ISLAND VOICES
Biotech not Hawai'i's answer

By Bill Freese
Research analyst with the Safer Food — Safer Farms Campaign at Friends of the Earth

It's no secret that plantation agriculture is dying in Hawai'i. Sugarcane and pineapple growers are abandoning the Islands for cheaper labor and land overseas, and the value of the state's agricultural output has stagnated. What can be done to rejuvenate Hawai'i's ailing ag sector?

Many state officials seek salvation in biotechnology, the practice of splicing DNA from bacteria, viruses and other organisms into plants to lend them certain traits, like resistance to chemical weedkillers.

The dean of UH's College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resources strongly supports such research, including construction of an agricultural biotech facility in Waimanalo. Before Hawai'i commits its farming future to biotechnology, however, its decision-makers would do well to carefully examine the risks as well as the potential benefits.

Biotechnology in Hawai'i is mainly experimental, not commercial. And most of the experiments are taking place not in a laboratory, but in the open air, in locations concealed from the public. In fact, Hawai'i has had more plantings of experimental biotech crops than anywhere else in the nation — or the world.

What's the point of genetic manipulation? The most common commercial application makes crops resistant to weedkillers. This has greatly increased herbicide use. Experimental applications include crops altered to:

• Make their seeds sterile, to force farmers to buy seeds instead of saving them.
• Change their nutritional content.
• Produce drugs and industrial compounds — so-called "pharmaceutical crops."

Pharmaceutical crops grown in Hawai'i include corn that generates a blood-clotting protein that causes pancreatic disease in lab animals and also harms many insects, including honeybees. Corn containing part of the ape version of HIV has been grown here, as has sugarcane that produces a potent human hormone active at concentrations below 1 part per billion. (Not a single "pharm crop" drug has passed FDA muster, and some believe none ever will.)

The National Academy of Sciences tell us it is virtually impossible to keep pharm crops out of the food chain due to cross-pollination, errant seeds and human error. Even the biotech industry's leading journal recently came out against "biopharming" in food crops.

Two pharm corn contamination incidents in 2002 highlight the risk. In Nebraska, half a million bushels of soybeans destined for infant formula and veggie burgers were seized and destroyed after contamination with pharm corn; in Iowa, 150 acres of potentially contaminated corn were burned.

In Hawai'i, the EPA recently fined Pioneer (on Kaua'i) and Dow/Mycogen (on Moloka'i) for violating permit conditions designed to prevent biotech contamination.

These contamination incidents — and many more like them — suggest that co-existence of biotech, conventional and organic agriculture may be impossible, especially in a state as small as Hawai'i. The genetically engineered, virus-resistant papaya offers additional proof. Introduced in 1998 to combat a viral disease that many believe can be adequately controlled with organic methods, the uncontrolled spread of the biotech trait threatens to turn the Islands into a "biotech-only" papaya zone where it is impossible to cultivate conventional and organic fruit (which fetch much higher prices).

A genetically engineered future is by no means inevitable. Biotech crops are shunned in Europe and Asia, where food products must be labeled, if they contain engineered ingredients. Fast food giants McDonalds and Burger King quietly killed pesticide-producing potatoes by refusing to purchase them. And there is massive opposition to genetically engineered rice and wheat among farmers and consumers around the world.

Hawai'i stands at an agricultural crossroads. It can choose to pursue experimental science and produce genetically engineered crops increasingly shunned by consumers and food companies around the world, or become an oasis for the cultivation of organic crops that people actually want.

The increasing incidence of biotech contamination makes one thing certain — Hawai'i can't have it both ways.