|
|
|||
| Biotech Backlash | |||
|
|
|||
|
Scientists and Consumers Retaliate Today, every time you sink your teeth into a God-made delicious organic apple you are engaging in a political act of protest against another Big Lie and taking a step into the new Garden of Eden which is humanity’s birthright. The politics of food is uniting the human race, perhaps because food is even more inescapable than war. To understand how your grocery cart is the place of worldwide awakening, in which you can participate for the health of your family and life on earth, consider the following recent events. The Canadian government asked the prestigious Royal Society of Canada to appoint a panel of experts on agricultural science, medicine, philosophy, biotechnology, toxicology, and law to provide guidelines for the regulation of food biotechnology in Canada. That panel is about as straight, square and mainstream as you could ever expect. Yet, a miracle happened which is enough to restore one’s faith in the human race. Instead of support for a policy of keeping people ignorant about the genetically modified science fiction we are expected to believe (for the financial benefit of biotech companies), the government got a huge slap in the face. The Royal Society’s January 2001 report is a withering critique of federal GE food policies. The panel provided more than 50 sober recommendations, none of which are compatible with business-as-usual for the biotech industry nor for government policy—a terrible blow, as Canada is the world’s third largest producer of GE foods. The usual congratulatory phrases introducing a new report were abruptly pulled from the government website after two days, when our bureaucrats and industry-friendly politicians had had a chance to actually read it. The Royal Society confirms that genetically engineered foods were developed in secret, released into the environment and our stomachs without mandatory scientific safety studies and without public consent. The few available scientific studies (not based on secret industry science) disturbed them, so several recommendations call for an outright moratorium (such as on fish with human genes). Almost simultaneously, the European Union and the United States completed a similar exercise prompted by the prestigious journal Science which had published a review article showing that by the year 2000, there existed only eight peer-reviewed articles on GMOs in the world’s scientific database, and three of those were sponsored by Monsanto, with incomplete data disclosure. There was, however, tons of industry propaganda on saving the world’s starving masses. The EU-US panel consisted entirely of biotech scientists handpicked by the Rockefeller Foundation. Then the miracle happened again—the panel agreed that science, safety, and public consent were missing. The European parliament promptly passed strict legislation which places the burden of proof on the companies that produce GE foods, and requires scientific transparency and labelling of the products. Europe had already banned bovine growth hormone (the first GE product developed) after Canada revealed its carcinogenic potential. In the U.S., public debate finally began in earnest (only one-fifth of Americans even know they are already eating GE foods). By March 2001, opinion polls showed that more than half of the U.S. population doesn’t want to eat it at all. The New York Times clucked that Europe was “technophobic.” Actually, European research is taxpayer-supported, not industry-dependent as North American universities are; also, Europe’s sophisticated food culture did not sell out to the processed-food industry. This year, in swift succession, one Asian country after another passed similar legislation. Most striking was Ecuador’s rejection of the U.S. food donations containing GE products. Apparently, the Ecuadorians found natural disasters easier to handle than genetically engineered foods. At the same time, the StarLink taco shell scandal occurred when Aventis released GE corn, not approved for human consumption, into the food chain via processed foods. The resulting multi-billion dollar class action suits are considered by industry experts to be so serious a blow as to put the entire enterprise of food biotechnology into jeopardy. The corporate credibility crisis is, however, hurting all of us: pesticide resistant superweeds, resulting from GE plants hybridizing with natural ones (something the industry swore could not happen), are devastating Canada’s prairie provinces and have started to invade Ontario and New Brunswick. The “golden rice” engineered to provide extra vitamin A to combat blindness in the Third World has turned out to be fool’s gold: it has less vitamin A than a carrot, ounce per ounce, and is only absorbable in the presence of plenty of fat—something sorely lacking in the diet of the world’s poor, for whom it was supposedly designed. Monsanto’s famous GE potato was voluntarily withdrawn because of “lack of public support”—the public being big guys like McCain’s who