bit like Bo Peep's shepherd's crook and and is used to catch chickens by their legs.

So by all means, sign that petition at www.fooddemocracynow.org . And encourage your local legislators to put food independence on the same priority level with energy independence, because biodiesel isn't going to be that important if we can't afford the imported food at the grocery store once we've driven there.

And for those of you who have questions about the basics of family farming, or knowledge they'd like to share, I offer the comments section below this piece as one more place where you can get together and share knowledge. If I know the answer, I'll share it, and maybe someone else can answer the questions that I can't.

Koa vs. the BioFuel Bonanza

Koa graveyard on the Mana Road. Photo by Janice Crowl

Fifteen years ago, when a new monthly community paper called Ka'u Landing had just been launched, I helped get it started with a series of articles entitled "Koa: the Struggle for a Forest." At that time, one biologist estimated that only about 15 percent of the islands' original koa forests were still viable as forests. The percentage today is even smaller. I was reminded of that fact last weekend, when I went up with a Sierra Club group to spend a couple of nights at Keanakolu Ranger Cabin on the Mana Road, a public 4WD trail that hangs like a necklace on the windward slopes of Mauna Kea. Most of the land that the Mana Road runs through is officially range land. But it is also a vast koa graveyard: a landscape where a few twisted ancient koa survivors still stand among thousands of rotting fallen trunks.

Koa, for those who don't know, is one of Hawai'i's three major native overstory trees: the big trees that overshadow everything else in the forest and form the backbone of forest ecologies.  'Ohi'a, the most common, tend to dominate the lower-elevation forests and the areas where lava flows are still relatively fresh; Koa prevail in the deep ash soils such as those on the slopes of Mauna Kea at mid-altitude (although some grow at sea level), while the much smaller mamane are the mainstay of the high elevation drylands forest.

Koa, in my opinion, are the most magnificent and unusual of the three. They start out life with delicate, locust-like compound leaves, and later grow large, sickle-shaped "leaves" that technically aren't leaves at all; they evolve out of petioles, the little stems that connect leaves to branches, which in mature Koa elongate and flatten to take over the normal leaf's chlorophyll-making function. But the trunks themselves also undergo a metamorphosis, albeit a slower one. In a healthy forest, young koa sprout from seeds or tree roots wherever sunlight strikes bare soil--a mechanism that evolved so that the forest could replace itself whenever an old tree fell, opening a hole in the forest canopy. In their youth, they grow tall and relatively straight. As the forest ages, however, the old trees grow huge, twisted and gnarled, spreading out their branches to cover more and more area as the trunks around them die.

The surviving trees along the Mana Road are extreme examples of this process, thanks to human interference. When Kamehameha the Great allowed Captain Vancouver to release cattle in Hawai'i, the bovines encountered a landscape that had not evolved with any grazing animals and had no defenses against them. With no native carpet grasses to munch, the cows greedily chomped up young koa and grazed and trampled out the understory plants. The koa seeds that had lain dormant, awaiting their literal chance in the sun, burst forth into the cow-trampled landscape, and were promptly gobbled in their turn. Then, to feed the starving cattle, humans introduced carpet grasses such as kikuyu grass, which had evolved on the African veldt and was programmed to grow faster than the wildebeests and antelopes and cape buffalo could eat it. Kikuyu is so virulent that it can grow atop fence-posts, and completely buries entire fences if it isn't grazed regularly. A koa seed that falls in Kikuyu grass and waits for sun on bare soil to trigger it may face a long hibernation indeed.

So the surviving Koa along the Mana Road have fought a long and losing battle against the cow pastures, falling trunk-by-trunk as they've waited in vain for their replacements to grow. They've grown twisted as giant bonsai, battling the elements to spread their branches as far as possible, producing thousands of seeds in long rattly pods and dumping them into the thick grass without reward.

