The End of Doom

by Ronald Bailey

  Rifkin was also a big player in the campaign that delayed the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of a biotech version of the hormone bovine somatotropin (BST) to boost milk production by as much as 25 percent. In 1986 the FDA had determined that BST was safe, since it is inactive in people. In addition, tests cannot differentiate milk from dairy cows treated with the hormone from milk from cows not so treated. The FDA finally approved BST in 1993 after finding that “milk from treated cows was safe for human food.” Every subsequent review by the agency has confirmed its safety. Spooked by the controversy and eager to avoid producing surpluses of highly subsidized meat and milk, regulators in Europe took the precautionary step of banning its use and the import of meat from treated cows. In 1999, the World Trade Organization ruled that the European ban on imports was based on phony safety concerns, the chief goal of which was to shield its farmers from competition and to protect its system of bloated farm subsidies.

  In 1994, Calgene’s delayed-ripening Flavr Savr tomato became the first genetically modified food crop grown and consumed in an industrialized country. Unfortunately, the tomato did not actually taste all that good, so the product failed among consumers. The first commercially successful modern biotech crops were planted in the United States in 1996. They included corn, potato, and cotton varieties that had been enhanced to resist pests and soybeans with an added herbicide resistance trait.

  Modern Crop Biotechnology Arrives

  For pest resistance, researchers installed versions of a gene from the Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) that kills insect pests with alkaline digestive systems. Bacillus thuringiensis has been used for decades in agriculture, especially by organic farmers, as an insecticide. Pest insects, usually caterpillars, ingest the bacteria, and their highly alkaline guts activate it to release protein crystals that poke holes in their digestive tracts, causing them to die. Studies accepted by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) show that Bt protein is safe for people to eat; it is degraded by human gastric fluids within thirty seconds. The herbicide resistance trait is derived from a gene isolated from another soil bacterium that prevents the glyphosate herbicide (Roundup) from interfering with the production of plant-specific amino acids needed for growth and development. The EPA pointed out that the bacterial gene that confers herbicide resistance differs little from the same gene that all plants already have. Reviewing the test data, the agency also found that the herbicide resistance trait is not toxic to mammals or birds.

  Since 1996, biotech crops have been adopted faster than any previous agricultural technology. In 1996, farmers planted 4.2 million acres of biotech crops. In 2013, 18 million farmers in twenty-seven countries planted 433 million acres, a hundredfold increase over eighteen years. Some 16.5 million of the farmers growing biotech crops are resource-poor farmers living in developing countries. Between 1996 and 2012, economic gains to farmers amounted to nearly $120 billion, 58 percent from saved inputs such as less pesticide, less plowing, and less labor. The remainder came from higher yields, totaling about 377 million tons over the past eighteen years. Due to these boosted yields, farmers did not have to plow up to an additional 300 million acres to keep up with the growing demand for food. This helped to preserve tropical forests and other biodiversity-rich ecosystems. Furthermore, by switching to biotech crops, farmers were able to cut their use of pesticides over the period by more than 1 million pounds of active ingredient, a reduction of nearly 9 percent.

  The Politics of Anti-Biotech Environmentalism

  Given these well-established advantages, including benefits to the natural environment such as lessening pesticide use, preventing soil erosion, and saving wild lands from being converted to farming, why do many leading environmentalist groups so strenuously oppose biotech crops? The chief problem is that just as biotech crops were being commercialized in the 1990s, they ran into a perfect storm of food and health safety scandals in Europe. In order to protect beef farmers and suppliers, British food safety authorities were downplaying the dangers of “mad cow” disease, which was spread by feeding cattle infected sheeps’ brains. Even though there were tests that could have identified donations from people infected with HIV, the agency in charge of French public health was permitting transfusions of contaminated blood. And the asbestos industry had exercised undue influence over its regulators in evaluating the risks posed by that mineral.

  These feckless incidents “led to strong distrust and caused people to think that firms and public authorities sometimes disregard certain health risks in order to protect certain economic or political interests,” argues French National Institute of Agricultural Research analyst Sylvie Bonny. Consequently, Bonny notes that these events “increased the public’s attention to critical voices, and so the principle of precaution became an omnipresent reference.” So when biotech crops were being introduced, much of the European public was primed to credit any claims that this new technology might carry hidden risks.

