At the request of partner groups in Sri Lanka PAN AP provided the following article for the local press. This was in response to pro-GE articles appearing in the local press in relation to the Sri Lankan government's decision to ban the importation of GE foods.

"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

Tel. : 604-6570271/6560381
Fax : 604-6577445
Email: panap@panap.po.my

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