This worries me...so I wrote an essay about it. Thoughts are welcome. I seriously believe that we need to press our Congresspeople on this matter. We need some type of legislation to protect our farmers, our food supply, and our species affected by the rapid growth of this industry with a lack of research on it's effects.
Essay below the fold.
In labs and in fields across the world, a danger is growing. This danger is hidden in an unassuming form - our own food. Right now, farmers, scientists, and corporations are splicing genes from humans, bacteria, and animals into our foods to give them different properties, such as resistance to disease, built-in vaccines that can possibly be purified, or higher nutritional value. Many of these plants are being grown in open fields, some with buffers of less than one mile between the genetically modified crop and a normal food crop (Roosevelt 56). Due to the dangers involved to humanity and the environment, we cannot allow scientists and corporations to destroy millions of years of natural selection and evolution by genetically modifying our food.
The idea behind genetically modifying foods is noble, despite the dangers. Agricultural scientists have been seeking ways to make crops more productive so that more people could be fed, pharmaceutical scientists have been looking for ways to make a cheaper vaccine so that it could be easier to afford, and nutritionists have been looking for ways to correct problems with people's diets. Genetically modifying food, at first glance, seemed to be a panacea for all of these wants.
Scientists have created rice with increased levels in vitamin A, corn and tomatoes that have the traits of natural pesticides such as bacillus thuringiensis (Bt), and plants that are immune to the effects of Monsanto's RoundUp, a popular herbicide. Scientists can also create grains and fruits with higher than normal crop yields, and they are researching ways to grow plants that have vaccines in them that are ingestible by humans.
The first commercially grown genetically modified crop was a tomato called the FlavrSavr, created by Calgene. It was submitted to the Food and Drug Administration in 1992 for testing, and after passing, was released to the market in 1994. According to the Wikipedia, it met with little public comment at the time. The FlavrSavr tomato was highly resistant to rotting, while retaining all the other aspects of a normal tomato. This meant that a FlavrSavr tomato could be left on the vine to ripen, then shipped, instead of picked early and left to ripen off the vine, resulting in a better tasting tomato. However, the cost of production made the FlavrSavr fiscally nonviable, and Calgene went bust after a few years due to mounting costs (Wikipedia).
Genetic modification has also been used to make certain foods more nutritious. For centuries, rural farmers in China have had poor eyesight. During this last century, researchers discovered that this may be due to a lack of vitamin A in their diet, which mostly consists of rice alone. To attempt to address this issue, Drs. Ingo Potrykus and Peter Beyer spliced the genes of vitamin A into rice to create a strain of rice that provides around 15 percent of the recommended daily allowance of vitamin A when eaten in the amounts normal to a rural Chinese person. This amount is considered enough to prevent early blindness. Now researchers are working on a way to make the same rice produce more iron as well, as iron-deficient anemia is another health problem that plagues these same rural farmers (Rader).
Genetically modifying foods can also reduce the amount of harmful pesticides needed, as in the case of cotton, corn, and other crops. Scientists were able to isolate the genetic code for the Bt toxin that is created naturally by the bacillus thuringiensis bacteria. The scientists then spliced the genetic code for Bt toxin into cotton and crossbred it with natural strains of the plant, creating a cotton plant that acted as its own pesticide. This genetically modified cotton does not need to be sprayed with the millions of liters of pesticide that it used to require, which can significantly ease the burden on the ecosystem (Rader).
One project that European scientists are working on is attempting to genetically modify maize and tobacco plants to carry vaccines. This is done by splicing in the genes for the proteins that cause the body to produce antibodies to diseases like HIV/AIDS and rabies. At this time, scientists are focusing on two different ways to turn these proteins into vaccines. One way is to harvest the plants with the proteins in them, extract the proteins, and turn them into standard vaccines. Should this work, scientists say they could produce vaccines at one-tenth to one-hundredth of the cost. The other option scientists are exploring is to grow genetically modified food that can be eaten and used as a vaccine in raw form. The first crops are due to be grown in 2006, with clinical trials starting in 2009 (U.N. Wire).
While all of these projects may sound promising, they ignore the inherent dangers of modifying the genetics of plants whose breeding patterns are uncontrollable outside of the lab. All of the plants in question reproduce by pollination, either via wind or animals. This can cause these genetically spliced in traits to be transferred to a new generation of plants that were not meant to have a genetic modification. In the case of pharmaceutical plants, this can be harmful to humans. Plants that have pesticides spliced into them, if they spread, can cause the extinction of insect species.
