Not long ago a cotton crop failed in the Mississippi Delta. In some fields planted with a new, genetically altered strain called Roundup Ready cotton, most of the bolls, from which the fiber is harvested, simply dropped away. For the farmers, it was an economic disaster. For Monsanto and the Delta and Pine Land Company, the developers of Roundup Ready cotton, it was a local public relations disaster -- the result, they allege, of bad weather, insects and human error. Roundup Ready cotton incorporates a gene that is supposed to allow a cotton plant to withstand the effects of a widely used weed killer called Roundup -- Monsanto's brand of a glyphosate herbicide. Monsanto has also developed strains of Roundup Ready soybeans and corn.

Nearly 14 million acres of cotton were planted in the United States this year, 3 million with Roundup Ready cotton. The failure of even a fragment of this country's genetically altered cotton is worrying because major agricultural corporations like Monsanto have committed themselves, and America's farmers, to the belief that biotechnology is the future of agriculture. This cotton failure, small as it is in national terms, dramatically demonstrates why that belief needs serious, continued scrutiny.

For thousands of years, farmers have looked for better varieties of the crops they plant, and for all but the last half century or so, farmers have been the principal means of improving crops. My grandfather, who farmed in northwestern Iowa before World War II, is a good example. He set aside some of each autumn's corn harvest, tested the ears of corn he saved and planted seeds from the best ones the following spring. He and many thousands of farmers like him controlled the genetic material on which their livelihoods, as well as America's food supply, depended. It wasn't necessarily the most efficient means of crop improvement, but it had the virtue of being broadly based -- genetically and politically -- and locally controlled. Steady observation and experimentation by farmers, after all, is how we got from the ancestral form of maize -- a thumb- sized nubbin of seeds -- to a modern ear of corn, which is as big as a man's forearm.

The genome of corn or soybeans or cotton is literally the common inheritance of humanity. Biotechnology manipulates that genome only fractionally -- inserting, say, a gene for pesticide resistance. But that is enough to allow a corporation to patent a manipulated version of the genome. Even if a patentable gene manipulation appears fairly benign, its use has an important impact on the diversity and control of agricultural genetics. A farmer who chooses to use Roundup Ready soybeans, for instance, must pay an additional "technology fee" of $5 per 50-pound bag of seed. He must also sign a licensing agreement that requires him to let Monsanto agents inspect his fields, prohibits him from using any glyphosate herbicide but Roundup and prevents him from saving seed for future planting. He also consents, implicitly, to the further centralization of agricultural control.

Certainly, Monsanto has a right to profit on its investment in this technology and to protect it. But the past half century in American agriculture has witnessed not only the flow of people from farms to cities but also the flow of information -- and with it economic and technological power -- from farmers to agricultural corporations. The introduction of gene-altered crops, and the licensing used to protect them, is one of the final steps in the reduction of farmers to what one agricultural foundation calls "bioserfdom" -- becoming mere suppliers of labor.

What is worse, Roundup Ready cotton offers exactly the wrong solution to the needs of farmers, who grasp at any economic advantage. There has been a boom in the production of organic cotton in recent years, driven in part by consumer demand. Roundup Ready cotton leads in exactly the opposite direction. Monsanto has created a Monsanto-brand cotton that tolerates a Monsanto-brand herbicide. In other words, the use of one Monsanto product thus guarantees the use of another. This may make sense in terms of corporate profits, but it makes no sense at all in terms of the resources that really matter -- the health of the land and the people who live upon it.

1/13/98