Not Invented Here #5 - Food

'Not Invented Here' syndrome is a term used about institutions which reject practical solutions because they originated from outside the in-group

This is the fifth in a series of articles about how ideological interest groups react when their institutional preferences are challenged by practical solutions.

This edition is written by guest author Zion Lights

For thousands of years, humans have used breeding techniques to modify organisms by crossing compatible plants and selecting desirable traits from their offspring, such as sturdy roots or disease resistance. Many types of food and livestock have been selectively bred to enhance specific characteristics. In the last few decades, advancements in biotechnology have enabled scientists to directly modify the DNA of microorganisms, crops, and animals, which achieves the desired traits without lengthy and often inefficient traditional breeding programs.

Now, almost all the plants we cultivate, including corn, wheat, rice, and even Christmas trees, have been genetically modified through breeding to last longer, look better, taste sweeter, and/or grow more vigorously in dry soil. We call these Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs). 

Since the crops were first planted two decades ago, humans have consistently consumed genetically engineered foods and worn genetically engineered clothing, and there has never been a single case of illness as a result. The scientific consensus is that foods derived from genetically modified crops are as safe to eat as any other food. GMOs also provide environmental benefits by promoting more sustainable agricultural practices, reducing agrochemical dependence, and contributing to food security. So why do so many people feel that gene-editing techniques are bad, and where do their fears come from?

Despite having lived with them for years already, in the 1990s, public opinion began to turn against GM technology, thanks to concerted efforts by NGOs and activists to convince people that biotechnology was a threat. In 1996 during the Bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) crisis, which was commonly known as Mad Cow Disease, Greenpeace argued that Monsanto’s transgenic soy ‘mad soy alert’ was also a risk to human health. 

These arguments played into the concerns of a broader political and cultural movement in the second half of the 20th century, which was characterised by growing suspicion and resistance toward governments, corporations, and globalisation. As people lost faith in the authorities around the handling of BSE, activists were able to leverage these feelings to demonise GM technology, anchoring on the idea that those in power were ‘messing around’ with our food, at great risk and cost to human health.

Anti-GMO activists were successful in lobbying companies directly to put them off developing or investing in biotechnology, and influencing government policy. The French government, which was supportive of agricultural biotechnology at the time, was compelled to revisit its stance. French biotechnician Marcel Kuntz described this period as “the defining crisis for the fate of GM plants in Europe… One of the reasons being that the ‘mad cow’ crisis was associated in the public perception with ‘modern’ agriculture and ‘unnatural’ practice”.

In 1992, an English professor at Boston College, Paul Lewis, coined the term ‘Frankenfood’ to describe GMOs. In a letter to the New York Times, Lewis wrote, “If they want to sell us Frankenfood, perhaps it's time to gather the villagers, light some torches and head to the castle”. Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth ran with this messaging. The story was built on that of Victor Frankenstein: beware the dodgy scientists doing unnatural things to human lives.

Oddly - and instructively - the ‘fish-tomato’ hybrid became a core graphic to demonstrate the Frankenstein-like danger of GMOs, depicting a tomato with fins or fish-eyes, but no such GM product actually existed. The Flavr Savr tomato – the first genetically engineered food available to purchase in grocery stores – was not a ‘Frankenfood’, as it had an introduced copy of one of its own genes to keep it fresh for longer. So where did the fish-tomato caricatures come from? A separate experiment that used a gene from the winter flounder to make a frost-tolerant tomato, which never left the lab. Nevertheless, it became a rallying cry for activists. The idea of mixing genes like this led to feelings of revulsion. 

Then came the newly released film Jurassic Park, which featured a genetic experiment gone awry, and further developed the message:  those in power are playing with your health to make money.

Environmental activists often suffer from the logical fallacy known as the ‘appeal to nature’, which is the idea that ‘natural’ things are inherently good and better for us, while unnatural things - those which have been influenced or changed by humans - are inherently bad. It’s a vague perspective, since arguably humans are themselves ‘natural’ and cannot exist without impacting the world around us, but what’s important here is not the logic (or lack thereof) of the fallacy, but the feelings behind it, which tie into the idea of the land being a natural or pure entity that has been harmed by the presence of humans. 

