The following are 3 excellent letters and articles sent to Sri Lanka's press following coverage of CS Prakash and Gregory Conko's AgBioWorld press release attacking Sri Lanka over its proposed ban on GM food imports. The items are from Devinder Sharma of India's Forum for Biotechnology & Food Security, Dr Richard Hindmarsh of the University of Queensland and PAN AP (the Pesticide Action Network, Asia and the Pacific).
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June 29, 2001
Dear Sir,
Dr U.P. de S. Waidyanatha's article in the Daily News (June 4, 2001) is merely an indication of how poorly informed are biotechnologists about the ground realities in their own countries and... the developing world. I am not even a bit surprised. After all, even the enlightened biotechnology proponents have still to get out of the "frog in the well" mentality. Like a frog, they too believe that they have a grip over the crisis facing the world. And in turn they end up pushing in an alien technology to ensure 'profit security' for the private companies at the cost of the food security of the resource-poor farmers.
It is true that 800 million people in the world go to bed hungry every night. But it is not because of any shortage of food. If we were to distribute the available food as per the minimum calorie requirement among the world's population, there would still be food left for another 800 million people. If such a large proportion of people is going to bed hungry it is not because of any shortfall in production but because of issues linked to access and distribution. Biotechnologists are, therefore, trying to divert attention from the real crisis afflicting global food security.
In Africa, for instance, even at the height of the famine in 1984-85, "the years of the worst famine, northwestern Ethiopia had heaps of grain, rotting, waiting for lorries to take them to areas where it was needed. Moreover, 85 per cent of the population is still rural with no access to financial resources other than crops grown by families. If a bad season turns up, families have no grain, and therefore no income. So, when there is food, they can't buy it." (Tewolde Berhan Egziabher in the New Scientist, Jan 20, 2001).
It doesn't end there. This year, India has a record grain surplus of 60 million tonnes. Much of it is rotting because people do not have the means to buy it. Even if India were to adopt biotechnology and let us for once accept the claims of the biotechnology industry (which in reality is untrue) that it will increase food production, do you think the still higher food surplus will make food within the reach of the poor and hungry? It will not. When will biotechnologists accept the ground realities and see that their faulty hypotheses (backed by the industry) do not lead to greater food insecurity?
Still worse. Like the biotechnology industry's promise of a magic potion, an American company has been allowed to set up a food manufacturing plant in India. The company will convert rice bran into nutritious human food (still an untested patented technology). After all, with the largest number of malnourished in the world, India is the right destination for such miracle foods. Interestingly, what is not known is that rice bran is traditionally used for cattle feed in countries like India. So, we are keen to convert cattle feed into human nutritious food. But look on the other side. India is trying desperately to find a market for its mounting foodgrain stocks, it has even decided to reduce the prices to the level being offered to 'below the poverty line' population so as to seek a price advantage. And when India exports foodgrains to the west, it is first consumed by cattle. Isn't it an irony (and shame) that we allow our human food to be exported for the cattle of the west and in turn convert our cattle feed into so-called human nutritious food !!!!
The politics of food is stinking. And biotechnology is a part of this murky politics.
Yours sincerely,
Devinder Sharma
President, Forum for Biotechnology & Food Security Email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
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29 June 2001
Editor Daily News
Sri Lanka
Dear Sir,
Precaution over genetic engineering: Sri Lanka is on the right track!
The current debate in the Daily News about GM foods and genetic engineering shows intense disagreement exists about the safety of GM foods and the release of genetically engineered organisms into the environment. This debate exists worldwide. It points up the high scientific uncertainty about the risks and hazards of genetic engineering posed to both humans and the environment. Clearly, it is problematic. Despite the promises projected by genetic engineering interests, the 'science' of genetic engineering to assess risk is further contested as it is clearly dominated by scientific entrepreneurship and now, increasingly, industrial ownership and application.
