“
What
Monsanto wished for from Washington,
Monsanto and, by extension, the
biotechnology industry got. If the
company's strategy demanded regulations,
rules favored by the industry were adopted.
And when the company abruptly decided that
it needed to throw off the regulations and
speed its foods to market, the White House
quickly ushered through an unusually
generous policy of self-policing.”
‘Biotechnology Food: From the Lab to a
Debacle', The New York Times, January 25,
2001 .
Throughout these ten years of
commercialization, the US biotech industry
has tirelessly asserted that GM crops are
safe, that they present no risk to the
environment or human health, and that they
provide many benefits for farmers and
consumers, such as higher yields and better
food quality.
Genetically modified foods have been on
US supermarket shelves for a decade. Over
50 percent of processed foods in the US
contain some GM ingredient, and over 70
million US acres have been planted with GM
crops. Yet the debate over GM crops in the
US has been relatively tame in comparison
with the outcry on the international level,
where the introduction of GM foods has led
to enormous turmoil, wide opposition and
outright rejection.
united states
:
land of gmo freedom
In the United States, GM foods are
considered to be substantially equivalent
to their conventional counterparts. The
regulatory system was founded on the notion
that GM foods are unchanged, hence safe,
and thus require no mandatory safety
testing and no specific regulation. It is
not surprising that the US government has
allocated scarce funding for research into
the potential health and environmental
impacts of genetically engineered foods.
The US Department of Agriculture, for
instance, spends just US$3.6 million out of
a $193 million research budget on studies
that examine the possible environmental
impacts of GMOs.
One of the main reasons for the lax
regulatory system in the US is the enormous
influence of the biotechnology industry,
and particularly the Monsanto corporation,
upon the government.
questioning the safety of gm
crops
In recent years. the debate about GM
crops in the US has heated up, and the
ineffective regulatory system has been
subject to increasing criticism. For
example, the policy of the US Food and Drug
Administration (FDA) for evaluating the
safety of GM crops has been deemed
inadequate. A 2003 report by the Center for
Science in the Public Interest concluded
that the regulatory process does not enable
the FDA to ensure that GM crops are safe to
eat: toxins and anti-nutrients that may
affect food safety and nutrition are not
always evaluated; the methods to determine
allergenicity are inadequate; data
summaries often lack sufficient detail or
information to determine safety; and so on
and so forth.
The fact that the US government
continues to refuse mandatory safety
testing and labeling of GM crops and food
has infuriated a growing number of US
citizens. Several legal actions have been
filed, and hundred of thousands of people
have called for labeling and testing.
Moreover, several incidents, including the
StarLink scandal and the contamination of
biopharmaceutical crops, have underlined
the weaknesses and flaws in the US
system.
the starlink
scandal
“I think we're just hitting the tip
of the iceberg here. We just don't know
what's in those elevators, and when we
start letting this stuff go and it's
tested, it's going to get worse.”
Iowa grain elevator operator, The
Washington Post, October 25, 2000 .
StarLink is a variety of GM maize
authorized in the United States only for
animal feed purposes.It was not allowed for
food consumption because of the potential
allergenicity of the protein Cry9C that was
genetically engineered into the maize.
Nevertheless, in 2000, Friends of the Earth
campaigners discovered StarLink in ‘Taco
Bell ' taco shells, a maize-derived food
product. By extension, this meant that
StarLink was present in the human food
chain.
The magnitude and gravity of the
StarLink contamination was breathtaking.
More than 300 corn products were recalled
across the United States . Despite the fact
that StarLink was only planted on 0.4
percent of total US corn acres, the numbers
of acres contaminated was much greater.
More surprising, although the contamination
was only supposed to be found in StarLink
brand seeds, it was later reported that the
Cry9C protein was found in another 80
varieties of yellow corn seed. Even more
unexpectedly, it was found in a white corn
product, when it was previously believed
that contamination could only happen
between varieties of yellow corn.
StarLink contamination was not contained
to the US , but was also detected in 2000
and 2001 in food shipments to Japan and
South Korea . This led to a series of
recalls in these countries as well. At the
June 2002 United Nations World Food Summit
in Rome , Latin American NGOs announced
that StarLink had been found in US food aid
in Bolivia (see page 21). And at the end of
December 2002, StarLink was discovered
again in Japan .
The StarLink case provides clear
evidence that GMO contamination is one of
the most urgent problems posed by GMO
releases into the environment. Once an
organism is released, the consequences are
unpredictable and the impacts unknown. The
fact that a released organism is very
difficult to recall has been ignored and
downplayed by US authorities, but the
problems of real life contamination
illustrate the fact that US regulatory
systems for GMOs are clearly
inadequate.
