| Makanan Rekayasa Genetika - Apakah Kita Merupakan Tabung Percobaan Global? |
| ( GM Foods: Are We The Global Test Tube?) |
| Oleh: HUW GRIFFITHS© |
| It’s a long time since I came across anyone who still has an open mind on the pros and cons of the genetic engineering of food. Most people I have engaged on the subject are deeply entrenched on one side of the issue or the other and stare across the divide mutually incredulous that anybody could be remotely serious about holding an opposite view. |
| Yet, the reality is that whether we want to or not, we are currently living in the ‘genetic’ age. It may not have the destructive imagery that we once associated with the ‘atomic’ age, but in my view it has just as much potential to destroy life, or at least reorder it, forever. As has happened so many times before, mankind decided to run a change workshop, but forgot to invite either Wisdom and Caution to moderate the session. |
| As least with the advent of the nuclear bomb, so beloved by the superpower governments of the 60’s, the catch cries of ‘mutually assured destruction’, ‘mega deaths’, ‘fall out’, ‘mushroom cloud’ and so on, had a certain negative ring of doom about them, making it easier for us all to know where we needed to sit on the matter. |
| Ask someone for a few one-liners on Genetically Modified (GM) foods though and you can get: ‘Franken foods’, ‘feed the world’s starving millions’, ‘reduced use of herbicides and pesticides’, ‘increased productivity’, ‘scientific progress’, ‘profitability’, ‘corporate greed’… and so it goes on. Perhaps this dichotomy of views is a consequence of a media industry regularly hibernating on the issue. |
| Yet in recent months we have seen a new awakening on the subject by the Australian press. In a rather typical and upbeat pro-GM fashion a series of headlines appeared declaring Aussie farmers ‘lagging on GM’,1‘Fewer Britons fear dangers of GM food’,2 ‘GM crops can meet India’s food, biofuel needs’,3 ‘Farmers around the world upbeat about GM food crops’.4 I could go on, but you get the feel for where this is all going. |
| Where it is all going of course has much less to do with the subject being headlined and much more to do with the fact that the five year moratorium on the growing of GM crops in most Australian states is coming up for review. It is now time for the GM public relations machine (courtesy of the national press) to warm the general public to the idea that our GM-free stature is about to undergo a change. |
| The evidence for coming change (at the time of writing) is overwhelming. The moratoriums are up, the editorials are calm, reassuring, reasoned and short. They tell us that our farmers need no longer fear for their drought ridden future, that GM is generally good for business, for progress, and that there really is no need for us, the public, to fear for our safety. “Relax; they know what they’re doing.” |
| If reading these articles was meant to make me less concerned about the implications of GM bio-technology and more confident in this nascent industry’s abilities to meet the needs of the coming age, then I confess that it had the opposite effect on me. |
| The last time I looked at the GM controversy there were some fairly significant safety issues looming over the whole thing, over mankind really. Yet, here we are, following a few industry commissioned surveys of European and Third World farmers, being subjected to mollifications by a bunch of farmer’s associations, state and federal politicians and a handful of sweet talking hacks. Not a single word about human health, nutritional integrity of food, transgenic horizontal gene migration or anything! All we read is a flurry of platitudes about Australian farmers being left in the dark ages, how far ahead of us the US, Argentina, Brazil, Canada, India and China are in the GM planting game, and how Australia can’t afford to defer the inevitable decision to push the GM button any longer. |
| Pity this concerted program of no-news articles will probably cruise to a highly successful conclusion for the GM proponents. Can we really be this gullible? |
| Don’t get me wrong though. I am an absolute believer in progress. I believe in the role of science in our future and that change is not only inevitable, but desirable. However, it always needs to be led hand in hand with wisdom, but with the scientific and corporate establishments being close bedfellows, it seldom is. I can understand why farmers look to GM developments for a more secure financial future and I appreciate the need for genuine investigation and assessment of a potential new technology, and that investments in R & D, once made, have to be recouped somehow. I also believe in the absolute importance of safeguarding the integrity of our food supply and by implication the state of human health on this planet. |
| Do we really have cause for concern? Well, yes… I think we do, big time! I just mentioned safeguarding our standards of health, yet looking at the big picture our current standards of global health are appalling and much that is wrong with these standards can be laid at the door of the quality (or lack of it) of our modern diet. So who or what are the primary gatekeepers of our standard Western diet: the food industry (the growers, the agro-chemical companies, the manufacturers and retailers along with their respective industry bodies) and the government. All they’ve succeeded in doing for the Western diet in the last hundred or so years is to create a world wracked with cardiovascular disease, diabetes, cancer and a myriad of other degenerative conditions all of which, either directly or indirectly, are associated with some form of dietary abuse or deficiency. |