With a little help, this forest could still grow again. That's obvious if you stroll the public trails around Keanakolu. This area of the forest has been fenced off and the cattle have been evicted. Younger trees appear to be thriving. The grass is still thick underneath them, but wherever there's a bare patch of earth--such as along the edges of the trail -- koa keiki are sprouting up. In fact, a row of young koa is forcing the path itself to visibly shift in places. A few years ago, the remaining koa in this area were being smothered by an invasive vine called banana poka, but biologists introduced a fungus that feeds on poka leaves, thinning the poka enough that the trees can survive. Now poka may even be contributing to the habitat; we saw evidence that native i'iwi and apapane were feeding on the poka blossoms and fruit.

Restoring the native understory could be more of a problem: the grass smothers other plants as well as koa, and may be altering the soil in ways that make it less hospitable to forest plants. But that problem pales, compared to a new threat: the Lingle Administration's drive for energy independence.

I recently reported in the Honolulu Weekly about the efforts of a company called Hawaii Sunfuels to start a plant here that would convert biomass to diesel fuel. To supply that operation, the company wants to plant thousands of acres of non-native eucalyptus trees on current "ranch land" under the DLNR's stewardship. But in two recent public meetings in Hilo and Honoka'a, it became clear that Sunfuels is only one participant in a new land rush: at least five different companies, maybe more, have designs on DLNR lands for biofuel production. Much of that land is currently leased to ranchers and is the same kind of remnant koa forest that I've been describing.

So far, the debate has been mainly between the biofuel companies and the ranchers, who argue that food-raising should also be a priority. But in fact, most of the cattle that are raised on those ranchlands are still being shipped of to the mainland for "finishing" in feedlot--they're an export cash crop, just like sugarcane used to be. Koa itself could be a cash crop. Thousands of fallen logs could probably still be salvaged from those cowpastures, and the rotten part burned for fuel and the good part sold for lumber, and some of the proceeds plowed back into reforestation. Koa could be intercropped with food or fuel crops such as apples or marijuana. There's an orchard at Keanakolu that was planted experimentally in the mid-20th Century and still produces apples and pears, despite decades of neglect. Woodworker Tai Lake and now-Councilman Kelly Greenwell started a project years ago that rotated apple and koa plantings; after salvage logging, apple trees were planted on the lumber mill site, and will produce for a few decades, then can be cut down and reseeded with koa.

Both energy independence and food independence are urgent and worthy goals. But if we allow those grandmother koas to be replaced with eucalyptus, that's the end of any future for the koa forest. As we search for answers to global warming and peak oil, I hope someone will take notice of that.

Papaya Problems.

I recently got a request to repost an article I did years ago, entitled "Plenty Papaya Problems." It was widely reprinted across the Web (0ften without permission) but apparently those other sites have deleted it or gone down, one by one. A partial copy is still up at www.gene.ch/genet/2003/Apr/msg00072.html, but unfortunately, that copy ends in mid-sentence. Even more unfortunately, my own e-copy was on a now-defunct computer. But I am putting up two other articles that I did on same subject, below.
If I can get somebody to pay me for my time, I'd like to do an update on the situation. I do know that the GM papayas have certainly not solved farmers' problems; in fact, they've proven even more susceptible than normal papayas to another disease, a fungal infection called phytophthera. Once more, lower Puna is dotted with abandoned fields full dead and dying papaya trees.

Archive: GMOs II: Transgenic Hawaii v. Chaos Theory

Hawai`i’s government and educational establishment have rushed to embrace genetic engineering technology. But on the ground, things keep going not quite as planned.

In the movie Jurassic Park, mathematician Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) demonstrates Chaos Theory to paleobotanist Ellie Satler (Laura Dern) by using drops of water falling on a human hand. No two droplets run down the hand the same way; factors too small and numerous to control always combine to send the droplets on unpredictable paths. This, Malcolm explains, is why Jurassic Park should never have been built: no matter how carefully it is planned, chaos will inevitably set in.

Just then, of course, the power fails, the tour jeep is stranded, and all Jurassic breaks loose.

This, in a nutshell, is the argument that many opponents tend to make against genetically modified organisms.