“You'd think that the North American
agricultural export industry would have no
choice but to bow to the demand: keep GM
seeds far away from their unaltered
counterparts and in general move away from
the controversial crops. You'd be wrong.
The real strategy is to introduce so much
genetic pollution that meeting the consumer
demand for GM-free food is seen as not
possible. The idea, quiet simply, is to
pollute faster than countries can legislate
–then change the laws to fit the
contamination.”
The Guardian, January 21, 2001
.
biopharmaceuticals
contamination
“Plans to add drug genes to food
crops prove we've learned nothing […] Why
on earth are companies adding these genes
to plants which through pollination or
mix-ups with seeds could allow the genes
and their products to find their way into
food?”
The New Scientist, July 2002.
The US experience with GMOs provides
another example of major concern for the
environment: ‘biopharmaceuticals'.
'Biopharming' is an experimental
application of biotechnology in which
plants are genetically engineered to
produce pharmaceutical proteins and
chemicals that they do not produce
naturally. A few known examples include a
contraceptive, potent growth hormones, a
blood clotter, blood thinners, industrial
enzymes, and vaccines.
In November 2002, the first significant
case of contamination by biopharmaceuticals
was reported. The company involved,
ProdiGene, conducted a range of open-air
testing of crops containing pharmaceuticals
and industrial products. In this incident,
Prodigene failed to properly remove all
remnants of GM maize from a field
cultivated in 2002. Consequently, some seed
remained in the ground, and these
‘volunteer' seeds germinated in 2003,
thereby contaminating a crop of soy.
Subsequently, when the soy had been
harvested and was at a grain elevator in
Nebraska , it was discovered that it had
been contaminated by the ProdiGene maize.
500,000 tons of soy worth some $2.7 million
were quarantined by the US Department of
Agriculture and later ordered
destroyed.
This example should prove that open-air
cultivation of biopharmaceutical crops
threatens global food supplies, jeopardizes
nonbiopharmaceutical crops with
contamination, and may pose potential
problems for wildlife and ecosystems. In
the US , some 300 open-air cultivations
took place between 1991 and 2002. In
October 2003, Monsanto announced that it
was abandoning biopharming technology and
closing its 70-person division. This
followed extensive lobbying of the US
government by consumer and environmental
groups for tougher regulations, as well as
outspoken opposition by the food processing
industry, which is concerned about the
health risks faced by customers through
product contamination.
pesticide use in gm crops on the
rise
One of the key arguments of the biotech
industry has always been that GM crops have
environmental benefits, in particular that
the herbicide-tolerant (HT) varieties need
fewer pesticides. However, recent studies
on the use of pesticides in GM varieties
showed a progressive increase in their
application between 1996 and 2003. The
volume of pesticides applied to
herbicidetolerant GM corn, soybean and
cotton increased 73.1 million pounds (33
kilos) in two sets of applications between
1996-8 and 2001-3.
There are many factors that can produce
an increase in the average amount of
pesticides applied per acre, but reliance
on a single herbicide (the primary method
for managing weeds on fields with GM
herbicide-tolerant varieties) has been
identified as the main cause.
“Reliance on a single herbicide as
the primary, if not sole method for
managing weeds on fields planted with HT
varieties, and the resulting indeed
inevitable ecological responses to such
intense herbicide selection pressure
remains the primary factor that has led to
the need to apply more herbicides per acre
to achieve the same level of weed
control.”
Charles Benbrook, “Impacts of genetically
engineered crops on pesticide use in the
United States : The first eight years”,
November 2003.
more information:
FoE United States website
:
www.foe.org/camps/comm/safefood/gefood/
index.html
GE Food Alert website:
www.gefoodalert.org/pages/home.cfm
|
biosafety protocol
contradicts us gmo
policy
The Biosafety Protocol is a United
Nations agreement adopted in 2000 in
Montreal , Canada that seeks to
protect the environment from the
potential risks of GMOs. It became
law on September 11th 2003 , and by
early 2004 over 80 countries around
the world had become party to this
treaty. One of the Biosafety
Protocol's main objectives is the
regulation of the transboundary
movements of GMOs. The Protocol is
the first international agreement
that clearly shows that GMOs are
different from conventional organisms
and therefore require different
treatment. The Protocol thus
contradicts policies held by some
countries, such as the US , which
maintain that GMOs are not different
from the conventional plants and
animals from which they are
derived.
more information:
www.biodiv.org/biosafety/default.aspx
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