For similar reasons, activists are often against industrialised agriculture, which they blame for deteriorating food quality, outcompeting small farmers, and damaging the environment. Biotechnology also symbolises the negative aspects of globalisation: the destruction of local cultures and economies and the trend of commodifying everything. Essentially, GMOs are seen as supporting the capitalist system which these groups are against.

This perspective was summarised succinctly by former Greenpeace France director Bruno Rebelle, whose opinions of GMOs presented at EU events directly influenced policy:

“We are not afraid of GMOs. We are only convinced that it is the wrong solution … GMOs may be a wonderful solution for a certain type of society. But it is precisely the kind of society we do not want.”

Ironically, the research that produced GMOs did not begin with large multinationals, but with small labs at academic startups. Eventually, a few larger firms (like Monsanto) became involved. This was also seen negatively, as ‘The Man’ - a faceless wealthy corporation - getting involved with our food. 

Activists attacked on all fronts. As well as lobbying companies and governments, they destroyed experimental agroecological trials, making investment in biotechnology risky and expensive. There was worldwide renunciation of the cultivation of GMO crops, with only a few countries as exceptions. 

A difference can be seen in an area that activists did not target - medical biotechnology - for which public support remains high - in the 57-91% range in the US and EU - while support for food biotechnology is on average 30 percentage points lower. 

Activist fearmongering has had tragic consequences for the world’s poorest people, as demonstrated by the case study of Golden Rice.

Lack of vitamin A is the world’s leading preventable cause of childhood blindness, especially common in Africa and South-East Asia. Every year, up to 500,000 children go blind due to vitamin A deficiency, and half of them die within 12 months of losing their sight. Scientists developed a simple solution: add beta carotene to ordinary rice. Dubbed Golden Rice, a single bowl can provide 60% of the recommended nutrient intake of vitamin A for children aged between 6 and 8. Just 20% of the recommended daily allowance can prevent or eliminate symptoms such as blindness. 

In many countries, children consume only rice daily, which means that this genetically modified rice could save millions of young lives from malnutrition, hunger and blindness. 

Anti-GMO protesters disagreed. In 2013, activists destroyed crops on an experimental field trial of Golden Rice in the Philippines, arguing in favour of diversity of diet instead. The reality is that people who live on three bowls of rice a day simply do not have access to other foods in the underdeveloped regions in which they live. Converting a single crop is much faster and easier than trying to implement and sustain a diversity of diets across vast geographic areas. 

Sadly, although Golden Rice was developed over 20 years ago, it has not been readily adopted by the countries that need it most. 

In 2016, a third of living Nobel laureates, including James Watson, who co-discovered the basic structure of DNA, signed an open letter to Greenpeace and world leaders, calling the NGO’s scare campaign a “crime against humanity” and calling on them to stop opposing Golden Rice. They wrote:

“Organizations opposed to modern plant breeding, with Greenpeace at their lead … have misrepresented their risks, benefits, and impacts, and supported the criminal destruction of approved field trials and research projects.

Scientific and regulatory agencies around the world have repeatedly and consistently found crops and foods improved through biotechnology to be as safe as, if not safer than those derived from any other method of production. There has never been a single confirmed case of a negative health outcome for humans or animals from their consumption. Their environmental impacts have been shown repeatedly to be less damaging to the environment, and a boon to global biodiversity.”

If the true aims of anti-GMO activists were to benefit humans and nature, they would have embraced biotechnology and actively advocated for Golden Rice. But the technology does not fit in with their ideology. They continue to lobby against GMO-friendly policies to this day, and have spread their scare stories worldwide. As a changing climate now threatens food security, biotechnology is our best resource for continuing to feed millions of people, address poverty, and prevent food systems from collapsing. Early experts on food technology predicted a future in which genetic engineering would solve major problems in agriculture, nutrition, sustainability, and food security, but, sadly, their visions did not come to pass, as ideology took hold instead.