No one, so far as we know, has actually attempted to re-grow a dinosaur. But in the past decade, a huge number of brand new organisms have been created: plants that make their own insecticide, mammals that glow in the dark, fruit trees containing virus genes, tomatoes with flounder genes and potatoes with chicken genes. Among the GMOs that have already entered commercial production-are weed-killer-tolerant and/or insectidal corn, soybeans, rapeseed (the source of canola oil), flax and cotton, which have been incorporated into food products from baby food to mayonnaise--none of which are required to be labeled as containing GMOs. Researchers have already introduced, or are currently testing, transgenic organisms including catfish, salmon, raspberries, sunflower seeds, walnuts, apples, hops, grapes, tomatoes, potatoes, peppers, onions, peanuts, watermelons, cranberries, plums, strawberries, broccoli, eggplants, carrots, cucumbers, lettuce, peas, sweetgum trees, poplars, spruces, bluegrass, zoysia grass, sugar beets, sugarcane, orchids, gladioli, petunias, chrysanthemums, carnations, rice and tobacco.

Hawai'i Leads the Way

While Europe, Canada and Japan have followed, at best, a “go-slow” approach to GMOs, Hawai`i’s educational and governmental establishments have largely embraced them. “Our growing biotechnology industry and its sectors--agriculture, marine sciences, human therapeutics, and the environment--are important sources of quality jobs and prosperity for the state,” Governor Ben Cayetano told delegates to the annual convention of Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO) last spring. “Recognizing this potential, we formed a partnership--government, education and the industry--to develop a cohesive plan...BIO provided a great deal of assistance in the formulation of a competitiveness strategy for Hawaii's industry, completed in December 1999.....”

Hawai`i’s scientific community has already positioned itself at the forefront of this effort. UH-Manoa researchers developed “Honolulu transgenesis,” a method of transplanting genes into mammals, which could be a licensing goldmine. Among the first subjects of the technique were the university’s famous (or infamous) phosphorescent mice, which glow under ultraviolet light because of a transplanted jellyfish gene. The jellyfish gene was chosen simply as a “marker”: it produced an easily detectable trait that proved the gene transplant was successful. Theoretically, virtually any gene could be transplanted using the technique.

“Possible applications could include using the mouse as a model for studying the function of human genes,” speculates one press release. “Also, more organs could be available for human transplant if pig genomes could be modified so that the corresponding pig organs wouldn't trigger a critical immune rejection in patients who receive them.”

Using similar techniques, Oregon researchers recently created glow-in-the-dark monkey embryos, suggesting that the feasibility of gene transplants in humans.

Nor is Hawai`i’s transgenic push limited to mammals. One goal listed on UH’s Sea Grant website, for instance, is the production of commercial gene-engineered shrimp. UH researchers have been looking into a transgenic solution to the tomato wiltspot virus, which affects at least 225 different flower and fruit species. An online description of a UH-Manoa course entitled “Biotechnology” is devoted almost entirely to transgenic topics such as “Recombinant DNA technology to produce new products in bacteria and fungi, “Production of human insulin and growth hormone in microorganisms,” “Transgenic fish,” “Engineering plants for herbicide and disease resistance,” and “Gene Therapy.” To its credit, the course also looks at “Ethical issues in biotechnology” and “Environmental aspects and concerns.”

The state is also attracting corporate research dollars. GMO giant Monsanto has applied for a federal EPA permit to grow experimental insecticidal corn here, for instance. Some commercially-approved insecticidal and herbicide-resistant corn varieties may already be in production by Hawai`i’s burgeoning seed corn industry. The World Rainforest Movement recently reported that an Australian company, ProBio, planned to plant experimental gene-engineered eucalyptus trees in Hawaii.

“There have been over 1,200 field tests applied for in Hawaii alone--most of it corn, but also rice, anthuriums, dendrobiums, and coffee with with lower caffeine levels,” notes retired Indiana University researcher Marti Crouch, who helped develop GM rapeseed before leaving the field because of concerns about the technology. She adds, “A lot of those applications don’t say specifically what kind of genes have been inserted, because it’s considered confidential business information.”

The most prominent transgenic plant on the Big Island so far remains the GM papaya. The UH and Cornell researchers who developed the new papayas have touted them for “saving” the local industry from papaya ringspot virus, which had devastated Big Island papaya fields.(See Part 1 of this series, Hawai`i Island Journal, May 16-21, pp. 8-10: the first GM variety, red-fleshed UH SunUp, was crossed with the popular non-GM Kapoho Solo to produce UH Rainbow. Both varieties contain Ringspot virus genes that make them virus-resistant. But their commercial introduction has been accompanied by a crash in papaya prices, and key markets in Japan and Canada have yet to accept it for export.

