A Swiss botanist has some “blasphemous” advice for the organic community.
Klaus Ammann, director of the botanical garden at the University of Berne, said organic growers should be embracing biotechnology instead of rejecting it.
While he realizes that kind of talk is considered heresy in many organic circles, Ammann said it is time for farmers to drop their dogmatic anti-biotech mindset and consider how biotechnology could benefit them.
In an interview following his speech to about 100 delegates attending the biotechnology portion of the Bio-Science Week 2004 conference, Ammann said scientists should woo organic growers by developing crops with traits that appeal to them.
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These include plants that have less dependency on fertilizer or better drought tolerance.
Debbie Miller, president of the Organic Crop Improvement Association, said while it’s an interesting idea, she doubts it will happen.
“To be honest I can’t imagine anyone putting a lot of money into trying to develop something that’s going to result in selling less fertilizer.”
Miller rejected Ammann’s assertion that most organic growers are fanatical biotech bashers. She keeps an open mind about the technology, but said it hasn’t offered anything that appeals to organic growers.
And there is a more important consideration.
“The market doesn’t want it, so why grow something that you know people don’t want to buy?”
Ammann is confident that attitude will change as the technology is refined.
He said science will eventually provide traits stemming from “non-alien transgenes,” which are genes harvested from the wild relatives of crops.
“That’s a big reservoir of genes we have hardly started to get to know.”
He said a shift away from interspecies gene transfer will help ease some of the concerns over genetically modified crops.
Instead of transplanting a fish gene into a tomato or using bacteria to create herbicide tolerant crops, scientists could soon be harvesting genes from wild barley and placing them into domestic barley.
“There are lots of concrete examples of resistance genes that can be used from the close relatives,” said Ammann, a biotech booster who also worked with Greenpeace in the 1990s.
He said there are risks associated with GM products and there must be a healthy respect for consumer anxiety surrounding the new crops, but the risks have been greatly distorted.
While companies such as Monsanto have produced peer-reviewed research on GM crops, he said organizations such as Greenpeace have indulged in what he called “pseudo-science.”
Miller countered that Monsanto’s research is biased because it has a vested interest in the results.
Ammann finds it odd there is so much concern about GM crops when there is much riskier technology used in agriculture. Gamma radiation, a process used by crop breeders to speed up the natural rate of plant mutation, is at the top of his list.
“That’s Frankenstein,” he told conference delegates.
Gamma radiation is much less targeted than genetic modification because the whole plant is indiscriminately bombarded with radiation to create mutant offspring that contain scary characteristics, Ammann said.
“Most are lethal and some are crazy and it’s done out in the field, which is just outrageous in my eyes. This is really risky.”
The technology has been used in durum, but nobody seems concerned, he said.
Ammann said it is “primitive” compared to genetic modification yet there is no link between eating food created with gamma radiation and human health problems, which should put the risk of GM crops in perspective.
