Genetically Modified Organisms: Frankenfood or a Solution?

Rocky Mountain Bullhorn cover story, -2000

 

 

Unless you only eat certified organic foods, then you’ve probably already become a part of what some of the globe’s top scientists call ‘the world’s largest unregulated research project’— that of genetically engineered foods.

 

While genetic modification (GM) to create ‘designer’ superhumans has been met with ideological resistance, in the U.S, the GM food revolution has occurred beneath the radar of public scrutiny.

 

An estimated 60-70% of the foods on our grocery store shelves contain genetically modified components, mostly ingredients made from corn, canola and soy.

 

Genetic engineering, also called genetic manipulation, or even ‘genetic enhancement’ by industry insiders, is a scientific process that makes it possible to skip the species barrier that limits traditional farming and combine traits of totally unrelated species, such as humans and pigs or fish and tomatoes.

 

To do this, ‘a slice’ of DNA is extracted from an animal or vegetable gene and transplanted into another, thereby ‘customizing’ an organism to have specific traits. New crop traits can include increased nutritional value, a shortened growing season, or ‘built in’ resistance to herbicides and pesticides.

 

Genetically modified tomatoes are injected with the ‘anti-freeze’ gene from flounder, to allow them a longer growing season.

 

Proponents and Biotech corporations say genetic engineering of foods is a method by which modern science can improve the world, increasing crop yields and nutritional values.

 

To critics, it’s an Orwellian nightmare in the making —  a few multinational corporations playing God with the world’s food supply.

 

“Genetic technologies are potentially far more dangerous than nuclear,” says physicist, John Hagelin, who just made his third bid for U.S. Presidency.

 

“You’re manipulating the very foundation of life, and gene pollution is self-perpetuating and irreversible, so where nuclear disaster only last ten thousand years, genetic pollution lasts forever.”

 

Hagelin was one of 357 prominent scientists from 42 countries, who signed a widely circulated ‘open letter from world scientists.’ that outlines why there should be an immediate global ban placed on GM foods. The letter was sent to the volatile World Trade Organization Conference in Seattle last year and the UN Biosafety Protocol Meeting that took place this year.

 

The scientists say that with the lack of scientific research on the long-term results, GM foods go against a fundamental scientific concept, the Precautionary Principle, which states that when there is reasonable suspicion of harm, preventative measures should be taken to protect the public.

 

“These foods were never tested for safety, either for the health impact or the environmental impact.” says Carolyn Bninski, of the Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center, an activist organization headquartered in Boulder. 

 

“This totally new technology could result in a number of unintended consequences and already a number of these consequences have already been seen.”

 

One of those consequences is the death of a variety of butterflies, most notably the Monarch butterfly who have died on a large scale after eating bioengineered Bt corn, so named because it has the natural pesticide, Bacillus thuringiensis ‘built in.’

 

The findings worry ecologists and organic farmers, who are permitted to use Bt, because insects could build resistance to the natural pesticide upon which organic farmers depend.

 



Adding to the public skepticism of GM foods was the recent FDA recall of of over 300 food products that were found to contain Starlink GM corn, which is produced for animal feed and not approved for human consumption.

 

One half to one percent of the US corn crop is Starlink corn designed as animal feed. It is likely the public would have never known about the release of Starlink into the food supply had a coalition of environmental organizations not conducted independent testing on the products, uncovering that they were tainted with animal feed known to cause digestive problems and allergies.

 

“There are some allegations surfacing. In fact, a woman called me and said she felt that she had been made ill because she ate a corn taco and then got very sick afterward, and she thinks it was probably because of Starlink.”says Suzanne Wuerthele, a toxicologist with the Denver office of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

 

Wuerthele says it’s difficult to establish a clear cause and effect because no government agency is in charge of monitoring allegations of ill effects related to GM foods. Possibly thousands of people across the nation may have suffered minor symptoms such as a headache or indigestion, but were completely unaware it may be attributed to Starlink corn, she says.

