o I’m too lazy to write but I found
a very good summary on why say no to GM Foods.
o I also suggest you guys read up on
Monsanto -_-“
http://online.sfsu.edu/~rone/GEessays/GMfree5.htm
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.
a. 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.
b. 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.
a. 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.'
b. 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?'
a. 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.'
b. 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.
c. 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.
d. 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.
e. 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
a. 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.'
b. 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.
c. 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.
d. 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
