Approving GM Crops is Abusing Science

[Guest guest]

1 Feb 2004 13:47:58 -0000

Approving GM Crops is Abusing Science

press-release

 

The Institute of Science in Society

Science Society Sustainability

http://www.i-sis.org.uk

 

General Enquiries sam

Website/Mailing List press-release

ISIS Director m.w.ho

===================================================

 

 

Approving GM Crops is Abusing Science

*************************************

 

 

Scientific evidence has gone decisively against GM crops. So why is commercial

growing allowed? Scientists from the Independent Science Panel are calling for

an enquiry. Dr. Mae-Wan Ho reports.

 

Prominent scientists representing more than a thousand colleagues around the

world voiced their deep concerns at the lack of social accountability of

publicly funded science, especially in genetically modified (GM) crops.

 

 

They spoke out at a Briefing to an audience of 120 at the Greater London

Assembly on Monday, 19 January 2003, organised jointly by Green Party member of

the Assembly Noel Lynch and the Institute of Science in Society (ISIS).

 

 

The scientists are particularly incensed at the persistent denial and dismissal

by the government’s scientific advisors of the now extensive scientific evidence

on the hazards of GM crops to health and the environment, in total disregard for

the precautionary principle.

 

 

The scientists belong to the London-based Institute of Science in Society,

representing more than 670 scientists from 76 countries, and Scientists for

Global Responsibility, with a membership of 600. All are also members of the

Independent Science Panel (ISP) on GM, launched 10 May 2003 at a public

conference in London attended by the then environment minister Michael Meacher

and 200 other participants.

 

 

The 24 scientists on the ISP published their report, The Case for a GM-Free

Sustainable World on the ISP website www.indsp.org 15 June 2003, billed as “a

complete dossier of evidence on the problems and hazards of GM crops as well as

the proven successes of all forms of non-GM sustainable agriculture”.

 

 

By July 3, the Report was downloaded 12 000 times in the United States alone. It

has since been published by ISIS and the Third World Network, republished by a

commercial publisher in the US, and widely translated. Spanish, French and

German translations have been done, and Indonesian and Portuguese translations

are on the way.

 

 

The evidence reviewed in this authoritative report, containing more than 200

references to primary and secondary sources, received ample corroboration from

new data released recently. The US Department of Agriculture confirmed that GM

crops increased herbicide and pesticide use by more than 50 million pounds since

1996.

 

 

UK’s Farm Scale Evaluations (FSEs), much criticised for being limited in scope

and biased in methodology, nevertheless confirmed that two of the three GM crops

harmed wildlife.

 

 

The third, GM maize tolerant to the herbicide glufosinate, appeared to do better

only because the conventional maize crop was sprayed with the deadly herbicide

atrazine that Europe banned a week before the FSEs Report was released. This was

exposed and universally condemned by public interest organisations. A

spokesperson of GM-Free Cymru – a group campaigning to ban GM crops from Wales -

called it a “cynical and dishonest” manipulation of the scientific process.

 

 

Despite all that, the Advisory Committee on Release to the Environment gave the

green light to growing the GM maize in Britain.

“Scientific evidence has gone decisively against GM crops,” said Dr. Mae-Wan Ho, of the Institute of Science in Society. “But that’s only scratching the

surface.”

 

 

She revealed how twelve dairy cows died in a farm in Hesse, Germany, after being

fed GM maize. “That is by no means an isolated incident.” She said, and reminded

her audience of research by Arpad Pusztai and his collaborators, by other

scientists, plus a host of anecdotal evidence showing that different GM feed

also harmed other livestock and lab animals (see “GM food safe?” series, Science

in Society 21). “This suggests there may be something seriously wrong with GM

food and feed in general.”

 

 

It has to do with the overwhelming instability of GM varieties, she said.

Practically every GM variety analysed by French and Belgian scientists recently,

including the T25 GM maize that the UK government is authorising for growing in

Britain, turned out to be unstable, and in some cases, non-uniform. “This would

make them illegal under European legislation.” She pointed out.

