Skepticism over potential benefits of GMO wheat

My colleague (and chief wheat breeder) at Oklahoma State University was recently interviewed by Ag Journal, and he expressed reservations about GMO wheat.  

A few snippets:

“Among consumers, there are a lot of myths and fallacies being spread, but I think they are also being spread on the science side,” said Brett Carver, chief wheat breeder at Oklahoma State University. “There’ve been some promises made about GM wheat that I don’t think are true or are being overstated.”

His main complaint is the way wheat has been portrayed as lagging behind other crops with the blame often placed on a lack of genetic modification. Carver is currently helping to edit a technical book that follows advancements in 16 major field crops and says studies show wheat is more than holding its own.

Carver contends changing climate trends in the last 25 years have benefited corn and beans more than GM seed development has. Most of the yield gains breeders have achieved are the result of taking advantage of a longer growing season and the ability to plant earlier in the spring, he said

The wheat "lagging behind" argument is one that appeared in my co-authored New York Times editorial on the subject.  To be sure this is a complicated issue and there are many factors at play including climate, government policies (particularly ethanol policies), drought, falling cattle inventory, interest rates, and technological advancement (including biotechnology), just to name a few.  Carver is right that the trend is not due solely (or perhaps even mainly) to biotechnology.  But, might it be one small part of the picture?

One should probably be careful about comparing yield of apples and oranges (or wheat and corn).  So, let's move away from discussions about yield, and look at farmer planting decisions. What do farmers decide to do with their land. The data are pretty clear that acreage allocations have moved against wheat over the past decade.  Here, for example, is USDA-NASS data on the number of acres planted to wheat since the mid 1990s (when GE corn and soy came on the market).

To look at it a bit differently, here is the % of planted acres in Oklahoma allocated to wheat over the past 10 years (this is the wheat % out of other major crops that include canola, corn, sorghum, soybeans, and wheat).

Some of this change is due to government policies.  Some may be due to climate change.  Some may be due to changes relative prices.  Some may be do falling cattle numbers (a lot of the wheat in OK is planted to feed stocker cattle).  But, some may also be due to differences in seed technologies available and benefits they provide beyond yield.  As the story indicates:

the most common application of GM technology so far — herbicide resistance — “protects rather than increases” yields, Carver noted

I agree, it is more than just about yield.  Convenience, risk reduction, and time saved also factor into planting decisions, and I suspect producers are willing to pay something for yield protection.   

Ultimately, I don't think "competitive disadvantage" of wheat (to the extent one exists) is the key reason to think about GMO wheat.  After all, if a farmer doesn't allocate their ground to wheat, they're likely to allocate it to a different crop (in recent years in Oklahoma that has been Canola - GMO and non-GMO).  What we care about are not crops but farmers and consumers.

Carver discusses a lot of interesting developments in wheat breeding and genetics that are worth pursing (do see the whole article).   Many of these are likely to bring about farmer and consumer benefits.  

Carver's chief complaint with biotechnology (aside from over-sold benefits) seems to be the following:

it represents “the most expensive tool in the toolbox.”

“I do want to be able to use the technology, but I want to use it responsibly,” Carver said. “What that means is, if I use it, I’m going to use it as a last resort. Why? Because of cost and because of public opposition.”

One of the huge costs is that related to regulatory burden associated with creating and commercializing seeds made with GM technologies relative to other breeding technologies.  That sounds to me like good motivation to work on attempts to bring down the regulatory costs associated with genetic engineering.  It also suggests a need to work on public opposition with scientific communication on the health and environmental aspects of genetic engineering.  It also makes me wonder if activist pressures might eventually bring molecular breeding techniques under a similar regulatory umbrella that now drives up the cost of commercializing GM.

Ultimately, Carver may be right.  New molecular breeding technologies and other advancements may circumvent the need for "GMOs" - at least as they're currently defined by the public and by regulators - and these advancements may indeed be less costly and invite less public scorn.  I'm certainly proud to work at a University with scientists like Carver working on those issues. 

In the end, however, I find it hard to see why we would want to block farmers' access to biotechnology.  If a company (or University) can create and commercialize a GMO wheat (and I suspect that day isn't far off, as there are many in development), farmers will have the choice to decide for themselves whether the promise has been oversold.  Clearly, the vast majority of corn, soybean, and cotton farmers believe enough in the merits of GMOs to pay a premium for them.  Maybe wheat farmers will have a different experience, and GMO wheat will fail the market test.  We'll never know until one is introduced.    

