For the most part, Ingeborg Boyens’s review of our book is accurate and fair. However, she has inserted a few misleading claims that deserve a response.
She states that our work is “part of the campaign to win … wider acceptance” of transgenic wheat. She is putting words in our mouth, and in doing so completely misrepresents our goal. We provide economic analysis using a commonly accepted framework. All of our assumptions are stated, and our work can be replicated. The Canadian Wheat Board and other industry stakeholders agree that a full benefit-cost analysis of the economic impacts of genetically modified wheat is necessary. This is precisely what we set out to accomplish, and we believe that our book provides economic analysis on a very important Canadian agricultural issue. We conducted a complete, relevant and accurate analysis with the information available over the 2002–04 period.
The reviewer states that we used a real options approach (a modified benefit-cost analysis), which resulted in a “rosy picture of an engineered future.” This statement is also misleading. The Canadian Grain Industry Working Group on GM Wheat, which consisted of representatives from a broad spectrum of the wheat industry, including the Canadian Wheat Board and the Canadian Grain Commission, endorsed the real options approach for the purposes of evaluating the introduction of transgenic wheat. Traditional benefit-cost analysis would conclude that transgenic wheat should be introduced if the economic benefits outweigh the costs. Real options analysis, on the other hand, is a more conservative approach that accounts for the fact that decisions are made in an uncertain world. Because of the uncertainty, the expected benefits must exceed the expected costs by a significant amount before the introduction of transgenic wheat is recommended. Our analysis indicates that the time for introduction of this specific type of transgenic wheat is already here.
The reviewer is correct that we do not directly address gene flow issues with genetically modified wheat, but incorrect when she says “the authors don’t deal with the issue of how farmers will deal with volunteer Roundup Ready wheat that comes up where it shouldn’t in subsequent years.” In fact, our analysis of the farm level benefits of Roundup Ready wheat addresses the control of volunteer wheat using conventional herbicides.
Colin Carter, Derek Berwald and Al Loyns
San Francisco, California,
and Saltcoats, Saskatchewan
A response from Ingeborg Boyens
The authors’ efforts at an unbiased “real options” analysis of the economic benefits of genetically engineered wheat are unfortunately undermined by the fact that their research was financed by Monsanto Canada and was based on the company’s own data regarding its Roundup Ready wheat. And although the authors may want to portray their assessment as pure economic analysis, they do bluntly state in the book that they were hoping to trigger a “gestalt shift” in the worldview towards biotechnology.
Ingeborg Boyens
Woodlands, Manitoba