 

 

“We all want to benefit from what new technologies have to offer, but history

shows that, all too often, we have failed to heed well-founded warnings and made

very expensive mistakes, and GM could be one of these;” says Professor Peter

Saunders, bio-mathematician, King’s College, London, “Precaution is the key, and

precaution is inseparable from good science.” He also insisted it was up to

companies to prove “beyond reasonable doubt” that their products are safe, in

analogy to a court of law. The current practice is anti-precautionary, for the

burden on proof is misplaced, as it is left up to the public to prove something

“harmful” before it could be withdrawn.

 

 

He demolished all the objections of critics, including the one that says the

precautionary principle would prevent any innovation in society. “On the

contrary,” he said, “It would not have prevented Sir Walter Raleigh from

introducing cigarettes to the world as there was no evidence suggesting

cigarettes were harmful; but it would surely have prevented tens of millions of

deaths had the precautionary principle been applied when evidence linking

smoking to lung cancer became available.”

 

 

Dr. Vyvyan Howard, medical toxi-pathologist, Liverpool University, showed how

so-called risk assessment is based on fictitious, simplistic models that are a

travesty of nature’s complexity. That’s what he called “fact-free” risk

assessment. “The £1.6 million given by the UK Government to Dr. Pusztai was to

develop hazard assessment techniques for novel foods. That tells us the

regulators recognized that the methods in use then were not adequate to protect

human health. Not much has changed, and it seems that line of research is no

longer seriously pursued. Consequently, the current risk assessments are still

totally inadequate.”

 

 

Dr. Arpad Pusztai, formerly of Rowett Institute, Aberdeen, Scotland, concurred.

“Science is able to provide the tools for conducting thorough risk assessments

on GM foods, yet this is not being done adequately. It leads one to ask, ‘Who is

responsible for not ensuring that GM foods are properly assessed, and why?’”

 

 

The risk assessment process is a sham, said Joe Cummins, Emeritus Professor of

Plant Genetics from University of Western Ontario, Canada. For example, there

are many toxins isolated from the soil bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis –Bt

toxins - incorporated into crops. Many are synthetic versions of the natural

toxins, and they are also processed differently in plants, with different

carbohydrate added to the protein. “But companies are allowed to test the

natural toxins instead of the toxins from the GM plants, as they would be eaten

by animals and human beings.” Said Joe Cummins.

 

 

Joe Cummins is also very critical of his own government: “The Canadian

government pumped millions of dollars into developing GM crops, especially GM

wheat, owned by the corporations. In return, the corporations agreed to enhance

the salaries of agricultural bureaucrats. The cosy relationship between the

corporations and government has resulted in lax regulation and widespread

pollution of non-GM crops. Worse still, scientists are intimidated into silence;

they are afraid to speak out, let alone do experiments on the risks and hazards

of GM.”

 

 

Many scientists deplore the pervasive commercial and political conflicts of

interests in both research and development and regulation of GM. Dr. Eva

Novotny, astrophysicist, formerly from Cambridge University, and spokesperson

for Scientists for Global Responsibility sums it up: “Vested interests must not

override science, economics and what the public want.”

 

Who are the winners and the losers in this GM debate? The environment, farmers

and consumers are all losers if GM crops are to be grown. Companies may appear

to be winners, but consumers have roundly rejected their offerings, farmers who

grew GM crops elsewhere have lost their markets. A report released last April by

Innovest Strategic Value Advisors signalled that agricultural biotechnology is a

high-risk industry not worth investing in. The Economics Review commissioned by

the UK Government last summer confirmed that there is no market for GM crops.

“GM companies might do best to cut their losses and begin producing something

their potential customers will actually want.” Said Eva Novotny.

 

 

The scientists are keen to work in partnership with farmers in research and

development of sustainable agriculture. John Turner, organic farmer from FARM, a

group set up in 2002 to represent independent and family farmers in the wake of

the foot and mouth epidemic, confirms that farmers in his organisation

overwhelmingly reject the commercial growing of GM crops. He is very

enthusiastic about the possibility of forming a scientists-farmers coalition. He

says: “This will ensure that science can respond to the present needs of

agriculture, and anticipate future aspirations and needs of farmers and

consumers.”

