http://www.iht.com/articles/520925.html
International Herald Tribune (from New York Times)
Friday, May 21, 2004

For biotech foods, a dwindling appetite
Andrew Pollack NYT

LOS ANGELES As a research scientist at the world's largest vegetable seed
company, David Tricoli used genetic engineering to create a virus-resistant
melon, something that conventional plant breeders had been unable to develop.

But the company, Seminis, dropped the melon project and other work on biotech
vegetables because of the high costs of obtaining regulatory approval and
perceived consumer resistance.

"There are things that growers need and want, but it's just too difficult to
get them out," said Tricoli, who left Seminis in 2001 after the cutbacks and
now works at the University of California at Davis. "In biotech, we have a
solution to the problem, but it's just sitting there."

The melon is emblematic of a problem in agricultural biotechnology: the small
number of crops that are genetically engineered.

Agricultural biotechnology continues to spread in the United States and
worldwide, and proponents see signs that the crops are being more accepted.
On Wednesday, as expected, the European Commission decided to allow imports
of a genetically engineered sweet corn developed by the Swiss company
Syngenta, ending a six-year EU moratorium on the approval of biotech food.
.
But to the extent biotechnology is growing, it is in a narrow range. Some 99
percent of the crops are grown in six countries - the United States,
Argentina, Canada, Brazil, China and South Africa. And virtually all the
worldwide acreage is devoted to only four crops: soybeans, corn, cotton and
canola.

With these four, genetic engineering caught on before consumer resistance
gathered force a few years ago. These crops are also largely used for animal
feed or clothing or to make oil and other ingredients for processed foods
rather than eaten directly - something that has helped them gain acceptance.

But recent attempts to move genetic engineering to other crops have met
resistance, or at least fear by food companies and farmers of consumer
resistance. And these days, many experts say, the time and money involved in
clearing regulatory hurdles make it uneconomical to apply biotechnology to
any but the most widely grown crops.

Just last week, Monsanto shelved plans to introduce the world's first
genetically modified wheat because some U.S. and Canadian farmers worried
that European and Japanese buyers would shun not just the modified wheat but
all of their wheat.

In April, California officials rebuffed a request by Ventria Bioscience, a
small company based in Sacramento, the state capital, to increase its acreage
of an experimental rice crop engineered to produce human proteins for use in
nutritional supplements. Some rice farmers had also worried about the effect
of such a crop on exports to Japan.

And the current edition of California Agriculture magazine laments a sharp
drop in efforts to develop genetically engineered fruit and vegetables -
small crops compared with corn and soybeans.

The first genetically engineered crop introduced, in 1994, was a tomato, and
some genetically engineered papayas and squash are on the market. But the
number of field trials in the United States involving biotech fruit and
vegetables plummeted to about 20 by 2003 from about 120 in 1999, an article
in California Agriculture said.

The situation allows both supporters and opponents of gene-altered crops to
claim victory. The supporters point to the increased acreage and the recent
moves by Brazil, a leading soybean grower, toward allowing farmers to plant
genetically engineered soybeans.

Opponents can say that the narrow range of biotech crops is a sign that the
technology has stalled. Not only are there just four crops, but they are
still limited to two main traits introduced by genetic engineering: insect
resistance and herbicide resistance.

Fifteen years ago, I would have predicted far more diversity in products
 based on what companies were saying and what scientists were saying,"
 said Jane Rissler of the Union of Concerned Scientists, a group skeptical of
 genetic engineering. "It's quite surprising it's limited to these two
 traits

The narrow range of crops means that biotechnology may not realize its full
potential. On Monday, for instance, the Food and Agriculture Organization, a
UN agency, issued a report saying that the technology, despite its promise,
was not yet doing much to help feed the world's poor because it was not being
applied to the sorts of crops grown in developing countries, like potatoes,
cassava, rice, wheat, millet and sorghum.

Some U.S. farmers also fear that their crops will not benefit from the latest
technology. Even as some expressed relief last week when Monsanto shelved its
transgenic wheat, others formed Growers for Wheat Biotechnology to push for
genetic engineering.

There is also a question of how much the agricultural biotechnology industry
can continue to expand without new crops, or at least new traits for the same
four crops. In the United States, more than 80 percent of soybeans and nearly
that share of cotton is already genetically engineered.

The pace of new product introductions has fallen sharply. In the past three
years, only two crops a year have been the subject of consultations with the
Food and Drug Administration before marketing. In the late 1990s, it was not
unusual for a dozen crops to go through this process each year.

And the new developments are mainly variations on the same themes.

"Within the regulatory pipeline, there's not a lot that looks dramatically
 new that we're aware of," said Michael Rodemeyer, executive director of the
 Pew Initiative on Food and Biotechnology, a research organization.

The New York Times