Huge Benefits, Unkown Costs

GM technology’s potential benefits are enormous: new medicines, cures for genetic diseases, healthier and more productive crops. Proponents argue that the risks to the environment of changing a few genes are less than those of using more pesticides or breeding entire organisms.

Many environmentalists and some scientists, however, argue that genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are flooding into the environment and the human food chain faster than regulations can be created to insure those products’ safety; that huge numbers of people are eating proteins no human has ever ingested before; and that inevitably, unpredictable and regrettable things are going to happen. Opponents can already point to some examples of Chaos Theory in action. One study indicated that genes from an insect-killing bacterium, bacillus thuringiensis (Bt), found to be harmless to mammals by itself, was linked to intestinal abnormalities in rodents when the gene was transplanted to potatoes. Another researcher found that pollen containing genes from the same bacteria, could impair or kill monarch butterfly caterpillars on nearby milkweed plants. And of course there were the infamous Taco Bell taco shells, found to contain a strain of GM corn approved only for animals.

Crouch notes that when a gene is inserted for a given effect, researchers can get more than they ask for: “Sometimes the researcher is adding a protein and the researcher thinks he knows what it does, but it creates other changes as well...sometimes it only shows up when the plant has been grown for a while. It may only show up under certain environmental conditions that weren’t encountered during the field tests....”

GMO opponents point out that among most common of the early GMO releases have been crops genetically designed to be herbicide tolerant--“Roundup-ready,” they are called--so that even more herbicides can be applied.

Papaya Meets Nature

In many ways, the GM papaya seems a best case scenario for a transgenic organism. It fulfills an urgent need by countering a virus invasion of plague proportions. If fruit from UH Sunup or UH Rainbow, the two commercial GM papaya strains, are tested for transgenic materials, only the seeds test positive. The plants contain only three alien genes. The virus genes they contain are also present in non-GM fruit that have been exposed to ringspot. Ringspot can only be contracted by other plants, not by humans.

Still, the GM papaya program has had its share of mishaps and missteps. Environment Hawai`i reported that in 1998, wind-born GM pollen may have escaped from an O‘ahu test site, due to the accidental presence of male papaya plants in the site. (Papaya plants come in three sexes: male, female and hermaphrodite. Male plants are more likely to spread pollen over long distances.)

The test program also demonstrated that while the GM plants were generally virus-resistant, they were still susceptible to other pests. One of the GM strain’s ancestors was less resistant to a common fungal infection, so researchers regularly sprayed the new plants with a fungicide called Dithane. At eight months, the plants were hit by a new pest: leafhoppers. Malathion, a powerful insecticide, kept the bugs at bay for only four months. Then, as a Tropical Fruit Report article by Timothy Wenslaff and Robert V. Osgood noted, “Gradually, the leafhoppers became resistant to Malathion, then to Pyrellin [another insecticide].”

To prevent disaster, the researchers got an experimental permit to apply another insecticide called Provado, which finally brought the leafhopper plague under control--but only after the loss of several trees.

Puna farmers have already reported scattered cases of viruses overcoming the GM papaya trees--especially young trees. But UH agronomist Steve Ferreira claims that, so far, the ringspot virus hasn’t shown any signs of overcoming the resistance to mature trees in any cases that he’s investigated.

Papaya Meets People

Chaos Theory really kicked in, however, when GM papayas encountered non-scientists.

According to Ferreira, the original plan was to cut down all non-transgenic papaya in lower Puna and replace them with GM papaya. After a year, the ringspot virus would have disappeared for lack of a host, and the lucrative Kapoho Solo could have been re-introduced.

Had such a plan been followed, concerns about a GM0-resistant virus evolving would have been minimized, as would concerns about the accidental release of GM genes into the non-GM papaya population. GM and non-GM papaya might never have met.

It just didn’t happen that way.