One of the largest worries about the spread of genetically modified foods is that the pharmaceutical "frankenfoods" will get intermingled with our current food supply, or cross-pollinate with unmodified plants grown for the food supply. One example of something like this occurring happened in December 2003, when the U.S. Department of Agriculture ordered the incineration of 500,000 bushels of soybeans in Aurora, Nebraska. The soybeans were accidentally mixed with corn that had been genetically engineered to carry a vaccine against pig diarrhea (Roosevelt 56-57).
In the Aurora, Nebraska case, the foods were only mixed together in a silo. It is possible, however for genetically modified plants to crossbreed with non-genetically modified plants due to the spread of pollen. In an article for the Boston Globe, Anthony Shadid tells the tale of Susan and Mark Fitzgerald, two farmers who have been hit by a new problem brought about by genetically modified crops being grown in the open air: genetic drift.
The Fitzgeralds had gone through the hassle of making sure that all the conditions were right for them to grow a crop of organic corn. Organic corn is a valuable product, as it can sell for double the profit of non-organic corn. They bought seed guaranteed to be free of genetic tampering, planted barrier shrugs and trees, and planted the crop in what they believed was the right place. None of these preparations helped. At harvest time, tests on the kernels revealed that some had the traits of genetically modified Bt corn, the pollen that fertilized the plan apparently blown over from a neighbor's field by wind. Due to this, they had to pull 800 bushels of their crop from the market, costing them approximately $2000 in losses (Shadid G1).
In addition to the problems with intermingling, there have not been nearly enough tests to determine if there are any long term effects on eating genetically modified foods. According to Professor Alexei Yablokov, President, Center for Ecological Policy in Russia, rats that had been fed for nine months on GM potatoes developed serious anomalies of their internal organs that damaged their immune systems. Professor Yablokov also brings to light the risk of a foreign gene entering the micro flora of the intestines, which could make the area resistant to antibiotics and possibly cause the spread of harmful bacteria (Skryabin and Yablokov). More tests need to be done to see if these foods will adversely affect us or not.
Genetically engineered products have harmed us before. In 1988, a company called Showa Denko changed the way it produced their l-tryptophan supplement from traditional methods to genetically engineering bacteria that they could grow in large vats and synthesize the supplement from (Clark). Professor E. Ann Clark, a contributor to the Scope Forum, described the outcome of that as follows:
"Because the product had been sold for years without adverse effects, and the new product was judged to be "substantially equivalent," no special testing was required. Yet within months of entering the market, Strain V had killed 37 people, left 1535 people permanently and severely disabled with eosinophilia myalgia syndrome, and temporarily disabled another 5000 people. Although the l-tryptophan was 99.6% pure, well within established standards, the trace contaminants -- specifically one called EBT -- were enough to kill and permanently disable."
Something like this could occur again if we do not take the time to find out exactly what effect genetically modified foods will have on us. Will the things we splice into them act as we believe they should? Will the plant not have the intended function, but instead have an entirely different effect? These questions must be answered before we can subject ourselves to consuming these foods or products made from them.
Incidents like the soybean one can also make one wonder about what would happen should a pharmaceutical plant crossbreed with a food supply plant without the farmer growing the food supply plants knowing. Jean Halloran of the Consumers Union sums up this threat in to two sentences. "Drugs have side effects," says Halloran. "They should not turn up in our cornflakes" (qtd. in Roosevelt 56). Should a cross-pollination like this occur, and the spliced genetic code passed into our food supply, many people could be sickened by side affects or allergic reactions to the hybrid offspring.
The ecological impact of genetically modified foods can be huge as well. While certain plants can be genetically altered to not need pesticides, herbicides still need to be used to control the weed population. Some plants have been modified to be unaffected by Monsanto's RoundUp, a popular herbicide. What this does is allow farmers to blanket their fields with this ecologically-harmful chemical, and in many cases, use more of it that would normally be used, thereby negating any reduction in ecological impact gained by using less pesticides. This is also a problem because overuse of the same herbicides will give rise at some point to strains of weeds unaffected by popular herbicides (Clark).
In the case of the plants that have had the properties of bacillus thuringiensis, there are two possible ways this could harm the environment. Since the properties of the Bt toxin make the stomachs of worms and caterpillars explode, this could cause some threatened and endangered species, like the monarch butterfly, to go extinct (Kingsolver 103). The other danger is that the widespread use of this property will give rise to a "superworm" that is unaffected by the Bt toxin, resulting in a return to chemical pesticides that are increasingly losing their effectiveness due to the adaptations of the creatures they are supposed to be killing.
