In Africa and Asia, climate change, disease, and political turmoil pose grave threats to agriculture. The picture in Africa is decidedly mixed. The country furthest along is South Africa, which has been growing GMO maize for a long time. Ruramiso Mashumba, a farmer from Zimbabwe, says there is no other option for his colleagues than genome editing. The effects of climate change, pests, and disease mean farming is not feasible. “The only option is to improve cultivars we have to sustain farming,” he says. “At the end of the day, food is key.”37
A good example is work on cassava, or yuca, a staple tuber crop for some 800 million people across Africa, Asia, and Latin America because its roots are rich in carbohydrates. But this hardy plant also produces a toxin—a chemical related to cyanide—that if insufficiently processed can cause konzo, a motor neuron disease leading to paralysis. CRISPR offers a means to remove the cyanogens by inactivating the genes encoding a pair of enzymes in the cyanogen biosynthetic pathway. Regenerating whole plants harboring these two dormant genes could eliminate konzo. Researchers are also using CRISPR to engineer resistance to the RNA virus that causes cassava brown streak disease.38 There have been some promising early results, but the virus’s capacity to evolve will not make things easy.
Many African nations don’t see anything special in CRISPR. In 2012, Kenya summarily banned the import of GMO foods,39 triggered by the publication of a controversial study by French biologist Gilles-Éric Séralini. Feeding rats a GM maize produced by Monsanto, the French group sensationally reported large tumors in rats.40 A companion documentary directed by Jean-Paul Jaud called Tous Cobayes? (All of Us Guinea Pigs Now?) railed at the health risks posed by GM crops and nuclear accidents, raising the unthinkable possibility that a Fukushima-style explosion would not only result in millions of evacuations but also, worse, vineyards in Bordeaux contaminated by radiation.
The Séralini study was retracted by the journal editors two months later,41 citing flimsy evidence including insufficient animals tested, only to be republished by another journal two years later.42 Despite widespread renunciation, Séralini remains an influential figure in Kenya. Only in 2019 did the Kenyan government finally give limited approval to farmers to plant GMO cotton.43 In Uganda, despite extensive debate on a biosafety bill, negative opinions about GMOs on public health prevail. Some opponents argue (falsely) that GMOs result in obesity, as in America.
Nnimmo Bassey, the Nigerian environmentalist, is deeply concerned about climate change, warning that ocean acidification and coastal erosion will breed conflict in his home country. But Bassey doesn’t distinguish between the polluters helping to incinerate the planet and industrial corporations seeking to impose genetically edited crops across the continent. Bassey accuses them of cynically taking advantage of poor, hungry Africans purely to gain market access. “They want to bring in new forms of control, new colonial ideas,” he says. “In each situation we have alternatives. Food is not just something you swallow. It is life, it is celebration, a cultural activity.”44
The three “big Ag” players—Bayer/Monsanto, ChemChina/Syngenta, and Corteva, born out of the 2017 Dow-DuPont merger—know they face an uphill battle. Neal Gutterson, Corteva’s chief technology officer, told me it’s important for African scientists to drive the research, not a bunch of American executives flying in to push their latest technology.45 There are myriad applications for CRISPR that could result in earlier release onto the market of edited crops, or more important, create bespoke varieties with improved disease resistance or nutritional value.46 The European market wants an alternative to palm oil, which is currently produced in Malaysia and Indonesia with devastating costs to the ecosystem. With some judicious gene editing, sunflowers can be turned into a palm oil substitute. “The beauty of the technology,” Gutterson says, “is when major societal needs can be addressed by emerging technologies.”
In The Happiness Hypothesis, psychologist Jonathan Haidt introduced the metaphor of the elephant and the rider. The rider is the rational side of our brain, the elephant is the emotional side. While it may appear that the rider is in control, should there be any sort of conflict or disagreement, the elephant is likely to win out. Convincing the public at large, suspicious if not downright hostile to GMOs, that CRISPR and other emerging techniques are safe remains a gargantuan challenge.
If CRISPR is going to help us feed the planet, its impact won’t just be felt in the plant kingdom. Livestock and other animals stand to benefit from genome editing to provide disease resistance and other benefits. Selective breeding over recent decades has resulted in some impressive improvements in yield and meat production, averaging around 20–30 percent annually. But with the world population on pace to exceed 9 billion people by 2050, these advances are insufficient at best, trivial at worst.
While genome editing appears the only viable solution to ensuring food security by improving the yield of crops and livestock, regulatory agencies take a different view. In the United States, the regulation of gene editing in plants by the USDA is much less constrained than that of livestock, which is governed by the FDA. When laws don’t evolve in keeping with technology, the regulatory agencies are obliged to fit a square peg into a round hole—make the science fit into the existing regulatory framework.
In 2017, the FDA declared that any edited animal DNA would be considered for regulatory purposes to be a drug.47 This sets up the ludicrous situation where farmers could over time breed a line of dehorned cattle using traditional methods and the FDA would barely bat an eyelid. But expedite the process using CRISPR to engineer the identical genetic tweak and the agency flips out. In Europe, the situation is reversed. Advocates believe that gene editing of food products should be judged on the ends rather than the means. “This technology was developed largely with public funding, and the public should benefit from its intelligent and careful application,” argued a group of gene-editing supporters in 2016.48
It is quite fitting that the arduous journey of the first GMO fish to market should be that of the salmon. In 1989, the transgenic AquAdvantage salmon was first created in the laboratory by a Massachusetts company, AquaBounty. The gene construct transferred into salmon eggs included a growth hormone gene promoter that allows the fish to grow faster than normal. The modified fish reaches a weight of 500 grams in about 250 days, compared to 400 days for its unmodified sibling. These fast-growing fish, reaching maturity in half the normal time, make land or indoor farming of salmon in 70,000-gallon fiberglass tanks economically feasible. (It’s not only healthier for the fish, it abolishes any risk of GMO fish escaping into the wild—especially in landlocked Indiana. Even if they did, the salmon are sterile.)
AquAdvantage salmon were approved for sale in Canada in 2016, a year after the FDA assessed that the transgenic salmon were safe. In May 2019, a shipment of 90,000 eggs left Prince Edward Island, Canada, cleared customs in Chicago, and arrived in Albany, Indiana—1,000 miles from the nearest ocean. After two decades and more than $100 million in regulatory costs, AquAdvantage could finally be sold in the United States. Whether any business will be convinced to sell a big GMO-labeled fish remains to be seen. While AquaBounty touts its supersized fish as sustainable, the situation is not. The enormous promise of CRISPR for food production will be crushed unless gene editing is decoupled from GMOs. Tellingly, AquaBounty has used CRISPR to produce fast-growing tilapia, but opted to produce them in Argentina where the regulatory hurdles were lower.