Hawai`i’s most lucrative papaya market, Japan, refused to accept GM varieties without more thorough testing. Japanese-owned packing houses lobbied the legislature for a quarantine plan using large buffer zones of GM papaya fields to shield fields of Kapoho Solo for the Japanese market. To implement a pilot quarantine project, farmers say, the state took over GM papaya seed stocks that had been slated for distribution through the Papaya Advisory Committee, which had paid for the seed with farmers’ mandatory dues.

Some angry farmers boycotted the PAC; others managed to aquire GM seeds before they were officially released, jeopardizing patent negotiations.

Mike Durkin, the only farmer sued by UH so far for patent infringement, says he planted seeds from GM SunUp fruit he’d found at a local farmer’s market.

“Basically they’re catering to the big guys, the big packing plants, and they don’t even care what happens to the little farmers,” he believes.

Durkin accuses UH officials of “Unclean hands.... They can’t come after me for unauthorized use of the material, when they were engaged in greater unauthorized use themselves.” He says that one UH “test field” was actually a commercial farm, and that GM fruit had already been sold to grocery stores before he planted his first seed.

Many Puna farmers refused to comply with the Department of Agricultures’ plan to eliminate non-GM papaya outside the quarantine fields, when there was no assured market for the GM varieties. They pointed out that even if they cut their healthy Solo plants, diseased fields still existed in neighboring districts and feral papaya had spread into to nearby rainforests. Some farmers who did acquire GM seeds ended up cutting the trees down after GM papaya prices plummeted.

Meanwhile, even science seemed to be succumbing to commercial spin-doctoring. As part of her Master’s thesis, Cornell papaya researcher Carol Gonsalves surveyed Puna farmers who had applied for papaya seed. Before her survey results were completely tabulated, she used “trends” in them to write an article entitled “Farmers say ‘Yes!’ to Transgenics.”

Farmers and state officials finally reached a compromise, in which the state would eliminate papayas in abandoned Puna fields and farmers would be patrol their non-GM fields to eliminate new cases of the virus.

So far, this compromise seems to be working. Healthy fields of GM and non-GM papaya are now growing in Puna. But the compromise virtually assures that both the virus and the GM papayas will remain in the environment for the foreseeable future.

Larger Issues

Some of the issues involving GMOs are actually basic to all modern farming. The leafhopper incident, for example, illustrates one concern that applies to both conventional pesticides and GMOs. Unless a spray or a gene splice is 100% effective in stopping the target pest, then the survivors may multiply, spawning a new strain of resistant superpests. That danger is particularly worrisome with another popular line of GMOs: the caterpillar-killing cotton and vegetables spliced with genes from bacillus thuringiensis. Nobody argues that Bt itself is unsafe for human consumption; in fact, organic farmers have been using the bacteria for years to kill caterpillars. But organic farmers only dust with the bacteria for brief periods as needed, reducing pests’ exposure time. Bt GMOs produce insecticide constantly, increasing the chance of a Bt-resistant caterpillar evolving--and depriving organic farmers prematurely of one of their most valuable tools.

Agribusiness has long been criticized for reducing the natural plant and animal diversity that once helped to protect against widespread crop failures. In Hawai`i’s pre-GMO papaya industry, for instance, the vast majority of papayas were a single variety, Kapoho Solo, planted in a single Big Island district. These were ideal conditions for a plague: only a single parasite was needed to devastate an entire industry.

“If you step back and say , oh, maybe the problem is that you have giant monocultures and you’re stressing the environment with pesticides, then your solution, to have a healthy, diverse agricultural environment, solves several problems at once,” believes Crouch.

Ferreira sees GMOs as a way to engineer “artificial diversity” into crops. He says that while Rainbow and SunUp are resistant only to the local strain of ringspot virus, the next generation of GM Papaya will incorporate gene proteins from ringspot strains from all over the world, guarding against new strains of the virus.

Crouch isn’t buying it. “The idea of having resistance to several viruses all in one papaya variety sounds like a disaster to me, because the mechanism that allows the papaya to resist all the viruses will be the same,” she says. “When one virus overcomes that mechanism, then all the viruses will be able to do the same.”