| Processed foods, whilst they may hit the spot when it comes to consumer convenience and commercial productivity, fail the test miserably when it comes to human health and nutrition. So here we are in 2008 being asked to put our fragile and vulnerable trust in GM technology which is being run either by or on behalf of the same vested interests that have a miserable track record of failure in everything they’ve done for humanity so far. But this time we’re not talking about shoving boxes of cereal down our throats; we’re talking about shoving Pandora’s Box down our throats instead. I can’t help thinking that GM is the big one. Once it’s out of the box there is no going back. |
| Several years ago when we first heard of the advent of GM bio-technology, it was all about the benefits. It was to be a brave new world with benevolent bells on. It was going to feed the Third World's starving millions, reduce the global use of agricultural chemicals, enhance the quality and aesthetics of our food supply, protect small farmers, vastly increase yields and was a totally safe extension of the traditional bio-tech development techniques of the past, a kind of fast lane hybridisation process. |
| We can ponder the extent to which these undelivered promises remain illusive or have in fact been turned on their heads, but first let’s remember that the sources of these early claims were the agricultural and agro-chemical corporatists, scientists and researchers, industrial institutions, and governments of the day which were being groomed by a small army of professional lobbyists who were in the pockets of the vested interests. They were indeed the very same (or remarkable look-alikes) as those who gave the world DDT, thalidomide, Vioxx, fluoridated water and all those other unmitigated man-made disasters that regularly visit mankind courtesy of ‘Trust Us We Know What We’re Doing Inc.” |
| How many of us remember that fateful day for Selwyn Gummer, the British Government Minister, when he paraded his young daughter before the world’s media and then forced her to eat a commercial hamburger as proof positive that British beef was 100% mad cow disease free? We should all have a hard think about that because nothing I’m aware of since has convinced me anything has changed. The people who are giving us all this reassuring advice can’t see any further than either the ends of their noses or the bottom line, be that the safe continuance of their careers or the next dividend. |
| When we see major issues like the wholesale adoption of GM technologies creep up on us as we now do – and it’s about to hit a point of no return – then I think we’re entitled to more than just the biased opinion of the vested interests concerned. I’m quite happy that they go into their secure laboratories and do their ground breaking research on getting the very best from what GM technology has to offer mankind, but the moment they bring their experiment into the open environment and start putting humanity into the global test tube, then I think we have a strong collective cause for very serious concern. In this context the fact that Aussie farmers are lagging the rest of the GM pack elates me. It makes me feel, albeit temporarily, safer. |
| The pace is hotting up. The GM/bio-tech industry is dominated by five or six industrial giants the most conspicuous of which, by far, is Monsanto. For years it has been quietly acquiring smaller companies that have given it enormous horizontal and vertical integration within the GM field, and this despite a large number of setbacks as dissenting voices forced a number of worldwide moratoriums on the planting and trialling of GM crops. Monsanto has also developed a big reputation for black ops, for using surveillance techniques that encourage neighbouring farmers to dob in each other on suspicion of contravening patent agreements, for forging potent and extensive revolving door affiliations between the government and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)5 in the US, a reputation for suing small-time farmers in Canada and the US whose fields have been cross contaminated with wind-blown Monsanto patented GM crops, and for taking advantage of Third World vulnerabilities by promoting GM crops to subsistence farmers while the developed world (outside of the US) hid behind short-lived paper fortresses of moratoriums. |
| More GM industry cross-pollination can be expected in the coming years. The worldwide number of bio-tech companies apparently grew from 584 in 2005 to 1,287 in 2008, a strange phenomenon given that the entire industry was supposed to be on the back foot during that time. We can expect many newcomers to become part of a new collective whole. |
| Not all of these developments relate directly to the future introduction of GM foods, but whether we’re talking GM pharmaceuticals or animal feed or indeed for the food on our tables, many, if not most, of these bio-tech innovations are destined to at least pass through our bodies one way or another. |
| A quick review of some of the main issues still outstanding with GM technology makes one shudder in disbelief that there could be so many major unresolved issues, all potentially capable of turning life on its head if they go wobbly, yet with so many proponents keen to press ahead regardless. These issues range from the ethical to the social, from health and environmental, to a plethora of unpredictable commercial and cultural outcomes. |
