Contemplating world hunger from the vantage point of a well-laden breakfast table is certainly comfortable, if odd. One morning last January, executives of Iowa-based Pioneer Hi-Bred International, the world’s largest developer, producer, and marketer of genetically improved seed, gathered at the Friend of a Farmer café in downtown Manhattan for a discussion about global food security. Amid the restaurant’s rustic decor—dried hydrangeas in earthenware pots, autumn gourds tumbling from rush baskets, exposed brickwork—the three officials and a group of journalists sat dining on maple syrup–soaked buttermilk pancakes, muffins, corn bread, omelettes, and apple butter as Pioneer’s chairman and ceo, Chuck Johnson, outlined his vision of the future. The business we’re in is ensuring that the world has the capacity to have the food it needs to survive, he explained. That future capacity, he is convinced, can come only from the crops that companies such as Pioneer are producing: high-yield, insect-resistant breeds of corn, soybeans, sorghum, and sunflowers.
Pioneer makes some of its seeds conventionally, by creating hybrids. Back in the 1920s, though, the conventional was radical, and the typical farmer looked upon the newfangled seeds, in Johnson’s words, as witchcraft and Satanism—until he got his first taste of the yield. For the past few years, however, Pioneer has been offering genetically engineered seeds, which have genes spliced into their chromosomes that make them more resistant to insects and weed killers. Johnson told the journalists about herbicide-resistant soybeans and a variety of corn that produces a toxin normally made by a bacterium known as Bacillus thuringiensis, or Bt. Last year, he said, a million acres of the Bt corn were planted in the Midwest, with an increased yield of 10 to 15 percent, thanks to the way the Bt toxin discourages corn-eating insects.
Pioneer’s vice president for marketing, Mary McBride, then chimed in, claiming that these transgenic crops have the power to increase food production in the developing world with minimal environmental impact. The world’s population, she noted, is continuing to rise and must somehow be fed. And with the growing affluence of Asia, much of that increasing population will be eating more meat—thus demanding even more crops to feed the pigs and cows they will consume. By using high-yield transgenic crops, farmers will be able to harvest so much food that they won’t try to cultivate fragile, marginal lands. Pioneer, as McBride put it, is creating virtual acres.
Outside the comfortable confines of the Pioneer breakfast, this sort of unmitigated optimism is harder to find. The public is generally wary of the transgenic crops that are landing in American fields, and there are many vocal critics. As of last October, 24 genetically engineered crops had been approved by the Food and Drug Administration for sale in the United States, a further 8 are awaiting approval, and thousands more are being tested. Many are similar to Pioneer’s crops, engineered to carry Bt toxin or to survive dousing by herbicides that kill the weeds infesting their fields. Others have been made resistant to various viruses, while still others have genes that delay their ripening or thicken their skin.