The multiple-gene-transplant strategy may have another danger. Ferreira says the actual ringspot viruses from around the world are being kept at Cornell, to prevent any danger of contaminating Big Island crops. But research reports available on the Web show that the experimental multi-transgenic papayas are being field tested here.

“From what I understand, viruses are able to exchange genetic information by recombination when they both infect the same host,” notes Crouch. Viruses are strings of genes that take over the host cells’ DNA to reproduce more viruses. If one virus overcomes the papaya’s immunity, its genes could mix with the transplanted virus genes already in the papaya cells and produce more diverse viruses.

Ferreira sees large monoculture crops as the price we pay for high food production and mass distribution.

“The issue is quality and uniformity for the person who’s processing,” he says, noting that bakeries require flour that behaves the same way every time, and fabric makers need cotton that is uniformly white.

“That’s a sort of chicken and egg argument,” reacts Crouch. “When did the consumer become so concerned with uniformity? Export-oriented agriculture basically advertised consumers into that position, so they could be educated out of that position into an appreciation of diversity. And in fact, the organic sector of agriculture is the fastest growing market in the world.”

Other questions about GMOs apply to basic rights, freedoms, and necessities. When genes can be patented, who controls the information in one’s own body? Can large corporations, for instance, use gene ownership to gain control of the world’s seed supply, stopping farmers from saving back seed from previous crops? Like any powerful tool, transgenesis may ultimately be as good or dangerous as the social institutions that govern it. Right now, it may be at its most alluring and most frightening, because those social institutions haven’t evolved as fast as the technology.

Meanwhile, back on the ground, some farmers are looking for a market and hedging their bets, as farmers have always done. In addition to his fields of GM SunUp, Mike Durkan is currently harvesting the first commercial papaya crop to be certified by the Hawai`i Organic Farmer’s Association. In the midst of chaos, he seems to have found a sure thing: a Canadian buyer has already purchased the whole crop.

“That’s the first time I’ve ever been able to contract a crop and advance-sell it,” he says.

Archive: GMOs in Hawai'i, Part I: Papaya's Uncertain Savior

(From the Journal, circa 2001)

A nationally broadcast PBS special highlights two scientists’ attempts to “save” Hawai`i’s papaya industry with a genetically modified, virus-resistant papaya. But on the ground salvation is proving more difficult.

The documentary opened with a sweeping helicopter-born view of waves crashing on the Puna Coast. The camera swept inward, then zoomed in....

Hawai`i’s papaya crisis, and the new fruit which was touted as its solution, had become the lead in for Harvest of Fear, a nationally aired PBS documentary on a growing world-wide controversy: the introduction of genetically-modified organisms (GMOs) into the human diet and the worldwide ecology. The show’s opening segment focused on Hawai`i-born Cornell researchers Dennis and Carol Gonsalves and their efforts to combat the devastating papaya ringspot virus by introducing a strain of papaya containing genes from the virus itself. “A decade of work created a breakthrough, and perhaps saved an industry,” intoned the show’s narrator.

During the next two hours, the show kept cutting back to Gonsalves’ story, making it a unifying element in two hours of interviews, narrative and commentary on the question of GMOs, which in the past six years have become a common part of most Americans’ diets without most Americans even being aware of it. Genetically modified soybeans and corn have become common ingredients in everything from baby food to cereal to soda pop. Agrochemical giants such as Monsanto have made gene-spliced crops a mainstay: the show featured a Monsanto spokesman declaring that “We stopped all chemical investment...and reinvested in biotechnology.”

The program was a joint production of Frontline and Nova, two of the most prestigious names in the documentary business. It included interviews with scientists involved in GMO research, including a virus-resistant sweet potato in Africa and a strain of corn that could tolerate soil with high concentrations of aluminum in Mexico. It also included arguments from GMO opponents, from Dr. Jane Rissler of the Union of Concerned Scientists to a spokesperson for an extreme environmental group that had set fire to a university office. But the special still drew some heavy flack from viewers who posted responses on the PBS website. Some comments accused the producers of using scare tactics against GMOs. Even more viewers accused Frontline and Nova of kowtowing to biotech companies. One viewer called the program “the longest commercial I've ever seen.”

