Ban Endures On Terminator Seeds

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Suicide Seeds - Bombshell in Bangkok

ETC GroupNews ReleaseFriday, February 11, 2005www.etcgroup.org

Suicide Seeds - Bombshell in BangkokCanadian-Led Coup to Allow Terminator Technology Narrowly Squelched at UN Meeting

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Ban Endures On Terminator Seeds

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Inter Press Service (Johannesburg)

February 11, 2005 Posted to the web February 11, 2005

Stephen LeahyBrooklin, Canada

An international moratorium on the use of controversial "terminator technology" in genetically engineered crops survived efforts to overturn it at a United Nations interim meeting on the Convention on Biological Diversity in Bangkok Friday.

The Canadian government initiated the move to lift the de-facto moratorium and allow testing and commercialisation of the genetically engineered technology that makes seeds sterile.

"It was a complete surprise to see this coming from Canada," said Jim Thomas of the ETC Group, a Canadian-based NGO.

"Canada's proposal could easily have been mistaken for one written by (agribusiness giant) Monsanto," Thomas told IPS from Bangkok.

Leaked Canadian government documents obtained by ETC Group state that negotiators were instructed to "block consensus" on any other option.

However, African countries, Austria, Switzerland, Peru and the Philippines strongly objected to Canada's proposal, and on the final day of meetings Friday were successful in keeping the moratorium in place, he says.

The precautionary moratorium was first instituted at a Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) conference in 1998 over fears about the technology's impact on agricultural biodiversity, farmers' ability to save seeds, and the risk of "sterilisation genes" ending up in wild plants.

"Terminator", a term coined by activists for a specific technology developed in the late 1990s and now owned by Monsanto and the U.S. government, is just one type of genetic trait control technology. The official CBD term is genetic use restriction technologies (GURTs). Several other seed sterilisation or trait controls are in development.

"There's no scientific reason why GURTs should be banned before we've been able to evaluate them in field trials," says Stephen Yarrow, national manager of the Plant Biosafety Office at the Canadian Food Inspection Agency.

"The Canadian government supports farmers and seed saving," Yarrow told IPS. "However GURTs are a whole class of new technologies that offer a number of potential advantages."

"We're not pushing this technology. And we're quite upset at being characterised (by activists) that way."

Others believe that GURTs would be useful in non-food crops that are genetically engineered to produce pharmaceutical products to prevent formation of seeds.

"Used correctly GURTs can be a benefit to society," says Manjit Misra, director of the Seed Science Centre at Iowa State University in the United States.

The technology could have prevented the ProdiGene incident where an unwanted second generation of experimental maize plants containing a protein for a pig vaccine grew in a field of soy in the U.S. Midwest. The contamination was discovered post-harvest and resulted in about 14 million kilogrammes of soybeans being destroyed.

"This technology is also very important for the protection of intellectual property," he said. In preventing the re-use of seeds, seed companies can get a better return on their research and development costs.

"Without intellectual property protection, private companies won't make those investments. This is something developing countries don't appreciate," he said.

There are lots of uses for GURTs and intellectual property protection is one of them, agrees Dick Crowder of the American Seed Trade Association. Crowder couldn't say what his association's position is on the moratorium. However, the U.S. is not a signatory to the CBD.

"I'm aware it's a controversial issue," he said.

Canada's National Farmer's Union (NFU) was upset to learn that their country wanted to overturn the moratorium. In a letter to the country's prime minister, they said the terminator technology is "the most controversial and immoral agricultural application of genetic engineering to date". They asked Canada to support the moratorium.

"We're very concerned. It's just another way to keep farmers from saving seed," said Terry Pugh, NFU executive secretary.

"It would give seed corporations tremendous amounts of power," he told IPS.

Pugh rejects the notion that GURTs could prevent GE pollen and seeds from contaminating fields or breeding with wild plants. "First they unleash this contamination problem on us and then they say this (GURTs) is the solution?"

Compounding the problem is the consolidation within the seed industry. Monsanto is buying up all sorts of smaller seed companies, said Pugh, citing the 1.4-billion-dollar purchase of Seminis, Inc., a California-based seed company in January.

