• Anheuser-Busch: Hold your horses Anheuser-Busch: Hold your horses From the St. Louis Post-Dispatch April 15, 2005 It’s understandable that Anheuser-Busch wouldn’t want to brew its beer with rice grown to produce anti-diarrheal drugs. Fairly or not, from a marketing
• Anheuser-Busch: Hold your horses
Anheuser-Busch: Hold your horses
From the St. Louis Post-Dispatch April 15, 2005
It’s understandable that Anheuser-Busch wouldn’t want to brew its beer with rice grown to produce anti-diarrheal drugs. Fairly or not, from a marketing standpoint it’s a no-brainer: Ick. But the brewery’s threat to boycott Missouri’s rice crop is an overreaction to a theoretical hazard. The brouhaha in the Bootheel shows the need for reasonable, science-based rules to assure safety in the new business of “biopharming.”
Ventria Bioscience of California has genetically engineered rice to produce human proteins used in drugs. Ventria wants to grow its rice on 200 acres in Scott County, south of Cape Girardeau. It may expand to more than 20,000 acres.
Ventria has a laudable goal, since diarrhea and dehydration kill 1.3 million children a year around the world. In fact, the infant industry of biopharming holds the promise of better and cheaper drugs. But some farmers, environmentalists and food companies fear that genetic traits of the new rice may spread to rice used for food. That would saddle the industry with the cost of testing and separating different types of rice. And it would give Europe more reasons to discriminate against yet another American farm export. Just ask Monsanto.
It’s not an unfounded concern. Traits of another type of rice, altered to resist herbicides, spread to other rice plants growing in the same fields in Arkansas. Could birds, wind or floods spread Ventria’s altered rice to other conventional rice fields? Maybe. For its part, Ventria says its rice plot will be seven miles from the next nearest rice field.
Enter the 500-pound gorilla: Anheuser-Busch The brewery says it will stop buying Missouri rice if the U.S. Department of Agriculture approves Ventria’s plan. Anheuser-Busch is the nation’s biggest single consumer of rice, so its threat sends a chill through Missouri’s rice farmers — and the politicians who represent them.
Anheuser-Busch employs 5,000 of our neighbors and holds the affection of St. Louis for its corporate largesse. It’s almost as much a symbol of our city as the Gateway Arch. But it has an unbecoming habit of throwing its weight around in Missouri. Its threat against Missouri’s $100 million rice industry is premature. The wiser course would be for Anheuser-Busch to monitor the Ventria project closely, to see if its worries are valid. Signs of contamination can be spotted early.
In the meantime, it might lobby for regulations that will let biopharming and conventional farming safely co-exist. American farmers have been growing genetically-altered crops for more than a decade, without damage. Much corn, soy and cotton grown today is bioengineered to tolerate herbicides or ward off pests.
Much of that has roots in St. Louis, which has become an international center for plant biotechnology, by the grace of Monsanto, the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center and the Missouri Botanical Garden. In the future, we may be known more for plants than for beer.
It would be a shame to see one industry hurt another.
