"GMO vs. Non-GMO":
What are the arguments, for and against.
"So... what's the deal with genetically modified foods?"
If you don't know, Read our introduction
first
Prepared for Lumen Foods by Dennis T. Avery,
Director, Center for Global Food Issues of the Hudson Instutite
Author: Saving the Planet With Pesticides and Plastic:
The Environmental Triumph of High-Yield Farming
Prelude: (Greg Caton,
Pres. -- Lumen Foods; 1/31/99)
Recently Lumen Foods received a serious of threats from
European conservation
activists (or at least that's how they view themselves). The crux
of their threats was simple: commit to agricultural ingredients that
are not genetically-modified or we will use our publicity machine
to ruin your business. The wording was much milder, of course,
but this was the sub-text, and the full meaning was certainly
well communicated.
Putting the crude
populist tactics of ecoterrorists aside, every argument deserves
its day in court. And considering the recent triumphs these
bullies have had on the likes of Heinz, Gerber, Nestle's, and
other large, publicity-sensitive, food producers, an objective
appraisal of "non-GMO" arguments is helpful for consumers.
It's easy to forget that in all the confusion, it is the
food consumer who feels caught in a "food wars" fire storm,
initiated and largely waged by technology wary activists who
have no problem waging a ecotheological jihad based on
assumptions that fly in the face of any and all available
scientific data on the subject.
We aim to help change
that.
Below you will find
a list of "charges" put forth by the "Anti-genetically-modified" camp. These are not idle charges.
They represent their best arguments -- their intellectual
front line troops in the battle to discredit biotechnology.
In fact, I have obtained these charges from threat letters
and email that I myself have been receiving from the less
entropic members of "non-GMO's" Republican Guard. Representing
the orthodox scientific community, I called upon
Dennis Avery, director of Center for Global Food Issues (Hudson
Institute) to help answer these charges.
Critics will, of course,
charge that counter-rebuttals would make such a presentation
more balanced. This is a valid point, and we will attempt to
provide these in the coming weeks. For now, the exchange you
see below is the best I have seen anywhere in allowing the
arguments of both sides to be brought forward to the public.
Think of this as a GMO session on CNN's Crossfire - without
the personal in-fighting.
Charge: Toxic compounds such as
glyphosate and Bromoxynil are used
on GM ("genetically-modified") crops. Thus, farmers should be
discouraged from using genetically-modified seed.
First, the track record of the
people claiming that biotech foods are dangerous: The eco-zealots
original claim that crop pesticides pose a threat to consumers and
the environment is a gigantic fraud.
The National Research Council
in 1996 ("Carcinogens and Anti-carcinogens in the Human Diet")
essentially endorsed the conclusion of Dr. Bruce Ames of the
U. of Cal/Berkeley, that 99.9 percent of the carcinogens we ingest
are natural chemicals in our food (limonene in orange juice,
hydrazines in mushrooms, etc.) The NRC finds no consumer risk
from approved use of pesticides. (Dr. Ames is the most widely-quoted
scientist in the world according to the New York Times, and
just got the National Science Medal from Pres. Clinton.)
The Canadian Network of
Toxicology Centers says, "The Panel concluded that it was not aware
of any definitive evidence to suggest that synthetic pesticides
contribute significantly to overall cancer mortality. The Panel
also concluded that it did not believe that any increased intake
of pesticide residues associated with increased intake of fruits
and vegetables poses any increased risk of cancer."
Our non-smoking cancer risks
began to decline about the time the First World started spraying
pesticides widely after 1950, and they would have declined even
faster if we had eaten more fruits and vegetables -- whether
sprayed with pesticides or not.
Second, if we were still
getting the level of crop yields achieved in 1950, we'd already
have plowed down another 15 million square miles of forest
and wildlands to get today's food supply. (That would have
cost us wildlife habitat equal to the total land area of
the U.S., Europe and South America.) High-yield farming is
thus our greatest conservation triumph. A good deal of the
credit goes to the chemical fertilizers and pesticides that that
Greenpeace and the Sierra Club falsely accuse of killing wildlife.