As for the future of the CBD moratorium, ETC Group's Thomas says the consensus is very fragile. It will be debated at future meetings and there is continuing pressure to allow field trials of GURTs and then commercialisation.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Permanently terminating the terminator technology will be difficult, he said.

*Adds response from Canadian government.***********************************

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The Gene-Food Myth Dr. Mae-Wan Ho, Director and co-founder of the Institute of Science in Society in The U.K. and scientific advisor to the Third World Network, replies to a recent New York Times article "Facing Bio Tech without the Fear Factor" that promotes genetically engineered foods.

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Journalist Misled and Misleading the Public

Jane Brody (Facing Biotech Foods Without the Fear Factor, 11 January 2005, New York Times) has obviously been taken in by the kind of sloppy, pseudo-scientific arguments used by proponents and paid apologists of genetically engineered (GE) crops and products to dismiss concerns about safety. She adopts a very superior attitude over the ignorance of the US public over science and their gullibility in falling for "The Frankenfood myth" (which happens to be a title of a new book written by two notorious apologists for the GE industry). In reality, it is most probably journalists like Brody that have been responsible for misleading the public by failing to put the genuine scientific evidence across to them. For years, every Europe-wide survey has consistently found that the more the public knew about the science behind GE food, the less they find it acceptable. In recent years, expert committees in the European Union have failed to gain the qualified

majority needed for approving GE varieties in every instance. The scientific community is deeply divided; those with vested interests overwhelmingly pronouncing GE products safe and GE varieties no different from varieties derived from conventional methods, even when all the scientific evidence has gone against them. Genetic engineering involves making new genes and combinations of genes in the laboratory that are inserted into the genomes of organisms. Far from being precise, the process is uncontrollable and unpredictable, because the genetic engineer cannot target the insert, which can land anywhere, typically in a rearranged, duplicated or otherwise defective form. Moreover, the insert creates disturbances in the host genome, rearranging and scrambling the host genome, and causing new mutations.

Independent Science Panel Against Corporate Takeover of Science

It has become clear that genetic engineering and other technologies have been commercialised without the due process of thorough scientific assessment, informed public consultation and public consent. That was why a number of us launched ourselves as the Independent Science Panel (ISP) in May 2003 at a public conference in London, UK, attended by the then UK environment minister Michael Meacher and 200 other participants. The ISP consists of dozens of prominent scientists from all over the world, spanning the disciplines of agroecology, agronomy, biomathematics, botany, chemical medicine, ecology, epidemiology, histopathology, microbial ecology, molecular genetics, nutritional biochemistry, physiology, taxonomy, toxicology and virology. As our contribution to the global GM debate, the ISP reviewed the evidence on the hazards and problems of GM crops as well as the proven successes of sustainable agriculture, and published its report in June 2003, The

Case for a GM-Free Sustainable World (www.indsp.org). The report has since been republished in the United States (GM-Free, Vital Health publishing, 2004), and translated into Spanish, French, Chinese and German; and Portuguese, Italian and Indonesian translations are on the way.

Independent Scientists Raise Doubts Over the Safety of GE Varieties

The key findings of the ISP report are as follows:

 

Regulations over the releases of GE crops and products have been highly inadequate. Few independent feeding studies have been carried out, but they raised serious doubts over the safety of the genetic engineering process itself, which have yet to be followed up by dedicated research. GE varieties are unstable; and this may enhance the horizontal spread of the inserted genes, with the potential to create new viruses and bacteria that cause diseases, and to disrupt gene function in animal and human cells. Many GE crops contain gene products known to be harmful. For example, the Bt proteins that kill insect pests include potent immunogens and allergens, and food crops are increasingly engineered to produce pharmaceuticals, drugs, and vaccines in the open environment. Herbicide tolerant GM crops - accounting for 75% of all GE crops worldwide - are tied to the broad-spectrum herbicides glyphosate and glufosinate ammonium, both of which are systemic metabolic poisons linked to spontaneous abortions, birth defects and other toxicities for human beings and laboratory animals, and also harmful to wild life and beneficial organisms in the soil. GE crops have resulted in no benefits to the environment. There has been no reduction in the use of pesticides, while herbicide tolerant weeds and volunteers have emerged, and highly toxic herbicides have had to be brought back in use.