Whatever the program’s overall fairness, its presentation on the GM papaya was one-sided by definition. The only interviews that the show featured from the Big Island were of the two scientists and of Big Island farmer Rusty Perry, who participated in the tests of the papaya. The program mentioned that the Gonsalves’ GM papaya had suffered a “setback” when Japan refused to accept the papaya without extensive testing, but no mention was made of any local opposition to the plants.

In fact, the opposition to the papayas has been substantial--and includes not only environmental activists, but many local farmers. Most of the fears about GMOs that the show expressed through the voices of mainland and European opponents--that the plants could accidentally crossbreed with non-GM strains, that the product will not gain acceptance by consumers, and that the targeted pest could build up immunity to the GM plant’s defenses, for instance--also have been expressed locally, in regard to GM papaya and over 50 other genetically engineered crops that have been released in the state.

So far, the claims that GM papayas will save the industry have proven premature. The factors behind this turn of events have as much to do with politics and economics as with science.

“I don’t think that they saved the industry at all. The problem is, if the people on the mainland will even buy it,” believes Ernesto Tagalicud, who heads a dissident farmer’s organization called the Papaya Freedom Fighters. Because of low prices for the GM papaya, called Rainbow, “The people could not produce more, and couldn’t afford to buy fertilizer to maintain their productivity. If you take a picture of the fields on the Kapoho-Pohoiki Road, that will tell you that they haven’t been fertilizing....

“A lot of the farmers did what they were told. They planted Rainbow. And they either cut it down or sold it for next to nothing,” notes community activist Ginny Aste, a past manager of the Papaya Administrative Committee (PAC) and current secretary of the community non-profit Na Poi O Aina. She can empathize with the farmers’ plight. Last fall, the price of Rainbow fell as low as $17 a bin. It has since rebounded somewhat, but still sells for about half of the price of Kapoho Solo, the most popular non-GM papaya. As of early April this year, a bin of Kapoho Solo sold for around $200.

“We kill a premium crop to put out a junk crop that gets barely $17 a bin here?” Aste marvels.

The word “kill” here is quite literal. At one point, the State Department of Agriculture had proposed cutting down and replacing all but a few small fields of quarantined Kapoho Solo with a “sea of transgenic papaya.” Farmers rebelled. In a series of angry meetings last year, they demanded, and finally got, the right to police their own fields for infected trees, instead of having their entire fields cut down. An $800,000 dollar program to eradicate non-transgenic papaya and replace it with transgenic Rainbow was reduced to a program to destroy abandoned fields of diseased papaya.

“We told the industry we would take down all the abandoned fields by the end of December, which we have done,” says Myron Isherwood of the State Department of Agriculture. “It cost us about $35,000.”

Current PAC Manager Emerson Llantero puts a positive spin on Rainbow’s economic debut. “In Hawai‘i, Rainbow is the preferred variety for the consumers,” he maintains “They’re asking for it, they’re actually consuming it more than for the regular varieties.” He says that the transgenic fruit’s low prices have had “something to do with the principles of supply and demand. This is the first crop and we didn’t actually know how it performs, in terms of yield, and we found out that under commercial situations, it yielded more than double the amount than for the regular variety. I’m sure that for next time, since we have the data on the yield, the growers will find a balance....[of] how much acreage they will plant in order to produce what the market demands....”

“I don’t think that rainbow produces that much more fruit per tree,” believes Aste. “It’s simply that they have a surplus of Rainbow because they don’t have a market for it. They were encouraging the farmers to plant because they thought they could break through the market in Japan and sell genetic there. So far, it hasn’t worked.”

Llantero is optimistic that the situation in Japan will change soon. “For Japan, there are two approvals needed to be able to export a rainbow papaya to Japan: for the Ministry of Agricultural and the Ministry of Health,” he says. “We have already received the approval from the Ministry of Agriculture, so we are waiting for the approval from the Ministry of Health.”

“He’s said that for two years,” scoffs Aste.

Charges of inequitable distribution of the new Rainbow seed, allegations that the quarantine zone favored large canning companies over independent farmers, and a University of Hawaii lawsuit against farmer Mike Durkin for planting Rainbow seed without authorization--despite the fact that PAC members were slated to get the seed for free--further eroded the farmers’ trust in the state’s program.

