5 reasons to keep Britain [and the rest of the world] GM-free

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Ecologist: 5 Reasons to Keep Britain GM Free

Tue, 24 May 2005 00:21:51 -0700

 

5 reasons to keep Britain [and the rest of the world] GM-free

 

The Ecologist spells out the five overriding reasons why the

commercialisation of GM crops should never be allowed in the UK [and

Mendocino County]

 

1. GM WILL REMOVE CONSUMER CHOICE

 

The UK government's official adviser on GM, the Agriculture and

Environment Biotechnology Commission (AEBC), has said it would `be

difficult and in some places impossible to guarantee' that any British

food was GM-free if commercial growing of GM crops went ahead. In

North America, farmers can no longer be certain the seed they plant

does not contain GM genes.

 

GM CROPS CONTAMINATE

 

Cross pollination

 

GM genes are often `dominant' - ie, they are inherited at the expense

of non-GM genes when cross-pollination occurs between GM and

conventional species. With the first GM crops considered for

commercialisation - oilseed rape and sugar beet and maize - the `gene

flow' (ability to contaminate non-GM varieties) is `high' and `medium

to high', respectively.

 

To prevent cross-pollination, the official advice in the UK is that

there should be a separation distance of just 50 metres between GM

oilseed rape and non-GM varieties. But pollen can travel a lot further

than that. Bees, for example, regularly fly for up to 10 kilometres;

hence, oilseed rape pollen has been found in hives 4.5 kilometres from

the nearest GM crop field. Tree pollen grains have been recorded in

the essentially treeless Shetland Isles, which are 250 kilometres from

the nearest mainland. And the University of Adelaide has published

research into wind pollination distances that shows oilseed rape

pollen can travel for up to 3 kilometres.

 

SEED MIXING AND SPILLAGE

 

GM seed, or parts of GM root crops like sugar beet, may be shed and

left in a field where they may grow later.

 

Combine harvesters move from field to field, and leftover GM seed may

be spilt if equipment is not cleaned properly.

 

Lorries removing a harvested crop from a farm may spill seed near

fields where non-GM or organic crops are grown.

 

For crops with very small seeds like oilseed rape spillage can be

high.In May 2002 the European Commission's Joint Research Centre (JRC)

echoed the AEBC almost verbatim when it warned that if GM crops were

widely adopted, preventing contamination of organic food would be

`very difficult and connected to high costs, or virtually impossible'.

 

The biotech industry is fully aware of this. As Don Westfall, vice

president of US food industry consultancy Promar International, says:

`The hope of the [GM] industry is that over time the market is so

flooded [with GM] that there's nothing you can do about it. You just

surrender.'

 

Likewise, the Soil Association's investigation into the impact of GM

in the US concludes: `All non-GM farmers in North America are finding

it very hard or impossible to grow GM-free crops. Seeds have become

almost completely contaminated with GM organisms (GMOs), good non-GM

varieties have become hard to buy, and there is a high risk of crop

contamination.'

 

 

2. HEALTH RISKS HAVE NOT BEEN DISPROVED

 

Pro-GM voices claim that after six years there have been no adverse

health effects from eating GM foods in the US. But then, there has

been no effort by the US authorities to look for health impacts either.

 

GM APPROVAL SYSTEMS LAX

 

Safety data comes from the biotech firms themselves. Independent,

peer-reviewed research showing that GM food poses no danger to human

health is not required. One Monsanto director said: `[We] should not

have to vouchsafe the safety of biotech food. Our interest is in

selling as much of it as possible.'

 

`Substantial equivalence'

 

The common methodology for government food-safety requirements in

North America and Europe has traditionally been a comparison between a

food and a conventional counterpart. The assumption is that existing

foods have a long history of safe use. So, if a GM crop is found to be

`the same' as a non-GM counterpart, it can claim this history. This is

called `substantial equivalence'. But GM crops are not the same,

because of the random nature and uncertain consequences of

modification. Biotech firms acknowledge this when it suits them -

stating, for example, that their GM varieties are distinctive enough

to warrant their own patents.

 

There have been no properly controlled clinical trials looking at the

effects of short- or long-term ingestion of GM foods by humans.