 

The EPA allowed Aventis, the corporation that developed Starlink corn, to police themselves to keep Starlink out of the food supply.

 

Aventis was instructed to educate farmers growing Starlink how to segregate it from regular corn to ensure that it wouldn’t cross-pollinate regular corn, but that wasn’t enough.

 

Even if the farmers did everything right there was no pre-existing system to separate Starlink and non-GM corn at the grain elevators, says Wuerthele, so they inevitably got mixed in together.

 

“Frankly the process to make sure that that Starlink corn was used in the proper way was actually run very sloppily, It never should have happened that way,” says Jim Miller, Policy Director at the Colorado Department of Agriculture.

 

“They simply said, ‘You may not use this corn for anything other than livestock feed.’ The problem is we didn’t have the infrastructure to enable that to happen. The fact that the EPA issued that approval knowing full well they had no way to back that up — they had no way to control use the of that product. It was up to the industry to do it the EPA said, and beyond that you can point your finger anyway you want.”

 

The apparent lack of accountability regarding biotech products can be traced to the Reagan/Bush administration and specifically to, Dan Quayle’s ‘Council on Competitiveness’ policy which rejected new regulations that might hinder the prosperity of the promising biotech industry, then in its infancy.

 

Instead, approval of the products was left to existing agencies; the FDA, the Department of Agriculture, the EPA and the United States Dairy Association.

 

In the absence of special regulations, the confusion as to which agency is responsible for what continues today because inter-species GE foods often fall under more than one category.

 

“We’ve traditionally regulated chemical pesticides,” says Wuerthele of the EPA.

 

“But now you’ve got a plant that makes a pesticide, and it’s also a food. It’s a pesticide and a food — it’s a floor wax and a dessert topping.”

 

“When they did this back in 1984, and said, ‘Okay we’re not going to make any special regulations’ I don’t think they realized what this means. That there would eventually be organisms that all three agencies would have to regulate, or should at least have review of,” says Wuerthele.

 

“So you can see that this is a totally new area, and how new the technology is that is creating these questions.”

 

“The whole issue with Starlink,” says Jim Miller, of the Department of Agriculture, “has really brought to light the need for our industry to say; ‘Are we prepared to govern at any time to be able to grow a crop for a very specific use? Do we have the infrastructure to be able to isolate that corn or that field crop and keep that identity preserved all the way through to its finally use?’”

 

Once they get past administrative hurdles, says Miller, there is absolutely no reason to reject GM foods altogether.

 

“My guess is that biotechnology will quickly, quickly begin to deliver benefits to the consumer through more nutritional products, even the ability to quickly accommodate a type of pharmaceutical process where you could actually develop a banana with extraordinary abilities to fight disease.

 

“I just see this coming, maybe not in my lifetime, but hopefully — I’m only 50 years old.”

 

Those with a less rosy outlook say that rather than having an interest in the public’s health, the biotech corporations’ singular focus on increasing profit above all else, mean the dangers of lack of regulations lurk around every turn.

 

Some GM crops now in development are designed primarily to increase the use of pesticides sold by the same multinational corporations who are selling, or planning on selling, GM seeds.

 

Monsanto corporation’s Roundup Ready seeds can withstand heavy doses of their money-making pesticide, Roundup. Not only can they can sell their own seeds, they can sell more of the chemicals that go along with it.

 

Miller says people’s fears are unfounded. He points to a biotech product called Golden Rice that has been developed by the Rockefeller Foundation. The seeds of the rice, ‘genetically enhanced’ with beta carotene, will be distributed in developing countries to prevent blindness.

 

“Nobody’s going to get rich on that, “ he says. “Why deprive the third world of the ability to see because you don’t like the smell of something called a multinational corporation?”

 

But critics say Golden Rice is just a complicated answer to a simple problem — poverty.

 

“In our society we tend to always look for a technological fix. You know, people aren’t getting enough vitamin A, so lets make a special new plant and change agriculture in Asia and then they’ll have vitamin A,” says Wuerthele.

