Biotech Bears Fruit for Farmers, Not Consumers

Biotechnology was supposed to feed the world. It was supposed to usher in an era of better-tasting fruits and vegetables engineered to be more nutritious--loaded with protein or pumped up with extra vitamins. The industry appears to be making good on that first promise, but seven years after the Flavr Savr tomato launched the agricultural biotechnology revolution in this country there’s little in the produce aisle to show for it. No protein-packed potatoes or palate-pleasing tomatoes.

Instead, the major biotechnology companies have rolled out a series of pest-repelling and herbicide-resistant crops that cater to Midwestern farmers rather than consumers.

In a remarkable miscalculation, the industry counted on consumers to recognize biotechnology’s rich potential and champion it. Instead it has found consumers to be the single biggest obstacle to advancement.

Indeed, “natural” foods have gained unexpected consumer support in recent years as mistrust of bioengineered foods has grown.

Industry leaders insist that consumers haven’t embraced biotechnology because they don’t understand it. But many scientists scoff at that notion.

“Computers have been accepted in our lives, not because we understand how they work, but because they are useful,” said Robert Goodman, a biologist at the University of Wisconsin and a former executive vice president at Calgene Inc. The biotechnology industry needs to tell consumers “what’s in it for them,” he said.

Modern biotechnology is based on inserting a gene from one type of plant or animal into another, which is different from century-old methods of cross-breeding.

Calgene invented the Flavr Savr tomato, using gene-splicing technology to create a slow-ripening tomato that promised to remain firm, flavorful and juicy weeks after it was shipped.

When consumers bit into them, however, they decided the tomatoes more closely resembled the standard cardboard-tasting fruit from the supermarket. For their part, farmers were unimpressed by the tomatoes’ quality and deterred by the expense.

If the research pipeline of biotechnology companies is any indication, there’s not much for consumers to look forward to--just more commodity crops such as corn, soybeans and wheat engineered with genetic traits to help farmers make money.

“I think the pipeline is just down to dribs and drabs, and what’s in there doesn’t look too compelling,” said Margaret Mellon of the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington.

Biotechnology executives say it’s too complex and costly to create innovative fruits and vegetables that farmers might not plant in large numbers and consumers might not be willing to pay more for, or even accept.

However, by ignoring consumers completely, experts say, companies such as Monsanto Co. and Syngenta have helped fuel the growing uneasiness with genetically modified food.

Groups in several states are pushing for bans on the planting of genetically modified crops. Public support also appears to be growing for labeling food that contains genetically modified organisms, or GMOs.

A new study by the Pew Charitable Trusts shows that 75% of U.S. respondents said it was somewhat or very important to them to know whether their food has been genetically altered. And nearly 60% of respondents said they didn’t want genetically engineered crops introduced into the food supply. Many of these people, however, weren’t aware that GMOs already are in more than half the products on supermarket shelves.

Holding Back on New Products

Until consumer acceptance of biotechnology grows, many companies are cutting their investment in research and holding back on product introductions.

Monsanto says its new-product pipeline this decade mainly will introduce plants designed to resist its popular Roundup weed killer, as well as more insect-, disease- and drought-resistant plants.

Only in 2007 and 2008 is Monsanto likely to begin introducing soybeans with more protein, fewer calories and no saturated fat and corn with more protein--products that could be marketed to obese people or those with high cholesterol. And researchers say these products are the result of research done more than 15 years ago.

Monsanto officials say they remain committed to developing products that appeal to consumers and deny they have narrowed the scope of their research to focus on only a couple of traits. “We spend a very significant portion of our [research] budget on breeding crops with improved nutrition,” said Robert Fraley, Monsanto’s chief technical officer. “The absolute truth is it’s just more complicated and takes more time.”

Analysts, though, say U.S. biotechnology companies are just coasting, waiting out the protests against genetically altered food after last year’s StarLink debacle, in which a potentially allergenic animal feed corn, developed by Aventis CropScience, made its way into the food supply, prompting the recall of hundreds of products.

In 1994, when the Food and Drug Administration registered the nation’s first genetically modified food, the Flavr Savr tomato, hopes were high that after a first wave of crops designed for farmers, great strides could be made in improving the quality and nutritional value of popular foods, said Peggy Lemaux, a molecular biologist at UC Berkeley.

