A Scientific Goof in the South African Corn Crop

A big "oops!" in South Africa.

Monsanto GM corn harvest fails massively

South African farmers suffered millions of dollars in lost income when 82,000 hectares of genetically-manipulated corn (maize) failed to produce hardly any seeds.The plants look lush and healthy from the outside. Monsanto has offered compensation.

Monsanto blames the failure of the three varieties of corn planted on these farms, in three South African provinces,on alleged 'under-fertilisation processes in the laboratory". Some 280 of the 1,000 farmers who planted the three varieties of Monsanto corn this year, have reported extensive seedless corn problems.

However environmental activist Marian Mayet, director of the Africa-centre for biosecurity in Johannesburg, demands an urgent government investigation and an immediate ban on all GM-foods, blaming the crop failure on Monsanto's genetically-manipulated technology.

One observer noted that you couldn't tell merely by looking whether the corn was defective or not.

"One can't see from the outside whether a plant is unseeded. One must open up the cob leaves to establish the problem,' he said. The seedless cobs show no sign of disease or any kind of fungus. They just have very few seeds, often none at all.

The South African supermarket-chain Woolworths already banned GM-foods from its shelves in 2000. However South African farmers have been producing GM-corn for years: they were among the first countries other than the United States to start using the Monsanto products.

The South African government does not require any labelling of GM-foods. Corn is the main staple food for South Africa's 48 million people.

Let's examine this problem by looking at foundational principles.

God is the Author of life, not Monsanto. (Our Founding Fathers would have said "Nature's God" but it is One and the Same.)

Should anyone be tampering with the genetic traits of food crops for profit? It is one thing to crossbreed crops to get hybrid varieties: that kind of science was popularized by Mendel, a green-thumbed religious monk. It is another to snip genes from insects and graft them onto corn in order to produce a trait that not only does not occur in nature and probably never would even with millions of years of opportunity.

But Monsanto, and a handful of other multi-national companies, goes Nature's God one trick better. God made food crops so that the prudent farmer could save some of his seed and grow another crop next year. What idiotic generosity! Monsanto makes sure that the seed from its crops is sterile; it will not reproduce, not next year or any other year. This way the hapless farmers are forced to come back to Monsanto for next year's seed.

If they're lucky, there won't be a lab screw-up, and something will actually grow.

Now you can call me old-fashioned, a religious zealot, a right-wing extremist, if you wish, but I believe with all my heart that if Nature's God wanted seeds to reproduce, year in and year out, without the helping hand of white-coated lab scientists involved, then anyone who bio-engineers them otherwise is anti-God. If we continue to allow them to do this, we are aiding and abetting un-Godly acts.

I'm not comfortable being in that position.

Furthermore, if Natural Law suggests that I should love my neighbor as myself, then why do I want to put him behind the GM 8-ball every planting season? It's a moral sin to do this, and it ought to be a crime.

Monsanto is responsible for the loss of crop production on 202,625 acres of South African land. That's 316 sections of land one mile square. Good corn can easily produce 130-140 bushels per acre, so we are looking at a loss of up to 28 million bushels. That's a lot of corn, and a lot of empty bellies on the world's most famine-prone continent. Oops, indeed!

This is just one of the unintended consequences of genetic modification. There are potentially many others.

What is Monsanto paying the South African farmers? Last year's corn crop in the U.S. brought $7 per bushel, although right now the price is about $4. Even at the low end, Monsanto ought to "shell out" $112 million, don't you think? Somehow I doubt that the reimbursement rate will be anything close to that.

I know this post is long, and somewhat technical, but I think it's important that as Americans we pay attention to what American-based corporations are doing in our name. I'm not anti-business or anti-profit -- far from it -- but I am pro-morality, and what is taking place is not moral.