GMO papaya export welcomed

It’s a business that sorely needed some good news, and seeing Japan flashing a green light on importing genetically modified papaya qualified as really great news. That is the latest development that could rescue Hawaii’s long-threatened $14.2 million papaya industry.

Ring spot virus — which spreads like wildfire due to the aphids that commonly infest the plants — devastated the local crop, primarily the variety known as Solo, in the 1990s. It might have wiped it out altogether had it not been for Rainbow, the type that genetic research yielded.

There are other cross varieties created to capture desired characteristics other than the resistance to virus, such as the familiar orange flesh of the fruit that some find more familiar-looking than the reddish insides of the resistant types. But it’s the Rainbow that finally has emerged from lengthy review by Japanese import authorities, making it that country’s first genetically modified organism (GMO) fruit it is shipping in. The only caveat: It must be labeled as a modified food.

The importance of this development can’t be exaggerated. Papaya exports fell to $5.8 million in 2009, a 19 percent decline from the previous year, according to data from Foreign Trade Zone 9, the hub of Hawaii’s international trade.

Diminished sales to the Hawaii industry’s formerly top customer, Japan — where GMO fruit was considered less desirable — represented a big part of the cataclysmic drop. Sales to Japan were toted up at $15.1 million in 1996, two years before Rainbow papaya was introduced. As of 2009, the industry revenue from Japan amounted to just $1.2 million.

Japan was helped in overcoming its aversion by the work of, among other researchers, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Pacific Basin Agricultural Research Center in Hilo. Those studies, which won the U.S. federal approval for the food crop, produced the data that ultimately satisfied the stringent Japanese regulators. The Japanese sent signals last year that approval was on the way, and last week it came through. Shipments should begin in December.

The GMO issue has become a contentious one, with some objectors voicing concern about the safety of consuming altered varieties. “Eco-terrorist” groups have vandalized crops in Thailand and elsewhere. Such an association has been feared but not established as the motive for repeated attacks that have destroyed thousands of papaya trees on the Big Island.

Otherwise, genetic modifications have been controversial where Hawaii’s traditional bedrock food crop, taro, is concerned. The University of Hawaii has wanted to research the possibility of developing GMO taro locally to combat a disease called “pocket rot” in taro varieties grown throughout the Asia-Pacific basin. Because of the cultural sensitivities surrounding Hawaiian taro, lawmakers have warded off such advances with local taro.

Particular care had better be taken around inspecting imports of any other regional taro, because that is the only other remaining preventive measure.

Non-GMO papayas are being grown in Hawaii, a niche made possible because the dominance of Rainbow has reduced exposure to disease.

Done carefully, the cultivation of genetically modified crops can safeguard such a choice in the marketplace.

Let’s hope that, should disease surveillance fail the taro farmers, such an intervention won’t come too late to save the native crop as well.