(We're losing a few thousand birds per year to accidents,
which is dwarfed by the amount of extra habitat we've saved
with the chemicals.)
Monsanto chose to develop
crops tolerant of glyphosate because it's the safest weedkiller
-- and one of the safest chemicals -- ever tested. It's less
toxic than aspirin. I can spray it on my pond without killing
the fish! Bromoxynil is not something we should give as a beverage
to small children, but very few children are out gnawing the
stalks of pest-resistant plants in our fields. (And since the
stalks are pest-resistant, we don't need to risk spraying
or spray drift.)
Charge: The "Monarch butterfly" proves that
genetically-modified crops are dangerous, at the least,
to insect life.
The famous Cornell experiment
gave two dozen Monarch caterpillars nothing to eat but milkweed
leaves heavily coated with Bt toxin. They died, of course.
Organic farmers have been using Bt for decades as a pesticide
because it kills caterpillars. (Editor: "Bt" comes from "Bacillus
thuringiensis," the bacterium that is the genetic source for
the insect-killing protein in GMO corn. Developed by Ciba-Geigy,
now part of Novartis, "Bt corn" was developed as a safe method of
ridding fields of the European corn borer. It's used because "Bt"
is less harmful to the environment than the pesticides it replaces --
none of which placates non-GMO advocates who don't understand
the underlying agricultural techniques.)
Recent studies in fields indicate
that: (1) corn pollen is heavy and doesn't get far outside
the fields; (2) corn pollen tends not to stick to milkweed leaves;
(3) it takes a lot of pollen to kill a caterpillar; and
(4) there are very few milkweed plants in corn fields.
Researchers say any Monarch caterpillar more than one yard outside a
Bt cornfield should be completely safe. Even the few caterpillars
feeding inside Bt corn fields may survive. Thus, Bt crops are
no threat to the Monarch.
Charge: Herbicide-resistant crops would lead
to more herbicide use.
Actually, the
herbicide-resistant crops allow the use of less herbicide.
Even better, more of the herbicide used will be less toxic.
That's called a win-win result.
Charles Benbrook,
the author of the "study" that Roundup-ready soybeans take
more pesticides, made no allowance for the harsh chemicals
that have to be used to play "catch-up" if the weeds
actually get a strong start in a non-GMO field. Nor did he
make any allowance for the benign nature of glyphosate.
Benbrook authored a recent scare-study about pesticide
residue dangers on fruits and vegetables (published in
Consumer reports) which was scientifically indefensible.
He made up his own "toxicity index" and claimed that eating
a single peach carrying legal levels of residue could cause
severe harm to a child.
Charge: GM crops may outcross and lead
to "superweeds."
First, outcrossing from
herbicide-tolerant crops is unlikely to produce superweeds,
because there's no evolutionary advantage to a weed outside
a crop field in being herbicide-tolerant. Second,
Roundup-ready soybeans would give the weeds tolerance only to
glyphosate. If Roundup-tolerant weeds became a problem (unlikely)
they could be killed by using a different herbicide.
If we're really worried
about outcrossing, we can make the GM crops sterile. But the
eco-zealots have decried the Terminator Gene (which makes
GM plants sterile) even more loudly than other GM traits. Why?
Because it would remove their best reason to oppose GM crops.
(The cry that farmers would suffer from having to buy new seed
every year is a fraud; modern farmers already buy hybrid seed
every year because it yields far more crop and far higher profits
than the seed they could save from their own fields.)
Charge: The use of GM plants reduces
the number of species actively grown and thus reduces biodiversity.
The use of high-yield crops
and crop protectants is saving millions of square miles of wild
biodiversity, much of it in the tropical forests which contain
about three-fourths of all the gene diversity in the world.
(Researchers have found more different wild species in three
square miles of Peruvian rain forest than in the entire North
American continent.)
