Thought for Food
By Helke Ferrie

The root of the word “religion” is the Latin religiere, meaning “careful consideration”. Since humans are thoughtful as well as greedy, this overview of biotechnology and organics is complex, because good thinking sometimes sabotages biotech, and greedy delusions infiltrate organics.  The curse of interesting times is upon us.

BIOTECH UNDER SIEGE AND HOT AIR FROM CODEX

Genetically engineered drugs and foods need for their success internationally recognized patents, a global market with trade regulated by the Codex Commission, and, of course, demonstrable benefits. Since patent laws have not caught up with the novelty of human-made objects replicating themselves in nature, obtaining patents for anything from bacteria to specific genes has been fairly easy. But controlling the global market has become a nightmare as Codex member states are increasingly simply ignoring its absurdities or fight back with science, the courts, and countervailing national legislation (visit www.alliance-natural-health.org).

A January 9^th editorial in The Washington Post lamented: “Fifteen years ago it was fashionable to pronounce the eclipse of the nation state: in a globalized world, power would flow to supernational bodies”, with the help of the North American Free Trade Agreement, the World Trade Organization and the United Nations, but “today this trend appears exhausted” because  “supernational institutions … have run out of forward momentum”; biotechnology was cited as the prime example. The writer expressed the hope that globalization and the corporate agenda will win, once nations “trip over their own populism”.  But the nation state is returning: people in rich and poor countries demand that governments act in the public interest. 

“ America ’s masterplan to force GM foods on the world” isn’t working out, as the UK ’s Guardian wrote on February 13. The US, Canada and Argentina took the European Union to the WTO court for refusing to import GMO foods. This court is secret, but the thousand-page ruling was leaked and shows that the EU’s crime had not been untimely response to allowing GMO imports, because trade rules permit countries to take their time over such decisions; instead, the crime was that EU countries had “politicized” this process by refusing GMO foods on scientific and safety grounds. Dubbing the EU “the coalition of the un-willing”, the Guardian observed: “There is little the WTO can do”, especially since the EU commented that the WTO court decision  “will not alter the system within which the European Union makes decisions on GMOs.” (New York Times, Feb.8)

Indeed “Europe has all but dropped off the world’s GM map,” opined The Guardian; thus, Cambridge University closed its biotech research center, Biogemma, in May and 25 scientists lost their jobs.  As reported in the Washington Post, February 8^th, Austria , France , Germany , Greece , Italy , Roamnia, and Luxembourg issued national bans on various GM crops. Ireland announced (like France and the Netherlands the year before) that it would not ratify the EU Constitution if GMOs were allowed. The Russians, like the Italians last year, banned GMOs from school cafeterias. Poland declared itself  GMO free. On May 8^th, the EU authorized Poland ’s ban as legal. The Polish Prime Minister even initiated a move for a “GMO-Free Europe” at the Declaration of Krakow on February 24. (gmwatch.org)

The most serious barrier for the biotech industry comes from mandatory labeling in Australia , New Zealand , Indonesia , South Korea and Japan ; their supermarket chains don’t carry foods containing GMOs, because nobody buys them (gmwatchdog.org, June 25). At the United Nations Food Standard Committee meeting held in Ottawa May 1 – 5 this year, the US tried to force member nations to drop all labeling whatsoever, but this failed due to the resistance from Consumers International’s representatives and those countries which banned GMOs. 

The US continues to shove it to its citizens with the force and swagger characteristic of the Bush administration: on March 8^th, despite enormous public protest, Congress passed a “national food uniformity” labeling law which, if passed by the Senate, would not only prevent any labeling of GMOs, but also overrule more than 200 State-based safety laws and scrap the individual States’ powers to require food safety labels of very kind, such as those warning of cancer risks, allergic reactions, and heavy metal poisoning.  A massive backlash is now in progress, and Washington analysts doubt it will pass the Senate (Organic Consumers Association, March 16, 2006).

Also in March, the US, Argentina and Canada were outvoted by 132 nations when attempting to force acceptance of  “terminator”. Terminator seeds are engineered to commit suicide if planted. Most of the world depends for its food on seed-saving farming practice. Since this issue is not yet totally dead, it is good to know that Norway has commenced building a “doomsday vault” which will house millions of natural crop seeds under the ice near the North Pole at Spitsbergen, so save agriculture in case of a nuclear, biotech, or climate disaster (The Independent, UK, Jan. 13). Terminator woke up religion as well: the World Council of Churches and the Pope condemned this technology because it “locates food sovereignty, the very backbone of community, in the hands of large corporations.” (GE Information Bulletin no 45, June 2006)

I often feel ashamed to be a citizen of a country that actively pushes GMOs.  Thirty-six years ago, when I left Germany, of which I wasn’t exactly proud either, I thought I had joined a more civilized tribe – which maybe I have, as I remind myself that Canadians started Greenpeace, Amnesty International, the Sierra Legal Defense Fund, and the Council of Canadians: they – not corporate biotech Canada – speak for the soul of this country.

