http://www.soilassociation.org/motherearth/viewarticle/articleid/4752/the-pro-gm-lobbys-seven-sins-against-science

The pro-GM lobby's seven sins against science

Peter Melchett

17 December 2012

The role that genetically modified (GM) food should play in our food chain is a highly contested political issues. One interesting facet of the debate in the past year has been the pro-GM lobby's interest in staking the 'scientific high-ground'; simultaneously positioning itself as the voice of reason and progress, while painting its opponents as unsophisticated 'anti-science' luddites, whose arguments are full of dogma and emotion, but lack scientific rigour. In this essay Peter Melchett explores how such crude characterisations are themselves based on logic that is itself profoundly damaging to the concept and representation of 'science' in our national culture.

Who Can We Trust on GM Food?

• Former chief scientist David King praises GM crops. But can we trust a government scientist any more than an industry insider?
  By Peter Melchett
  The Guardian - UK, December 9, 2008
  
  

Last week, on the Radio 4 programme Street Science, a publicist for the GM industry made a number of claims about what GM crops can do. He said: "Using GM technology, there are now varieties of major crops, rice, wheat and maize being produced that are drought resistant, flood resistant, saline resistant and disease resistant, which could transform Africa's ability to feed its people ... Some products have emerged, for example, from South Africa. They are now planting drought resistant crops that have increased the yield by 30% ... So you can actually save millions of people from starvation by these techniques - nothing to do with the private sector ... Americans are perfectly happy to eat [unlabelled GM food] and I don't know of anyone who has ever suffered from eating a GM product."

There is nothing wrong with this - similar claims are made all the time by people working for GM companies. Except that this was not Monsanto's press officer, it was Professor Sir David King, recently retired as the UK government's chief scientist.

The first claim, if read carefully, is not inaccurate. GM companies are trying to produce crops that are drought, flood and saline resistant, and although none are available for commercial use, in theory such crops could increase food production in Africa and elsewhere - if you make a number of assumptions.

These assumptions are not scientific, they are political, subjective and highly contested. This particular point of view assumes that the key cause of hunger and starvation is lack of food, rather than problems with distribution, access to land, wars, corruption and poverty. It also assumes that in future poor farmers will have no problems with buying expensive seeds, fertiliser and pesticides, all of which are required by GM crops. I know many people assume GM crops must somehow be needed to feed the world. But the IAASTD (the food and farming equivalent to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) report by 400 international scientists - led by Professor Robert Watson, now chief scientist at the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs - said GM crops were not essential to feed the world.

David King was wrong to say that drought-resistant GM products that increase yield by 30% are now being planted in South Africa. In fact, Monsanto is carrying out trials of GM drought-resistant maize in South Africa. The process of trialling the crops has only just begun (a permit was issued a year ago), and these crops are probably about eight years away from commercial use if they prove to be successful. No drought-resistant GM crops are currently grown commercially in South Africa. King has been wrong before about new crops in Africa, claiming that a successful project near Lake Victoria was benefiting from GM technology, before having to admit the crops involved were not GM at all.

In the BBC programme, David King referred to crops like rice that are "flood resistant". In fact the submergence tolerant (flood resistant) rice that is on the market is not GM, but instead marker assisted selection (MAS), normal breeding informed by knowledge of the genome and supported by environmentalists and organic organisations, was used to develop it. This is an example of the kind innovative non-GM plant breeding that is making a lot of progress in a number of areas that the GM companies are only just beginning to tackle - with unknown results. Marker-assisted breeding (usually called marker assisted selection) uses the genetic diversity found in crops or their wild relatives, combined with genomic data (genomic markers) to speed up what are otherwise essentially conventional breeding methods.

Two years ago, the scientists at the University of California Davis responsible for developing submergence tolerant rice initially tried to develop the rice using both MAS and GM techniques. While the MAS worked well and quickly, GM failed initially, for unknown reasons. The scientists were moving a rice gene into another type of rice, so this failure simply underlines the inherent uncertainty and lack of precision in GM technology. Finally, a couple months ago, the scientists did get the GM process to work, but this version is not being bred for sale to farmers. To get the GM process to work, the scientists had to attach the gene they wanted to transfer to a very powerful promoter - the part of the gene that determines in what parts of the plant, when, and how much, the gene functions (called "expression"). The promoter they used is from an ubiquitin gene and it is turned on at a high level in many tissues of the plant, most of the time.