If we want to save
biodiversity, what we must do is raise the yields still higher
on the good land we;re already farming. (Most of it never
had much biodiversity.) Then we can save the rich biodiversity
of the tropical forests and most of everything else.
If we insist on feeding
8.5 billion affluent people (and their pets) in 2040 with
organic systems, there will be virtually no room for wildlife
habitat left anywhere in the world. That would really cost
biodiversity! Justification: We currently use about 6 million
square miles of land for crops. An organic mandate would
double that to 12 million square miles. Increasing output
by 250 percent for the bigger, more affluent population
of 2050 would mean 36 million square miles for crops even
if we had lots of good land left, which we don't.
Politically-correct Germany,
ironically, has just slashed in half its annual donation to the
network of international agricultural research stations which
maintain the world's biggest plant gene bank. (Too many German
voters associate the research with pesticides and GM crops.)
Charge: Farmers will be at the mercy of
GM-producing corporations.
Just like the rest of
us are at the mercy of the companies making cars and airplanes.
If we don't like what Ford offers, there's always Mercedes or
Toyota. And Hyundai trying to break into the market.
The monopoly argument is totally silly in a fast-moving
hi-tech era where Microsoft may be dead tomorrow as the
result of new technologies and software. (Remember the
monopoly suit against IBM just before the personal computers
wiped out most of IBM's mainframe market?)
If farmers don't think
the Monsanto products are cost-effective and beneficial,
they won't buy them. Some other company will offer
something else.
Charge: EPA accepted industry testing
on GM crops.
EPA and FDA have always
relied on industry testing, carefully reported and verified,
for pesticides as well as other potential health risks.
The penalties for fraud in reporting such tests are very high, indeed.
Charge: The FDA should have insisted on
the same testing regime for GM foods as for new drugs.
The FDA has fully tested
everything different about the GM foods. There's very little that's
different. For example, they fed lab rats all they'd eat of the
new Bt potatoes, and didn't find any difference. Even when they've
tested the new proteins at thousands of times the expected human
exposure, they don't find any risk. When a risk was found
(an allergen from the Brazil nut was transferred in an experiment
trying to make the soybean more nutritious) that gene was dropped
from the program. The system worked. Rather than admit that the
test results have found everything safe, biotech opponents claim
the tests were inadequate. (They loved the lab rat tests on
saccharine, when the rats got so much saccharine that it
crystalized in the bladders of the males, and the crystals
caused bladder cancer! That was their idea of a test!)
Most GM opponents also make
a big deal out of the precautionary principle.
But the precautionary principle assumes that the world
already has enough food. (It doesn't; Europe does.)
The precautionary principle also assumes that we have enough
high-yield farm technology to feed tomorrow's 8.5 billion
affluent people and their pets without taking any more
land from nature. (We don't; that will take nearly three
times as much farm output -- unless we bioengineer
a soybean with a complete set of amino acids.)
Charge: Biotech won't help the world food
problem, which is the result of poverty and distribution problems,
not a food shortage.
The Third World is raising
its per capita incomes twice as fast as the First World, as the
World Trade Organization has lowered trade barriers. The first
thing these newly-affluent consumers want is more high-quality
protein. Meat consumption has been rising five times as fast
in the Third World since 1975. China's meat consumption apparently
doubled in six years during the last decade. Polls say that
three-fourths of the Hindus in India will eat meat (though not
beef) when they can afford it.
The idea that we can
satisfy the demands of nearly 9 billion people and their pets
(China will have 500 million companion cats and dogs) by
organically farming today's farmlands is either a tragic error
or a terribly cynical lie. The world has a severe shortage of
biomass to be composted, and it has no unused grasslands for
pasture. More meat and milk means more feedstuffs will be
required. Even with a breakthrough in soy protein consumption,
soy yields aren't nearly high enough to save the wildlands.
Mr. Dennis T. Avery
is director of the Center for Global Food Issues of
the Hudson Institute
and the author of
Saving
the Planet With Pesticides and Plastic: The
Environmental Triumph of High-Yield Farming.
(Hudson Institute, 1995)