The Dialectic of Pro-Poor Papaya - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 764

commodity crops. What lessons might be learned for understanding and predicting
the future of non-commercial projects designed primarily for use in comparatively
less-industrialized countries? hough concerns that relatively poor countries and
farmers cannot benefit from agricultural biotechnology because of patents and con-
trol by multinational life-science corporations, the politically powerful property issue
proves to be more variable than common accounts suggest (Cohen 2005; Lybbert
2003). Some disaggregation of the lumped together term “GMOs” is illustrated by
papaya.InthecaseofPRSV-resistantpapayainhailand,propertyrightsshouldnot
ostensibly have raised opposition from anti-GE activists on the specific grounds of
multinational corporations being the sole beneficiaries, because the papaya was devel-
oped by a nonprofit-making international consortium of public-sector scientists; the
seeds were distributed for free in Hawaii and would have been in Thailand as well had
protests not succeeded.
Similarly, concerns about non-replicable and patent-protected seeds reducing the
rights of farmers are shown in this case to be misplaced, as in the case of “Golden Rice.”
The virus-resistance trait in papaya was fully heritable and any patents were registered
and held in the public interest by universities and research institutes. Furthermore, pub-
lic fears about human health dangers of genetically engineered foods were addressed by
multiyear safety trials published in the peer-reviewed academic literature, as has been
thecasewithotherGEcrops(Chassy,thisvolume).Finally,theprovensuccessoftrans-
genic papaya in Hawaii could also have provided real-world evidence reassuring Thai
farmers and consumers concerned about the prospects of GE papaya.
The issue of segregated international markets might, however, have raised some con-
cerns requiring careful consideration. Specifically, Thailand is a major trader in agri-
cultural commodities; export markets might be negatively affected by the presence of
unauthorizedtransgenesinpapaya.However,economicimpactswouldlikelyhavebeen
manageable given that the vast majority of Thai-produced papaya is consumed domesti-
cally; moreover, the smallholder papaya-growing sector produces exclusively for local
consumption. The potential for cross-pollination from GE papaya, another frequently
raised concern by opponents, was studied and found to be limited. Papaya is mostly
self-pollinating; moreover, the impact of even a worst-case outcrossing of transgenic
papaya would merely have been to spread virus resistance more widely, protecting more
treesfromdiseaseandprematuredeath.Itisnotclearwhythisoutcomewouldneces-
sarily represent a genuine environmental threat such as those, like deforestation and cli-
mate change, on which Greenpeace typically focuses its campaigns.
These factors raise the intriguing possibility that it may have been precisely because
the GE papaya could not be opposed on the basis of many of the most common anti-GE
arguments that it generated such a strong outpouring of activist opposition in Thailand.
A safe transgenic crop delivering obvious consumer benefits, produced in the public
sector for the use of small farmers in a developing country, might therefore be seen as
more threatening to activist groups than GE applications with a more explicitly com-
mercial focus, such as tolerance to proprietary herbicides. The stakes would have been
particularly high with the new Greenpeace Southeast Asia office looking to mount a