This contrasts with the normal (native) promoter of the sub1A gene, which is turned on only when needed in the plants and at the correct levels. Therefore, while the sub1A gene, run by the ubi promoter may nominally function, it is much more likely to have negative side effects in the plant because of its incorrect expression (called ectopic expression). These effects could be harmful to health or the environment, or just have adverse effects on the agronomic properties of the crop (for example, it could cause the crop to grow poorly under some conditions, as has happened in practice with some other GM crops). Normal breeding using MAS worked better and faster, and is less likely to have negative side effects.

David King also mentioned GM crops that "have not been produced in the private sector, they've all been produced by government and international research laboratories" when he spoke about crops being developed for farming in South Africa. I assume that he was actually talking about the Water Efficient Maize for Africa project (WEMA), which involves several African countries - Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, and South Africa. The WEMA project was only announced in 2008, so no crops have yet been grown even experimentally. The projections for yield increases from this project are that "the maize products developed over the next 10 years could increase yields by 20-35% under moderate drought, compared to current varieties". But this applies to non-GM as well as possible GM varieties, and the first conventional varieties developed by WEMA could be available after six to seven years of research and development. The project says that GM drought-tolerant maize hybrids "will be available in about ten years".

http://www.organicconsumers.org/articles/article_17292.cfm

Cloning: Agribusiness as Usual

• Apart from the under-researched 'safety' of cloning, and its inherent cruelty to animals, this technology serves only corporate, not consumer interests
  By Peter Melchett
  The Guardian - UK, January 16, 2008
  
  
  

To no one's great surprise, the US Food and Drug Administration has decided that cloned animals, and products from them, such as milk, are safe for consumers.

As a result, European regulators are now under pressure to adopt the same pro-cloning policy in order to allow imports of foods from cloned animals, and indeed that is supported by the EU's scientific advisory committee. Already, thousands of doses of cattle semen from clones have been used in the US. In September last year, the European Commission held a meeting to help it decide on its policy. Experts explained how cloning depends on several horribly cruel processes. Using hormones and invasive techniques, the eggs are extracted from female animals, and surrogate mothers are then used to rear the implanted embryos. There are frequent abnormalities and many foetuses are naturally aborted or have to be terminated. Many others die soon after birth.

Partly because of these huge losses, the clones themselves are extremely expensive, and would not be used for food, but they would be used, for example, for producing semen for artificial insemination.

US regulators have decided that the progeny of cloned animals can be used for food, despite the fact that there is almost no scientific research to show if this is safe. The Soil Association, along with almost all of those involved with organic food, and many others, is concerned about these further attempts to manipulate nature in ways that will benefit a few of the largest farmers and enrich some of the largest agribusiness companies in the world.

My own concerns fall into two main areas - risk and animal welfare. Food safety cannot and should not be judged until there is a body of scientific understanding of the biological impacts of cloning. With so little research into the health impacts, it is unscientific and totally irresponsible to simply "assume" or "hope" that these animals are safe for eating. This approach has been proven to be wrong with GM; many animal trials show negative effects from "EU approved" GM crops.

There are major animal welfare problems, which mean this technique should not be allowed even if it is "safe" for people. The commercial use of cloning, for example through artificial insemination, will further reduce the genetic diversity of livestock and so increase the risk of disease epidemics. More generally, this technique will promote industrialisation of livestock rearing with negative nutritional, animal health and environmental consequences, including increased emissions of greenhouse gases.

Whatever your view on the lack of scientific evidence for food safety, the animal welfare arguments against cloning on animal welfare grounds seem to me to be irresistible. The scientists involved in cloning claim that the "loss rates" are coming down as the technology improves. Joyce D'Silva, of Compassion in World Farming, is clear that this technology is unacceptable on animal welfare grounds. She notes that cloned animals "are the high-producing animals that have the most endemic welfare problems anyway".

Those supporting cloning respond to the animal welfare criticisms in exactly the same way as the GM industry has responded to the realities of higher pesticide use, similar or lower yields, and rejection in the marketplace - by promising jam tomorrow. In the case of cloning, scientists claim that cloning could be used to enhance animal welfare - for example, by spreading useful genetic mutations that make animals resistant to diseases such as scrapie. The same scientists claim that cloning could make animals able to adapt to a changing climate or to resist new diseases. There is no evidence that any of this can actually be achieved, any more than GM crops have eradicated hunger and starvation nearly a quarter of a century after GM scientists started claiming that these miracles would soon be delivered by GM technology.