Moreover, as Dr Arpad Pusztai (who was sacked when he printed research

about the effects of GM potatoes on lab rats) warns: `There is

increasing research to show they may actually be very unsafe.'

 

THREE MAJOR CONCERNS

 

Allergic reactions

 

Genetic modification frequently uses proteins from organisms that have

never before been an integral part of the human food chain. Hence, GM

food may cause unforeseen allergic reactions - particularly among

children. Allergens could be transferred from foods to which people

are allergic to foods they think are safe. When a new food is

introduced, it takes five to six years before any allergies are

recognised.

 

In 2000 GM `StarLink' maize was found in taco shells being sold for

human consumption in the US - even though the maize had only been

approved for animal feed. StarLink is modified to contain a toxin that

could be a human allergen; it is heat stable and does not break down

in gastric acid - characteristics shared by many allergens.

 

Antibiotic resistance

 

Genetic modification could also make disease-causing bacteria

resistant to antibiotics. This could lead to potentially

uncontrollable epidemics. Antibiotic-resistance genes are used as

`markers' in GM crops to identify which plant cells have successfully

incorporated the desired foreign genes during modification.

 

A 2002 study commissioned by the UK's Food Standards Agency (FSA)

showed that antibiotic-resistance marker genes from GM foods can make

their way into human gut bacteria after just one meal (see box below).

Two years previously, the British Medical Association had warned: `The

risk to human health from antibiotic resistance developing in

micro-organisms is one of the major public health threats that will be

faced in the 21st century.'

 

Industrial and pharmaceutical crops

 

Since 1991 over 300 open-field trials of `pharma' crops have taken

place around the world. In California, for example, GM rice containing

human genes has been grown for drug production. Pharmaceutical wheat,

corn and barley are also being developed in the US, France and Canada.

 

Last year in Texas 500,000 bushels of soya destined for human

consumption were contaminated with genes from maize genetically

modified by the US firm Prodigene so as to create a vaccine for a

stomach disease afflicting pigs. A major concern is that GM firms are

using commodity food crops for pharm-aceutical production. If there

were such thing as a responsible path with `pharma' GM it would be to

use non-food crops.

 

 

3. FARMERS WILL BE DESTROYED

 

Within a few years of the introduction of GM crops in North America

the following occurred:

 

Almost all of the US's $300m annual maize exports and Canada's $300m

annual rape exports to the EU disappeared;

 

The trade for Canadian honey was almost completely destroyed because

of GM contamination;

 

Asian countries, including Japan and South Korea - the biggest foreign

buyers of US maize, stopped importing North American maize;

 

Just like domestic consumers, food companies - including Heinz, Gerber

and Frito-Lay - started to reject the use of GMOs in their products.

 

Former White House agriculture expert Dr Charles Benbrook calculates

that the lost export trade and fall in farm prices caused by GM

commercialisation led to an increase in annual government subsidies of

an estimated $3-5 billion.

 

In December 2000 the president of Canada's National Farmers Union,

Cory Ollikka, said: `Farmers are really starting to question the

profit-enhancing ability of products that seem to be shutting them out

of markets worldwide.'

 

Farm, which represents UK farmers, has said: `Farmers are being asked

by the agro-biotech companies to shoulder the economic and

public-image risks of their new technology, for which there appear to

be few or no compensating benefits. The claimed cost savings are

either non-existent or exaggerated. The long-term health and

environmental impacts are still uncertain. And consumers don't want to

eat GM food. So why would farmers sow something they can't sell?'

 

HIGHER COSTS, REDUCED PROFITS

 

The Soil Association's US investigations found that GM crops have

increased the cost of farming and reduced farmers' profits for the

following reasons:

 

1- GM varieties increase farmer seed costs by up to 40 per cent an

acre; GM soya and maize, which make up 83 per cent of the GM crops

grown worldwide, `deliver less income on average to farmers than

non-GM crops';

 

2- GM varieties require farmers to pay biotech firms a `technology fee';

 

3- The GM companies forbid farmers to save their seeds for replanting;

contrary to traditional practice, farmers have to buy new seed each

year; and

 

4- GM herbicide-tolerant crops increase farmers' use of expensive

herbicides, especially as new weed problems have emerged - rogue

herbicide-resistant oilseed rape plants being a widespread problem;

contrary to the claim that only one application would be needed,

farmers are applying herbicides several times.

