4:07 AM Dec 1, 1995

BIOTECH COULD WORSEN AGRICULTURAL PROBLEMS

by Dr. Vandana Shiva* Third World Network Feature

New Delhi 1 Dec (TWN/Vandana Shiva) -- Amarnath or ramdana, grown across India in traditional farming systems, is the world's most nutritious grain. Its leaves and stems are also nutritious, containing more than twice the protein of other cereals. It is also environment friendly.

Prof Ashish Datta of Jawaharlal Nehru University and the Department of Biotechnology have filed a patent for transferring the gene that codes for protein in amarnath to other cereals like rice and wheat. The patent will cover the isolation of the gene and delivery/transfer or construct for transferring the gene into other crops. It will be applicable in the United States and Europe.

What does the patent for a transgenic crop using amarnath genes imply for biodiversity and human health and nutrition? It has been the claim that transgenic crop will enhance the protein level of edible oils. However, a comparison of the nutrition available from polycultures based on amarnath as well as the nutrition available from amarnath clearly shows this claim to be false.

Amarnath is not just a source of high protein. It has high calcium and iron too. These multiple and complex nutritional properties do not get transferred to the transgenic crop. Transferring amarnath protein gene to rice, for example, thus does not create overall nutrition; it decreases it.

Besides people do not eat only rice, but rice with dal. The balance comes from the rice and dal mixture, not from rice alone. By trying to increase the protein content of rice through genetic engineering, dal as a source of a balanced protein composition is being negated.

In addition, the transgenic rice will have none of the built-in resilience of amarnath. It will be vulnerable to diseases, pests and drought, thus requiring intensive chemical and intensive water use. The development of transgeenic crop with amarnath genes will lead to the displacement of amarnath itself as companies with investments in research and patents will have to promote the spread of transgenes.

Genetically engineering amarnath genes in the rice will add to the environmental costs of agriculture, instead of reducing them. It will make agriculture non-sustainable rather than sustainable. Further new health risks can be introduced through such transgenic crops.

The extreme form of genetic determinism which assumes that each specific character of an organism is encoded in a specific, stable gene so that the transfer of a gene results in transfer of a character, has already been rejected by the majority of biologists and the intellectual community, because it fails to take into account the complex interactions between genes and their products that are involved in the development of all characters. In many, cases, it has been impossible to predict the consequences of transferring a gene from one type of organism to another. Furthermore, changing a gene's cellular and surrounding environment can produce a cascade of further unpredictable changes that could be harmful.

The essence of a genome is self-organisation: elements that fit together. Complexes of effective genes form coherent wholes, which vary within usually stable patterns. However, genomes of all organisms are known to be subject to a host of destabilising processes, so that the transferred genes may mutate, transpose, or rearrange within the genome, and may even be transferred to another organism. As a consequence of genetic engineering, the stabilising or 'buffering' control circuits are exposed to disruption thus threatening the stability of organisms and ecosystems.

In transgenic plants particularly, there is abundant empirical proof that genetic engineering is indeterminate and uncertain. A classic example is the maize A1 gene that has been introduced into a white flowering mutant of Petunia hybrid which has resulted in transgenic plants with flower colours ranging from brick red through variegated to white. However, during a field trial of 300,000 plants, the number of plants producing flowers with white or variegated petals and plants with weakly pigmented blooms varied during the season.

The study linked the stability of the transgene with environmental stress and endogenous factors such as the age of the parent plant. The effect of environmental factors on the stability of transgene expression has also been evidenced by transgenic alfalfa.

Studies with rice plants genetically engineered to resist kanamycin showed not merely that this trait, though inherited, was not expressed in the progeny but also that gene amplification or loss occurred in the progeny of the same parent plant.

Problems like silencing or suppression of the inherited gene suggest that this phenomenon results from events that are an integral part of normal gene expression in plants. This way plants recognise that foreign DNA is not known; but all evidence points to the possibility that the newly integrated DNA may be recognised as foreign.

The unpredictability and uncertainty that accompanies genetic engineering has serious implications at two levels: that of biosafety of transgenic organisms, and that of patents for them. Given the factors of instability and uncertainty of genetic engineering, the 'safety' of genetically engineered organisms cannot be taken as a prior assumption. As more transgenic crops leave the controlled environment of research greenhouses and are subjected to natural variation in farmers' fields, problems associated with transgene instability will increase in magnitude.

