The Dialectic of Pro-Poor Papaya - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 758

what fruits were harvested all came from PRSV-infected fields. Three of the five papaya
packing houses had closed in Puna by 1998, and the two remaining facilities had ceased
to operate full-time. However, the process to deregulate transgenic papaya for full-scale
production had already begun: Approval was obtained from the USDA-Animal Plant
HealthInspectionService(APHIS)in1996,andfromtheEnvironmentalProtection
Agency in 1997, along with the necessary consultation with the federal Food and Drug
Administration(FuchsandGonsalves2007).
With official clearance obtained, transgenic papaya seeds were distributed free to
growers via the Papaya Administrative Committee in Hawaii under a lottery system
based on need and the severity of PRSV infection on farms. Because of the severity of
thecrisis,mostfarmersplantedtheirtransgenicseedssoonatertheyreceivedthem—
within a year, by 1999, visibly healthy fields of papaya trees were commonplace. Today
about70 percentofthepapaya-growingareainPuna,Hawaii,istransgenic,andGE
papaya fruits can be purchased by consumers throughout the United States, Canada,
and,toalimitedextent,Japan.
To date no breakdown of resistance to the virus has been reported, even with rapid
and widespread deployment. The commercial release of transgenic papaya has also had
the wider benefit of assisting non-transgenic papaya recovery by dramatically reducing
theoverallprevalenceofthevirus—anexampleoftheso-calledhaloefectofsomepest
and disease-resistant GE crops. Transgenic papaya has also had the environmental ben-
efit of allowing papaya production to be focused on existing virus-infected land, reduc-
ing the pressure to clear highly biodiverse forested land in a constant quest to avoid the
virus(FuchsandGonsalves2007).
The introduction of transgenic papaya into Hawaii is particularly relevant for study
because the transformed cultivars were not developed by private companies for com-
mercial gain but in the public sector by teams based at academic institutions (princi-
pallyCornellUniversity)inresponsetoperceivedneedinasmall-scalefarmingsector.
Papaya growers on Hawaii are primarily of Filipino ethnic background, and the indus-
trymainlyconsistsofsmall,family-orientedgrowers—manyofwhomsupplementtheir
incomesbyholdingof-farmsecondjobs(FuchsandGonsalves2007).hankstothis
rapid and carefully targeted deployment of biotechnology, a family-farm industry con-
tinues today in Hawaii when it otherwise might have been wiped out by a virulent agri-
cultural disease.
Papaya Transformed for
Virus-resistance in Thailand
As detailed earlier, papaya ringspot virus is not a problem conined to Hawaii. In
hailandthepapayaringspotviruswasirstobservedin1975,andinfollowingyearsit
became an increasingly serious threat to production. An eradication program launched