Compare U.S. and U.K. attitudes over GE crops

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" News Update from The Campaign "

Compare U.S. and U.K. attitudes over GE crops

Fri, 25 Jun 2004 13:04:00 -0500

 

News Update From The Campaign to Label Genetically Engineered Foods

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Dear News Update Subscribers,

 

In effect since 1998, the moratorium on genetically engineered foods in the

European Union (EU) is slowly being removed.

 

One type of corn produced by Syngenta was recently approved for distribution

in the EU and another version from Monsanto is likely to get approval soon.

 

The excellent article posted below titled " GM food is heading for your

fridge " was written by the former United Kingdom (UK) environment minister,

Michael Meacher.

 

Meacher is greatly concerned with the potential health risks that could come

from eating genetically engineered crops. However, since genetically

engineered foods are required to be labeled in the EU, it is unlikely that

these new corn products will become readily accepted by the U.K public.

 

What I found fascinating about reading Meacher's article, is that it

indirectly points out the radical difference in attitudes over genetically

engineered foods that we have in the United States.

 

In the U.K., nobody is eating genetically engineered foods, and they are

very concerned about the possibility of ANY of it entering their food

supply. In America, most people are eating genetically engineered foods

every day without even realizing it.

 

The concerns raised by Michael Meacher in the article are genuine and real.

They should have been addressed in the United States before our government

allowed these biotech crops to be fed to our citizens on a wide scale basis.

 

American citizens have been made guinea pigs in the largest feeding study

ever conducted in human history.

 

Craig Winters

Executive Director

The Campaign to Label Genetically Engineered Foods

 

The Campaign

PO Box 55699

Seattle, WA 98155

Tel: 425-771-4049

Fax: 603-825-5841

E-mail: label

Web Site: http://www.thecampaign.org

 

Mission Statement: " To create a national grassroots consumer campaign for

the purpose of lobbying Congress and the President to pass legislation that

will require the labeling of genetically engineered foods in the United

States. "

 

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GM food is heading for your fridge

It may well be dangerous - and it is about to enter our food chain

 

Michael Meacher

 

Friday June 25, 2004

The Guardian (UK)

 

Genetically modified food is coming to Britain. Two applications for the

approval of GM animal feed are reaching their final stages in Brussels. This

will lead to their import into the UK, and into the human food chain. The

1998 moratorium put in place by the EU to prevent this is being broken.

 

One of these applications concerns Syngenta Bt 11 GM sweetcorn. It failed to

get a majority vote in the EU agricultural ministers' council but, following

ministerial deadlock, it has now been approved by the commission itself (as

Ukip might note). The second application is for Monsanto NK 603 GM maize,

which is being introduced under the novel foods regulations. It also failed

to get a majority vote in the EU's scientific regulatory committee.

Ministers will now decide and, if they don't agree, the commission will take

the decision.

 

The safety of GM food remains a very open question. And one is not

encouraged when the guardian of our food safety, the Food Standards Agency,

and particularly its chairman, John Krebs, is so strongly pro-GM. They

naively rely on company data to prove the safety of GMOs, despite numerous

reports which have revealed the dubious credibility of company studies. The

FSA has also focused mainly on the safety of inserted GM material, and

neglected the inherent risks of the gene insertion process itself, such as

the production of new toxins and allergens.

 

This is a remarkable omission given that the GM process is so new. GM

introduces genes from other species, even distant ones, which nature would

never do. It also breaks up nature's all-important sequencing of the genes.

Making a GM plant thus involves breaking and joining the DNA at random

locations. This leads to substantial scrambling of both foreign and host

DNA, which can produce abnormalities in animals and unexpected toxins and

allergens in food crops.

 

The genetic material of any species can be recombined and transferred in the

lab. Genes and new combinations can be introduced into our environment and

food chain that have never previously existed. Indeed, GM DNA is often

designed to cross species barriers. Its structural instability enhances

horizontal gene transfer and recombination, the very process that creates

new diseases and spreads antibiotic and drug resistance.

 

Against this background it is almost incredible, but true, that there have

been no peer-reviewed clinical studies on the human health effects of GM

food. Instead, when the biotech companies manufacture a new GM product, they

compare it with its non-GM counterpart in terms of nutrients, toxins and

allergens, and if they allege it to be " substantially equivalent " , they deem

it to be safe. Such an assumption would never be allowed in the regulation

of pesticides or drugs. It is simply a device to circumvent direct trials of

the effects of GM foods on human health, and ensures that GM crops can be

patented without even animal testing.

 

In the tiny number of cases where tests have been carried out, the results

have been worrying. A study in August 1998 by Dr Arpad Pusztai in Aberdeen

found that young rats fed GM potatoes for just 10 days developed growth-like

thickening of the stomach and intestinal lining. Could the overgrowth of the

gut lining be a prelude to cancer? This was highly threatening to the

biotech industry, but rather than pursue these questions, the research was

closed down, and Pusztai vilified and hounded out of his job.

 

In a study at Newcastle University in 2002, volunteers were fed a single

meal of GM soya. The GM DNA was found not to have been digested, as

scientists had claimed it would be, but to have survived and transferred to

the gut bacteria, which could compromise antibiotic resistance. In the US in

2000 many food products were accidentally contaminated with GM StarLink

maize, and it caused allergic reactions in 50 Americans, some

life-threatening. Recently in Germany 12 cows died after eating Syngenta's

GM Bt 176 maize, and the company paid the farmer compensation.

 

None of these results, which were rubbished by the scientific establishment,

have ever been followed up by further research. Where research has been

done, the results are sometimes suppressed. A study of GM Chardon LL maize,

fed to cows at Reading University two years ago, has never been published,

probably because the results were so unpalatable to the biotech industry.

 

The last word should go to the doctors. The BMA says: " There has not yet

been a robust and thorough search into the potentially harmful effect of GM

foodstuffs on human health " . The Medical Research Council believes more

knowledge is needed of the effects of GM on metabolism, organ development,

immune and endocrine systems, and gut flora.

 

Instead of pursuing the arid and polarised debate about GM, isn't that

precisely what we should now do before we launch it into our food supply?

 

Michael Meacher MP was environment minister, 1997-2003