“The issue was losing control over what we had developed,” says Professor Steve Ferreira of the UH-Manoa Department of Plant and Environmental Protection Sciences, of the Durkin lawsuit. “It put Hawai`i in a very uncomfortable situation in having to say, you gave us permission to do this work, but we lost control of the material. The ability for us to do work in the future got put at risk, as well as the ability to control intellectual property. What happened in the case of Durkin’s situation is never tolerated.”

Now that Rainbow has gone into commercial production, however, controlling the spread of the transgenic strain may be impossible, even with lawsuits. Durkin claims that he got his seed from papayas bought at a local farmer’s market. Other farmers worry that even if they plant non-transgenic varieties, pollen from neighboring fields of Rainbow could contaminate their crop. Those fears have been exacerbated by a recent Canadian court case, in which a Canola seed farmer who had planted non-GM seed discovered traces of a patented GM strain in his fields--and Monsanto successfully sued him for patent violation.

Ferreira says that cross-pollination could occur, but that if it did, the GM genes would be detected only in the seeds, not in the flesh of the fruit. But farmers say that could still cut them out of both the Japanese market and the organic market.

Organic papaya is currently not a major crop in Hawai`i, but it could be a potentially lucrative one. Organic crops often command much higher prices than those raised with conventional commercial pesticides (or from GM seeds).

“You can raise an acre of organic papaya and make value-added products, and make more money than you’d make if you raised twenty acres of papayas selling for $17 a bin,” believes Aste.

But agricultural economist Dr. Eileen O’hora-Weir, who inspects crops for the Hawaii Organic Farmer’s Association (HOFA)Hawai`i Organic Farmers’ Association, notes that food grown using biotech and agrochemical product aren’t required to be labeled as such, while organic products have to documented meticulously, placing an unfair burden on the latter.

“We’re taxing the wrong groups of farmers. Right now now we’re having to pay certification fees to prove that we’re following organic practices, and soon we’ll have to be paying GMO testing fees.”

Riding a wave of farmer dissatisfaction, the Papaya Freedom Fighters swept the PAC’s board elections on the island last month, electing their entire slate of candidates. The new members must still be appointed by the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture. But if they are confirmed, Tagalicud promises a somewhat different direction. Right now, he says, he is “looking at the project, looking up the research.” The farmers want to develop a better marketing plan for the entire industry. And they’re open to looking at possible alternative methods of controlling the virus. “Maybe use a vaccine. Maybe use a fertilizer that suppresses the virus,” Tagalicud suggests.

Llantero is skeptical. “I think industry and the researchers have spent more than enough money to find controls for the virus, and research shows that here is no cure for the virus except for genetic engineering, which has been done,” he maintains. “Further research on controlling the virus--looking for chemicals, whether or organic or non-organic chemicals--to solve the virus problem, will be a waste of money.”

But Aste believes that state officials have not looked seriously at alternative control methods--and that when she and the farmers proposed it in the past, they were ignored. We said, “Fine, cut trees but put 230K toward research, and some of it toward organics. They wouldn’t even listen to us.”

She worries that the state’s plan to use some of the leftover funds from the abortive non-GM papaya eradication plan for “education” would just lead to more of the same. “What are they going to educate about?” she asks. “They’re gong to say ‘Plant genetic.’ Or they’re going to say ‘cut trees if they get the virus.’ We’ve been doing that already. Why would you pay Department. of Agriculture people say the same thing?

Meanwhile, Isherwood says that the papaya farmer’s plan to police themselves seems to be going well: “The industry said that they would take the responsibility for having their members cut newly infected non-transgenic trees down, and by and large, they are doing that. We have a crew that goes out to survey, and the reports that I get back from them are that the growers are taking down the diseased trees on a pretty timely basis--which is a good sign.”

In some senses, the hybrid plan for coping with the virus may be working. Questions about whether the world will accept GM papayas remain unanswered, prices for the new GM papaya have been dismal, and the virus hasn’t been eradicated. But Isherwood says the virus isn’t completely out of control, either. “You can find the virus around,” he says, “but it’s not nearly as bad as in the mid-1990’s so far, definitely.”