This means, as the Daily News debate highlights, that science is certainly not value-neutral or 'objective' and instead different value-systems and value-judgments affect regulation and decision-making. This questions the regulators of GM foods and crops in key GM western countries being too closely allied to scientists and others with a direct interest in commercialising genetic engineering and reaping inflated material and financial rewards, whether in the form of monopoly profits or enormous amounts of research funding.
The enduring contestation of scientific knowledge highlights that scientific uncertainty is now a strong driver of the debate about biotechnological change. As some commentators in the Daily News GM debate identify, this has given rise to the need for precaution or the use of the precautionary principle in decision-making, which the government of Sri Lanka is exercising in the banning of GM foods and its subsequent review.
The precautionary principle shifts the 'onus of proof' 'in decision-making from those who claim that harm may occur from some human activity to those whose actions may cause change. Those causing the impact need to provide a convincing argument that their actions will not have serious or irreversible impacts on the environment or human health detrimental to society. I applaud the wisdom of applying this process, as the developers (after nearly 30 years of research and development on genetic engineering) have not provided a convincing case to genetically reconstruct the environment or food. I would highlight some of the risks posed that need addressing.
The most often stated health concerns are possible allergens and toxins introduced by GM foods. Research has shown that milk from genetically engineered bovine growth hormone (BGH) treated cows (in the US) may contribute to increased mammary cancer risk; that tobacco plants engineered to produce gammalinolenic acid instead mainly produced the toxic product octadecatetraenic; that yeast modified to obtain increased fermentation accumulated metabolite methyl-glyoxal in toxic and mutagenic concentrations; that a gene from a Brazil nut inserted into soybeans produced unexpected strong allergic reactions in nut-allergic people who had never had any problems with soybean products. Moreover it has not been clarified whether 37 deaths and 1500 cases of chronic neurologic and autoimmune-symptoms in the US and Europe in 1989 following the ingestion of some amino-acid nutritional supplement called L-tryptophan were due to its manufacture by a GM bacteria or to the purification process involved. A more recent preliminary toxicology study in rats showed that the nutrient content of GM potatoes was not the same as that of conventional potatoes, and that long-term consumption of such potatoes adversely affected mammalian immune system and vital organs.
Environmental effects include: (1) Scottish research showing indirect adverse ecological effects from GM insect-resistant potato plants upon non-target ladybirds, (2) likewise, adverse effects on non-target lacewings foraging on poisoned target insects of insect-resistant maize, (3) Danish and Scottish research showing that GM oilseed rape may transfer their inserted transgene by cross-pollination of wild relatives, (4) a forced, augmented capability of self-pollinating GM plants to cross-pollinate other plants, (5) GM cotton plants with inserted herbicide-resistance genes demonstrating two types of malfunction. In some cases, the plants dropped their cotton bolls, in others the resistance genes were not properly expressed, so the GM plants were killed by a herbicide it was 'designed' to resist, and (6) when GM plants resistant to certain viruses are infected with other viruses, new, recombinant viruses can arise which have their host specificity and other biological properties changed. Recently, Australian researchers accidentally created a deadly virus while trying to genetic engineer a contraceptive vaccine for mice. It killed all the mice belonging to a strain genetically resistant to mouse-pox virus, and also 50% of the genetically resistant mice that had been immunized against mouse-pox virus.
Such GM problems question the aspect of 'precision' often referred to as a 'predictable' characteristic of genetic engineering. Professor Terje Traavik, Scientific Director GENOEK-Norwegian Institute of Gene Ecology at Tromsö University challenges this claim: 'The organisms we get out of the genetic engineering techniques we use at the moment are extremely unpredictable with regard to what they are, and how they will perform under different conditions and in different environments. And we do not have the right knowledge and methods to pre-assess them.' He continues, 'our association with the word "technology" includes predictability, control, and reproducibility. Yet, while the parts of gene technology which concern construction of vectors (for transgene transfer) are truly technology, current techniques for genetic modification of cells and organisms mean no possibility to target the vector/transgene to specific sites within the recipient genomes.'