GMO bans and labels

It appears that voters in Jackson county Oregon have passed a ballot measure that would ban GMOs in the county.  

Much of the discussion by supporters of the ban leading up to the vote focused on GMOs "contaminating" organic crops.  But, that really doesn't make any sense because organic is a labeling scheme based on process not outcomes.  Just because an organic-labeled food was found to have synthetic pesticide residue or (heaven forbid!) trace elements of GMOs, that doesn't make it non-organic as long as the producers followed organic rules and procedures.  

I suspect the outcome will embolden supporters of mandatory GMO labeling laws and will speed the efforts of GMO advocates seeking some kind of over-riding national labeling law (which is unlikely to require mandatory GMO labels).  

At the same time, there seems to be growing acceptance and acknowledgements of the benefits and safety of biotechnology by the mainstream media and by prominent food writers.  Mark Bittman's recent writing is one prominent example.    

In that vein, I noticed this recent piece in Slate by the food writer and historian, James McWilliams on GMO labels.  You'll see a quote from me about some of the pseudo science that's sometimes used to promote such labels, but McWilliams mainly focuses on the potential costs of such labels:

It’s certainly possible that food will be reorganized into three general tiers—GMO, non-GMO, and organic—with non-GMO food moving toward the more expensive organic option while GMOs, which will be seen as less desirable, drop in price.

However it happens, a cost-free label is a happy thought. But until the label becomes the law, and until consumers are set free to cast their votes in the aisles of the marketplace, we’ll have little more to go on than tea leaves. And until they are genetically modified to be more accurate, I’d prepare to pay more for food.

Pollan and Bittman on GMOs

A good passage by Keith Kloor on the subtle shift by some in the "food movement" on GMOs:

As I have said to Lynas, this kind of turnabout owes not so much to discovering science but more to unshackling oneself from a fixed ideological and political mindset. You can’t discover science–or honestly assess it–until you are open to it. The problem for celebrity food writers like Bittman and Michael Pollan, who is also struggling to reconcile the actual science on biotechnology with his worldview, is that their personal brands are closely identified with a food movement that has gone off the rails on GMOs. The labeling campaign is driven by manufactured fear of genetically modified foods, a fear that both Pollan and Bittman and like-minded allies have enabled.

Kloor argues that 

Now that this train has left the station, there is no calling it back, as Bittman seems to be suggesting in his NYT column.

There may be no calling it back but I suppose we should at least celebrate the fact that celebrity foodies aren't actively at the engine anymore.  Now if I can just persuade Bittman and Pollan on the science and economics that conflict with some of their other pet food causes (including some of the nonsense Bittman spread about organics in the same column where he admits the safety of GMOs) . . .

How Crops are Genetically Modified

Interesting graphic from the Genetic Literacy Project.

GMOs and Indian Suicides

Just as Keith Kloor seems to put the issue (or myth as he calls it) to rest in an article recently appearing in Issues in Science and Technology, now comes a new article in the journal Globalization and Health suggesting a link between farmer suicides in India and farmer debt, a finding that will no doubt re-ignite the argument that adoption of GMOs caused suicides.  Indeed, the authors conclude the article by saying

Some observers have suggested that the introduction of genetically modified varieties of crops since liberalization has considerably worsened the situation . . .

 For background on the controversy, see this Wikipedia page.

I personally didn't find the new analysis in Globalization and Health as being particularly compelling, and it does NOT, as some reports of the study have suggested, provide "causal links."  The authors estimate simple linear regressions specifying suicide rates (suicides per 100,000 people per year) in a region (or state) as a function of indebtedness (measured as the % of farmers in a region that have taken out a loan in excess of $5).  

I don't doubt that indebtedness and suicides are correlated, but isn't it possible that there is some unobserved factor (or factors) causing both?  Macro-economic conditions? Social-cultural factors within a region (there are no regional fixed effects in the models)? A shift in time preference caused by other unobserved factors? If this sort of endogeneity exists, the estimates are biased.  Although the authors have 5 years of data on their dependent variable, they only have one measure of "indebtedness" at a single point in time, and assume it is the same for all time periods; thus, they cannot include year by region fixed effects.  This means that they cannot separate other regional-specific shocks to suicides from indebtedness effects.

For a more complete and through analysis of the issue, I suggest the papers by Guillaume Gruèrea and Debdatta Sengupta, which first appeared in a working paper with IFPRI and then later in a more condensed form in the Journal of Development Studies.