The joy of a good biotech lunch

Try not to over-eat

Prince Charles, a chinless British Royal and the product of generations of selective in-breeding, recently declared that the production of genetically modified (GM) foods is the worst disaster of all time. He further expressed his horror that farmers who grow GM crops leave themselves subject to major corporations.

The waggly-eared prince’s scientific knowledge of genetic engineering may be about as good as President Mbeki’s grasp of the science of HIV/AIDS, but it is worth considering a few of his points.

Farmers – and this may come as a surprise to a member of a royal house which gained its titles by enslaving peasant farmers – are not slaves, they’re businessmen. There is no way on earth that a farmer would buy seeds to produce a crop that would leave him worse off than the alternatives.

India, which has significant barriers to the farming of GM crops, has licensed only one variety: Bt cotton which fights off the endemic and disastrous boll weevil. Cotton production is quite inefficient, requiring a vast amount of land and water. The Confederation of Indian Textile Industries has declared that, while area under agriculture has decreased by 6.6%, yields are expected to rise and prices are up 14%. This, they claim with a great deal of satisfaction, is entirely due to Bt cotton, which now makes up 80% of all production. And it’s no wonder when Bt cotton produces 87% higher yields than more ‘organic’ varieties.

Profits are up, efficiency is up and the benefits are to Indian farmers, hardly major corporate players.

Yet, even if the beneficiaries of GM crops are small farmers, it is true that the producers of GM crops are, by and large, a handful of major corporations.

This contrasts strongly with other areas of biotech research, which is filled with small businesses. In the competitive world of biopharma, the major pharmaceutical firms now rely on small upstarts to populate their production pipelines.

Bristol-Myers Squibb has offered PDL BioPharma nearly $1.16 billion in order to secure the distribution rights to PDL’s antibody products. The Cleveland-to-Pittsburgh 'Biosciences Tech Belt' in the US attracted $343 million in health-care venture investment to 45 companies during 2007.

Clearly even small start-up companies can play in this sector. So how come GM agricultural products are the domain of so few?

Consider the legislative background against which GM products are developed. There are few countries that allow trials and it is astonishingly expensive to comply with all the red tape. And worse, mid-way through your expensive trial, Greenpeace activists turn up and destroy the crop.

Since 2000, only 54 GM crop trials have been allowed in the UK. Almost all of them were vandalised.

There are virtually no small businesses that could afford to see their efforts destroyed and their investment wasted in this fashion. Far better to enter other fields. And so, the only companies that can afford to persevere against the international opprobrium heaped on GM producers are very, very large ones. The very legislation designed to protect people from the domination of the industry by major corporations entrenches major corporations.

Over 100 million hectares of agricultural land are now under GM crops. An EU study released recently, entitled ‘Economic Impact of Dominant GM Crops Worldwide’, concludes that, “analyses show that adoption of dominant GM crops and on-farm economic gains have benefited both small and large farmers ... Moreover, detailed analyses show that increases in gross margin are comparatively larger for small and lower-income farmers than for larger and higher income farmers.”

The science that is producing new biopharma cancer therapies and advances in treatment for senile dementia is the same science used in the production of GM crops. And that science isn’t going away.

Poorly thought out responses to an industry that offers so much benefit seems naive and self-destructive. But then, we’ve been saying that about Thabo Mbeki’s AIDS policies as well.