have the corner on potato chips and refuse to use GE products. In a desperate attempt to hang onto some respectability, Monsanto appointed a panel of medical and life science experts from famous universities around the world to help “improve how Monsanto serves society” through “dialogue, transparency, sharing, respect, and delivering benefits” (Ontario Farmer, June 12, 2001). If these experts turn out to be anything like the ones that wrote the Canadian and EU-US reports, Monsanto won’t know what hit them. The world’s premier science journal, Nature, reported on February 8 the results of a ten-year trial comparing natural versus GE sugar beets, canola, corn and potatoes. Untended, within four years the GE varieties became extinct (47 of the 48 plots), unable to reproduce and handle the ups and downs of climate, temperature, and pests—unlike their natural counterparts. On April 19, Nature magazine sported Granny Smith apples on its cover. The lead article discussed a five-year research project comparing organically grown and conventional (pesticide-sprayed) apple orchards. The result: the organic apples are sweeter, more profitable and “ranked first in environmental and economic sustainability.” Ouch! A hard blow for the corporate giants preaching that the world can only be fed if agriculture becomes more efficient by buying their pesticides and accepting their improvements on nature. Adding insult to injury, the United Nations’ Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) reminded scientists of their “moral responsibility” to not rush products to market on the basis of “insufficient test results.” The UK’s premier research centre, the John Innes Centre, announced that all genetically engineered crops are “fundamentally flawed,” because messing with plant genomes “weakens them” and “interferes with [various] functions.” Health Impact of Genetically Modified Foods Indeed, GE foods have the potential to interfere very seriously with us as well. For the past decade, Dr. Shiv Chopra has led Canadian Health Protection Branch scientists in resisting our government’s determined effort to bypass the mandatory regulatory process on behalf of their corporate biotech friends (see my Vitality article February 2000 for the full story). Persecuted for years, public opinion has recognized him for the hero he is, and Health Canada recently appointed him to the committee which addresses both the medical antibiotic resistance crisis and the GE food issue. They are related problems: antibiotics are (ab)used in making GE foods. Dr. Chopra said in a recent interview: “You can eat a cancer tumour and you will definitely not get cancer, but when you eat GE food you are eating an unpredictable process.” The primary scientific reason that gave Dr. Chopra the ammunition to stop bovine growth hormone in Canada was the fact that the rate of breast cancer is seven times higher in the presence of an insulin-like growth factor which BGH treated milk contains. Environmental and nutritional medicine expert, Dr. Sherry Rogers, tells us that cancer in chickens is often caused by infection with the Rous sarcoma virus. This virus is used by biotech scientists as a carrier to implant human growth hormone genes into farmed fish to make them grow faster. The hydrochloric acid in human stomachs does not kill it; nobody knows what the combined effect will be of the virus and the hormone (which also can persist). Industry assures us that nothing bad can possibly happen. Since every second person is expected to get cancer now, cancers caused through eating such fish would be impossible to trace and no one could be held liable. But reports of humans being infected by the chicken leukemia retroviruses, used in pigs to implant human hormones, already exist. The clearest evidence for the dangers of ingesting GE foods comes from experiments done by the Hungarian scientist-couple Ardai Puzstai and Susan Bardocs at Edinburgh’s Rowett Institute. They told their story in Ottawa at the Council of Canadians’ February conference on food safety. The government, appalled at finding not a single food safety study on GE potatoes about to be released for consumption, appointed Puzstai in 1995 to provide such a study at the cost of 1.6 million pounds sterling. He expected nothing serious, but the carefully designed animal trials resulted, to his own shock, in clear evidence of brain damage, immune system dysregulation, pre-cancerous cell changes, and hormone imbalances especially in young, rapidly growing animals. With the permission of the Rowett Institute, Puzstai went public. But when Monsanto (Rowett Institute’s chief money source) learned of this, Rowett was forced to fire these internationally renowned scientists. The British parliament ordered Puzstai to testify publicly. The UK turned against GE foods as a result of this testimony and Dr. Chopra’s resistance to BGH in Canada. To this day, Puzstai’s studies are the only genuine safety studies on GE foods. The director of the U.S. National Corn Growers Association, Fred Yoder, summed