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GM foods - the art of public deception
(Wednesday, July 23, 2003 -- CropChoice guest commentary) -- Devinder Sharma, The Guardian: For fifty years they went on promoting chemical pesticides. They termed
the obnoxious chemicals as 'safe' provided these were to be used
carefully. They continued to brush aside reports of pesticide poisoning
and the resulting environmental contamination. They surely had a job to
do and they did it remarkably well.
It was instead a case of systematic public deception. Knowingly or
unknowingly, agricultural scientists were very conveniently used as
loudspeakers by the chemical industry -- an industry, which has since
then moved to life sciences. And these scientists didn't spare any
effort to turn down all the traditional wisdom and knowledge in pest
control as 'sub standard' and 'backward'. The only way to increase crop
productivity, we were told, was to use more chemicals.
It took three decades for the International Rice Research Institute
(IRRI) to realise the gravest mistake of green revolution - pesticides
are unnecessary. But by the time the mistake was realised, pesticides had
polluted the environment, poisoned the fertile soils, contaminated the
ground water and taken a heavy human toll.
Not far from where IRRI is located, rice farmers in Central Luzon
province in the Philippines, had gradually got disenchanted with the
indiscriminate use of pesticides. From a peak insecticide use in the
mid-1980s, it is now at an historic low. Contrary to what agricultural
scientists and the chemical industry had maintained all these years, the
decline in insecticide use has been accompanied by an increase in
productivity from an average of 2.75 tonnes to 3.25 tonnes per hectare
in 2002. It also resulted in savings on an average of up to 1,000 pesos
per hectare for these farmers.
Equally significant is the scientific courage with which IRRI's director
general, Dr Ronald Cantrell has accepted the reality: "It shows that the
mistakes of the Green Revolution - where too much emphasis was sometimes
put on the use of chemicals for pest control - have clearly been
recognized and corrected, " adding, " because of their toxicity,
insecticides really should be used by farmers as a last resort, and we
are very pleased to see that farmers have realized this for many years,
especially here in the Philippines." His colleagues at IRRI are now
equally critical of the extent and use of pesticides. Says Gary John, an
ecologist: "The simple fact is that, in the rest of Asia, most
insecticide use on rice is a waste of the farmers' time and money."
But Nobel laureate Norman Borlaug wouldn't agree to that when green
revolution technology was being widely applied in Asia. In fact, I
remember when Rachel Carlson wrote the path-breaking book The Silent
Spring, I happened to interview Dr Borlaug for the Indian Express. The
father of the green revolution was surely not going to take it lying
down. "Rachel Carlson is an evil force," he told me, adding "these are
the people who do not want hunger to be eliminated." Ironically,
approximately 25 years after Rachel Carlson's book was first published,
Dr Borlaug seems to have finally bowed to public opinion. He is now
advocating the use of genetic engineering to reduce the use of harmful pesticides!
Pesticides were safe as long as the industry's commercial interests
needed protection. Since the same industry has now moved to life
sciences, and has a huge stake in promoting genetically engineered foods
and crops, scientists too have jumped onto the more lucrative
biotechnology bandwagon. In fact, such is the desperation to promote the
commercial interests of the private companies that even plant breeding -
which is responsible for the high-yielding crop varieties that ushered
in green revolution -- is now being branded as a dangerous technology.
At a recent meeting at the John Innes Institute for Plant Sciences at
Norwich (UK), I was shocked to hear a distinguished molecular geneticist
castigate plant breeding. I am sure when nanotechnology finally emerges
on the commercial horizon, the same breed of scientists will term
genetic engineering as a dangerous technology!
Public money is being ruthlessly squandered to provide legitimacy to GM
products. "The European Union has spent Rs 325 crore in 15 years to study
the impact of GM products. And it has given a clean chit to GM products,"
screamed a blurb in the last issue of BioSpectrum magazine. The United
States in addition is spending Rs 25-30 crore in complying with the
regulatory requirement for a single GM product. In China, Argentina,
Australia, Canada, Japan, and in Europe, already close to some Rs 10,000
crore has been incurred on field testing and regulating these crops. In
India, the GM research on nine crops has cost the industry some Rs 60
crore, and the Department of Biotechnology would end up incurring
another Rs 20-30 crore for setting up an ineffective regulatory mechanism.