 

 

“The problem with our government’s scientific advisors is that they not only

refuse to look at evidence in their own field of molecular genetics, they refuse

to look at evidence from other fields, such as the documented successes of

non-GM sustainable agriculture.” Mae-Wan Ho pointed out.

 

 

She just returned from visiting Ethiopia, which has a Green as president. The

head of its Environment Protection Authority, Dr. Tewolde Egziabher, and Sue

Edwards, Director of the Institute of Sustainable Development, started a small

project in sustainable agriculture in the state of Tigray at the very north of

the country in 1996.

 

 

Mae-Wan Ho summarised the work with great enthusiasm: “The results were so good

that the project rapidly spread, and now 2 000 families are involved. Over a

range of agricultural land from wet to very dry, from rich soils to very poor

thin soils, farmers found that just by adopting pit composting, the traditional

way in Ethiopia, they were able to increase yields up to 4-fold, and do better

than chemical fertilizers in the overwhelming majority of farms. That is

something Londoners can do in their garden while they keep London and Britain

GM-Free.”

 

 

The Briefing itself was webcast. To see this please go to ,

http://wms5.westminster-digital.co.uk/gla/meetings/winningthegmdebate_190104.wmv

 

 

 

===================================================

This article can be found on the I-SIS website at http://www.i-sis.org.uk/

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If you would like to be removed from our mailing list - please reply

to press-release with the word in the subject field

===================================================

CONTACT DETAILS

The Institute of Science in Society, PO Box 32097, London NW1 OXR

telephone: [44 20 8643 0681 [44 20 7383 3376] [44 20 7272 5636]

 

General Enquiries sam

Website/Mailing List press-release

ISIS Director m.w.ho

 

MATERIAL IN THIS EMAIL MAY BE REPRODUCED IN ANY FORM WITHOUT PERMISSION, ON

CONDITION THAT IT IS ACCREDITED ACCORDINGLY AND CONTAINS A LINK TO

http://www.i-sis.org.uk/

 

 

 

 

 

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[Guest guest]

Approving GM Crops is Abusing Science

 

press-release

 

The Institute of Science in Society Science Society Sustainability

http://www.i-sis.org.uk

 

General Enquiries sam Website/Mailing List

press-release ISIS Director m.w.ho

===================================================

 

Approving GM Crops is Abusing Science

*************************************

 

Scientific evidence has gone decisively against GM crops. So why is

commercial growing allowed? Scientists from the Independent Science

Panel are calling for an enquiry. Dr. Mae-Wan Ho reports.

 

Prominent scientists representing more than a thousand colleagues around

the world voiced their deep concerns at the lack of social

accountability of publicly funded science, especially in genetically

modified (GM) crops.

 

They spoke out at a Briefing to an audience of 120 at the Greater London

Assembly on Monday, 19 January 2003, organised jointly by Green Party

member of the Assembly Noel Lynch and the Institute of Science in

Society (ISIS).

 

The scientists are particularly incensed at the persistent denial and

dismissal by the government’s scientific advisors of the now extensive

scientific evidence on the hazards of GM crops to health and the

environment, in total disregard for the precautionary principle.

 

The scientists belong to the London-based Institute of Science in

Society, representing more than 670 scientists from 76 countries, and

Scientists for Global Responsibility, with a membership of 600. All are

also members of the Independent Science Panel (ISP) on GM, launched 10

May 2003 at a public conference in London attended by the then

environment minister Michael Meacher and 200 other participants.

 

The 24 scientists on the ISP published their report, The Case for a

GM-Free Sustainable World on the ISP website www. indsp. org 15 June

2003, billed as “a complete dossier of evidence on the problems and

hazards of GM crops as well as the proven successes of all forms of

non-GM sustainable agricultureâ€.

 

By July 3, the Report was downloaded 12 000 times in the United States

alone. It has since been published by ISIS and the Third World Network,

republished by a commercial publisher in the US, and widely translated.

Spanish, French and German translations have been done, and Indonesian

and Portuguese translations are on the way.