 

Even a 2002 report by the US Department of Agriculture, a key ally of

the biotech industry, admitted that the economic benefits of

cultivating GM crops were `variable' and that farmers growing GM Bt

corn were actually `losing money.'

 

LOWER YIELDS

 

The University of Nebraska recorded yields for Monsanto's Roundup

Ready GM maize that were 6-11 per cent less than those for non-GM soya

varieties. A 1998 study of over 8,000 field trials found that Roundup

Ready soya seeds produced between 6.7 and 10 per cent fewer bushels of

soya than conventional varieties.

 

Trials by the UK's National Institute of Agricultural Botany showed

yields of GM oilseed rape and sugar beet that were 5-8 per cent less

than conventional varieties.

 

CORPORATE CONTROL GROWS

 

Adopting GM crops would place farmers and the food chain itself under

the control of a handful of multinational corporations such as

Monsanto, Syngenta, Bayer and DuPont. For US farmers this has meant:

 

1- Legally-binding agreements that force farmers to purchase expensive

new seeds from the biotech corporations each season;

 

2- Having to buy these corporations' herbicides (at a cost

considerably above that of a generic equivalent) for

herbicide-tolerant crops;

 

3- Paying the biotech firms a technology fee based on the acreage of

land under GM;

 

4- The development of so-called `traitor technology' crops on which

particular chemicals will have to be applied if the crops' GM

characteristics (such as their time of flowering or disease

resistance) are to show;

 

5- The invention of `terminator technology' that stops GM plants

producing fertile seeds; thus farmers are physically prevented from

sowing saved seed and have to buy new seed from the biotech firms

instead; and

 

6- Biotech firms buying up seed companies. This creates monopolies and

limits farmers' choices still further. DuPont and Monsanto are now the

two largest seed companies in the world. As a result of their control

of the seed industry, farmers are reporting that the availability of

good non-GM seed varieties is rapidly disappearing.

 

PRISONERS TO GM

 

US farmers are obliged by their contracts to allow biotech company

inspectors onto their farms. As with all crops, leftover seed from GM

plants can germinate in fields since used to grow different crops; the

seeds produce so-called `volunteers'. If biotech company inspectors

find any such plants, they can claim - and have repeatedly done so -

that the farmers are growing unlicensed crops and infringing patent

rights. For example, David Chaney, who farms in Kentucky, had to pay

Monsanto $35,000; another Kentucky farmer agreed to pay the firm

$25,000; and three Iowa farmers are on record as having paid it

$40,000 each. These and other farmers have also had to sign gagging

orders and agree to allow Monsanto complete access to their land in

subsequent years. Crops have also been destroyed and seed confiscated.

The biotech industry currently has legal actions pending against 550

farmers in North America.

 

ORGANIC FARMERS RUINED

 

Internationally, the organic movement has rejected GM because of its

potential for genetic contamination and its continued reliance on

artificial chemicals.

The Soil Association reports that in North America `many organic

farmers have been unable to sell their produce as organic due to

contamination'. Contamination has already:

 

1- meant the loss, at a potential cost of millions of dollars, of

almost the entire organic oilseed rape sector of Saskatchewan;

 

2- cost US organic maize growers $90m in annual income (the losses

were calculated by the Union of Concerned Scientists in an analysis

for the US Environmental Protection Agency); and

 

3- forced many organic farmers to give up trying to grow certain crops

altogether. Last month a survey by the Organic Farming Research

Foundation found that one in 12 US organic farmers had already

suffered direct costs or damage because of GM contamination.

 

4- If commercial planting of GM crops took place in Britain, the UK's

burgeoning organic sector - now worth £900m, and set to increase with

(supposed) government support - would perish. If, by some miracle,

contamination could be avoided the costs involved would inevitably

lead to organic farmers going bust. A study published by the JRC in

May predicted that efforts to protect conventional and organic crops

from contamination would add 41 per cent to the cost of producing

non-GM oilseed rape and up to 9 per cent to the cost of producing

non-GM maize and potatoes.

