Shortchanged: Biotechnology and the Emerging Climate Market
A report prepared for Californians for GE-Free Agriculture 2009
http://nature.berkeley.edu/~alitonak/Shortchanged%20PDF.pdf  

Executive Summary  

The failure of the first generation of agricultural biotechnology to deliver on its principal promises of higher yields and lower inputs set the industry on a defensive stance in the past decade. Unabated public rejection and key defeats, not least in California, has led to a thorough rebranding and re-packaging of the old transgenic manipulations. The Biotechnology industry has found an emergent market for expansion driven by popular concern over Climate Change.  

"Climate Ready Crops" are more likely to be developed by non-transgenic methods. Traditional transgenic techniques do not lend themselves to develop crop varieties tolerant of abiotic stress. Meanwhile, public reluctance to embrace transgenic products does not abate. Both developments make non-transgenic methods such as Marker Assisted Selection (MAS) the primary likely avenue for the development of "Climate Ready Crops." Although MAS per-se is not a transgenic manipulation, it can be used rhetorically to mask the presence of transgenic constructs in parental lines and hybrids as they move through the long breeding pipeline.  

The ecological effects of gene flow from crops produced for abiotic stress and transgenic biofuels will likely be greater than "first generation" transgenic crops. Gene flow from crops that are developed for extreme environments pose the threat of conferring this great phenotypic advantage to the recipients, including weedy relatives of the crop, which already are a problem as superweeds in the vicinity of current GM crops.  Furthermore, manipulations of the cell-wall biochemistry proposed by biofuel-related initiatives is likely to lead to increased susceptibility of plants to pathogen/parasite attack. Conversely, proposed manipulations could spread to microbes and increase their capacity to break down plant cell walls and contribute to increases in pathogenicity.

Agroecological methods provide a better alternative than biotechnology in addressing challenges to agriculture that might arise from climate changes. Agricultural systems that are based upon diversification and lower inputs, that use already existing diversity and crop varieties and are under the stewardship and control of the producers and the public are locally adaptive and better suited to mitigate the negative effects that might arise from changing climates.

Transgenic plants may be more readily accepted as biofuels. Since biofuels are not ingested by humans there is likely to be less opposition from consumer groups and the public against the use of transgenic plants as biofuels as opposed to food or feed. Lower public scrutiny is compounded by a much lower degree of understanding of the novel crops involved in biofuels: trees, grasses, algae, microbes. We do not have the centuries of accumulated knowledge nor the scrutiny of modern science over those new crops before they are released into the environment.

Cellulosic and microalgal biofuels are unlikely to be commercially successful in the long run and are hyperbolic in their estimations of productivity and potential. The commercial viability of biofuels largely rests upon state subsidies and is impacted by fluctuating fossil fuel prices. This is not to undermine the point that serious questions remain about whether biofuels themselves represent any of the benefits they are supposed to bring. The biological viability of the current proposals of transgenesis in biofuels rides on manipulating processes that are very far from being understood, in organisms that we do not know how to manipulate as well as we do our crops. But transgenic products as part of the biofuel industry will likely increase in the future given current political trends.

Synthetic biology is genetic engineering by another name and is likely to fail. There are many reasons why synthetic biology should follow the unenviable steps of "first generation" transgenics, but a pragmatic look at market success shows that the "SynthBio" industry is actually on its way out, kept under "artificial respiration" by public support and subsidy. If first-generation transgenesis failed in its quest of control and reliability in dealing with relatively short inserts of DNA, there is no reason why a multiplication of transgenic manipulations with large numbers of inserts should be more predictable, controllable or reliable.

CA specialty crops will most likely not have transgenic varieties soon. While there is research involving transgenic modifications of specialty crops it is unlikely that there will be commercial development anytime soon as indicated by the stagnancy of field trials (Roundup Ready Onion might be an exception).

Transgenic safflower might see commercialization in the near future. Oils produced from transgenic plants are claimed to be free of DNA and therefore transgene free. For this reason transgenic safflower for oil might be commercialized soon. Absence of DNA is not neccesarily the case and the amount of DNA present in oils is contingent on the method of production.

Transgenic insects with gene drive systems must be opposed vigorously when and if they appear. Research is being done into linking transgenes to unstable genetic elements to control insect populations. This line of research and possible products should be opposed as they present a serious ecological threat.

Transgenic vaccines have largely remained underexposed to critical inquiry. They represent one of the most radical interventions, and paradoxically one of the most viable because of the simplicity of the viral systems as well as the political momentum in support of their development and release.

California plays a major role in the development of biotechnologies associated with Climate Change. Many of the research institutions and biotechnology corporations conducting research associated with Climate Change are located in California and especially in the San Francisco Bay Area. The plexus of public universities, federal institutions and private corporations, all bundled into an academic-military-industrialcorporate complex comprises a veritable "ecosystem of biotechnology" in California.

We suggest that the Cal GE-free coalition could well shift its focus from campaigning against the cultivation of GM products to campaigning against the institutions which produce the GM products. A strategic move in freeing California and the world in general from transgenic organisms would be to focus on the venues of production concentrated in the state. This type of campaign could resonate well with the public since it would liberate public institutions from the stranglehold of corporations. During these times where skepticism of capitalism has become ubiquitous, a reasonable and strong case can be made for research in the public interest, rather than for corporate profit.