Report from the North American Grain Congress

“The Scientific Cost of Not Pursuing GM Wheat”

Forrest Chumley, associate director for research at Kansas State University, says that in science, success is the best recruiting tool, and failure to develop and commercialize biotech traits may lead to a decline in wheat research investments, reduced student enrollments, and lost research opportunities in the future.

Chumley discussed “the scientific cost of not pursuing genetically-modified wheat” during the research forum of the recent Grain Congress in San Antonio, the annual meeting of the National Association of Wheat Growers.

In science, there is a certain amount of competition for research talent, he says, and success is the best recruiting tool. Without biotech, Chumley speculated, “can we continue to attract the best and brightest to wheat research and education?”

Chumley says wheat as a research field has been “moderately” successful in non-biotech research advancements, but has failed at making strides within biotechnology. He says there are several reasons why investment in wheat biotech has been comparatively low compared to other crops:

• It’s generally viewed as a “low value” commodity, with low value inputs.
• Wheat is a commodity fragmented by six types or classes, making the tremendous expense of developing a biotech trait more difficult to recover.
• Planted acres have been in steady decline since 1980, even before the arrival of biotechnology.
• Wheat has a complex, challenging molecular genetics background that makes biotech research more tedious than in other crops.
• A comparatively small research community, with very little private research.
• Lack of “pull” from the industry.

The continued acceptance of other biotech crops around the world – including more acreage and more biotech crops (rice is around the corner) – will help pave the way for wheat, says Chumley.  “Biotechnology represents the most rapid adoption of any agricultural technology ever,’ he says.  “There isn’t one credible case of someone becoming sick by this technology.”

Chumley says that of 12,173 field test permits granted by USDA-APHIS since 1987 for researching crop biotech traits, 5,535 have been for corn (45.4%) and 396 for wheat (3.2%). “That’s about a 15-fold difference, and I don’t think corn is 15 times more important than wheat.”

He says that the earliest permit filed with APHIS was in 1994 by Monsanto to test glyphosate tolerance, shelved by the company a decade later because of resistance to the technology.  Chumley says there were just three public biotech wheat field test permits pending as of early 2006, filed by the University of Minnesota, Kansas State, and Oklahoma State.  He says public biotech wheat research now is focused on drought and fusarium resistance.

“In biotech we have a trait that promises to take a dangerous toxin out of the food supply, so why not,” says Chumley, referring to DON or vomitoxin from scabby wheat.  “But with increased biotech acceptance, biotech will be hard to keep out of wheat.  It will come.”