| Fundamentally though, we need to be quite clear as to the real importance of the need for genetically modified food in the first place. Is the world truly dependant on GM technology in order to feed itself or to stop itself choking on its own toxicity, or is it just a Trojan Horse for improved profits at the unwitting expense of humanity’s health and well being? Do we, for example, really need to be able to grow tomatoes in cold climates (by crossing them with flounders), or develop tobacco with the capacity to deter tooth decay (or should we develop better dental care programs for smokers instead)? As for feeding the world’s hungry, wouldn’t a restructuring of Third World debt be a more honest, effective and safer way of addressing the problem? |
| To millions of people around the world the safety concerns attached to GM foods remain far from resolved. The industry maintains its inherent safety, yet it has a track record of screw ups (some on a grand scale and even fatal) and suppression of negative research that confirm otherwise. |
| Unlike conventional foods which have been around and successfully and safely hybridised for millennia, some GM foods are known to develop unintentional and exaggerated adverse effects on both animals and humans that have ingested them. The most notable concerns a Japanese company called Showa Denko KK that developed a GM based tryptophan dietary supplement.6 Fortunately the impact of the blunder was immediate and devastating which made it traceable and stoppable, but in the process 100 people died and 10,000 were made chronically sick. But the fact that it was caught before it got out of hand was more luck than judgement, and an investigation into why it happened was allegedly rigged to suggest a faulty filter was responsible rather than the product as marketed. |
| These types of experiences raise the crucial issue of the need for pre-market testing (in isolation and for lengthy periods), for not all the consequences of a gene splice can be expected to be as evident or spontaneous or for that matter as pernicious as the tryptophan incident. Industrial expedience demonstrates time and again that commerce cannot be trusted to regulate itself either; such a system would be wide open to abuse. Farmers don’t appoint foxes to guard their hen houses and neither should we. |
| Engineering genes, despite impressions to the contrary, is apparently a very inexact science and its outcomes can be difficult to predict. One frequently occurring consequence is that GM forms of food cause increases in food allergenicity and toxicity. Yet the GM foods in question would be difficult, even impossible, to spot because there are essentially no testing protocols prior to market entry. Strange, but apparently true. |
| Under current FDA procedures in the USA, the procedure is that if a GM version of a food looks, smells, feels and tastes like the original food, then it is considered to be "not significantly different"7 and is allowed to be marketed to the unsuspecting public and enter the human food chain, usually unidentified and unlabelled. |
| Moreover, the insertion of genetic materials from one source to another usually involves either viral or bacterial vectors. One such instance would be the use of the anti-biotic resistance marker gene, which is used to demonstrate to the bio-engineers that a gene insertion has been successful. Proponents of GM maintain that these marker genes are safe because they cannot survive the passage through the human gut and are therefore benign. Yet, there are anecdotal reports that not only are some capable of doing so, but that having done so can deliver ongoing anti-biotic resistance to human gut flora. |
| Beyond this there are a plethora of other implications associated with unintentional cross-breeding of conventional crops (both domesticated and weeds) with compatible GM plant strains. It's one thing to be an unwitting farmer whose farm sits downwind of a neighbour’s field of patented crop and who cops a writ from Monsanto as a result, but another to be a peasant farmer in the Peruvian Andes who mysteriously finds his landrace surrounded by pesticide resistant corn and odd tasting GM potatoes. All of a sudden he finds he can no longer successfully grow the subsistence food of his ancestors and his traditional way of life is shape-shifted for ever. |
| There is little, and in some countries no, effective regulation of GM foods. In the US there is even legislation against it. On the basis of ‘substantial equivalence’, a description and system that is overseen (or overlooked depending on how you view it) by the FDA, most foods containing GM ingredients need or must not be labelled as such. This means that despite some nations having introduced mandatory GM labelling requirements, the use of GM ingredients in some imported foodstuffs would be impossible or at best extremely difficult to spot. |
| The European Community and Japan currently lead the world in their resistance to the use of GM-based food in their markets, but even their regulations are forced to make allowances for minimum percentage thresholds of GM content in some of their imported food products. |
| Interestingly though, the EU and Japan are excellent examples of the benefits of public education and the resultant people-power it generated to stop the use of GM technology in their markets once the public understood clearly what was involved with it. Faced with heavy public rejection governments have demonstrated their willingness to reject it too and this is why, to a large extent, GM agriculture has failed to deliver the bonanza promised to farmers a decade or two ago. They are simply unable to export their suspect crops to large traditional export markets that prefer to remain GM free. |
