( music playing )
Christophe:
We're here because this place has been at the center
of a fierce debate about whether we should grow
and eat genetically modified food.
And that question is only getting more important.
At the current rate, we will have to grow more food
in the next 30 years than we have in all of human history.
Doing that without destroying the environment that we live in
will be one of the defining challenges of our generation.
And many experts argue that to do that,
we'll have to engineer the genes of our food.
But the safety of that technology has been controversial for decades.
So, should we be worried about genetically modified food?
( music playing )
- Good morning. - Hey, how's it going?
- How is everybody today? - Fantastic.
Chocolate peanut butter. Chocolate peanut butter.
- Oh, my God. - How is it?
- It's really good? - I can't tell if that was good or bad.
It's Reese's peanut butter for breakfast.
- In a Cheerio. - I love it.
Why are we here?
- We are here in my home. - "We are here in my home."
I have brought you here.
I have brought you guys here to talk about GMOs.
I'm curious to hear how you grew up thinking about them.
'Cause for me, I was-- I was definitely taught that
GMOs are a terrible thing.
In my family, it was just never something that was talked about ever.
I was taught that the big business around GMOs
is something to be, like, hated.
All these labels started appearing, like this one,
"Non-GMO project verified," which seems to signal to people
that there's something harmful about GMOs.
There's one thing at this table that does contain
genetically modified organisms and is labeled as such.
- And I'm curious if y'all can find it. - Huh.
- It's not the coffee. - This one says non-GMO.
It's the one that y'all haven't looked at yet.
- The fruit. No. - Mm-mm
"Partially produced with genetic engineering." It is the Cheerios.
Alex: Oh, there it is. It's at the very bottom of the box.
Sneaky little--
If you look through the ingredients, you can see whole grain oats,
sugar, peanut butter, dextrose, corn starch,
and corn syrup, and corn that was probably produced with genetic engineering.
In a way, it's almost like a status symbol for your foods
if you're able to identify that all your foods have
the positive label of being GMO-free.
Cleo: I guess my question to you, Christophe,
is it a good label? Like, is that something that I should be looking for?
Um...
To understand how we got here,
we have to talk about the first GMO.
This is the Flavr Savr tomato.
Leading up to its launch,
people called this the super tomato.
It became major news.
The future is now, at least in terms of the American diet.
Genetically altered tomatoes are a step closer to your supermarket tonight.
The new tomatoes will soon be on a store shelf near you.
When it hit shelves, it became the first commercial crop that was genetically modified.
It was designed to be
less perishable than regular tomatoes.
What followed was a new generation of bio-engineering initiatives
that promised to feed the world,
including things like golden rice,
a GMO enriched with beta keratin to combat blindness and death
from vitamin A deficiency.
Researchers believe they have found a way
to add critical nutrients to rice.
Man:
of malnourished children in the third world.
But over the next few years, public perception of GMOs
went from gentle curiosity like this...
As long as it was-- it was healthy, you know?
No-- no health risks. Yeah, I'd consider it.
...to bitter divisiveness like this.
Hell no, GMO. Hell no, GMO.
Other labs tried to replicate that study and found that it wasn't true.
- No, actually that is not true. - Yes.
( speaking foreign language )
One side says that modifying food is totally harmless
and the other side says that it's a serious threat to us.
They take viruses and bacteria and insecticides
and put them into the DNA.
More often than not,
they're inserting viruses
or bacteria into these plants.
But that's not exactly how it works,
so let's clear things up.
- Cleo, you free right now? - Sure.
All right. So genetic engineering works by taking a tiny piece of DNA
from one organism and putting it inside of another organism.
That tiny piece of DNA is called a gene.
It is a set of instructions that tells the organism
how to express a trait.
You can kind of think of that like taking a recipe
from one cookbook and putting it inside of another one.
So one set of instructions here contain a really special trait,
and it's bookmarked.
- Insect killer. - Exactly. Grandma's insect killer recipe.
