GM Looking Less Taboo in Times of Crisis

Soaring food prices and global grain shortages are bringing new pressures on governments, food companies and consumers to relax their longstanding resistance to genetically engineered crops.  In Japan and South Korea, some manufacturers for the first time have begun buying genetically engineered corn for use in soft drinks, snacks and other foods.  Until now, to avoid consumer backlash, the companies have paid extra to buy conventionally grown corn.  But with prices having tripled in two years, it has become too expensive to be so finicky.

In the United States, wheat growers and marketers, once hesitant about adopting biotechnology because they feared losing export sales, are now warming to it as a way to bolster supplies.  Steve Mercer, a spokesman for U.S. Wheat Associates, a federally supported cooperative that promotes American wheat abroad, was quoted as saying, “I think it’s pretty clear that price and supply concerns have people thinking a little bit differently today.”  The group, which once cautioned farmers about growing biotech wheat, is working to get seed companies to restart development of genetically modified wheat and to get foreign buyers to accept it.

Even in Europe, some prominent government officials and business executives are calling for faster approvals of imports of genetically modified crops.  They are responding in part to complaints from livestock producers, who say they might suffer a critical shortage of feed if imports are not accelerated.  In Britain, the National Beef Association, which represents cattle farmers, issued a statement in April demanding that “all resistance” to such crops “be abandoned immediately in response to shifts in world demand for food, the growing danger of global food shortages and the prospect of declining domestic animal production.”

The chairman of the European Parliament’s agriculture committee, Neil Parish, said that as prices rise, Europeans “may be more realistic” about genetically modified crops: “Their hearts may be on the left, but their pockets are on the right.”  Pressure to re-evaluate biotech comes as prices of some staples like rice and wheat have doubled in the last few months.  (New York Times, 4/21/08).