The Three Mile Island of Biotech?

[Guest guest]

" JoAnn Guest <angelprincessjo "

<angelprincessjo

Mon Dec 23, 2002 9:36 pm

The Three Mile Island of Biotech?

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Three Mile Island of Biotech?

by John Nichols

 

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20021230 & s=nichols

 

Hamilton County, Nebraska, is where food comes from. You can visit

the Plainsman Museum on Highway 14 to learn about " farm life from the

1880s to the 1950s, " or you can just drive on up the highway and

learn about farm life in 2002 at any of the dozens of family farms

that still grow corn and soybeans on fields that some families have

worked since their ancestors homesteaded here just after the Civil

War. For more than a century, farmers in this fertile stretch of a

state where folks still refer to themselves as " cornhuskers " have

planted food crops each spring and trucked the harvest in the fall to

towering grain elevators on the edge of the bustling Great Plains

town of Aurora. Those grains become the cereals, the breads, the cake

mixes and the soy patties that feed America and the world.

 

This fall, however, the predictable patterns of Hamilton County and

American food production took on the characteristics of a dystopian

science-fiction story. An area farmer, who a year earlier had

supplemented his income by quietly planting a test plot with seed

corn genetically modified to produce proteins containing powerful

drugs for treatment of diarrhea in pigs, this year harvested soybeans

for human consumption from the same field. He trucked them off to the

Aurora Co-op, where they were mixed with soybeans from other fields

throughout the county in preparation for production as food. Just as

the soybeans were about to begin their journey to the nation's dinner

plates, a routine inspection of the test field by US Department of

Agriculture inspectors revealed that corn plants that should have

been completely removed were still growing in the field from which

the soybeans had been harvested--raising the prospect that the

pharmaceutical crop had mingled with the food crop.

 

Suddenly, as they say in Aurora, all kinds of hell broke loose. In

November, USDA investigators swooped into town to order the lockdown

of a warehouse filled with 500,000 bushels of food-grade soybeans

that had been contaminated by contact with the beans containing

remnants of the pharmaceutical corn. Aurora Co-op managers quietly

secured the soybeans. But when word of the incident leaked out,

Greenpeace campaigners climbed a tall white elevator to unfurl a

banner that read: " This Is Your Food on Drugs! " Agitated officials of

the Grocery Manufacturers of America expressed " concerns about the

possible adulteration of the US food supply. " Consumer groups made

unfavorable comparisons between the incident in Hamilton County and

the last great genetically engineered food debacle, which occurred

two years ago when GE StarLink corn that had been approved solely for

animal feed turned up in taco shells, chips and other food products.

 

Biotech industry groups and the government agencies with which they

have worked closely to promote the increased use of genetically

modified organisms in food crops rushed to assure consumers that all

was well. Anthony Laos, CEO of ProdiGene, the Texas biotech company

that has made Aurora ground zero for experiments in putting drugs

into food, and that faced a possible $500,000 fine and the loss of

its testing permit, promised to cover the $2.8 million cost of the

contaminated crops. Jim Rogers, a spokesman for the USDA's Animal and

Plant Health Inspection Service--which has been criticized for lax

oversight of pharmaceutical crop experiments, commonly known

as " biopharming " --said, " It's isolated, it's in one location, it's

not being moved. " That same week, however, it was revealed that

ProdiGene had been ordered, just two months earlier, to burn 155

acres of corn from an Iowa field where stray biotech plants

had " jumped the fence " and contaminated conventional corn crops.

 

But there is no two-strikes-and-you're-out rule at the USDA.

ProdiGene got off with a $250,000 fine and a promise to follow

regulations better. The company kept its permit to plant experimental

crops, and biotech promoters continue to push for policies that could

allow as much as 10 percent of US corn production to be devoted to

pharmaceutical crops by 2010. " The future of biopharmaceuticals has

simply never been brighter, " said Laos. Farm and food activists worry

that the events of fall 2002 will be little more than a bump in the

road to the brave new world of biopharming.

 

" This is the Three Mile Island of biotech, " says Mark Ritchie,

president of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy,

comparing this fall's incidents to the near-meltdown of the

Pennsylvania nuclear power plant, which led to a dramatic shift in

public attitudes about expansion of that industry. " The biotech

industry says that because some soybeans were quarantined at the last

minute, no one should worry. Well, at Three Mile Island, they

contained things. But that didn't mean it wasn't a crisis, and it

certainly didn't mean that people should have said, 'Oh, everything's

fine now. Let's just let these guys get back to business as usual.' "

 

Richie says it's crucial to seize the moment--this is possibly the

last chance to prevent the disasters that are all but certain to

occur if biotech corporations are allowed to continue on their

current course. " This is not the point to back off; this is the point

to move very aggressively to get a handle on what is happening, and

to control it, " he says. " We're at the earliest stage of the attempt

to genetically engineer corn plants to make them factories for

producing powerful and potentially dangerous drugs, and already we

have examples of contamination of food crops. This is scary stuff. "

[see Mark Schapiro, " Sowing Disaster? " October 28.]