There is also the problem of planting entire crops with a single genetic strain of plants. Barbara Kingsolver raises this point in her essay "A Fist in the Eye of God," from her collection of essays Small Wonder:
"The infamous potato famine or Southern Corn Leaf Blight catastrophe could happen again any day now, in any place where people are once again foolish enough, or poor enough to be coerced (as was the case in Ireland), to plant an entire country in a single genetic strain of a food crop.
While agricultural companies have purchased, stored, and patented certain genetic materials from old crops, they cannot engineer a crop, ever, that will have the resilience of land races under a wide variety of conditions of moisture, predation, and temperature." (101)
This lack of biodiversity could lead to the ruin of the food supply and starvation, especially in underdeveloped nations where local farmers may not have any other choice than to plant the seeds forced upon them by their government.
There are some benefits to genetically modifying foods. They can be made to be more nutritious, as in the case of the rice with extra vitamin A, or resistant to rotting, as in the case of the FlavrSavr tomato. The biggest promise, despite the dangers, does come in the form of pharmaceutical food.
Should pharmaceutical foods follow the models expected by scientists, they could be used to create medicines at one-tenth to one-hundredth of the cost currently needed to produce the same medicine traditionally. At this level of savings, it is possible that crops like this could be grown entirely within greenhouses, and still provide some cost savings. In a greenhouse, the plants would not have the ability to cross-pollinate with plants in the food supply. This would handily reduce one of the major risks involved with growing a genetically modified crop, if it turned out to be fiscally viable. Under no circumstances, however, should we allow a pharmaceutical crop to be grown outdoors where it could cross-pollinate with a plant that could go to our food supply.
For non-pharmaceutical genetically modified plants and other test crops, it is possible that they could be grown in the open if a large enough "dead zone" were placed around the crop to minimize the chances that they could cross-pollinate with non-genetically modified plants. The size of this zone would have to be determined using factors such as the frequency and amount of wind in the area, how far common pollinating insects native to the area travel, and other factors related to the spread of pollen. This still leaves a slight risk of cross-pollination; it also creates a problem where land that could possibly be used to plant crops on would go unused.
Few people, if anyone, will argue the good intentions behind the cause championed by GM-advocating scientists, companies, and farmers. That being said, without the proper testing, controls, and regulations on these food products, we cannot subject ourselves to the grave possibilities that cross-pollination and accidental consumption entail. Until a time when it can be determined if it is economically feasible to grow pharmaceutical foods in a greenhouse and the size of a dead zone around a genetically modified food crop is established, we cannot abide by the possibility of the nation's, perhaps the world's, food supply, being contaminated by man-made creations.
Works Cited
Clark, E. Ann. "GM Food: Positions." SCOPE Forum. No date listed. SCOPE Research Group. 17 Nov. 2004. <http://scope.educ.washington.edu/gmfood/position/show.php?author=2>
Clark, E Ann, "Showa Denka Debacle." SCOPE Forum. No date listed. SCOPE Research Group. 17 Nov. 2004. <http://scope.educ.washington.edu/gmfood/position/clark.php?link=link4>
Kingsolver, Barbara. "A Fist in the Eye of God." Small Wonder. 1st Perennial ed.: Harper-Collins Publishers, 2003. 93 - 108.
Rader, Charles. "A Report on Genetically Engineered Crops." Personal Website. Apr. 2003. Charles Rader. 23 Oct. 2004. <http://members.tripod.com/c_rader0/gemod.htm>
Roosevelt, Margot. "Cures on the Cob." Time 25 May 2003: 56-57.
Shadid, Anthony. "Blown Profits." Boston Globe 8 Apr. 2001: G1.
Skryabin and Yablokov. "The Case For/Against GM Foods." Mosnews.com. 29 Apr. 2004. Mosnews.com. 16 Nov. 2004. <http://www.mosnews.com/feature/2004/04/29/gm_foods.shtml>
United Nations Foundation, The. "First Crop Of Vaccine-Bearing GM Plants Scheduled For 2006." U.N. Wire. 13 July 2004. The United Nations Foundation. 30 Oct. 2004. <http://www.unwire.org/UNWire/20040713/449_25779.asp>
Various. "Genetically modified food." Wikipedia. 18 Oct. 2004. Wikimedia Foundation. 23 Oct. 2004. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetically_modified_food>.