Why genetically engineered food is dangerous: New report by genetic
engineers
Earth Open Source press release 17 June 2012
Aren’t critics of genetically engineered food anti-science? Isn’t the
debate over GMOs (genetically modified organisms) a spat between
emotional but ignorant activists on one hand and rational GM-supporting
scientists on the other?
A new report released today, “GMO Myths and Truths”,[1] challenges
these claims. The report presents a large body of peer-reviewed
scientific and other authoritative evidence of the hazards to health and
the environment posed by genetically engineered crops and organisms
(GMOs).
Unusually, the initiative for the report came not from campaigners
but from two genetic engineers who believe there are good scientific
reasons to be wary of GM foods and crops.
Dr Michael Antoniou
One of the report’s authors, Dr Michael Antoniou of King’s College
London School of Medicine in the UK, uses genetic engineering for
medical applications but warns against its use in developing crops for
human food and animal feed.
Dr Antoniou said: “GM crops are promoted on the basis of ambitious
claims – that they are safe to eat, environmentally beneficial, increase
yields, reduce reliance on pesticides, and can help solve world hunger.
“I felt what was needed was a collation of the evidence that
addresses the technology from a scientific point of view.
“Research studies show that genetically modified crops have harmful
effects on laboratory animals in feeding trials and on the environment
during cultivation. They have increased the use of pesticides and have
failed to increase yields. Our report concludes that there are safer and
more effective alternatives to meeting the world’s food needs.”
Dr John Fagan
Another author of the report, Dr John Fagan, is a former genetic
engineer who in 1994 returned to the National Institutes of Health
$614,000 in grant money due to concerns about the safety and ethics of
the technology. He subsequently founded a GMO testing company.
Dr Fagan said: “Crop genetic engineering as practiced today is a
crude, imprecise, and outmoded technology. It can create unexpected
toxins or allergens in foods and affect their nutritional value. Recent
advances point to better ways of using our knowledge of genomics to
improve food crops, that do not involve GM.
“Over 75% of all GM crops are engineered to tolerate being sprayed
with herbicide. This has led to the spread of herbicide-resistant
superweeds and has resulted in massively increased exposure of farmers
and communities to these toxic chemicals. Epidemiological studies
suggest a link between herbicide use and birth defects and cancer.
Claire Robinson
“These findings fundamentally challenge the utility and safety of GM
crops, but the biotech industry uses its influence to block research by
independent scientists and uses its powerful PR machine to discredit
independent scientists whose findings challenge this approach.”
The third author of the report, Claire Robinson, research director of
Earth Open Source, said, “The GM industry is trying to change our food
supply in far-reaching and potentially dangerous ways. We all need to
inform ourselves about what is going on and ensure that we – not
biotechnology companies – keep control of our food system and crop
seeds.
“We hope our report will contribute to a broader understanding of GM
crops and the sustainable alternatives that are already working
successfully for farmers and communities.”
Notes
The report, “GMO Myths and Truths, An evidence-based examination of
the claims made for the safety and efficacy of genetically modified
crops”, by Michael Antoniou, PhD, Claire Robinson, and John Fagan, PhD
is published by Earth Open Source (June 2012). The report is 123 pages
long and contains over 600 citations, many of them from the
peer-reviewed scientific literature and the rest from reports by
scientists, physicians, government bodies, industry, and the media. The
report is available here:
http://earthopensource.org/index.php/reports/58
A shorter summary version will be released in the coming weeks.
Key points from the report
- Genetic engineering as used in crop development is not precise
or predictable and has not been shown to be safe. The technique can
result in the unexpected production of toxins or allergens in food
that are unlikely to be spotted in current regulatory checks.
- GM crops, including some that are already in our food and animal
feed supply, have shown clear signs of toxicity in animal feeding
trials – notably disturbances in liver and kidney function and
immune responses.
- GM proponents have dismissed these statistically significant
findings as “not biologically relevant/significant”, based on
scientifically indefensible arguments.