More Doubts Over the Safety of GE

Since its publication, all the major findings of the ISP report have been further corroborated; not the least of which, in a powerful indictment of the "rubber-stamp" regulatory system of the United States by two US scientists, Bill Freese of Friends of the Earth, and David Schubert of the Salk Institute, La Jolla, California. New evidence confirms that most, if not all GE varieties may be unstable. French government scientists examined five GE varieties already commercialised, and found all the GE inserts had rearranged themselves. Belgian government scientists confirmed those results, and found some of the GE varieties were also non-uniform, in that different batches of the same variety gave different results. Researchers at the Institute of Food Safety in Wageningen, The Netherlands, reported in 2002 that 22 out of 33 transgenic proteins have runs of 6 or 7 amino acids identical to known allergens. These include all the Bt toxins (Cry

proteins) used to kill insect pests, the CP4 EPSPS and GOX conferring glyphosate tolerance, the coat protein of the papaya ringspot virus used in virus-resistant GE papaya, and even marker proteins such as GUS (B-glucuronidase). A follow-up study confirmed those results, highlighting the inadequacy of current methods to predict the potential of proteins new to our food chain to cause allergies and the need to take positive findings seriously until they can be ruled out by further tests to be "false positives". This warning is particularly significant as a string of anecdotal evidence - including feeding trials presented by companies to regulatory authorities under "confidential business information" - continue to raise serious doubts over the safety of GE crops and GE food and feed. More reports from the scientific literature indicate that the natural toxin is not the same as, or "substantially equivalent" to, the GE toxin. Green lacewings suffer significantly reduced

survival and delayed development when fed an insect pest (lepidopteran) that has eaten GE maize containing the Bt toxin Cry1Ab, but not when fed the same pest treated with much higher levels of the natural toxin in bacteria. These findings again suggest that the genetic engineering process itself may be unsafe. Finally, a new report drawing on nine years of US Dept of Agriculture data concludes that overall, GE crops have increased pesticide use by 122 million pounds weight since 1996. Despite all these known problems and uncertainties over the safety of GE products, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has just put forward new proposals in its draft "Guidance for Industry: Recommendations for the Early Food Safety Evaluation of New Non-Pesticidal Proteins Produced by New Plant Varieties Intended for Food Use",* to further relax its regulation, which will almost certainly result in widespread contamination of our food supply. The new FDA policy sets out loose

"safety assessment" guidelines under which a company may voluntarily consult with the FDA to have its experimental GM crop material deemed "acceptable" as a food contaminant. The "safety assessment" consists of paperwork and two inadequate tests that the FDA estimates will take companies just 20 hours to complete; and does not include animal feeding trials or tests for unintended effects caused by genetic modification. This would then give biotech companies the legal cover to allow their experimental GM crops to enter the US food supply. These US proposals to effectively legalize contamination from GE experimental crops are a clear breach of the international Cartagena Biosafety Protocol for regulating the use and handling of GE products, which is based on the precautionary principle; they are ignoring the threat of serious irreversible damage to human health from unknown and untested GE material not intended for human consumption. Once released into the environment,

people will be eating these foods for generations, so there is a need for safety assessments to be long term, intergenerational and on the whole food, not on just the new substance that the GE organism is designed to produce. It is already virtually impossible to test for the presence of experimental GE food crops in foods imported from or processed in the US, because over two-thirds of US field trials of experimental GE crops involve one or more genes classified as confidential which therefore cannot be detected. Not only should the FDA reject its policy changes proposed in its Draft Guidance for Industry, it should be devising strict rules and procedures to prevent contamination of the food supply with experimental transgenic proteins and to replace its current non-rigorous "voluntary consultation" process with a mandatory, science-based review process designed to guarantee that the GE crops are safe for food and feed. Meanwhile, journalists like Jane Brody should

stop feeding the public pro-GE propaganda instead of critical information that enables the public to make up their own mind. ------------- For more critical public information visit Institute of Science in Society website.

More at: http://www.ratical.org/co-globalize/MaeWanHo/i-sisnews4.html

 

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