What You Should Know About GM FOODS

BY JOSEPH A. HARRISS

IT'S A beautiful but unlikely media star. With its ten-centimetre wingspan, orange and black colour and arduous, fluttering migrations, the monarch butterfly has long been a favourite of naturalists. But it wasn't a full-blown celebrity until May 1999, when researchers at an American university announced that monarch caterpillars died after feeding on pollen from genetically modified (GM) corn.

       The news caused an uproar. Environmental groups were quick to claim, as one Greenpeace flyer did, that "GM organisms have the potential to wreak havoc on natural ecosystems and to threaten human health." Similarly, Friends of the Earth warned shrilly, "There is a real risk that farms could soon become wildlife wastelands."

       The Bt gene, which lets a crop produce its own pesticide, had been used in some corn products approved by the European Union (EU) scientific committee in Brussels. But with public opinion alarmed, EU environment ministers have refused to consider authorizing any new GM products. That has helped shut down an estimated $200 million worth of American corn imports and threatened a transatlantic trade war.

       In the meantime, shortly after the monarch research made headlines, independent evaluation by scientists showed that it shouldn't be taken too seriously -- it was very preliminary and limited to the confines of a laboratory, with no necessary implications for monarch butterflies in the fields.

       "Insecticides kill butterflies; we already knew that," says Jean-Pierre Prunier, an agronomist at France's National Institute for Agricultural Research (INRA). "This doesn't prove GM corn is more dangerous for monarchs than conventional spraying, which is probably much worse."

       Officials at Britain's Ministry of Agriculture agree. "People jumped to conclusions," says a spokesman for the Joint Food Safety and Standards Group. "Bt, derived from a soil bacterium, is a natural pesticide used for years by conventional and organic farmers. More research needs to be done before a decision can be reached on this study for the agricultural environment."

       Even the monarch study authors warned against drawing conclusions about the risk. Still, the campaign against genetically modified organisms (GMOs) has reached a frenzy. Some groups actually destroy test crops. Often rigged out in white biohazard suits, they invade farms and cut down swaths of experimental corn or soybeans.

       "Our actions are proportional to the risk of GMOs," asserts Hans Wolters, head of Greenpeace's European office. Media photographers and cameramen are frequently alerted in advance.

       Last January the pressure led to a new protocol being signed in Montreal by 130 nations. It allows countries to ban GM food imports if they feel there is insufficient evidence that they are safe. Producer countries (chiefly Canada and the United States) must mark shipments that "may contain" GM materials.

       Currently, no GM fresh fruits or vegetables are available for human consumption in Europe. Yet Robin Woo, deputy director at Georgetown University's Centre for Food and Nutrition Policy in Washington, D.C., asserts, "Serious science indicates that there is a reasonable certainty that GMOs are safe for human consumption and for the environment."

       To put this controversy into perspective, here are answers to commonly-asked questions about biotech food:

 
What's the difference between conventional food and GM crops?

For centuries, farmers have modified crops by selecting seeds that give the best yield, taste and nutrition.

       To get those seeds, breeders cross and backcross different varieties of a plant, thus mixing thousands of unknown genes with largely unpredictable results. Then they wait a full growing season. If the right hybrid doesn't turn up, they repeat the trial-and-error process.

Related Links The following links are for informational and educational use only. Reader's Digest does not endorse or guarantee any infomation contained therein. UK Department of Health Health Implications of GeneticallyÊModified Foods British Medical Journal Genetically modified foods National Academies Technology to Feed the World Health Canada Information on food, nutrition and novel and genetically modified foods. Great Need to Educate Consumers on Safety and Benefits of GM Foods Plant Genome Science: From the Lab to the Field to Market Testimony of R. James Cook (Washington State University) before the Subcommitee on Basic Research, House Science Committee Fears or Facts? A Viewpoint on GM Crops The need to dish out facts on GM foods Canadian Food Inspection Agency Office of Biotechnology Regulation of Biotechnology in Canada

       GM techniques let plant breeders choose the traits they want with much greater precision. A specific gene among the 50,000 in, for example, a tomato can be isolated and transferred directly to another plant to obtain desirable traits like pest resistance or better quality. This does not harm the nutritional or health aspects of the target plant.

       Greenpeace and other such groups assert that GM techniques pose special risks not created by traditional plant breeding. This assertion is not supported by scientific evidence. "In every study so far, no evidence has been found that GM crops present special risks," notes R. James Cook, professor of plant pathology at Washington State University and a member of America's National Academy of Sciences. "The types of risk are exactly the same as for crops modified by the classical plant-breeding methods."

 
Has testing been done to ensure safety for humans?

Scientists contacted by Reader's Digest note that the GM foods available today have been put through more testing than any food in history. Around the world, some 25,000 field trials have been done on more than 60 crops in 45 countries, including most of the 15 countries of the EU.