[Guest guest]

I live in Aurora Nebraska, in Hamilton county, (and have lived here for 25

years, and know a lot of the farmers around here) and some of what this

report says is not accurate, with it's exaggerated adjectives trying to

portray a big deal happening here, and some of it's assertions. For example,

two men from Green Peace showed up, and hang a banner on the local grain

elevator. Within 15 minutes, the banner was down, the local sheriff had

arrested them, and there were no other witnesses other than the grain

elevator operators. Nobody else happened to be around to notice what was

going on. The fact that the sheriff and grain elevator operators reported it

to the local newspaper was probably the only way the general public would

have known about it. If Green Peace wants to make it's presence known, it

didn't do a very good job. Further, there were only a couple inspectors, and

the inspection was routine. The bulk of corn crops around here are field

corn, for use in cattle feed. A lot of it is BT corn, There is also a corn

seed production plant here. There is a dog food plant and an ethanol plant

in this county that use the bulk of the corn that's produced. There is very

little food crop corn grown around here, other than what people grow locally

for their own use. Soy is another story, however. But to equate the corn

crops as food crops is ludicrous, unless you people want to consume field

corn grown for cattle feed. Further, this past year was a drought year here

in Hamilton County, and the county was hit very bad. The quality of the corn

crops were so bad that it isn't likely that it would be used for food crops.

Rather than calling Hamilton County the Three Mile Island of Biotech, we

should be calling Hamilton County the Enron Whistle blower of Biotech.

 

There's more to the story than that, but I hope you understand what I'm

trying to say. You always need to take any " red flag " news with a grain of

salt, because there is no accurate or balanced reporting in the news media

now days. Most of it is exaggeration and emotion driven. I remember a few

months back when someone on one of my lists posted that the IAM's dog food

factory was producing dog food that was contaminated by fumes from a dry

cleaning plant next door to it. The IAM's dog food factory is in Hamilton

County, out in the middle of corn fields for miles, at least 5 miles from

the nearest dry cleaning plant. But it just makes me aware of how imbalanced

news and rumors can be.

 

But quite frankly, it's pointing the finger in the wrong direction. There

are grain processing centers in other areas that ARE processing

pharmaceutical products without knowing it. They just happen to be more

thorough in Aurora Nebraska, and caught it. Aurora Nebraska should be

commended for having caught this problem. Instead, people keep portraying

Aurora Nebraska as the center of some evil plot. If you want to find out

where pharmaceutical crops are biggest, look to countries like Puerto Rico,

where they grow a lot of pharmaceutical crops, including three

pharmaceutical corn crops a year, right next to corn food crops. Puerto Rico

is an ideal spot for growing corn, because the weather allows them to grow

three crops a year, and the laws controlling genetically modified crops are

not as stringent there as they are in the United States. Why not call Puerto

Rico the Three Mile Island of Biotech?

 

Further, there was not actual pharmaceutical products in the soy beans. The

corn plants that were found in the field were only 10 inches tall. They had

not begun to produce any corn yet. The part of the plant that contains the

pharmaceutical chemicals is in the seeds. So the " contaminated " soy beans

were only contaminated with residue from the leaves of the pharmaceutical

plants, which is a long cry from the StarLite fiasco.

 

I happen to personally know one of the farmers in a nearby county who grows

pharmaceutical crops. He's been growing them for years, as do other farmers

in other states. Pharmaceutical corn is not confined to Hamilton County

Nebraska. Suddenly people are made aware of this, after it's been done for

years? But one of the reasons why he turned to pharmaceutical crops in the

first place is because farmers can't make money growing corn. More and more

corn farmers have gone out of business, or had to become corporate farms in

order to stay in business. The price is too low for them to recap their

costs. If we want to change the direction that farmers are going, in growing

more and more genetically modified crops, we need to change the system that

allows middle men to make profits, while keeping the farmers from making any

profit. They will grow what makes them the most money. We need to take

pricing control out of the stock market and put it back under the control of

farmers, as most other businesses do to manage product pricing so that they

can make a profit at it. We need to change the system from one of auctioning

off corn to one of having production costs that are passed on to the

wholesaler.

 

One of the things that bothers me about all the reporting that I've seen

concerning the Hamilton County soybean contamination is that nobody has

specified what the pharmaceutical corn was engineered to produce. Was it

something so deadly that even tiny quantities of it could cause health

hazards? Then why was it growing out in the open in the first place? Or was

it something as benign as say corn that was engineered to produce human

progesterone, as the corn crops of the farmer that I happen to know

produces. For a human to accidentally ingest tiny amounts of progesterone

(and if the soybeans were contaminated, the amount would be almost

undetectable) would not be considered a major threat since men and women

both produce progesterone naturally in their bodies. Certainly people are

not raising the issue of hormonal pollutants like estrogen-like chemicals in

the same degree that they are raising the issue of genetically modified

crops. And yet our society is pumping out huge quantities of estrogen-like

chemicals, and ignoring the consequences. The reason why they're turning to

genetically modified crops to produce drugs like progesterone is that the

normal source for natural progesterone comes from pregnant horses, in a

rather inhumane process. Personally, I'd prefer genetically modified corn to

inhumane treatment of animals.

 

Incidentally, the USDA bought the contaminated soybeans. They were never

destroyed. Why isn't anyone asking what they intend to do with them?

 

Linda Jones

lindaj

 

-

<angelprincessjo

 

Monday, December 23, 2002 8:40 PM

The Three Mile Island of Biotech?

 

 

> " JoAnn Guest <angelprincessjo "

> <angelprincessjo

> Mon Dec 23, 2002 9:36 pm

> The Three Mile Island of Biotech?

>

>

>

>

>

>

> The Three Mile Island of Biotech?

> by John Nichols

>

> http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20021230 & s=nichols