- Certain EU-commissioned animal feeding trials with GM foods and
crops are often claimed by GM proponents to show they are safe. In
fact, examination of these studies shows significant differences
between the GM-fed and control animals that give cause for concern.
- GM foods have not been properly tested in humans, but the few
studies that have been carried out in humans give cause for concern.
- The US FDA does not require mandatory safety testing of GM
crops, and does not even assess the safety of GM crops but only
“deregulates” them, based on assurances from biotech companies that
they are “substantially equivalent” to their non-GM counterparts.
This is like claiming that a cow with BSE is substantially
equivalent to a cow that does not have BSE and is thus safe to eat!
Claims of substantial equivalence cannot be justified on scientific
grounds.
- The regulatory regime for GM foods is weakest in the US, where
GM foods do not even have to be assessed for safety or labelled in
the marketplace, but in most regions of the world regulations are
inadequate to protect people’s health from the potential adverse
effects of GM foods.
- In the EU, where the regulatory system is often claimed to be
strict, minimal pre-market testing is required for a GMO and the
tests are commissioned by the same companies that stand to profit
from the GMO if it is approved – a clear conflict of interest.
- No long-term toxicological testing of GMOs on animals or testing
on humans is required by any regulatory agency in the world.
- Biotech companies have used patent claims and intellectual
property protection laws to restrict access of independent
researchers to GM crops for research purposes. As a result, limited
research has been conducted on GM foods and crops by scientists who
are independent of the GM industry. Scientists whose work has raised
concerns about the safety of GMOs have been attacked and discredited
in orchestrated campaigns by GM crop promoters.
- Most GM crops (over 75%) are engineered to tolerate applications
of herbicides. Where such GM crops have been adopted, they have led
to massive increases in herbicide use.
- Roundup, the herbicide that over 50% of all GM crops are
engineered to tolerate, is not safe or benign as has been claimed
but has been found to cause malformations (birth defects),
reproductive problems, DNA damage, and cancer in test animals. Human
epidemiological studies have found an association between Roundup
exposure and miscarriage, birth defects, neurological development
problems, DNA damage, and certain types of cancer.
- A public health crisis has erupted in GM soy-producing regions
of South America, where people exposed to spraying with Roundup and
other agrochemicals sprayed on the crop report escalating rates of
birth defects and cancer.
- A large number of studies indicate that Roundup is associated
with increased crop diseases, especially infection with Fusarium, a
fungus that causes wilt disease in soy and can have toxic effects on
humans and livestock.
- Bt insecticidal GM crops do not sustainably reduce pesticide use
but change the way in which pesticides are used: from sprayed on, to
built in.
- Bt technology is proving unsustainable as pests evolve
resistance to the toxin and secondary pest infestations are becoming
common.
- GM proponents claim that the Bt toxin engineered into GM plants
is safe because the natural form of Bt, long used as a spray by
conventional and organic farmers, has a history of safe use. But the
GM forms of Bt toxins are different from the natural forms and could
have different toxic and allergenic effects.
- GM Bt toxin is not limited in its toxicity to insect pests. GM
Bt crops have been found to have toxic effects on laboratory animals
in feeding trials.
- GM Bt crops have been found to have toxic effects on non-target
organisms in the environment.
- Bt toxin is not fully broken down in digestion and has been
found circulating in the blood of pregnant women in Canada and in
the blood supply to their foetuses.
- The no-till method of farming promoted with GM
herbicide-tolerant crops, which avoids ploughing and uses herbicides
to control weeds, is not more climate-friendly than ploughing.
No-till fields do not store more carbon in the soil than ploughed
fields when deeper levels of soil are measured.
- No-till increases the negative environmental impacts of soy
cultivation, because of the herbicides used.