up the unfolding biotech debacle best, revealing the hypocrisy of the entire enterprise (Ontario Farmer, May 8, 2001). He observed that the biotech industry went about introducing this technology “the wrong way.” They should have “created a need first, and then come up with a solution, and then you are going to make money”—which is what it was all about in the first place. Organic Movement Gains Momentum In January, the international organic farmers’ conference at Guelph University provided evidence for the world-wide organic food boom. And on February 16 in Ottawa, the Council of Canadians brought together activists, whistleblowers, and scientists from all over the world. Drs. Shiv Chopra and Margaret Haydon were given the “Whistleblower Award,” and both told an audience of more than a thousand that they intended “to remain a royal pain in the side of the Canadian government” for years to come. At Guelph, Bernward Geier, the CEO of the International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements (www.ifoam.org), provided data from 105 countries showing how organic farming has grown in a mere three seasons from US$10 billion to $20 billion in revenues, and is expected to reach US$100 billion by the end of this decade. The organic movement started in 1924 in Germany with the philosopher Rudolf Steiner. Now, every university in Germany and Switzerland, and most throughout Europe, have professorships and full departments, financed by only public research money, devoted to organic farming research. Geier stated that McDonalds in Sweden has gone organic, Swiss Air and Lufthansa are the first airlines to be totally organic; the German government announced in January that its official agricultural policy is now organic. The European Union has introduced legislation requiring labelling. Most of Europe, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Arabia, China, many African countries and some South American countries all require labelling already. It was also learned that Canada is quietly pouring millions into developing technologies to segregate GM crops from the real thing after having asserted for years that this could not be done. Also at the Guelph conference, the courageous agricultural professor, Ann Clark, who nearly lost her job at Monsanto-money-padded Guelph University for revealing that our government has not done any safety tests of GMO foods at all, described how organic farming is the ultimate challenge to globalization. Bruster Kneen, editor of The Ram’s Horn newsletter, provided details on the efforts of biotech companies to gain total control of the world’s food supply—and how that control is coming unravelled through the world-wide grassroots movements demanding that “the world is our home, not the playground for corporate agendas.” Just how effective and organized this public protest is becomes clear when considering the following statistics: research at Johns Hopkins University examined the non-profit sector world-wide. The so-called NGOs (non-governmental organizations like Greenpeace etc.) are growing at four times the rate of the world’s economy. Annual total world expenditure is at roughly one trillion dollars; if all the NGOs were one country—the voice of the common people calculated as a single nation—it would be equivalent to the eighth-largest economy in the world. Furthermore, NGOs employ more people than the for-profit private sector by a margin of six to one (M. Barlow, 2001). In Ottawa, the Council of Canadians conference also featured Ralph Nader who provided a magisterial overview of activism. (The entire conference can be enjoyed on CD ROM; call 1-800-387-7177, ext. 250 for instructions.) The speakers from Brazil, Argentina, the U.S., and Asia told of their devastating experiences with corporate power undermining their governments as well as the actions of courts and individuals turning the tide everywhere. Leanne Simpson, the director of the Indigenous Environmental Studies program at Trent University, said that among her people it is the responsibility of everyone to “think ahead seven generations,” which is what made her into an anti-GE activist. Native people in Canada already consume most of the GE foods, as their traditional food sources have become contaminated with heavy metals. Why eat organic? Because it is free of carcinogenic pesticides, endocrine-disrupting chemicals, and foreign genes that our enzyme system cannot handle safely; it protects the soil and water quality as well as sustainable farming practices, and provides humane treatment for animals. Organic food consumption also encourages local food production and varieties (as opposed to jet-setter strawberries). The single most important health choice you can ever make is to protect your body from the witches’ brew of money-science. Regaining the Garden of Eden is a task to be accomplished and we have the knowledge to create it. |
|||
|
|
|||
| Sources and Resources: |
|||
|
|
|||
|
Organizations: Society For Biodynamic Farming (Canada) 519-684-6846 |
|||
|
|
|||