 

4. THE ENVIRONMENT WILL SUFFER

 

INCREASED USE OF HERBICIDES

 

The proponents of GM argue that the technology will lead to a

reduction in the use of chemical weedkillers. But for the majority of

GM crops grown so far, the evidence does not bear this out.

 

Four years worth of data from the US Department of Agriculture shows

herbicide use on Roundup Ready soya beans is increasing.

 

In 1998 total herbicide use on GM soya beans in six US states was 30

per cent greater on average than on conventional varieties.

 

The Soil Association's US investigation found that `the use of GM

crops is resulting in a reversion to the use of older, more toxic

compounds' such as the herbicide paraquat.

 

WHY?

 

Genes modified to make crops herbicide-resistant can be transferred to

related weeds, which would then also become herbicide-resistant.

 

Crops can themselves act like weeds. Because GM crops are designed to

have a greater ability to survive, leftover seeds can germinate in

later years when a different crop is growing in the same field. The

leftover volunteer plants would then contaminate the new crop. In

Canada, where GM herbicide-tolerant oilseed rape has been grown since

1998, oilseed rape weeds resistant to three different herbicides have

been created. These oilseed rape weeds are an example of

`gene-stacking' - the occurrence of several genetically-engineered

traits in a single plant. Gene-stacking was found in all 11 GM sites

investigated in a Canadian ministry of agriculture study. As professor

Martin Entz of Winnipeg's University of Manitoba observes, `GM oilseed

rape is absolutely impossible to control'.

 

Following a review of the Canadian experience, English Nature - the UK

government's advisory body on biodiversity - predicted:

`Herbicide-tolerant gene-stacked volunteers of oilseed rape would be

inevitable in practical agriculture in the UK.'

 

INCREASED USE OF PESTICIDES

 

There has also been an increase in pesticide use by farmers attempting

to cope with pest resistance created by GM Bt crops. Bt crops are

modified to produce the insecticidal toxin Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt)

in all their tissues.

 

However, the World Bank says insects can adapt to Bt within `one or

two years'. And scientists at China's Nanjing Institute of

Environmental Sciences have concluded that if it was planted

continuously Bt cotton would probably lose all its resistance to

bollworm - the pest it is designed to control - within eight to 10 years.

 

Meanwhile, pests' adaptability to pest-resistant GM crops could force

farmers onto a `genetic treadmill' of ever more technical biotech

fixes (including new varieties of pest-resistant crops) and more

frequent spraying, and more toxic doses, of chemical pesticides. It

could also destroy the effectiveness of Bt as a natural insecticide in

organic agriculture.

 

Perversely, GM pest-resistant crops could make agriculture more

vulnerable to pests and disease; they could end up harming beneficial

soil micro-organisms and insects like ladybirds and lacewings that

keep certain pest populations in check.

 

The Delhi-based Research Foundation for Science, Technology and

Ecology found in a study of four Indian states that `not only did

Monsanto's Bt cotton not protect plants from the American bollworm,

but there was an increase of 250-300 per cent in attacks by non-target

pests like jassids, aphids, white fly and thrips'. And researchers at

Cornell University in the US found that the pollen from Bt corn was

poisonous to the larvae of monarch butterflies.

 

As GM `pest-resistant' crops fail to deliver, Australian farmers have

been advised to spray additional insecticide on Monsanto's Bt cotton

by the Transgenic and Insect Management Strategy Committee of the

Australian Cotton Growers Research Association. Overall insecticide

applications on Bt maize have also increased in the US.

 

GENETIC POLLUTION

 

GM crops may also reduce the diversity of plant life by contaminating

their wild relatives and indigenous crop varieties in areas where the

crops evolved. Widespread GM contamination of conventional maize has

already been detected in Mexico. In Europe, contamination of wild

relatives of oilseed rape and sugar beet is considered inevitable if

GM commercialisation goes ahead. The same applies to wild relatives of

rice in Asia.

 

IMPLICATION

If wildlife is harmed `unexpectedly' (ie, without that harm having

officially been predicted), and an official risk assessment had not

previously decided that GM crops were safe, it is the state and

society that will have to pay for putting things right - if this is

possible.

