Dust Up: A Thriller by Jon McGoran

Soyagene as aid, both seeds to grow and soyflour as food aid. Energene has been outpaced by its larger competitors. There’s a lot riding on Soyagene and Early Rise, its new corn variety, to help it catch up. People at Energene are stressed. I’m the office nurse, so I see it, people coming in with stress-related problems, and Ron has been right in the thick of it. Anyway, I thought it would be great to get out of the office. I have a close friend in Haiti from when I was in grad school at Penn, and I wanted to keep an eye on Ron. Make sure he was okay. So I took some vacation time and went with him.”
    She took a deep breath and let it out. “It was intense. Turned out Soyagene and Early Rise were both controversial in Haiti. Energene was pushing the soyflour as a protein supplement, but soy’s not a big part of the local diet in Haiti. And many people—including the president—are opposed to GMOs. There was a lot of political tension and instability, about a number of things, but partly about Energene and the GMO aid shipments, and GMOs in general. Have you been following the political situation there at all?”
    I shook my head.
    “It’s a mess. Last year, near the end of his term, President Abelard banned GMOs. Energene and the other biotech companies put up tons of money to get this guy Martine elected, very pro-GMO, free trade, no regulations. People were shocked, because no one really liked him, but like I said, there was a lot of money behind him. As soon as Martine gets in, he rescinds all the regulations on this stuff. But then he has a heart attack and dies. They have a special election, and one of Abelard’s allies is elected, this guy Alain Cardon, and now Cardon is calling for a moratorium on new GMO varieties—including Soyagene and Early Rise. So there’s the drought, there’s all this political tension, there were also rumblings about some kind of armed rebel faction, and there were criminal gangs adding to the chaos. They stole some of our Soyagene soyflour before it was even cleared for distribution. We were up north, a place called Cap-Haïtien, and the port was crawling with American private security types working for Energene and Stoma, trying to protect assets and keep a lid on things.”
    “Stoma?”
    She nodded. “Stoma’s even bigger over there than Energene. Everywhere, really. Especially their GMO corn, Stoma-Grow. It’s all over the place. Energene is hoping to make a dent with the new Soyagene soybeans, but they can’t get their corn off the ground because Stoma has the corn market locked up. They’re pretty aggressive about protecting their market share.”
    “I know all about that. What does all this have to do with Ron showing up at my house?”
    “I’m getting to that. So, while Ron was working, I was spending time with my grad school friend, Regi Baudet, who’s a deputy health minister. A few days before we left, there was an outbreak of some kind of respiratory illness in this tiny village called Saint Benezet, out in the countryside. I went with Regi to see if I could help. Some of Energene’s security contractors were there when we arrived, skulking around, giving us dirty looks. We had no idea what it was. Regi was stumped, his assistant was stumped, I was stumped. It was bad, too. Everybody had it, but some people were really struggling, wheezing and gasping, especially the little ones and the old people. Luckily, we were able to get some steroid inhalers, because otherwise, some of them wouldn’t have made it through the night. Anyway, we got them all stabilized, and we took blood samples and left.
    “The next day, everyone was better. But we were curious. Ron studied infectious diseases while getting one of his Ph.D.s, so he and Regi brought some of the samples into a lab there, developed a few theories about it. It gave them a chance to get to know each other, which was nice.” She smiled sadly. “Anyway, two days later, the respiratory thing flared up