  Bonny points out that opposition to biotech crops arose first among “ecologist associations,” including Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth. In fact, hyping their opposition to biotech crops served as a lifeline to organizations like Greenpeace. Bonny notes that in the late 1990s, Greenpeace in France was experiencing a serious falloff in membership and donations, but the GMO issue rescued the group. “Its anti-GMO action was instrumental in strengthening Greenpeace-France which had been in serious financial straits,” she reports. It should always be borne in mind that environmentalist organizations raise money to support themselves by scaring people. More generally, Bonny observes, “For some people, especially many activists, biotechnology also symbolizes the negative aspects of globalization and economic liberalism.” She adds, “Since the collapse of the communist ideal has made direct opposition to capitalism more difficult today, it seems to have found new forms of expression including, in particular, criticism of globalization, certain aspects of consumption, technical developments, etc.”

  These concerns are obviously well beyond any scientific considerations regarding the safety of biotech crops for health and the environment. In any case, as the result of the institutional survival imperatives of environmentalist and social movement organizations, opposition to biotech crops became a major strand of their anti-globalization ideology. That had significant negative consequences for the acceptance of this useful technology around the world, especially in poor countries. To illustrate the destructive effects of this ideology, here are a few disturbing vignettes.

  In October 1999, a cyclone killed 10,000 people and left 10 million homeless when it slammed into India’s eastern coastal state of Orissa (now known as Odisha). In the aftermath, nonprofit private aid agencies distributed a high-nutrition mixture of corn and soy meal to the hungry in Orissa. This act of charity outraged Indian ecofeminist Vandana Shiva. “We call on the government of India and the state government of Orissa to immediately withdraw the corn-soya blend from distribution,” demanded Shiva, director of the New Delhi–based Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Ecology. “The U.S. has been using the Orissa victims as guinea pigs for GM [genetically modified] products which have been rejected by consumers in the North, especially Europe.”

  In response to Shiva’s unscientific rant, Per Pinstrup-Andersen, then director general of the International Food Policy Research Institute, observed: “To accuse the US of sending genetically modified food to Orissa in order to use the people there as guinea pigs is not only wrong; it is stupid. Worse than rhetoric, it’s false. After all, the US doesn’t need to use Indians as guinea pigs, since millions of Americans have been eating genetically modified food for years now with no ill effects.”

  In 2002, 2.5 million Zambians were on the edge of starvation. To alleviate the impending famine, the United States sent food aid, including tons of biotech corn. The president of Zambia refused the food. “We would rather starve than get something toxic,” said Zambian President Levy Mwanawasa. Mwanawasa also stated, “Simply because my p
eople are hungry, that is no justification to give them poison, to give them food that is intrinsically dangerous to their health.” On the other hand, as the Los Angeles Times reported, some of his citizens disagreed. “I would rather eat that maize than die because the government has no alternative to the hunger problem,” said Bweengwa Nzala, a twenty-eight-year-old farmhand. The reason that Mwanawasa thought biotech crops were toxic had everything to do with the propaganda peddled by international environmental organizations and the European Union’s official efforts to get developing nations to adopt anti-biotech regulations. After all, Americans had been safely eating foods made with ingredients from biotech corn for seven years at that point.

  Also in 2002 the United Nations convened a World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, South Africa. As is usual with such confabs, the UN arranged for youth representatives to meet. At one such session, a young Kenyan announced his opposition to GMOs. Why? Because he had heard that GMOs weakened the immune systems of Africans so that they would more easily succumb to AIDS. From whom could he have gotten this disinformation? What could be more demoralizing than to believe that white scientists from rich countries had devised a technology that aimed to kill you?

  In 2003, I watched a Brazilian member of the Friends of the Earth repeatedly yell at a group of poor Mexican women to whom food made with biotech ingredients was being distributed that it was “contaminated” and “toxic” and would harm their children. The food included boxes of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes. The good news is that the women ignored him and his fellow activists and took the food.

  As the opening quotations from representatives of leading environmental lobbying groups show, they still are fighting crop biotechnology. Let us go through many of the claims made by the activists and see what the science shows. First, what about the activist assertion that there is “no real consensus on GMO crop safety”? Flatly false.

  The Overwhelming Scientific Consensus on Biotech Crop Safety

  No one has ever gotten so much as a cough, sneeze, sniffle, or stomachache from eating foods made with ingredients from modern biotech crops. Every independent scientific body that has ever evaluated the safety of biotech crops has found them to be safe for humans to eat.

  “We have reviewed the scientific literature on GE [genetically engineered] crop safety for the last 10 years that catches the scientific consensus matured since GE plants became widely cultivated worldwide, and we can conclude that the scientific research conducted so far has not detected any significant hazard directly connected with the use of GM crops,” asserted a team of Italian university researchers in September 2013. And they should know, since they conducted the largest ever survey of scientific studies—more than 1,700—that evaluated the safety of biotech crops.