 

“The question is; who will really benefit from this? Wouldn’t it be simpler for them to find a way to get people vegetables, that are already available in their own country now, that would not only give them vitamin A, but vitamin C, and magnesium and calcium and everything else, all at once?”

The FDA is the agency most often accused of bending over backwards to accomodate the biotech industry.

 

Companies are allowed to police the safety of their own products and present their findings. The FDA itself does no pre-market or post-market studies on the safety of GMOs.

 

In many cases they have given the green light on GM crops against the recommendations of some of their own scientists.

 

Dr.Louis Pribyl, a microbiologist with the FDA wrote, “There is a profound difference between the types of unexpected effects from traditional breeding and genetic engineering which is just glanced over in this document.”

 

 

In a 1995 FDA Consumer article author John Henkel wrote; “Genetic Engineering already is improving lives in areas such as disease diagnostics and treatments, but at the moment it is a fledgling economic force in the commercial food business.”

 

The paper goes on to say, “The important thing for consumers to know about these foods is that they will be every bit as safe as the foods now on the store shelves.”

 

It’s these kind of bold assertions, partnered with the lack of FDA testing on GM foods to back them up that prompted the Alliance for Bio-Integrity, a coalition of public interest groups, scientists, and religious leaders to file a lawsuit against the FDA in May 1998.

 

The lawsuit demands mandatory safety testing and labeling of all genetically engineered (GE) foods, and is still ongoing.

 

An FDA press officer who declined to be identified said she could not discuss ongoing litigation or GM foods on the record at all because, “We need to be in the background as much as possible.”

 

Nevertheless, the FDA is expected to institute new guidelines for GM foods next month. The guidelines will require 120 days advance notification to the FDA before GM foods appear on the grocery store shelves. Currently no notification is required.

 

Due to public pressure, the FDA will also be coming out with a neutral criteria for labeling of GM or non-GM products. The idea is to create language for the labeling that neither promotes nor condones genetic engineering  “so that it won’t appear that the product is better or worse than another product,” said the FDA representative.

 

The upcoming Congress will also be considering legislation to make labeling on biotech foods mandatory, but it is expected that deep-pocketed corporate lobbyists will be successful in their bid to block any such regulation.

 

The United States is the unofficial testing ground for GM foods both because of most of the biotech corporations are headquartered here and because restrictions are looser than most other countries.

 

In Europe, and even some countries in the southern hemisphere, the public has expressed their objections to genetical modified foods loud and clear and demanded labeling.

 

Farmers have benefited most from biotechnology so far, says Miller from the Department of Agriculture. GM technology means increased crop yields, but farmers question the economic viability of growing biotech crops that can not be exported due to stricter legislation abroad.

 

 “There was a greater amount (of biotech corn) grown last year,” admits Miller. “When the controversy over whether or not you could export corn to the European Union came out there was some fear among corn growers that it would probably be unwise to go to a bio
tech product right now. The assumption was you wouldn’t be able to sell it.”

 

And there may be more reluctance on the part of farmers after the Starlink corn fiasco. Colorado corn growers, for the most part, have avoided the Starlink controversy, because most of Colorado’s corn is produced as animal feed aimed for the domestic market.

 

In late October, Aventis corporation issued a new in-house safety report for Starlink corn and appealed to the FDA to approve it for human consumption.Now biotech industries are looking to grow chemicals within crops, such as motor oil in canola, or pharmaceutical drugs in tobacco plants, which would bring up a whole new set of ecological, social and consumer issues. The biotech industry is clearly eager to push ahead with new technologies and get quick approval of existing ones.

 

If Starlink corn is any indication, the government entities designated to keep the industry in check will give a tentative go ahead in the interest of progress and sort out any consequences later.

 

“We haven’t seen anything yet,” says Miller, from the Department of Agriculture, “I for one refuse to be scared off from the potential of this technology.”