What this means in practical terms is that modifications performed with identical recipients and vector gene constructs under the same standardised conditions may result in highly different genetically modified organisms (GMOs) depending on where the transgenes become inserted. It also means no control with changes in gene expression patterns for the inserted or the endogenous genes of the GMO; and no control of whether the inserted transgene(s), or parts thereof, move within or from the recipient genome, or where transferred DNA sequences end up in ecosystems. Traavik concludes, 'Would you call this a "technology"?'
Professor Traavik's main concern though is over horizontal gene transfer, which he argues many biotechnologists have little knowledge about or want to discuss. What is horizontal gene transfer? Traavik explains, "it is non-sexual transfer of genetic information between organisms, and consequently differs essentially from the vertical transfer (sexual transfer) from parent to offspring". A DNA construct that is deliberately released or which escapes accidentally may theoretically be taken up by one type of microorganism in an ecosystem, and thereafter horizontally transferred to other types of microorganism and thence to new ecosystems. During the process, the DNA construct may be integrated into the genetic material of separate individuals and thereafter be transferred vertically. An example is antibiotic multi-resistant bacteria spreading from hospitals to large numbers of freely living, naturally occurring species of bacteria.
Traavik is at the cutting edge of research in trying to understand how it occurs. His concern is that there is little possibility of evaluating in advance whether a specific DNA construct will be horizontally transferred, when it will be transferred, or where it will end up. Genetic 'pollution' from GMOs is thus a real possibility, not only from cross-pollination but also from unplanned breeding and horizontal gene transfer. Such events, Traavik notes, may result in extensive and unprecedented health, environmental and socioeconomic problems.
How then do we address such potentially dire threats of genetic engineering? First, we need to openly acknowledge them, and second we need endorse the precautionary approach at the very least. As Professor Traavik argues, 'The real problem in the whole field of genetic engineering is the unpredictability and the lack of solid knowledge about potential risks and hazards. The scientific basis for both risk management and science is the Precautionary Principle. Scientifically, because it directs your intellect, creativity and experimental approaches in the right directions, namely towards the unknown. And the mission of all science should be to approach the unknown, not to defend the known!' I tend to agree with him.
Yet, in the context of the global environmental crisis, I would go further and strengthen the formulation of the precautionary principle to an 'ecologically situated precautionary principle'. Its application would require that regulators prioritise questions of ecological complexity and interrelated social risk over limited technical genetics and economics notions of risk and benefits.
In addition, it would consider alternatives to potentially harmful technologies in advance; and that scientists and technology developers acknowledge uncertainty and be made responsible to initiate research aimed at reducing that uncertainty. Also, that decision-making must be transparent, participatory and account for local values and perceptions of risk and hazard. This would offer a practical and necessary 'brake', apart from widespread public opposition, to question and check the relentless push of those attempting to construct a GM future nature. This future would appropriate and monopolise, through patenting, our evolutionary pathways that have existed satisfactorily for millennia asthey are.
Sri Lanka is certainly on the right track and offers a vision of wisdom that we can only hope the west will achieve one day!
Richard Hindmarsh
Dr Richard Hindmarsh Contemporary Studies University of Queensland Ipswich Australia 4305 Ph: 61+ 7 3381 1569 Fax: 61+ 7 3381 1572 Email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
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"Why Genetic Engineering is Not Good for Your Health or the Environment!"
By the Pesticide Action Network, Asia and the Pacific (PAN AP)
2 July 2001
Biotechnology developers say genetic engineering has miraculous powers. They claim we will be liberated from our genetic straight jackets and thus overcome hunger and disease, solve global environmental degradation, and live longer. How are such wonders to be achieved? A central way offered is by reducing pesticide and herbicide use and increasing crop yields through new genetically engineered (GE) crops.
Farmers, consumers, the poor and the environment will thus all be better off. Indeed, the multibillion-dollar corporations behind genetic engineering are adamant that we can't feed the world's rapidly expanding population without it. Biotech proponent Dr. U. P. de S. Waidyanatha says, if we don't embrace GMOs we will be "wittingly or unwittingly responsible for the looming calamities, which may truly descend on all of us."
