Likely yes. The reason is way more prosaic. It is sliding into inevitable failure mode at
the farm gate. The farming industry is
learning how to shift completely out of industrial protocols over to organic
protocols because they actually now perform better. The snowball has begun to move and it is
downhill.
Thus in the long term
all this will be a blip. These techniques
will still have their place but only as absolutely necessary as lands and
biomes recover from a couple centuries of almost reckless husbandry.
As I have been posting
anyway the long term is very much elsewhere in agriculture.
Is Monsanto Giving Up on
GMOs?
| Wed Jan. 29, 2014
3:00 AM GMT
Is
genetically modified seed giant Monsanto doing the unthinkable and moving away
from genetically modified seeds?
It
sounds crazy, but hear me out. Let’s start with
Monsanto's vegetable division, Seminis, which boasts it is the
"largest developer and grower of vegetable seeds in
the world." Monsanto acknowledges Seminis
has no new GM vegetables in development. According to a recent Wired piece, Seminis has has
reverted instead to "good old-fashioned crossbreeding, the same technology
that farmers have been using to optimize crops for millennia."
Why?
The article points to people's growing avoidance of genetically modified foods.
So far, consumers have shown no appetite to gobble up GM vegetables. (But that
doesn't mean people aren't eating GMOs: Nearly all GMOs currently on the market
are big commodity crops like corn and soy, which, besides being used as
livestock feed, are regularly used as ingredients in processed food—think
high-fructose corn syrup and soy oil.)
But
the Wired piece also
suggests a factor that doesn't get nearly enough attention: GM technology
doesn't seem to be very good at generating complex traits like better flavor or
more nutrients, the very attributes Monsanto was hoping to engineer into
veggies. Here'sWired:
Furthermore, genetically modifying consumer crops proved to be
inefficient and expensive. [Monsanto exec David] Stark estimates that
adding a new gene takes roughly 10 years and $100 million to go from a product
concept to regulatory approval. And inserting genes one at a time doesn't
necessarily produce the kinds of traits that rely on the interactions of
several genes. Well before their veggie business went kaput, Monsanto
knew it couldn't just genetically modify its way to better produce; it had to
breed great vegetables to begin with. As
Stark phrases a company mantra: "The best gene in the world doesn't fix
dogshit germplasm." [Emphasis added.]
Okay,
that's vegetables. What about Monsanto's core business, selling seeds for big
industrial commodity crops like corn, soybeans, cotton, and alfalfa? Monsanto
has come to dominate these markets with its Roundup Ready products, which are
designed to withstand Monsanto's flagship herbicide, and, for corn and cotton, its
"Bt" products, which are engineered to produce a toxin found in Bacillus thuringiensis, an
insect-killing bacteria. Does
the company have lots of novel GM products in mind for this vast, lucrative
sector?
Monsanto's
latest Annual R&D Pipeline Review,
a document released earlier this month that showcases the company's research
into new product lines, foretells all kinds of impressive-sounding stuff. But a
surprising amount of the company's new research, even for its most lucrative
crops like corn and soy, promise either new iterations of herbicide tolerance
and Bt, or rely on classical breeding—not biotechnology.
The
one major exception is a corn seed relying on a new kind of GMO: RNA
interference (RNAi) technology, a recently discovered way to turn off certain
genes, which Monsanto plans to engineer into crops to kill certain insects.
According to Monsanto's pipeline review, RNAi corn remains in the early
"proof of concept" phase. In a recent piece, the New York Times' Andrew Pollack reports that
the technology is showing promise—Monsanto hopes to have it on the market
"late this decade." But it's also generating controversy even in
normally Monsanto-friendly regulatory circles because researchers have suggested it may kill beneficial insects like ladybugs along with
targeted pests.
Pollack points to this 2013 paper by Environmental
Protection Agency scientists, which warned that the unfamiliar technology
presented "unique challenges for ecological risk assessment that have not
yet been encountered in assessments for traditional chemical pesticides."
So
RNAi corn may be coming—and could bring public relations and regulatory
complications for Monsanto, not to mention unpredictable ecological consequences
for the rest of us. But how much other GMO-based stuff does Monsanto have up
its sleeve? According to the US Department of Agriculture's Animal and Plant
Health Inspection Service, the agency that oversees the rollout of new GM
crops, not much. Of the 13 new GMOs APHIS is tracking, only 2 are from
Monsanto: an alfalfa engineered to be more easily digestible as animal feed,
and a soybean designed to withstand a harsh old herbicide called dicamba (a
variation on the familiar Roundup Ready herbicide-tolerance theme).
Just
two crops in the final stages of USDA deregulation, from the ballyhooed GMO
seed giant? That makes me think of Monsanto's recent $1 billion purchase of
Climate Corp., a company that proposes to use GPS-backed data
analysis tools to help farmers make planting decisions, for a fee. The move reminds
me of IBM's mid-2000s decision to
transition out of the business that made it famous by ditching the personal
computer and focusing on IT products and consulting.
I've
called Monsanto's press office to ask about their plans, and I'll return to
this topic if they get back to me. And in the meanwhile, to be sure,
Monsanto still makes loads of money selling GMO seeds—along
with their matching proprietary herbicide, and likely will for a long time. But
the facts have me wondering if the company's quiet exit from genetically
engineered vegetables and placement of a billion-dollar wager on data services
signal that the GMO giant just might be hedging its bets on GM technology.
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