 

 

 

When I wrote this article, the genetically modified food industry was exploding and was a hot topic worldwide. Environmental groups were scrambling to highlight the dangers of GE foods and activists and governments around the world worked swiftly to enact legislation labeling so-called ‘frankenfoods’ before they hit the markets.

 

The world has since moved on from the story, but in the meantime GM foods have become the norm in the U.S. and Canada. When GE’s first came to market the idea that you could splice genes from two very different species to create ‘designer food’ made many uneasy due to possible unintended consequences of messing with Mother Nature.

 

While increased crop yields are an important goal, due to worldwide population growth, legitimate concerns about GE foods remain.

 

I almost had the opportunity to interview ecologist and activist, Dr. Vandana Shiva, one of the world’s leading critics of GMO’s for this story.

 

I don’t know where I got her number — maybe one of my IANS contacts?

 

I called her and was surprised to find she answered her own office phone. She was pleasant but sounded expectedly busy as she was already a rockstar in the ecology world at the time. Shiva long ago mastered the art of delivering powerful sound bites that resonate with those concerned about the more unsettling aspects of the collision between capitalism and food production. She told me to try to catch her later, but unfortunately we had to go to press before I got her on the line again.

 

I’ve read enough of Shiva’s work to know that she believes allowing intellectual property right for seeds is a capitalistic imposition that rises to the level of abuse of human rights, and she has long blamed it for the high rates of suicide among Indian farmers.

 

Largely thanks to Shiva, India does not permit importation of GM seeds or grains (genetically modified bt cotton is widely planted though) and legislation that went into effect in 2021 increased India’s regulations, requiring fruit, vegetables and grains to be accompanied by a certificate which states that the product is of non-GM origin.

 

Just as in other countries where GMOs have been introduced though, India’s ban doesn’t prevent GM foods from reaching the market.

 

Even if strict regulations were in place throughout the food supply chain, it doesn’t mean that nature can even reasonably be contained.

 

When this article was published, the concern about the diminishment of Monarch butterflies was just beginning.

 

Today, Monarch butterflies move closer to extinction with their population down to 1% of previous numbers in one region where they are tracked.

 

 

Golden Rice, touted by Miller from the USDA, proved to be an abstract, hard-to-implement solution to address the problem of childhood vitamin deficiency.

 

The Philippines became the first country to approve commercial production of Golden Rice, but poor people don’t typically own plots of land on which to grow it, and landowning farmers see no incentive to grow it over their traditional variety.

 

In the 30 years since Golden Rice was developed, the Philippines has halved childhood Vitamin A deficiency, which now stands at 17%, but not because of Golden Rice.

 

Instead the improvements are thanks to traditional childhood nutrition programs and simply as a welcome byproduct of decreasing poverty rates overall.

 

Other countries such as the U.S., Canada, and Australia have approved Golden Rice for the consumer market, but the authorities haven’t received any applications to cultivate it, so it is still not approved for commercial production.

 

More than GE foods themselves, the herbicide Roundup has been blamed for cancer and infertility worldwide.

 

Monsanto was bought out by Bayer AG in 2018, and inherited tens of thousands of pending lawsuits against the company.

 

In the U.S. alone Reuters revealed that there 42,700 plaintiffs suing Bayer. After the acquisition, Bayer lost the first three lawsuits brought against them.

 

Juries were appalled at the behind-the-scenes shenanigans of Monsanto. The plaintiffs, who blamed Roundup for their non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, won multimillion dollar settlements.

 

Although still appealing decisions in the first three lawsuits, Bayer has since decided to allocate $10.9 billion to future settlements with 125,000 litigants rather than further sour public perception of the company and its products (Bayer’s stock tanked after losing in the courts).

 

The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), a World Health Organization agency based in France, lists glyphosate as a Group 2a carcinogen, meaning it is ‘probably carcinogenic’ to humans.

 

This lies in contrast to the Environmental Protection Agency’s, 2020 assertion that glyphosate poses ‘no risks of concern to human health’ if used correctly.