       Before being approved for use, GM foods are assessed for "substantial equivalence" under guidelines issued by the World Health Organization, the Food and Agriculture Organization, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, and Europe's Novel Foods Regulation, among others.

       This means scientists have compared them with their traditional counterparts and found them no different in nutritional value and health properties. Says Maurice Lex of the European Commission's Biotechnology Unit in Brussels: "We've spent 43 million euros on biotech safety since 1986. It's total nonsense to claim, as some do, that safety studies on GMOs haven't been done."

       If a gene were transferred from the peanut plant to, say, the carrot, that could cause a reaction in someone allergic to peanuts who thought he was only eating a carrot. So GM foods undergo rigorous testing for potential allergy problems. Similarly, pesticides bred into crops like Bt corn are not believed to affect humans, unlike widely used conventional pesticides that can cause muscular and nervous-system symptoms if accidentally consumed.

       Says Maurice Hofnung, head of the Pasteur Institute's molecular programming and genetic toxicology unit in Paris: "We've never had the least incident with GMOs -- not a single incident in 25 years of research and use. So, if the guidelines are followed, I conclude it's safe."

 
Why is biotech agriculture needed?

Nearly 40 percent of the world's food crop is lost every year to insects, fungal diseases and spoilage that biotech could help prevent. Nutrition experts say GM crops are also going to be needed to help increase cereal yields to meet food demand, especially in the Third World. Dr. Manvendra Kachole, a leader of Indian farmers' unions, recently lashed out at anti-GMO activists: "India today cannot afford to listen to pseudoscientific rhetoric."

       On the biotech horizon are crops that require less pesticide and water during the growing season and that have improved nutritional content. One GM rice in development at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich has enough beta-carotene to satisfy daily vitamin A requirements with only 300 grams of cooked rice -- a boon to the up to 250 million people around the world who suffer serious vitamin A deficiency. The same rice has increased iron and will help fight the deficiency of this mineral, which affects over four billion people.

       Danish researchers are working on GM cassava that can be eaten without danger of goiter and leg paralysis even if not properly cooked, unlike the variety consumed by more than 400 million people, mostly in the developing world.

 
Are GMOs safe for the environment?

Most scientists point out that no new ecological or environmental problems have shown up in the thousands of biotech field trials and the millions of hectares of commercial planting. In fact, all the signs point to less damage to the environment than with conventional crops. A study by the National Centre for Food and Agricultural Policy in the United States last year showed that planting GM corn with the Bt gene that kills the corn borer insect reduced the amount of land that would have been sprayed with traditional insecticides by 810,000 hectares. That's millions of litres of chemicals that didn't seep into groundwater.

       GM crops resistant to herbicides while growing, rather than treating the soil before planting, may also reduce the number of chemical applications needed. The herbicides used with these GMOs may be less polluting than conventional ones like atrazine, according to Bill French at the National Institute of Agricultural Botany in Cambridge, England.

       Increasingly, environmental scientists are coming to realize that Europe's intensive conventional agriculture has raped the countryside in a way GM crops never could. Three decades of it have poisoned groundwater and created dozens of "superweeds" with tolerance to herbicides. In the United Kingdom alone, the last 20 years have seen the loss of more than 20 million farmland birds of ten species.

       "In Europe we already have serious problems with conventional agriculture, including surface and groundwater pollution," says Brian Johnson of English Nature, the government's official advisors on nature conservation. "Biotechnology may offer a way out."

 
Can we trust the experts?

A recent succession of food-safety disasters and imbroglios, from BSE to dioxin, and even troubles with HIV-tainted transfusion blood, have seriously decreased public confidence in the ability of authorities to protect public health. Nevertheless, the scientific evidence pointing to the safety of biotech food is impressive in breadth. It was EU political leaders, not scientists, who hit the panic button in June 1999 in Brussels, creating the de facto moratorium on GMO authorizations in the wake of the monarch butterfly report. Yet the Bt corn concerned had already won approval from scientists in the United States, Chile, Argentina and France, as well as from the EU's own scientific committee.

       Several high-placed European Commission scientists privately told Reader's Digest that they are dismayed by the politically generated confusion in Brussels over GMOs. "It's chaos," says one. "GMOs are now perceived here as different from other foods. They're not."

       Food-safety specialists agree that the Commission must create a centralized, science-based, nonpolitical regulatory agency to carry out the GM approval process. In January it proposed setting up an independent European food authority in 2002.

       That's not to say, however, that citizens should not voice their opinion. In Switzerland, for example, there were five months of freewheeling public debate in 1998. Citizens then voted 2 to 1 against banning several aspects of biotechnology, including field releases of GM crops. No other European country has gone through this process.

       Politicians must listen to the scientists and give them more of a say in determining policies on GMOs. The subject is too complex, and too much is at stake, for policy to be set by political posturing.

       Until such changes are made, consumers will go on being unsure of what's on their plates -- and worried about the butterflies in their fields.

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