In the US , too, people are successfully resisting, often with the help of their own government. Some hundred Texas cotton farmers have sued Monsanto, Bayer, and Delta & Pine over their “longstanding campaign of deception” which resulted in enormous losses sustained from planting Bt cotton which cannot adapt to drought. A large coalition of farmers and environmental organizations initiated legal action in February against the government, because the US Department of Agriculture approved biotech alfalfa, but neglected to do a mandatory environmental review. This could ruin the annual $ 480 million export business with Japan and South Korea who announced they wouldn’t buy any US alfalfa if its biotech version is approved.  (That threat stopped biotech efforts for wheat last year.)

In January, the US Inspector General severely criticized the government’s agricultural department for not “ensuring the safe introduction of agricultural biotechnology.” The public knows that biotech products are not safe; American consumers have forced Wal-Mart not to carry GMO-containing products, especially bovine growth hormone in milk products, forbidden in Canada and the EU.

And biotech scientists are worried. As reported in Nature (May 25), public distrust has prompted the development of policing measures and ethics standards to monitor their research by an independent body. The draft outline is available on-line: http://pbd.lbl.gov/sbconf. This was triggered by Dr. Ignacio Chapela, who was denied tenure at the University of California at Berkeley (heavily financed by the biotech industry), for speaking out about Mexico ’s problems caused by biotech contamination of corn.  He was featured in the outstanding documentary “The Future of Food”. Public outcry forced the university to grant him tenure in 2005.

To succeed, GMOs have to show some clear benefits nutritionally, medically and financially. Financially, the whole enterprise is mostly a pipe-dream of Enron proportions. Nature weekly biotech stocks section showed in the June 1 issue a sharp decline of 13% since February and 8% since January. Researchers in the UK and Venezuela found that Bt-engineered crops have, due to the constant presence of the toxic Bt bacteria (which organic farmers use only occasionally) caused the pests to thrive on them (Ecology Letters March 2006). This is the agricultural equivalent of antibiotic resistance  -  also caused by constant overuse which triggers an adaptive response. Because Bt is so important to organic farming, this adaptation could be disastrous for all agriculture.  Corporate biotechnological exploitation is creating a super pest. 

Until last year, there were very few studies on GMOs and health, the most important one by Ardai Pusztai of Scotland ’s Rowett Institute.  At the behest of Monsanto, he was fired when he showed that GM potatoes caused pre-cancerous damage to all vital organs in rats.  Prince Charles had Pusztai testify before the House of Lords. Since then, animal deaths on a large scale and many instances of severe illness and deaths in humans, caused especially by Bt biotech crops, have been reported from the Philippines , India , and from drug trials in the UK .  Like Puzstai’s rats, potentially fatal allergic responses were observed, and damage to many organs was also found (Institute for Science and Society, April 18. 2006, gmwatch.org Jan-June 2006, Environmental Health Perspectives  March 3). When genetically modified peas were tested on mice, their immune systems were severely damaged. (www.seedsofdeception.com) 

Last October, the Russian Academy of Sciences published research by Irina Ermakova.  She fed pregnant rats Monsanto’s Roundup Ready soy.  The mothers were unharmed, but 55.6% of the offspring died within 3 weeks, compared to only 9% of normally fed pups; all GM-fed pups also showed significant reduction in weight (www.responsibletechnology.org).  This prompted the American Academy for Environmental Medicine to join forces with Ermakova’s Institute for Responsible Technology to call upon the US National Institutes of Health to commence immediately with safety studies.

So far, biotechnology has produced nothing useful in medicine (let me know if you hear of something!).  Some (profitable) gene therapy disasters are described in former New England Journal of Medicine editor, Dr. Jerome Kassier’s book, On The Take ( Oxford , 2005). Gene therapy has caused cancer, diabetes, and most recently the deaths of most of the participants in a UK drug trial (The Guardian, March 16, 2006 and gmwatch.org). On April 27, Nature reported on patients born with combined immune deficiency who, following successful biotech treatment to jump-start their immune systems, subsequently developed lymphoma, a T-cell leukemia. It was concluded that the biotech method itself was the cause.