 

Nevertheless, with a mountain of lawsuits facing them, Bayer decided in July 2021 to retire Roundup from the U.S. home consumer market by 2023.

 

 

 

Le Monde also reported that Monsanto had secret files of journalists and politicians, which prompted French Prosecutors to file charges against the company.

 

The U.S. ultimately passed a specious GMO labeling bill in 2016.

 

Backed by Monsanto, The Safe and Accurate Food Labeling Act allows for GMO information to not actually appear on food labels but, be hidden behind a bar code that has to be scanned and looked up online to find the desired information.

 

The bill also exempts products made with high fructose corn syrup or soybean oil made with GMOs, so most processed foods.

 

The law also overturned a stricter state law in Vermont and prevents individual states from making their own labeling legislation in the future.

 

Environmental groups and anti GMO activists referred to the legislation the DARK bill, for ‘Deny Americans the Right to Know.’

 

The year the Safe and Accurate Food Labeling Act was passed was a very good year for campaign donations from Monsanto.

 

Those in the U.S. now eat genetically modified foods daily.

Now — contrary to the early GM days, when I produced this article — even those who eat only certified organic foods in the U.S. are still most likely consuming GM foods.

The cat is long out of the proverbial bag.

Most of the soybean, corn and canola is genetically modified and it’s almost impossible to avoid those three ingredients.

Nonetheless, according to Pew Research, nearly half of Americans believe they are not consuming GM foods.

 

While facing a mountain of litigation themselves, Monsanto aggressively sued farmers who claimed they unwittingly used Monsanto’s patented seeds after their fields were contaminated by pollen or seeds from neighboring farms’ crops, or even borrowed equipment.

 

Contamination of traditional crops with GMO’s continues to be a problem for farmers worldwide.

 

More than twenty years after the Starlink fiasco, the European Union still forbids imports of U.S.-produced GE corn or High Fructose Corn Syrup.

 

Due to both genetic cross contamination and the dangers of impurity in the supply chain, responsible farmers and seed sellers simply do not guarantee that their products are GE free anymore.

 

Jerry Armstrong, vice president of North American Seed Sales, Pioneer Hi-Bred, admitted the company could not guarantee their traditional non-GE products were not contaminated:

 

 

The same language indicating ‘no GE-free guarantee’ is now standard.

 

You can read the same exact verbiage on validation certificates for sunflower seeds and wheat.

Agro Business and GM Food in the U.S. and Argentina

Although both Presidents purported to be concerned about ecology, both U.S. President Barack Obama and Argentine President Cristina Kirchner handed over unprecedented control over their respective countries’ food supply to multinational biotech companies.

Obama appointed former Monsanto Vice President, Michael Taylor as the ‘Food Czar’ of the Federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 2009.

Taylor was Deputy Commissioner of Policy at the FDA back in 1992.

He is the person responsible for writing the wide-reaching policy that GMOs are “substantially equivalent” to traditional crops, which opened the door for GMOs to go market without independent testing.

In 2012, former Argentine President, Cristina Kirchner (and current VP) met with Monsanto in the U.S. where she famously said, “Argentina has become a defender of (food) patents.“(video:Spanish)

Today, eighty-five percent of the corn in Argentina is genetically modified. Argentina’s number one cash crop is genetically modified soy, almost all of which is exported to China.

Argentina is third in the world in soy exports behind the U.S. and Brazil, which also produce GM soy.

All of those crops are engineered to be glyphosate-tolerant and produced with Roundup.

The Roundup and privacy lawsuits aren’t the only problems that Bayer EG inherited from Monsanto.

They are also so far on the losing end of lawsuits for another Monsanto legacy pesticide, dicamba.

Suggested Reading on GMO’s

Pro GMO:

“One Billion Hungry: Can We Feed the World?”*

Anti-GMO:

Earth Democracy: Justice, Sustainability and Peace 

The Monsanto Papers: Deadly Secrets, Corporate Corruption, and One Man’s Search for Justice

*affiliate links

Suggested Viewing:

The Corporation 

Food Evolution