 

The evidence reviewed in this authoritative report, containing more than

200 references to primary and secondary sources, received ample

corroboration from new data released recently. The US Department of

Agriculture confirmed that GM crops increased herbicide and pesticide

use by more than 50 million pounds since 1996.

 

UK’s Farm Scale Evaluations (FSEs), much criticised for being limited in

scope and biased in methodology, nevertheless confirmed that two of the

three GM crops harmed wildlife.

 

The third, GM maize tolerant to the herbicide glufosinate, appeared to

do better only because the conventional maize crop was sprayed with the

deadly herbicide atrazine that Europe banned a week before the FSEs

Report was released. This was exposed and universally condemned by

public interest organisations. A spokesperson of GM-Free Cymru – a group

campaigning to ban GM crops from Wales - called it a “cynical and

dishonest†manipulation of the scientific process.

 

Despite all that, the Advisory Committee on Release to the Environment

gave the green light to growing the GM maize in Britain. “Scientific

evidence has gone decisively against GM crops,†said Dr. Mae-Wan Ho, of the Institute of Science in Society. “But that’s only

scratching the surface.â€

 

She revealed how twelve dairy cows died in a farm in Hesse, Germany,

after being fed GM maize. “That is by no means an isolated incident.â€

She said, and reminded her audience of research by Arpad Pusztai and his

collaborators, by other scientists, plus a host of anecdotal evidence

showing that different GM feed also harmed other livestock and lab

animals (see “GM food safe?†series, Science in Society 21). “This

suggests there may be something seriously wrong with GM food and feed in

general.â€

 

It has to do with the overwhelming instability of GM varieties, she

said. Practically every GM variety analysed by French and Belgian

scientists recently, including the T25 GM maize that the UK government

is authorising for growing in Britain, turned out to be unstable, and in

some cases, non-uniform. “This would make them illegal under European

legislation.†She pointed out.

 

“We all want to benefit from what new technologies have to offer, but

history shows that, all too often, we have failed to heed well-founded

warnings and made very expensive mistakes, and GM could be one of

these;†says Professor Peter Saunders, bio-mathematician, King’s

College, London, “Precaution is the key, and precaution is inseparable

from good science.†He also insisted it was up to companies to prove

“beyond reasonable doubt†that their products are safe, in analogy to a

court of law. The current practice is anti-precautionary, for the burden

on proof is misplaced, as it is left up to the public to prove something

“harmful†before it could be withdrawn.

 

He demolished all the objections of critics, including the one that says

the precautionary principle would prevent any innovation in society. “On

the contrary,†he said, “It would not have prevented Sir Walter Raleigh

from introducing cigarettes to the world as there was no evidence

suggesting cigarettes were harmful; but it would surely have prevented

tens of millions of deaths had the precautionary principle been applied

when evidence linking smoking to lung cancer became available.â€

 

Dr. Vyvyan Howard, medical toxi-pathologist, Liverpool University,

showed how so-called risk assessment is based on fictitious, simplistic

models that are a travesty of nature’s complexity. That’s what he called

“fact-free†risk assessment. “The £1.6 million given by the UK

Government to Dr. Pusztai was to develop hazard assessment techniques

for novel foods. That tells us the regulators recognized that the

methods in use then were not adequate to protect human health. Not much

has changed, and it seems that line of research is no longer seriously

pursued. Consequently, the current risk assessments are still totally

inadequate.â€

 

Dr. Arpad Pusztai, formerly of Rowett Institute, Aberdeen, Scotland,

concurred. “Science is able to provide the tools for conducting thorough

risk assessments on GM foods, yet this is not being done adequately. It

leads one to ask, ‘Who is responsible for not ensuring that GM foods are

properly assessed, and why?’â€

 

The risk assessment process is a sham, said Joe Cummins, Emeritus

Professor of Plant Genetics from University of Western Ontario, Canada.

For example, there are many toxins isolated from the soil bacterium

Bacillus thuringiensis –Bt toxins - incorporated into crops. Many are

synthetic versions of the natural toxins, and they are also processed

differently in plants, with different carbohydrate added to the protein.