Datta, who has a co-application for the patent claim on amarnath gene, is also the head of the Indian commission meant to decide on biosafety regulations, which has recently permitted Proagro Seed Company of India and Plant Genetic Systems (PGS) of Belgium to deliberately release hybrid brassica (which includes mustard and rapeseed) and hybrid tomatoes at the Proagro Research Station at Gurgaon, near New Delhi. The tomato variety will contain a Bt gene and the mustard will tolerate the herbicide Basta produced by Hoechst. When contacted, the Department of Biotechnology first contended that such release was safe, and then admitted that information on biosafety based on which permission was granted was supplied by PGS on the basis of its own work in this field.

Genetically engineered herbicide tolerance carries with it enormous environmental risks. A primary concern is that such resistant plants could themselves become weeds, or transfer their resistance to wild relatives, which would then become super-weeds, especially in countries which have developed the crop in the first place and where numerous farmers' varieties still exist.

A study conducted by University of California-Riverside geneticist Norman Ellstrand has confirmed that genetic traits of crops can be transferred to their wild relatives by even hybrid varieties through simple pollination. Besides, such varieties will encourage the use of more herbicides.

Likewise, the Bt gene has also proved to be less effective and more hazardous both for the environment and for life-forms other than those targeted than claimed. Transgenic plants with the Bt component produce anti-pest toxin continuously, leading to increasing Bt resistance.

Further, Bt ingestion can result in feeding inhibition in the pest before it has absorbed a lethal dose of the toxin. Bt has also been shown to target beneficial insects, and has been linked to the creation of newer resistant virus varieties as well as multiple virus infections.

In humans, Bt has been incriminated in severe types of eye infection that can lead to blindness, besides food poisoning. Micro-biologists agree that the most obvious potential hazard associated with Bt is to individuals whose immune defences are impaired. Such individuals comprise most of the populations in the Third World -- as their immune defences become impaired by diseases like measles in childhood and malaria, besides AIDS. Developing bio-safety regulations is thus imperative in environmental and public interest.

The instability and unpredictability of genetic engineering also have implications for intellectual property rights in the area of lifeforms. Patents to genetically modified organisms are given on grounds that these are bio-technological inventions. Such a patent claim is based on the false assumption that genes make organisms and, therefore, the makers of transgenic genes make transgenic organisms.

Proteins are not made by genes but by a complex system of chemical production involving other proteins. Genes cannot make themselves any more than they can make a protein. They are made by a complex machinery of proteins. It is also not genes that are self-replicating, but the entire organism of a complex system.

Thus relocating genes does not amount to making an entire organism. The organism makes itself. To claim that an organism and its future generations are products of an investor's mind needing to be protected by intellectual property rights as bio-technological inventions amounts to denying the self-organising, self-replicating structures of organisms.

Put simply, it amounts to a theft of nature's creativity.

Granting patents for genetically engineered organisms becomes even more inappropriate because biologists who claim patents on life often have to use 'junk DNA' (95% of DNA whose function is not known). In the case of transgenic sheep Tracy, called a 'bio-technological invention', the scientists at PPL (the company holding the patent on Tracy) had to use 'junk DNA' to get high yields of alpha-i-antitrypsin. As Ron James, director of PPL, says, "We left some of these random bits of DNA in the gene, essentially as God provided it and that produced the high yield." However, their patent claims are proof that PPL is claiming to be God.

The primary threat to diverse forms of life as both biological and cultural diversity comes from this reductionist/mechanistic paradigm which has devalued most species, and all non-Western non-reductionist knowledge systems, leading to species extinction and erosion, and cultural extinction and erosion.

Conservation of biological and cultural diversity calls for transcending of the dominant reductionist trends in biology. The need of the house is a post-reductionist biology in which humans and other species stand as equal but diverse partners, and modern biology and ancient systems of life sciences stand side by side in a pluralism.

(Dr. Vandana Shiva is a leading environmental scientist from India and author of Staying Alive and other books and articles on issues related to resources, environment and women)