But several years later, it was clear that the nation’s largest companies weren’t going to advance the technology. They were content to focus on a few traits that appealed to farmers and that in some cases helped sell other products--Monsanto’s Roundup being one example.

And because there are fewer biotechnology companies now after a series of industry mergers and acquisitions, less research is being funded, scientists say.

Many cite the demise of the Flavr Savr tomato as a turning point. After it flopped because of lackluster taste and quality, projects stalled. In the ensuing, often heated debate over the safety of bioengineered foods, decisions were made to shelve or delay projects.

“Some of the cleverest stuff that was started back then never made it to market,” the University of Wisconsin’s Goodman said, including the corn with enhanced protein, which was developed in the mid-1980s but is not scheduled for release until 2007.

And some plants, such as golden rice, designed to have increased levels of beta carotene and other carotenoids the body converts to vitamin A, will be distributed only in developing countries such as India and the Philippines, where the rice is being tested.

Syngenta has the commercial rights to the product for North America and Japan, but company executives say they have no plans to bring it to the U.S.

Getting a bioengineered product to market is a difficult proposition, taking about seven years from field trials to application for FDA approval and costing tens of millions of dollars, industry officials say.

Even after years of field trials, companies must ensure that products won’t harm the environment, don’t contain high levels of natural plant toxins and won’t cause allergic reactions. An example of one product that failed to make it through this testing gantlet is a soybean that Pioneer Hi-Bred International was developing using a gene from a Brazil nut to boost its nutritional value. After a series of skin-prick tests yielded allergic reactions in humans, the product was killed before it made it to market.

And seed companies say the task of proving a product fit for human consumption is getting harder and more expensive.

“Certain regulatory requirements have become even more stringent,” said Peter Matlock, a marketing director for Seminis Inc. of Oxnard, the nation’s largest vegetable seed company. “What this means is it will take more money, resources and time to develop products.”

Most of those new products won’t be found in the produce aisle until late in this decade. Biotechnology companies have chosen to focus on staple crops such as corn and soybeans because they are planted in such large quantities and used as an ingredient in so many processed foods, scientists say.

The fresh fruit and vegetable business is smaller and more fragmented and therefore less lucrative. “The people doing the engineering are companies looking after a huge market,” Goodman said. “You’ve got 80 million acres of corn. The acreage of tomatoes can be measured in the hundreds of thousands.”

Consumers Willing to Pay for Flavor

Still, a few studies show that consumers are willing to pay more for a tomato that tastes better, said Ken Gross, a researcher at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Center in Maryland. Many already are paying higher prices for more flavorful traditional versions such as vine-ripened hothouse tomatoes or small grape tomatoes.

Less than 1% of Seminis’ revenue comes from bioengineered products. Matlock said Seminis is still committed to creating new plants but the company is using its knowledge of plant genomics mainly to assist in traditional cross-breeding.

Syngenta, formed late last year from the spin-off and merger of the agricultural chemical units of pharmaceutical companies Novartis and AstraZeneca, is using tiny genetic markers to identify desirable genes, such as ones that produce higher yields or bigger fruit.

This speeds up plant breeding and makes cross-breeding more precise, said Jeff Rosihan, Syngenta’s global coordinator for technology scouting.

And it could prove more palatable to consumers.

The recent mapping of the rice and wild mustard genomes is expected to advance the centuries-old process of selective breeding by providing a framework for decoding the genetic instructions in many other grains and vegetables. With this knowledge, scientists can work on several groups of genes at once that affect different plant functions, such as ripening and size.

But UC Berkeley’s Lemaux warned that progress will continue only if universities and private companies work together and share information rather than try to own it.

“When you wind up patenting all the tools you need to get to a [new] end product, you hamstring the whole process” of innovation, she said. “We need a basket filled with all the technologies and [to] let companies focus on patenting the end product.”

Eventually, researchers at the Salk Institute in La Jolla are hoping to load all this information on plant genes and their functions into a computer database so researchers can create plants that adjust to any growing condition.

Agricultural biotechnology may seem a disappointment, experts say. But it’s just too early to tell how influential it will be in shaping the nation’s food supply.

“Ag biotech’s promise was just made prematurely,” Goodman said. It “involves a lot of science that hasn’t been done yet.”