| Not so the USA. Despite mounting evidence that GM food isn’t, or might not be, safe, no one really knows whether they are eating it or not. Because it isn’t labelled there are many members of the public who genuinely believe that they don’t eat GM foods but are, albeit unwittingly, sometimes its best customers. |
| In order to be successful in the market place the GM/bio-tech industry needs a complacent, ill-informed and unaware consumer base. Fortunately for them and courtesy of the failure of the FDA to operate as protector to the American public, this is exactly what Americans have become. |
| The FDA doesn’t evaluate ‘substantially equivalent’ GM foods for safety, yet relies on GM food producers to provide ‘substantial equivalence’ classification. When a group of FDA scientists raised a red flag on specific and perceived dangers8 related to some GM foods, they were completely ignored by the politically motivated managing elite of the agency. Neither does the FDA conduct follow-up studies on the subsequent impact of GM foods on human health once they have been released to the public, and if it did it would take decades (or good luck) to unravel the tangle of evidence demonstrating cause and effect. All this at a time when an increasingly sick America is experiencing unprecedented rises in rates of food related allergies. It makes you wonder why they don’t wonder, doesn’t it? |
| Scientists and researchers who dare publish negative or potentially damaging reports on the impact of GM foods have been summarily discredited and/or fired from their posts. This was the case of Dr. Arpad Pusztai who was a highly celebrated scientist of impeccable credentials working at the Rowett Institute in Scotland. He was selected to conduct specific research intended to be the definitive word on the safety of GM foods, yet when the remarkable results of his research signalled serious damage to the digestive, immune and neurological systems of rats, he very quickly found himself out of a job, his work misrepresented and suppressed and his eminent 35 year career in tatters.9 Fortunately Pusztai’s work eventually saw the light of day in the Lancet,10 but it’s not surprising that with consequences like that eight out of ten research papers on the subject of GM bio-technology are industry sponsored and all are favourable. |
| For my money this whole GM thing has too much of a dark side. The prime movers in the industry are basically the same bunch of crooks that have given humanity wave after wave of human tragedy and disaster, and all I can see at the moment, with their fast lane to market tactics and their willingness to suppress relevant negative issues, is an appetite to repeat the same old familiar follies. If I were given a choice of putting my faith in either agri-business, the agro-chemical industry, governments, fear-stricken farmers, a compliant global press and a public relations industry that is entirely without conscience or creed, or in good old common sense and a sense of self-preservation, then I’m going to have to go with the latter. |
| I’m not a Luddite and I believe in human progress. I don’t, however, believe in turning the human race into a giant laboratory rat on a just-in-case basis. Who in their right mind would stake their safety and wellbeing purely so that scientific progress can stay ahead of schedule? |
| By all means let the Monsantos and the Dow Cornings of this world retreat to their secretive labs and under cover of quarantine do some serious and safe research in order to figure out what is safe and what works. Keep the genie in the box. |
| Meanwhile, we have quite enough functional problems, allergies, environmental toxins, human disease and other man-made tragedies in progress without the added help of what GM food experimentation has to offer mankind. |
| As for Australia, I really do hope that it takes a collective step back from what may well be a brink. We, like New Zealand, are uniquely placed, both geographically and culturally to exploit our food export markets using the reputation of excellence, quality and purity which we have so carefully managed to build up over the years. |
| Surely it couldn’t be allowed to happen here? Or maybe we should just get comfortable, sit back, close our eyes and start counting cane toads until we drop into the comfort of the black abyss. |
| Regardless, I remain optimistic for mankind. |
| Footnotes: |
| 1. Aussie farmers 'lagging on GM' by Asa Wahlquist, The Australian, 16 February 2008 2. Fewer Britons fear dangers of GM food by Denis Campbell, The Observer, 24 February 2008 3. GM crops can meet India's food, biofuel needs, Reuters, 25 February 2008 4. Farmers around the world upbeat about GM food crops, Indo-Asian News Service, 25 February 2008 5. The Case Against GM Food: If they ain't broke, why.....? by Dave Abbott, www.drs.org.au/new_doctor/73/GM_food_2.html 6. Recoding Nature. Critical Perspectives on Genetic Engineering by Hindmarsh and Lawrence; Is GM Food Safe to Eat? by Judy Carmen, www.gefreeaustralia.org/images/JUDY-download.pdf 7. Ibid 8. An Open Letter to Hillary Clinton from a Wellesley College Alumna by Linn Cohen-Cole, 19 February 2008, www.celsias.com/2008/02/19/an-open-letter-to-hillary-clinton-from-a-wellesley-college-alumna/ 9. The GE Sellout by Jonathan Eisen 10. Ibid |
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