The fable of Hawaiian Frankencorn: the Aloha State's dishonest anti-biotech campaign.

• Author: Bailey, Ronald
• Position: Columns - Column

"Anybody you see around here dressed in a Tyvek suit will be someone from Greenpeace," David Stoltzfus joked as we surveyed the thousands of carefully numbered corn plants growing in the stony rust-colored soil of a former sugar cane plantation just a few miles inland from the spectacular Wailea Beach. Stoltzfus, who heads Monsanto's Piilani seed production farm on Maui, was referring to the white disposable coveralls that protesters wear for the TV cameras when "decontaminating" biotech crop fields.

Hawaii is the epicenter of a furious campaign to shut down production farms that yield genetically modified seed. It was September, and I was there to see for myself the "Frankencorn" that haunts activists' choleric imaginations.

Anti-biotech signs and literature were scattered across the Hawaiian Islands. The Crystals and Gems Gallery in Hanalei, a trendy little town on Kauai, displayed several protest posters and offered fliers urging a ban on biotech crops. The gallery is the sort of place where, when my wife picked up an attractive stone and asked a clerk what it was, the reply was, "Do you mean, 'What does it do?'" Apparently, that particular rock can dispel negativity.

After being advised on the therapeutic properties of various crystals, we asked the clerk what all the anti-biotech literature around the shop was about. She informed us that biotech crops cause cancer, stating emphatically that Kauai's cancer rates were exceptionally high, especially among people who live close to the seed company fields where biotech crop varieties are grown. She added that eating foods containing these ingredients disrupts satiety signals to the brain, causing people to eat too much, resulting in the obesity epidemic. Don't ask me to explain.

Why are the seed companies in Hawaii in the first place? Three words: perpetual growing season. Plant breeders here can produce three crops per year instead of just one. This speeds up the development of new crop varieties from seven years to just four. The seeds can then be transferred to mainland production farms, where bulk quantities of the new, improved seeds can be grown to supply farmers around the world.

Standing in that Maui field, looking at the tens of thousands of inbred corn plants that will be crossbred to produce seed, underlined the enormous benefits of hybridization. The inbred parents of fixture hybrid corn stand a spindly four or so feet tall. Their high-yielding hybrid offspring will grow as high...