The food industry is constantly adapting to changes in consumer tastes and priorities, and today a big part of that is adjusting to resistance among consumers to foods made with genetically modified ingredients.  At The Wall Street Journal’s recent Global Food Forum, Mike Frank, senior vice president and chief commercial officer of Monsanto Co., a global leader in seed sales and crop genetics, talked with the Journal’s Chicago bureau chief, Joanna Chung, about the GMO debate and what other technological advances are in store for agriculture. Edited excerpts of their conversation follow.  MS. CHUNG: Why is it that the non-GMO side of the debate seems to have prevailed?  MR. FRANK: If you look at the scientific journals, the regulators around the world, they’ve all come to the same conclusion—that GMOs are safe from a consumption standpoint, they’re safe in the environment, and they offer farmers real benefits. And so, from a scientific consensus standpoint, there’s really no argument on that from my perspective anymore.  Now, some people do want to buy organic or non-GMO, and I think that’s great. We sell a lot of seed that’s non-GMO.  Often what happens is, there’s a conversation that it’s kind of good versus evil, or good versus bad. Farmers everywhere, whether they’re organic or conventional or using GMOs, they’re all trying to do the same thing: They’re trying to produce successful harvests, they’re trying to manage pests, they’re trying to do the right thing in the environment, and they’re trying to create a viable business model, so that they can hand it down to the next generation.  And so it’s not one system is good and one system is bad. I think all of the systems are good. And ultimately, in order to feed a growing planet, we need every farmer on the planet, whether they’re organic or conventional, or they use GMOs, to be more successful going forward.  MS. CHUNG: Do you think it’s a good thing for people to want to know where their food comes from, and have more information about it?  MR. FRANK: Yes. It’s great that consumers are interested in where their food comes from. The more the agricultural industry and the food companies can help educate the public and give them honest, factual information, so that consumers can then choose what they want, then I think that’s fantastic.  I also think affordability is a very important issue. A lot of our population in the U.S. or in the Western world has the luxury of making economic choices. And that’s great. But if the idea is that it should all be one way, and it should be a way that’s more costly, then I think that is a problem.  Families want to feed themselves and their children healthy, nutritious and affordable food. So, it’s a matter of, how do you create the environment so that farmers and food companies can ultimately bring that to the consumers?  MS. CHUNG: I think what you’re saying is that in order to meet all those demands of affordability as well as nutritious food, that we’re going to continue in the direction of having more technological intervention in our food.  MR. FRANK: Words like technological intervention, that sounds kind of scary. We need innovation.  Most farmers make decisions at the field level. They’ll go in with the same seed, the same fertilizer rate, the same pesticides, and they’ll kind of treat the field as a field.  Agriculture is changing dramatically right now. Big data is really impacting agriculture. And so, our view is that in the very near future, farmers will farm on the square meter—they’ll make seed decisions and fertilizer decisions and pesticide decisions on [the level of] the square meter [as opposed to the entire field]. And that’ll make farming more efficient and more productive.  MS. CHUNG: What are you most excited about, in terms of the next technological advances? Or what are the most near-term advances that we’re probably going to see?  MR. FRANK: Data science in agriculture is probably at the top of the list for us. We think that by understanding the soil conditions, the weather, and being able to track year after year exactly how all of these things combine to impact the ultimate harvest, this will change agriculture. It’ll change it for the equipment companies, it’ll change it for the seed companies, for the crop-protection companies and for the fertilizer companies. This is going to be an extremely important change that’s coming quickly to agriculture, and it’s very exciting.  I also think it’s the integration of solutions. A lot of the solutions that farmers use are very fragmented. They go buy their seed from one supplier, they buy their fertilizer from another supplier, and their crop-protection products. With data science, being able to provide in a seamless way that solution on the square meter, that’s going to be very important.  So, it’s not just the data science, it’s also how can you bring it together in a way that the farmer can ultimately translate it into the field in a practical way?  MS. CHUNG: In terms of global markets, what are the hurdles to offering our technology and our experience with agriculture in markets like China?  MR. FRANK: China has 20% of the world’s population, and 9% of the arable land. They want to try to be self-sufficient, but they’re not. So the reality is China imports a lot of grains from around the world. A lot of our soybeans go to China.  And this is the same in Europe. A lot of people think, well, Europe doesn’t have GMOs. Europe is not self-sufficient either.  And so, whether it’s China or Europe, most of the grains they’re importing are GMOs. Their regulators have looked at the science of it and said, yeah, this is fine. But because of political and societal pressures, they haven’t allowed their farmers access to the tools.
Monsanto’s Mike Frank says there is a danger in making the discussion of genetically modified foods into a debate of good vs. bad.