This one page tells that bacteria
how to create this protein that kills insects.
Okay, so how does this gene
get from the bacteria to the corn?
You can use kind of this bacterium that naturally goes into the other plant
and, like, dumps the DNA off
or you can use something called a gene gun.
The gene gun literally shoots gold particles that are covered in DNA...
- Dope. - ...into cells of the corn.
This corn plant will then produce those same insecticide proteins.
And what that means is that farmers now would not have to spray
those corn plants with insecticide.
So it's not as though GMOs
are using a small part of a bacteria
and putting it into corn or something else.
It's more like they're taking a small instruction
that a bacteria has
and allowing corn to also have that instruction.
- Is that right? - Exactly.
So what do we know about how safe it is
- to eat something like this? - Mm, let me show you.
In the past 20 years that we've been eating these crops,
there have been no negative health impacts on consumers.
- That's great. - Yeah. I learned all of this from Pamela Ronald.
She is a geneticist at UC Davis.
We've been genetically engineering
many different types of plants
and genetically engineering medicines for over 40 years,
and there hasn't been a single instance of harm
to human health or the environment.
Christophe:
but they're probably best summarized in this one
from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.
So this is like a meta study of thousands of reports.
Can I get a highlighter? Great.
Cleo: There's some evidence that GE insect-resistant crops
have had benefits to human health by reducing insecticide poisoning.
The research, blah, blah, blah, blah,
of GE foods reveals no differences
that would implicate a higher risk to human health
from eating GE foods
than from eating their non-GE counterparts.
- That's the money line. - That's it.
This seems so certain,
but it-- it also seems like this is such a big controversy.
It is. So the 2015 Pew Research poll
found the majority of Americans
believe that it's not safe
to eat genetically modified food,
but almost 90% of scientists say that they're safe.
And this gap is the biggest
of any politicized scientific issue.
So that means bigger than climate change, bigger than vaccines.
It makes me feel like there must be some other issue
with GMO products or GMO companies
that people are really struggling with.
- That's what I want to figure out, yeah. - Like, it can't be this.
So the thing is, as much as people might worry
about GMO fruits and vegetables,
you're not really likely to find them in produce.
They're in cheap processed foods made from GMO corn and soy.
And the vast majority of GMO crops don't actually even wind up in food.
You know, for the most part,
they are turned into biofuels or into feed.
In the U.S., where over 90% of corn is genetically modified,
just 10% is turned into things that people actually consume.
So all that genetic engineering allowed us to do
was to grow crops like that
on a bigger scale than ever before.
Could it have more to do with how the business of GMOs
is actually implemented?
There's one place that I think
can help us answer that question,
and it's in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
( music playing )
Hawaii is ground zero
for developing new genetically engineered crops.
In the 1990s, the entire papaya industry in Hawaii
was basically on the verge of collapse.
Plants started to be infected by papaya ringspot virus.
This problem persisted for decades,
and then came something called the rainbow papaya.
This was a transgenic variety
that was designed to resist the virus.
Until 2017, this was the only GMO fruit
that was sold in the U.S.
This fruit was proof that genetic engineering
could really benefit both consumers and farmers.
But it also kicked off a long debate about what genetic engineering
means for the state of Hawaii.
It's hosted more open air experimental field tests
than any other state in the country.
And the U.S. grows more GMOs
than any other country in the world.
And all of these companies are here because
Hawaii's tropical climate
allows for three to four plantings of seeds per year,
as opposed to just one
on most parts of the mainland U.S.
It kind of creates this ultimate outside laboratory
for seed companies.
We're gonna go visit one of these test fields
that's owned by Bayer with members of the SHAKA movement.
So tell me what SHAKA is.
The SHAKA movement is
the Sustainable Hawaiian Agriculture
for the Keiki and the 'Aina.
Okay, we're here in Kihei,
and these are the Hale Piilani homes,
and they are next to
the Monsanto test field here in Kihei.
Now these people are right on top of the problem.