 

 

5. GM CROPS WILL NOT FEED THE POOR

 

The idea that GM will end global poverty is probably the biggest of

all the GM apologists' lies - the one used to accuse anti-GM

campaigners in rich countries of not caring about the Third World. The

truth is that the introduction of GM crops into the developing world

will result in decreased yields, crop failures and the impoverishment

of literally billions of small farmers.

 

DECREASED YIELDS

 

As already statedon page 36, there is no evidence that genetic

modification increases yields. But, just to make the point, consider

the following:

 

1- a US Department of Agriculture report published in May 2002

concluded that net yields of herbicide-tolerant soya bean were no

higher than those of non-GM soya, and that yields of pest-resistant

corn were actually lower than those of non-GM corn;

 

2- in September 2001, the state court of Mississippi ruled that a

Monsanto subsidiary's `high-yielding' GM soya seeds were responsible

for reduced yields obtained by Mississippi farmer Newell Simrall; the

farmer was awarded damages of $165,742.

 

But then, no commercial GM crop has ever been specifically engineered

to have a higher yield.

 

CROP FAILURES

 

Crop failures (and, therefore, drastically reduced yields) have

already occurred with GM soya and cotton plants in the developing

world. This is largely due to the unpredictable behaviour of these

crops. GM soya's brittleness, for example, has made it incapable of

surviving heat waves. And in 2002 `massive failure' of Bt cotton was

reported in the southern states of India; consequently, in April the

Indian government denied Monsanto clearance for the cultivation of its

Bt cotton in India's northern states.

 

THE RUIN OF SMALL FARMERS

 

GM would force the two billion people who manage the developing

world's small family farms to stop their age-old practice of saving

seeds. Each year they will have to buy expensive seeds and chemicals

instead. The experience of North American farmers shows that GM seeds

cost up to 40 per cent more than non-GM varieties.

 

TECHNOFIXES DON'T WORK

 

Inadequate yields are not the cause of hunger today. As Sergey

Vasnetsov, a biotech industry analyst with investment bank Lehman

Brothers, says: `Let's stop pretending we face food shortages. There

is hunger, but not food shortages.' In 1994, food production could

have supplied 6.4 billion people (more than the world's actual

population) with an adequate 2,350 calories per day. Yet more than 1

billion people do not get enough to eat.

 

Furthermore, the types of GM crops being produced are almost

exclusively for the processed-food, textiles and animal-feed markets

of the West. Instead of being used to grow staple foods for local

consumption, millions of hectares of land in the developing world are

being set aside to grow GM corn, for example, to supply grain for

pigs, chicken and cattle. In May, ActionAid published a report called

GM Crops: going against the grain, which revealed that `only 1 per

cent of GM research is aimed at [developing] crops [to be] used by

poor farmers in poor countries'. And ActionAid calculates that those

crops `stand only a one in 250 chance of making it into farmers'

fields'. As the UN Development Programme points out, `technology is

created in response to market pressures - not the needs of poor

people, who have little purchasing power'.

 

SUSTAINABLE ALTERNATIVES

 

Sustainable agriculture projects have led to millet yields rising by

up to 154 per cent in India, millet and sorghum yields rising by 275

per cent in Burkina Faso and maize yields increasing by 300 per cent

in Honduras. Combined with reforms aimed at achieving more equitable

land ownership, protection from subsidised food imports and the

re-orientation of production away from export crops to staple foods

for local consumption, sustainable farming could feed the world.

 

In 1998 a delegation representing every African country except South

Africa submitted a joint statement to a UN conference on genetic

research. The delegates had been inspired by a Monsanto campaign that

used images of starving African children to plug its technology. The

statement read: `We strongly object that the image of the poor and

hungry from our countries is being used by giant multinational

corporations to push a technology that is neither safe,

environmentally-friendly nor economically beneficial to us. We do not

believe that such companies or gene technologies will help our farmers

to produce the food that is needed in the 21st century. On the

contrary, we think it will destroy the diversity, the local knowledge

and the sustainable agricultural systems that our farmers have

developed for millennia, and that it will undermine our capacity to

feed ourselves.'

__________

 

Sources: Briefing papers by Genewatch, Friends of the Earth, the Soil

Association, GM Free Wales, Farm

 

http://www.theecologist.org/article.html?article=432

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