With all its promise to do so much good, why is there so much concern and opposition to genetic engineering in both developed and developing countries. Worldwide, environmentalists, consumer groups, animal-rights activists, organic agriculture advocates, food-trade organisations, and concerned farmers, politicians, scientists, religious groups, and indigenous people's have all entered the debate. Without exception, they have all indicated how they will be disadvantaged by the application of the genetic engineering technique.
Increasingly, scientific evidence is accumulating that genetic engineering could have unpredictable, unprecedented, irreversible and thus disastrous consequences for the health and wellbeing of all living beings on earth.
Molecular geneticist Dr. Michael Antoniou (Guy's Hospital, London) states, genetic engineering "places in human hands the capacity to redesign living organisms, the products of some three billion years of evolution ... Now whole proteins will be transposed overnight into wholly new associations, with consequences no one can foretell ... It is all too big and is happening too fast ... Going ahead in this direction may be not only unwise, but dangerous. Potentially, it could breed new animal and plant diseases, new sources of cancer, novel epidemics."
For those not familiar with the proposed new scientific wizardry, genetic engineering techniques allow scientists to transfer genes from one organism to another, often from one unrelated species to another to produce new or 'novel' organisms. Genes are entities responsible for a particular function or feature of an organism, for example, resistance to a herbicide, expression of a toxin, resistance to a virus, increased growth, flavour, nutritional aspects, etc.
'Novel' or GE organisms have been and are being created. They include cold-resistant tomatoes that have been inserted with an antifreeze gene from a coldwater fish for longer shelf life in the supermarket, corn that produces its own insecticide, soybeans resistant to herbicides, banana's with edible vaccines to immunize children, animals and plants that produce pharmaceutical drugs in their milk, violet carnations (called 'Moondust'), faster growing pigs and fish (some with human-origin DNA inserted), cows encouraged to produce more milk via injectable GE bovine growth hormone, pineapples and papaya that resist rotting, and pigs with human-origin DNA inserted for human organ transplants.
Although many might see some of these creations as naturally alluring, corporations see these new products as offering a new "gene-gold" production line of consumer goods. All manner of novel medicine, meat and dairy products, fruit, grains and vegetables are being imagined in shapes and colours, flavours and textures never before seen. Two recent products being developed are low-mow and novelty grasses (for example, luminesent and multi-coloured grasses) and allergy-free cats (the developers say there is a market for them in the US of 20 million Americans who are allergic to cats).
Genetic engineering thus creates organisms that could never exist in our natural world. But the proponents' persist in imagining that genetic engineering is merely an extension of traditional cross-breeding methods used by nature and farmers for thousands of years.
In fact, the technology is radically different to traditional breeding. Cross-breeding uses natural reproductive mechanisms only able to combine genetic material from the same or closely related species. For example, cauliflower can be cross-bred with broccoli but not with zucchini. Cross-breeding is subject to very precise and systematic rules and boundaries that do not allow for a random selection of genes from one organism to be inserted into the DNA of another organism.
Genetic engineering tools however can force this to happen. Professor Terje Traavik (of the Institute of Gene Ecology, Norway) strongly questions the application of genetic engineering, because in contravening natural boundaries, genetic engineering is neither precise nor predictable. The evidence is that when injecting a gene, scientists have little idea of where, or even if, the gene will be properly inserted into the cells of the receiving organism. Neither are they aware of the possible effects, that is, whether the target gene/s are expressed or if they trigger off expression of non-target host gene/s.
The Ecological Society of America, representing 8,000 ecologists, notes the long-term human health and ecological effects caused by the release of GMOs into the environment are difficult to predict.
If genetic engineering is so natural and safe, as its developers claim, why are all countries involved with it developing all manner of elaborate and complex regulations for its development and use in the open environment. Surely, if biotechnology works "with" nature these would not be necessary.