- Golden Rice, a beta-carotene-enriched rice, is promoted as a GM
crop that could help malnourished people overcome vitamin A
deficiency. But Golden Rice has not been tested for toxicological
safety, has been plagued by basic development problems, and, after
more than 12 years and millions of dollars of research funding, is
still not ready for the market. Meanwhile, inexpensive and effective
solutions to vitamin A deficiency are available but under-used due
to lack of funding.
- GM crops are often promoted as a “vital tool in the toolbox” to
feed the world’s growing population, but many experts question the
contribution they could make, as they do not offer higher yields or
cope better with drought than non-GM crops. Most GM crops are
engineered to tolerate herbicides or to contain a pesticide – traits
that are irrelevant to feeding the hungry.
- High adoption of GM crops among farmers is not a sign that the
GM crop is superior to non-GM varieties, as once GM companies gain
control of the seed market, they withdraw non-GM seed varieties from
the market. The notion of “farmer choice” does not apply in this
situation.
- GM contamination of non-GM and organic crops has resulted in
massive financial losses by the food and feed industry, involving
product recalls, lawsuits, and lost markets.
- When many people read about high-yielding, pest- and
disease-resistant, drought-tolerant, and nutritionally improved
super-crops, they think of GM. In fact, these are all products of
conventional breeding, which continues to outstrip GM in producing
such crops. The report contains a long list of these conventional
crop breeding successes.
- Certain “supercrops” have been claimed to be GM successes when
in fact they are products of conventional breeding, in some cases
assisted by the non-GM biotechnology of marker assisted selection.
- Conventional plant breeding, with the help of non-GM
biotechnologies such as marker assisted selection, is a safer and
more powerful method than GM to produce new crop varieties required
to meet current and future needs of food production, especially in
the face of rapid climate change.
- Conventionally bred, locally adapted crops, used in combination
with agroecological farming practices, offer a proven, sustainable
approach to ensuring global food security.
About the authors
Michael Antoniou, PhD is reader in molecular genetics and head, Gene
Expression and Therapy Group, King’s College London School of Medicine,
London, UK. He has 28 years’ experience in the use of genetic
engineering technology investigating gene organisation and control, with
over 40 peer reviewed publications of original work, and holds inventor
status on a number of gene expression biotechnology patents. Dr Antoniou
has a large network of collaborators in industry and academia who are
making use of his discoveries in gene control mechanisms for the
production of research, diagnostic and therapeutic products and human
somatic gene therapies for inherited and acquired genetic disorders.
John Fagan, PhD is a leading authority on sustainability in the food
system, biosafety, and GMO testing. He is founder and chief scientific
officer of Global ID Group, a company with subsidiaries involved in GMO
food testing and GMO-free certification. He is a director of Earth Open
Source. Earlier, he conducted cancer research at the US National
Institutes of Health (NIH) and in academia. He holds a PhD in
biochemistry and molecular and cell biology from Cornell University.
Dr Fagan became an early voice in the scientific debate on genetic
engineering when in 1994 he took an ethical stand challenging the use of
germ line gene therapy (which has subsequently been banned in most
countries) and genetic engineering in agriculture. He underlined his
concerns by returning a grant of around $614,000 to the US National
Institutes of Health, awarded for cancer research that used genetic
engineering as a research tool. He was concerned that knowledge
generated in his research could potentially be misused to advance human
germ-line genetic engineering (for example, to create “designer
babies”), which he found unacceptable on grounds of both safety and
ethics. For similar reasons, around the same time, he withdrew
applications for two additional grants totalling $1.25 million from the
NIH and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS).
In 1996 he started Global ID when he saw that GMO testing could be
useful to assist industry in providing consumers with the transparency
that they desired regarding the presence of GMOs in foods.
Claire Robinson, MPhil is research director at Earth Open Source. She
has a background in investigative reporting and the communication of
topics relating to public health, science and policy, and the
environment. She is an editor at GMWatch (www.gmwatch.org),
a public information service on issues relating to genetic modification,
and was formerly managing editor at SpinProfiles (now
Powerbase).
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