Straight Goods February 6-7, 2000
Genetically modified spin
Top 10 great big fibs of biotech
By: Stephen Leahy
[Reprinted courtesy of author. Copyright, Stephen Leahy, 2000. Any reproduction of this article in electronic or other media is strictly prohibited unless expressly granted by the author.]
http://www.straightgoods.com/item44.asp
During a beverage break while chopping wood last weekend my neighbor said: “You sure hear a lot about genetically modified food these days”.
“Yep,” I said, “And most of it involves telling great big fibs.”
Do we want our food produced like this? Here’s a list of the top ten fibs from the biotech promoters. They roll right off the tongue. Agribusiness, government, and some farm organizations want you to swallow these lines. Straight Goods advises a dose of salt.
They’re not, otherwise why bother engineering them? Bt corn (corn that has been bred with an organic pesticide called “Bt”), is one genetically modified crop grown on tens of thousands of acres in Ontario and Quebec. It looks exactly like regular corn except that the tissues of the plant, including the corn kernels, produce a toxin that kills certain insects, including Monarch butterflies. The toxin, by the way, came from a soil bacteria.
There are other less obvious and potentially more risky differences. In order to get corn plants to produce the soil bacteria toxin, a lot of foreign genetic material including antibiotic-resistance marker genes, bacterial promoters, vectors and other assorted bits of DNA - the nuts and bolts of biotech - had to be blasted into corn plants using a gene gun. It’s actually more like a shotgun blasting thousands of tiny gene pellets into corn cells.
Millions of acres of farmland aren’t being planted because crop prices are too low, while thousands more acres produce fuels and fibre, not food. GM foods aren’t the answer to world hunger. Money for people to buy food is.
All this extra genetic stuff may be acting in very subtle ways on the corn’s biochemical processes.
Genetic engineering allows genes from distant and unrelated organisms to be combined - genes from fish into tomatoes or soil bacteria into corn and potatoes. Species barriers can’t be hot-wired in traditional plant breeding. Also, the actual nuts and bolts of doing genetic engineering (see #1) is completely different.
Millions of acres of farmland in US, Europe and even Canada aren’t being planted this year because crop prices are too low. Thousands of more acres are being used to produce biofuels and fibre instead of food. The world could easily be fed right now, and well into the future, if everyone had enough money to buy the food they need.
Hunger is an economic issue, not an agricultural one.
Unlike other risky stuff like pesticides, radiation and chemicals, GM crops are alive - they reproduce, disperse and evolve. That makes it very hard to figure what risk they pose. The recent international agreement on biosafety between more than 130 countries including Canada acknowledges that genetically modified organisms - plants, animals, fish and bacterias - may pose a risk to human health.
There’s been no long-term human health studies and for that reason the British Medical Association wants a moratorium on GM foods. One of the worries concerns bits of the transgenic material being transferred to the good bacteria in our bodies’ digestive tract.
Straight Goods Monday, February 07, 2000
http://www.straightgoods.com/item50.asp
Canada has two watchdogs regulating GM crops and foods, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency and Health Protection Branch of Health Canada. Neither does any actual testing. Instead, they review results of testing done by companies wanting to sell their GM products. Aside from the suspicion they might only reveal their best data, once a GM food is considered “substantially equivalent” to unmodified food no further testing is required. And long term testing isn’t even on the menu. Ann Clarke, a professor at the University of Guelph, in a review of this process concluded that Health Canada’s approval of GM food safety is based “largely on assumptions and inference rather than on any sort of actual testing”. (See web site reference below)
Canadian Food Inspection Agency officials knew that Monsanto’s Bt corn killed butterflies but gave it the green light anyway. Why???
Monarch butterflies can be killed by eating pollen from Bt corn. It also affects other kinds of butterflies and moths. This came as no surprise to officials at the Canadian Food Inspection Agency and Monsanto, the manufacturer of Bt corn, since they already knew it had a wide range of effects on butterflies and moths before it was given the green light for use in Canada. Last December, New York University scientists discovered the toxin in Bt corn leaks into soil and persists there. No one knows what the consequences of this will be and there is nearly no funding to find out. Companies are heavily promoting the use of these crops. And with the four or five years needed to do large-scale field research, relevant studies will not be done until well after crops are approved.
Superweeds are already being created. Pollen travels hundreds of meters on the wind and up to ten kilometers thanks to bees and other insects. In 1998 pollen from GM plants transferred their genes to some wild plants making them resistant to a common herbicide in northern Alberta. All that GM pollen floating around will inevitably add novel genes into wild plant populations threatening biodiversity. No one knows what the consequences of this will be in wild ecosystems.
For one thing, GM seeds cost more, despite recent price cuts. Secondly, farmers often have to sign contracts saying they won’t save any seed from the plants they grow. That forces them to buy new seed from the company next spring, which costs more. There is no question many farmers are deep financial trouble. When we buy a box of cereal for $3.95, farmers only get a few cents out of it. There is something sadly wrong with our food production system but GM crops aren’t going to solve that problem - and may be making it worse.
Do we want our food produced like this?
Yields for GM crops were poor initially but recently are comparable and occasionally better. However, according to research by Charles Benbrook, former executive director of the US National Academy of Sciences’ Board on Agriculture, yields of Round-up Ready soybeans were 6% lower in 1998 than non-GMO soybeans. Benbrook says when this “yield drag” is added to the extra costs of buying GM seeds reduces farmers’ gross per-acre income as much as 12%.
Pesticides, especially insecticides are expensive. Crops with low value like corn are rarely sprayed. The millions of acres of Bt corn have reduced insecticide use by 1% or 2 % at most Charles Benbrook estimates. The other GM crops are mainly herbicide-resistant. This means they can be drenched in herbicides and still live. It’s a stretch to see how this could lead to less pesticide use.
Stephen Leahy is a freelance journalist covering biotechnology for the past three years who has visited labs and farm fields, and interviewed molecular biologists, ecologists, farmers, government officials, industry spin doctors and activists.
Richard Wolfson, PhD
Consumer Right to Know Campaign for Mandatory labelling and long-term testing
of genetically engineered food
500 Wilbrod Street, Ottawa, ON K1N 6N2
email: rwolfson@concentric.net
http://www.natural-law.ca/genetic
subscription to genetic engineering news of 12 months is $35 (payable to BanGEF at above address)