What they're doing in the test field
is they're trying to see how much herbicide
the plant and the seed can take.
We know tests-- the pesticide drifts,
especially with this wind,
and it would bring it right into these homes,
straight into these homes.
This was one of the reasons for the moratorium
was the proximity of these test fields
to these homes we're standing next to.
In 2014, Maui County passed a moratorium
on the research and development and production of GMOs.
Man: Hawaii is the center of a fight
between the companies who make crop seeds here
and residents who say they are being poisoned.
Hawaii's Maui County passed one of the strongest
anti-GMO measures ever.
A battle over the Maui County GMO moratorium
is headed to court.
Eventually, that moratorium
was overruled in a federal court.
We were just asking to slow down, take a breath, stop,
and let's see what's going on in terms of experimentation
with these open fields putting all these people in danger, right?
It was easy for the industry to turn around and go, "Oh, you're anti-GMO."
Are you anti-science when you're being openly tested on?
And the fact that they're going,
"We're experimenting with this corn and we're gonna see
how much pesticide it can handle before it dies."
Look where you're doing it.
You're doing it where people live.
Okay, let me clarify what they're talking about.
One of the most popular kinds of genetically engineered traits
is something called herbicide tolerance.
By giving a plant a gene that makes it resistant
to one specific kind of chemical,
farmers can spray herbicide on their plants to kill weeds
without having to worry about harming their crops.
So even though the other most common
kind of genetically engineered trait
successfully reduced the need for insecticide,
this particular GMO trait
actually encourages the use of more herbicides.
Since 1996, when the biotech company Monsanto
first introduced crops tolerant to glyphosate,
that's the active ingredient in the herbicide Roundup,
the use of that chemical has skyrocketed.
Now, glyphosate has traditionally been considered
a relatively safe herbicide, but in 2015,
the World Health Organization concluded
that it likely causes cancer to humans who are exposed to it.
Now there are thousands of lawsuits against Bayer,
which acquired Monsanto,
for failing to warn consumers of those risks.
We reached out to Bayer for comment,
but at this time, they haven't provided a statement.
( music playing )
I can count three chickens from where I stand.
But there are more everywhere. Oop!
Lorrin:
I was born and raised in Hawaii.
I got involved in this issue of GM growing.
Walk me through what the concerns that people here have
- about those kinds of crops in particular. - Yeah.
The Maui community was quite upset about corporate agriculture
in Hawaii and on Maui.
Our concern are the pesticides, okay?
You're using too many pesticides.
When the stuff you put is blowing on the wind,
and you haven't told anybody downwind
who got drifted about informed consent,
and they never got to respond,
that's unethical.
This is the framework of human experimentation.
I will give them the benefit of the doubt
that they want to feed the world and use less pesticides.
I will give them that.
That does seem to be something that we hear a lot
- on this topic is this idea... - What? Feed the world?
...that GMOs are a necessary technology to feed the world.
Corporations and scientists have shown that's the goals.
"What do you want?" "Feed the world."
I'll give that to you. Maybe we're trying to feed the world.
But the process that we get there
seems to trample on certain people's rights.
( music playing )
We're about to go talk to Dr. Harold Keyser.
He's going to explain to us what genetically engineered crops
look like here in Hawaii.
And we're climbing up a hill.
( music playing )
That's Harold. He found a chameleon.
- ( indistinct chatter ) - ( squeals )
- They have a very long tongue. - ( gasps )
Oh, my God. Oh, my God.
( squeals ) It's on the camera.
It's so hard to separate the technology from its context of big AG.
- Mm-hmm. - Do you feel like that is
going to make this argument endure for a long time?
Like, when are we going to stop talking about this?
Genetic engineering is safe as any other form of plant breeding.
Regulation is so expensive,
you know, to get it through
all the stages at EPA
and Food and Drug Administration,
to get a new product out.
And, I mean, I think that's also part of
why the focus has been on the major crops.
Because they spent all this money and then that's where they're gonna, you know,
they're gonna go after the big payoffs first.