Yet another problem is that genetic engineering uses viruses as vectors for the transfer of genes and antibiotic resistance genes to indicate successful insertion of new genes. This can potentially lead to the development of super-viruses and human antibiotic resistance. Professor of Botany Debashis Banerji (Director of Baba Amte Centre for People's Empowerment in Madhya Pradesh, India) notes that the use of antibiotic resistant genes of bacteria and viruses "has potentially lethal consequences for the health of all living organisms." The emergence of super-viruses is already well known. Do we need more? A worst case scenario of what can possibly go wrong with genetic engineering has already been indicated in the US and Europe in 1999 when a batch of the amino-acid food supplement L-typtophan manufactured using genetically engineered microbes (strain V) entered the market. It killed 37 people and permanently crippled some 1,500 others with a new nervous system disorder-eosinophilia myalgia syndrome (EMS). Today it still has not been identified whether the problem was due to an inadequate purification system or to the GE bacteria used to manufacture it. The manufacturer settled million-dollar damage claims out of court without being legally required to produce, for analysis, the organism that may have caused the havoc.
Turning more to GE foods, Dr. Arpad Pusztai, one of the world's foremost expert's on nutritional studies with 12 scientific books and close to 300 primary peer-reviewed scientific papers published, says there has been little scientific study into their health risks. He argues the safety testing of GE foods is inadequate to assess potential harm, that GE foods can carry unpredictable toxins and that they may increase the risk of allergenic reactions.
A primary reason why comprehensive studies into the potential hazards of GE foods are so inadequate is the rush to commercialise these products. Risk assessment is lagging far behind commercialisation. The Physicians and Scientists for Responsible Application of Science and Technology (PSRAST), a global non-governmental organisation of scientists, points out, "research funding on the biotechnology risk has been a trickle compared to the huge investments into developing new GE crops."
A core area of biotechnology development is herbicide tolerant crops. Almost three-quarters (73 per cent) of the area planted to GE crops in 2000 was dominated by this GE product alone. Herbicide tolerant crops are engineered so farmers can use a particular pesticide or herbicide without damaging the crop. Monsanto, for example, sells Roundup Ready soybeans that can tolerate Monsanto's herbicide Roundup (glyphosate). Biotechnology expert Dr. Charles Benbrook (of the US Northwest Science and Environmental Policy Centre), in a recent report on Roundup Ready soybeans, not only reaffirms previous studies that weeds are growing resistant to Roundup, but that farmers are using considerably more herbicide than farmers cultivating non-GE varieties.
This clearly contradicts the claim by GE corporations that herbicide-resistant crops will lead to less herbicide use. Instead, they will entrench and expand chemical agriculture, thereby increasing poisonings from chemicals, chemical dumping, chemical pollution in our food and the environment, and increase costs for small farmers. Another contradiction is that Benbrook's study challenges the assertion by GE corporations that the new industrial biology will lead to higher yields. Dr. Benbrook found that Roundup Ready soybeans produce less of a yield (5-10 per cent) than conventional soybeans. Indeed, in April 2000, 160,000 US farmers collectively tried to sue Monsanto for reduced crop yields of Roundup Ready soybeans. The court ruled that there was not necessarily one reason for the yield loss. Some farmers are now seeking damages individually.
Genetic engineering already threatens to significantly affect the way in which our food is produced, processed and marketed. The claims of proponents that genetic engineering will improve food production, reduce the use of herbicides and increase crop yields is more propaganda than fact. Nor have GE foods yet been proven to be safe and it is doubtful they ever will be. A grand experiment on all of us is more the picture.
Many other issues exist besides those raised here, including the patenting or private ownership of our genetic heritage. It is all too evident that genetic engineering and GE foods serve the short-term capital interests of a multi-billion dollar industry at the expense of our health and the environment. Corporations basically have only a financial motive in developing biotechnology: to create a new round of capital accumulation widely condemned as a new form of colonisation-biocolonisation. This new colonisation would restrict alternative futures-like organic agriculture - that are more suited to an ecologically sustainable world.
For more information: PANAP P.O. Box 1170 10850 Penang Malaysia Web : http://www.poptel.org.uk/panap Tel. : 604-6570271/6560381 Fax : 604-6577445 Email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.