Food fights: the unresolved issues
May 17th, 2003
The representatives of environmental and other nongovernment organizations are into the 22nd day of—appropriately enough—a hunger strike to protest the government’s approval of the nationwide distribution of Bt corn seeds for planting.
The strikers are asking Department of Agriculture Secretary Luis Lorenzo Jr. to withdraw his department’s approval for Btcorn. From President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo they’re asking a review of the process that led to its approval, as well as a call for farmers not to plant the seeds.
Bt corn is a GMO, or genetically modified organism. It was created through genetic engineering, and can generate its own anti-insect toxins. GMOs are crop plants “created” in the laboratory to enhance certain desired traits—for example, resistance to pests or improved nutritional content.
The nutritional content of rice, for example, can be enhanced artificially through the inclusion into its genetic makeup of genes from carrots (for the beta carotene and vitamin A). Bt corn, as well as Bt rice and cotton, has also been imbued in the laboratory with the capacity to produce its own insecticide.
Conventional or “old-fashioned” breeding methods have enhanced desired traits in plants in the past. But they are criticized for being slow and inaccurate, whereas genetic engineering can very quickly isolate the gene that carries the desired trait and recreate that trait in the host organism.
Genetic engineering can transfer traits not only among plants but also from nonplant species (thus the reference to the results as “Frankenfoods”). The use of Btgenes is the most well-known example. Bt, or Bacillus thuringiensis, is a bacterium, not a plant, that produces a toxin that kills insect larvae. Its capacity to do so has been transferred to corn, cotton and rice through gene-splicing.
Those who favor the widespread cultivation and consumption (by people as well as livestock) of GMOs—primarily the corporations that produce GMOs in their laboratories and who market them worldwide, as well as scientists engaged in GMO work—premise their arguments on the need to address world hunger, which is already of crisis proportions.
Social and political activists as well as environmental groups argue, however, that the world food crisis is not due to a shortage of food but to its unequal distribution, as determined by the way most societies and the globe are at present structured.
But GMO proponents contend that to address this crisis, food will have to be grown in amounts greater than has ever been possible, and that GMOs can do this because they can be tailored to be resistant to pests, herbicides, diseases, drought and cold.
At the same time, GMOs can be developed—and have been developed—to increase the nutritional content of certain food crops like rice, a staple in many Third World countries, but which lacks enough nutrients to prevent malnutrition.
These advocates also say that genetic engineering can develop vaccines against common human diseases in certain food plants, which would make storage and administration easier; as well as modify plants so they can reverse environmental pollution by absorbing poisons dumped into the soil.
Those who oppose GMO propagation and consumption basically have three arguments: concern over the environment; risks to human health; and economic issues.
The hunger strikers at the Department of Agriculture have warned of an ecological disaster with the nationwide introduction of Bt corn, as have environmental groups worldwide. In 1999 a US study found that Btcorn toxin was killing monarch butterflies. So far genetic engineering has not developed GMOs that can distinguish between beneficial and harmful insects. Btcorn thus kills both, which can have a long-term and wide-ranging impact on the environment.
There are also concerns that Btcorn and other GMOs that have been modified to produce their own insecticides can develop insect resistance to pesticides in the long-term, which means the creation of an even bigger problem. Another concern is the possibility of gene transfer through natural cross-breeding from, say, Btcorn to common weeds, creating a species of superweeds resistant to herbicides.
On the other hand, the health risks to humans could include new allergies, as well as others yet unknown. While there is so far no evidence that modified foods when consumed expose people to health risks, it is argued that the very possibility of such risks alone justifies at least caution and stringent requirements before GMOs are introduced into the food chain, or at most, their total ban.
Finally, there is concern over the patenting of new plant varieties genetically engineered by giant corporations like the US’ Monsanto Chemicals. Environmental and other civil-society groups in both the developed and the developing world fear that patenting will lead to seed prices beyond the reach of farmers in poor countries. This fear is premised on the assumption that GMO crops, if not opposed, will eventually become the main food crops all over the world.
Corporations like Monsanto have explored the possibility of including genes into their GMOs which would make seeds viable only for one planting season: that is, the plants grown from such seeds cannot reproduce, so that farmers will have to buy new seeds each time—an option that would be disastrous to the world’s poor farmers once GMO crops become the global norm rather than the exception (which is exactly what the giant corporations want).
These concerns have been seriously considered by the European Union, Japan and some Third World countries like Brazil, which has banned the planting of genetically modified crops entirely.
Japan has required health testing of genetically modified (GM) foods since 2001, even as, given a choice between GM foods and nonmodified foods, Japanese consumers usually choose the latter.
The European Union requires food labeling of GM food, among other precautions. Many European countries have also been reluctant to import GM foods because of consumer resistance.
What currently available information suggests is that the consequences to health and the environment of the propagation of GMO food crops and the consumption of GM foods are, at the very least, yet to be established, even as the dominant use of GMO food crops could lead to a global monopoly on food crops by a handful of corporations, most of them US multinationals, which can then dictate seed prices.
It will thus not do to dismiss the protest of the hunger strikers as narrowly politically motivated, in the sense of preventing the confirmation of Lorenzo. The strikers may indeed be politically motivated in another, larger sense: in that they would prefer more stringent government control over the propagation of GMO seeds in the Philippine environment.
It’s not an unreasonable hope, the government being the only entity capable of such control. GMOs present an immense challenge to the policymaking capacity of governments by marshaling the will to safeguard not only the environment but also the health of their people by—again at the very least—erring on the side of caution.
GM foods may yet turn out to be the boon that their giant corporate advocates and creators claim them to be. But they may also be the curse those who oppose them say they are. It will admittedly take time before either side is vindicated. Genetic engineering is a relatively new technology with the potential for either great, irreparable harm, or great good—maybe.
Global hunger can be more forcefully addressed right now through the reform not only of unjust social structures, but also of a global order in which millions go to bed hungry while in countries like the US schoolchildren can afford the luxury of food fights. But this is not a profitable option for those corporations that benefit from the inequities of the global order, thus the rush to propagate GMOs.
(Today/abs-cbnNEWS.com, May 13, 2003)