Corn, soybean, alfalfa, cotton,
things that are on, you know, big acreages.
You know, there's been consolidation.
And that basically crowds out everyone except for the large ones and incentivizes--
Oh, yeah. Somebody with the really deep-- probably deep pockets.
Christophe:
Well, at the same time that GMO technology was taking off,
the seed industry was also undergoing major changes.
Let me show you how.
Each of these seeds represents an individual seed company back in 1996.
By 2018, all of these were fully or partially owned by Monsanto,
which made it the biggest seed company in the world.
The pharmaceutical company Bayer bought Monsanto for $63 billion.
But it's not just Bayer. Dow and DuPont merged to become Corteva,
and ChemChina acquired Syngenta.
Today these four companies
control over 60% of the world's seed sales.
Those companies patent the genetics of their seeds,
which means that farmers can't harvest their own seeds.
They have to buy them every year.
And because these seeds work hand in hand with the chemicals
produced by the same companies,
you can't really have one without the other.
So for some, adopting GMOs means buying into a system where,
for the first time in the history of agriculture,
farmers are not fully controlling
and owning their seeds.
But even though there's immense pressure to do so,
not every farmer is buying into that system.
( dog barking )
- ( indistinct chatter ) - Hey, how's it going?
( muttering )
- How's it going? Nice to see you. - All right. How you doing?
This is, like, in full operation.
We just put this extension in.
You can see this is where the door used to be.
We took that shade house down, poured the slab,
and then did all this.
The system comes on.
- And do you hear that sounds? - Uh-huh.
That's the sound of money.
We produce about five to 600 pounds of greens a week
and we do it on 2,500 square feet
on a 9,000 square-foot lot.
So you could say I'm probably
one of the largest smallest farmers here in Hawaii.
This conversation about genetic engineering in food
has gotten so much attention as kind of a focal point
for how this conversation is happening all across the world.
Yeah, because the corporate takeover of agriculture, so to speak,
has been consolidation. I mean, it's happening today.
Has been a big issue. The farmers are going back to these companies going,
"Hey, man, we got bugs attacking our plants."
"Well, here." And they start giving them
petrochemical pesticides and herbicides.
And it didn't take long before that just spiraled out of control.
Well, the farmers are just trying to find ways to make ends meet.
That created-- that whole attack on the plant created a dysfunction,
and that's when genetic engineering came in.
So I feel it was a dysfunction on top of a dysfunction,
which creates dysfunction squared.
Am I against GMO?
Um, I just don't support it.
You know, as a farmer, I want to grow food for people
without using that kind of technology.
And, um, so that's my main interest.
Little did I realize that I could actually make a living
on a postage stamp with agriculture.
This is where we grow what I call the chocolate cake.
- You can take it-- - It went straight through.
This is like black gold.
We're here in paradise on Earth. We can grow a lot of food.
- Here I am on Maui. I mean, what more can I ask? - Here we are.
- Yeah. Seriously. - Yeah.
The idea of genetically modified food
is so often sold to us based off of future promises--
crops that can resist a changing climate,
or with better yield,
or with improved nutrients to feed the world.
More efficient water use,
bigger root systems, nutrient uptake.
There's definitely potential.
Christophe:
Right now, most aren't even turned into food.
The real reason to worry about GMOs
isn't that they're unsafe to eat.
It's how they're being used today.
Barbara:
This is in no way farming to feed people.
Christophe:
that some GMOs encourage have demonized a technology
that objectively could help a lot of people.
That's part of why in 2013,
anti-GMO activists in the Philippines
destroyed a test field for golden rice,
setting public sector research back by months.
Vincent:
The technology is not producing
the promise that it said it's going to feed the world and all that stuff.
Christophe:
that could help people the most fail because of concerns
that don't have anything to do with the technology itself.
That's what we should be worried about when we worry about GMOs.
Thank you so much for watching.
For more episodes of "Glad You Asked,"
you can click the link to the right.
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Thanks again.