In an interesting quote, the UK's National Farmers Union (NFU), which represents agribusiness, and currently takes a pro-GM and pro-cloning line, reveals what is wrong about the reaction of some farmers to these new technologies. Helen Ferrier, the NFU's food science adviser, says: "Generally, our views on the safety or the acceptability etc are really based on the opinions of independent scientific experts." It's one thing to rely on scientists to pronounce on safety, but why on earth aren't the NFU listening to their customers when it comes to deciding whether a particular way of raising farm animals is "acceptable" or not? Whether something is acceptable is a moral question, something which people producing a product should leave to society as a whole and individual customers to decide. It is a gross abuse of science to suggest that pronouncing on acceptability is a scientific matter.

To add insult to injury, the NFU go on to say that they don't want there to be any requirement to label meat or dairy products from cloned animals or their offspring because it might "mislead" consumers. So the animals suffer and the people who buy the food from these new and cruel systems are going to be kept in the dark about where their food comes from. I suppose, as an organic farmer, working in a system that bans GM and cloning, I should be pleased; but, in fact, the whole business leaves me feeling sickened and sad.

Melchett speaks out against GMO's

Response: The GM debate is not about scientists versus anti-capitalists
Peter Melchett
The Guardian, February 26 2008 http://www.guardian.co.uk:80/commentisfree/2008/feb/26/food.environment

Campaigners who oppose GM food aren't vandals - they are acting in the public interest, says Peter Melchett

(This article appeared in the Guardian on Tuesday February 26 2008 on p37 of the Leaders & reply section)

Your article about the GM industry's lobbying to make its crop trial locations secret, said that there are 'fears that anti-GM campaigners are winning the battle over the controversial technology' (GM crop trial locations may be hidden from public, February 16).

But your story characterises two sides of the battle exactly as pro-GM campaigners would wish. Those who oppose GM food are described as 'protesters' engaged in 'vandalism'. In contrast, commercial interests promoting GM are described neutrally as the 'GM industry'.

This, and your special inside report (Biotech firm mans barricades as campaigners vow to stop trials, February 16), implies these pro-GM campaigners are motivated by a heady mix of scientific integrity and altruism. You report that the old industry claims of GM feeding the world are now extended to GM being 'at least part of the solution to food inflation, food security and even global warming'. The fact that these multinational chemical companies have been making these claims - that the next GM crop trial will help cure disease or feed the world by increasing yields - for at least 20 years, without this once actually happening, should induce a degree of scepticism.

The main thrust of your account of the GM industry's views - that those opposed to GM crops in Europe are part of a general anti-capitalist conspiracy - is also an old chestnut. In the 1990s Monsanto dismissed opposition to GM in Europe because they thought it came from a small minority of anti-science and anti-big business activists. In fact those early environmental concerns turned out to be shared by the vast majority of Europe's citizens. Why? Because concerns about growing and eating GM food are justified by both experience and scientific research.

Another golden oldie is the threat from pro-GM campaigners that Britain must embrace GM or lose jobs. The article says that 'fears of vandalism have forced many companies to shift their crop trials abroad', without asking whether the rejection of GM food by our citizens might have had something to do with it. In fact, opposition to GM is growing throughout the EU, especially in France and Germany, as the article itself notes.

GM trials pose a risk to the environment and to farmers growing similar non-GM and organic crops. In 1999, 28 Greenpeace volunteers, of whom I was one, removed a GM maize crop in Norfolk. You describe this as a 'protest', and that is exactly what the prosecution in our subsequent criminal trial tried, and failed, to prove. The jury found that what we did was legally remove a crop that threatened the integrity of other nearby crops, acting in the public interest. The fear of many farmers is that, once released into the environment, GM crops will spread their traits to related native plants. Once released, they can never be recalled.

The reckless abandon with which GM companies want to spread this poorly understood, inherently uncertain and potentially very dangerous technology terrifies me, and the public are right to continue to reject it.

· Peter Melchett is an organic farmer and policy director of the Soil Association.
pmelchett@soilassociation.org