“But companies are allowed to test the natural toxins instead of the

toxins from the GM plants, as they would be eaten by animals and human

beings.†Said Joe Cummins.

 

Joe Cummins is also very critical of his own government: “The Canadian

government pumped millions of dollars into developing GM crops,

especially GM wheat, owned by the corporations. In return, the

corporations agreed to enhance the salaries of agricultural bureaucrats.

The cosy relationship between the corporations and government has

resulted in lax regulation and widespread pollution of non-GM crops.

Worse still, scientists are intimidated into silence; they are afraid to

speak out, let alone do experiments on the risks and hazards of GM.â€

 

Many scientists deplore the pervasive commercial and political conflicts

of interests in both research and development and regulation of GM. Dr.

Eva Novotny, astrophysicist, formerly from Cambridge University, and

spokesperson for Scientists for Global Responsibility sums it up:

“Vested interests must not override science, economics and what the

public want.â€

 

Who are the winners and the losers in this GM debate? The environment,

farmers and consumers are all losers if GM crops are to be grown.

Companies may appear to be winners, but consumers have roundly rejected

their offerings, farmers who grew GM crops elsewhere have lost their

markets. A report released last April by Innovest Strategic Value

Advisors signalled that agricultural biotechnology is a high-risk

industry not worth investing in. The Economics Review commissioned by

the UK Government last summer confirmed that there is no market for GM

crops. “GM companies might do best to cut their losses and begin

producing something their potential customers will actually want.†Said

Eva Novotny.

 

The scientists are keen to work in partnership with farmers in research

and development of sustainable agriculture. John Turner, organic farmer

from FARM, a group set up in 2002 to represent independent and family

farmers in the wake of the foot and mouth epidemic, confirms that

farmers in his organisation overwhelmingly reject the commercial growing

of GM crops. He is very enthusiastic about the possibility of forming a

scientists-farmers coalition. He says: “This will ensure that science

can respond to the present needs of agriculture, and anticipate future

aspirations and needs of farmers and consumers.â€

 

“The problem with our government’s scientific advisors is that they not

only refuse to look at evidence in their own field of molecular

genetics, they refuse to look at evidence from other fields, such as the

documented successes of non-GM sustainable agriculture.†Mae-Wan Ho

pointed out.

 

She just returned from visiting Ethiopia, which has a Green as

president. The head of its Environment Protection Authority, Dr. Tewolde

Egziabher, and Sue Edwards, Director of the Institute of Sustainable

Development, started a small project in sustainable agriculture in the

state of Tigray at the very north of the country in 1996.

 

Mae-Wan Ho summarised the work with great enthusiasm: “The results were

so good that the project rapidly spread, and now 2 000 families are

involved. Over a range of agricultural land from wet to very dry, from

rich soils to very poor thin soils, farmers found that just by adopting

pit composting, the traditional way in Ethiopia, they were able to

increase yields up to 4-fold, and do better than chemical fertilizers in

the overwhelming majority of farms. That is something Londoners can do

in their garden while they keep London and Britain GM-Free.â€

 

The Briefing itself was webcast. To see this please go to ,

http://wms5.westminster-digital.co.uk/gla/meetings/winningthegmdebate_190104.wmv

 

=================================================== This article can be

found on the I-SIS website at http://www.i-sis.org.uk/ If you would

prefer to receive future mailings as HTML please let us know. If you

would like to be removed from our mailing list - please reply to

press-release with the word in the subject

field =================================================== CONTACT

DETAILS The Institute of Science in Society, PO Box 32097, London NW1

OXR telephone: [44 20 8643 0681 [44 20 7383 3376] [44 20 7272 5636]

 

General Enquiries sam Website/Mailing List

press-release ISIS Director m.w.ho

 

MATERIAL IN THIS EMAIL MAY BE REPRODUCED IN ANY FORM WITHOUT PERMISSION,

ON CONDITION THAT IT IS ACCREDITED ACCORDINGLY AND CONTAINS A LINK TO

http://www.i-sis.org.uk/