The simple question that no one wants to ask is: Why spend so much money
on something, which has no additional advantages? Why is nobody
interested in the cost-benefit analysis of developing GM crops? After
all, as a consumer what do I gain by eating herbicide-tolerant corn or
herbicide-tolerant soyabean? Why should I eat these genes for herbicide
tolerance or for Bt toxin? Why should I take the risk? And in that case,
why should we have these GM products in the first place, which require
such phenomenal costs to regulate? After all, these crops do not
increase crop yields. Nor do they provide any additional nutrient to the
consumer. Pests can be easily taken care of by adopting well-known
integrated plant protection measures (like the IRRI is now advocating).
Look at the misplaced emphasis. If only the money that has been spent on
field testing and regulation was to be diverted to feeding the hungry and
malnourished, almost all the 320 million people in India who go to bed
hungry could have been well fed. And that would have also helped in
getting rid of the mounting foodgrain surplus of 50 million tonnes that
continues to rot under the monsoon rains. If the Rs 325 crore that EU
spent on a wasteful exercise of knowing the impact of GM foods, was to
be instead given to Nepal, the land locked country would have overcome
its acute hunger crisis thereby wiping out Maoism from the mountains of
central Himalayas.
If the public money being incurred on GM crops research, regulation and
promotion and that too in the name of eradicating hunger and
malnutrition, were to be diverted to feed the hungry, the Food and
Agricultural Organisation of the United Nations (FAO) can meet its
target of reducing global hunger by half and that too at least 12 years
before the internationally accepted deadline of year 2015. That would
mean saving the lives of some 24,000 people who die from hunger and
related ailments every day. But no, you cannot ask such fundamental
questions. After all, didn't former President Bill Clinton say:
"Monsanto is the company which will take us into the 21st century."
We are being repeatedly told that if 350 million Americans are eating GM
food for the past 15 years and there has been no adverse reaction, what
more evidence is required to ascertain the safety of GM foods. This is
exactly what they said when junk food started emerging as a major food
industry in the United States. Ignorant Americans, believing these
scientists, began gobbling down the subsidized food and carbonated
beverages. Today, 62 per cent of America's population is obese, and
human allergies have gone up by 70 per cent in the past three decades.
Not convinced, a US public interest attorney and director of the Alliance
for Bio-Integrity, Steven M. Druker, filed a lawsuit that forced the US
Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to divulge over 44,000 pages of its
internal files on GM foods. Accordingly, the FDA's records reveal that
its own scientific experts overwhelmingly concluded: "genetic
engineering has unique potential to produce unintended and essentially
unpredictable new toxins and other harmful substances". They cautioned
that a GM food could not be considered safe unless it had undergone
rigorous toxicological tests using the whole food. The uniformity of
opinion is attested by the FDA official responsible for summarizing the
expert input, who reported: "The processes of genetic engineering and
traditional breeding are different, and according to the technical
experts in the agency, they lead to different risks."
(Photocopies of 24 key FDA documents are in a numbered set at
http://www.biointegrity.org )
Nevertheless, FDA bureaucrats, who admit they have been operating under
an on-going White House directive "to foster" the biotech industry,
disregarded their experts' warnings and covered them up. They then
declared there is an overwhelming consensus among experts that GM foods
are so safe they don't need to be tested, even though they knew their
own experts regarded them as uniquely hazardous - and even though they
knew there was not a consensus about safety in the scientific community
at large, as evidenced in a letter by the FDA Biotechnology Coordinator.
(FDA document #8 at www.biointegrity.org). And to deepen the deception,
they claimed they were not aware of any information showing that GM
foods differ from others in any meaningful way, says Druker.
What more evidence do you need about the dangers of eating GM food? #
Devinder Sharma is a New Delhi-based food and trade policy analyst. Among
his recent works include two books: GATT to WTO: Seeds of Despair and In
the Famine Trap. | |