Meanwhile, Codex appears determined to regulate trade to make the world safe for Big Pharma and biotech, even as many of its member states pass defensive laws at home and the European Union is up for grabs.  So far, Codex has approved pesticide residues on foods in higher quantities than World Health Organization standards. Irradiation is fine by Codex, as is microwaving and biotechnology – anything is okay, it seems, that reduces nutrient value to zero.

On July 11, 2005, Codex announced their intention to enforce specifically  “labeling [designed] to stop overdosing on vitamin and mineral food supplements” (for which there is no shred of evidence). It proposes using “scientific risk assessment protocols” (designed for toxins, not nutrients) in order to establish “upper safe limits”  (a meaningless concept for essential nutrients because the body metabolizes them as needed) predicated on a mythical “average” human. Fortunately, the scientific community has woken up and research from the UK , Germany and Israel is challenging Codex on, for example, Codex-approved baby formula that makes cow’s milk equivalent to human milk to serve the financial interests of the dairy industry (British Medical Journal, March 20). 

Codex chairman, Dr. Rolf Grossklaus’ pronouncements include the assertion that “only pharmaceutical drugs prevent and mitigate disease”, even though product inserts state categorically that drugs don’t cure disease, but only control symptoms (www.Dr-Rath-Foundation.org).  Should this scientific gobbledygook actually become international regulatory policy, it would be enforced by the WTO; how it is obeyed, was described above. An excellent source of information on Codex is a new book by Mike Fillon cited below.

NEGOTIATING WITH THE DEVIL

In May, CBC  “Ideas” described how the organic movement is struggling with its success and the takeovers by large corporations, such as Kraft, Kellogg’s, General Mills, and Wal-Mart, which correctly see yet another profitable way to make big bucks.  That’s  how the demand for organic food has grown. About 1/3 of North Americans eat organic. US demand has grown such that $ 1.5 billion worth was imported in 2005.

This corporatization causes industrial efficiency to contaminate the organic movement: caged chickens are peddled as “organic”, as is some beef raised on inhumane cattle feed lots; strawberries are trucked across the continent from Texas-based farms or flown in from Chile , as is oatmeal from Scotland and coffee from Guatemala .  Organic baby food was found to have far more refined sugar in some UK brands than allowed in conventional food; it was also too low in iron and did not meet the standard for protein content (www.timesonline.co.uk, March 4).

In “My Saudi Arabian Breakfast”, Chad Heeter calculated that a 400 calorie organic breakfast costs 2,800 fossil fuel calories to produce, as calculated at the University of Michigan . True, Cornell University has shown that organic foods produce 30% less CO2 emissions than conventional foods – which are “like driving a Hummer” (Organic Consumers Association, March 24). The average animal-based diet, reports World-Watch (July 2006) generates annually, per person, 1.5 metric tons of carbon dioxide more than a plant-based diet of equivalent calories.

Organic farming continues to grow 20 to 25% annually, while biotech crops allegedly grew in 2004 by 11%  - a doubtful claim, when available data were independently examined by Canada ’s Polaris Institute. The few US data available turned out to be inflated by 10% (Straight Goods, February 15^th, 2006).  Today, less than 1% of the world’s arable land is under GMO cultivation (Washington Post, January 12, 2006).

TOOLS FOR HEALTH AND SURVIVAL

While governments tell us that labeling of GMO-containing foods would be too cumbersome, the fact is they are already labeled. If you avoid processed foods, farmed fish, conventional soy and corn products, and all oils packaged in plastic bottles you are almost GMO safe. Check produce stickers: conventionally grown foods have four numbers on the PLU code, while organics have five prefaced by a 9.  GMO fruit has five numbers as well, but prefaced by the number 8.

Conventionally grown foods are seriously deficient in essential minerals without which the body cannot absorb vitamins and essential fatty acids. According to the American College of Nutrition and the data published by the US Department of Agriculture, Iron has declined by 15%, vitamin C by 20 to 80 % (depending on the fruit), riboflavin dropped by 38%, magnesium and calcium are also below even RDA levels (organicconsumers.org).  The reason for this nutritional decline is simple: plants require 72 minerals to become healthy themselves and nutritious to animals and humans.  However, industrial agriculture only replenishes 3 to 5 at most.  Thus, the plant looks like the real thing, but it is literally a food phantom. (HealthKeepers, Vol. 8, issue 2). Supplementing with minerals is the cheapest and most effective way to remain healthy and get the most out of the food you eat. Drs. Wenzel and Pataracchia provide a complete guide through the kingdom of minerals and how to use them in their excellent book The Earth’s Gift to Medicine (see below).

The only effective way to overcome corporate deception is consumer passive resistance – by not buying their stuff.