  A statement issued by the board of directors of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the largest scientific organization in the United States, on October 20, 2012, point-blank asserted that “contrary to popular misconceptions, GM crops are the most extensively tested crops ever added to our food supply. There are occasional claims that feeding GM foods to animals causes aberrations ranging from digestive disorders, to sterility, tumors and premature death. Although such claims are often sensationalized and receive a great deal of media attention, none have stood up to rigorous scientific scrutiny.” The AAAS board concluded, “Indeed, the science is quite clear: crop improvement by the modern molecular techniques of biotechnology is safe.”

  In July 2012, the European Commission’s chief scientific adviser, Anne Glover, declared, “There is no substantiated case of any adverse impact on human health, animal health, or environmental health, so that’s pretty robust evidence, and I would be confident in saying that there is no more risk in eating GMO food than eating conventionally farmed food.” At its annual meeting in June 2012, the American Medical Association endorsed a report arguing against the labeling of bioengineered foods from its Council on Science and Public Health. The report concluded, “Bioengineered foods have been consumed for close to 20 years, and during that time, no overt consequences on human health have been reported and/or substantiated in the peer-reviewed literature.” In December 2010, a European Commission review of 130 EU-funded biotechnology research projects, covering a period of more than 25 years and involving more than 500 independent research groups, found “no scientific evidence associating GMOs with higher risks for the environment or for food and feed safety than conventional plants and organisms.”

  A 2004 report from the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) concluded that “no adverse health effects attributed to genetic engineering have been documented in the human population.” In 2003 the International Council for Science, representing 111 national academies of science and 29 scientific unions, found “no evidence of any ill effects from the consumption of foods containing genetically modified ingredients.” The World Health Organization states, “No effects on human health have been shown as a result of the consumption of such foods by the general population in the countries where they have been approved.”

  A 2002 position paper by the Society of Toxicology found that “[t]he level of safety of current BD [biotechnology-derived] foods to consumers appears to be equivalent to that of traditional foods.” In 2002, the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) reviewed the scientific literature and sought expert advice about the safety of genetically modified foods. The GAO concluded, “Biotechnology experts believe that the current regimen of tests has been adequate for ensuring that GM (genetically modified) foods marketed to consumers are as safe as conventional foods.” The experts with whom the GAO consulted also pointed out that “there is no scientific evidence that GM foods cause long-term harm, such as increased cancer rates,” and that “there is no plausible hypothesis of harm.” GM foods might have adverse effects if they produced harmful proteins that remained stable during digestion. However, the GAO noted that the proteins produced through genetic enhancement are in fact rapidly digested.

  In 2000 the report Transgenic Plants and World Agriculture, issued under the auspices of seven national academies of science, including the US National Academy of Sciences and the British Royal Society, found that “no human health problems associated specifically with the ingestion of transgenic crops or their products have been identified.” In a 2014 op-ed in The New York Times, even the notorious food puritan Mark Bittman declared of crop biotechnology that “the technology itself is not even a little bit nervous making,” adding, “the technology itself has not been found to be harmful [emphasis his].”

  Fringe Anti-Biotech Science

  Unfortunately, there is no shortage of fringe scientists to gin up bogus studies suggesting that biotech crops are not safe. My personal favorite in this genre is Russian researcher Irina Ermakova’s claim, unpublished in any peer-reviewed scientific journal, that eating biotech soybeans turned mouse testicles blue.

  One widely publicized specious study was done by the French researcher Gilles-Éric Séralini and his colleagues. They reported that rats fed herbicide resistant corn died of mammary tumors and liver diseases. Séralini is the president of the scientific council of the Committee for Research and Independent Information on Genetic Engineering, which describes itself as an “independent non-profit organization of scientific counter-expertise to study GMOs, pesticides and impacts of pollutants on health and environment, and to develop non polluting alternatives.” The committee clearly knows in advance what its researchers will find with regard to the health risks of biotech crops. But when truly independent groups, such as the European Society of Toxicologic Pathology and the French Society of Toxicologic Pathology, reviewed Séralini’s study, they found it to be meretricious rubbish. Six French academies of science issued a statement declaring that the journal should never have published such a low-quality study and excoriating Séralini for orchestrating a media campaign in advance of publication. The European Food Safety Authority’s review of the Seralini study “found [it] to be ina
dequately designed, analysed and reported.”

  In November 2013, Food and Chemical Toxicology, the journal that published the Séralini research, decided to retract the badly flawed study. All to the good. Sadly, however, such junk science has real-world consequences, since Seralini’s article was apparently cited when Kenya made the decision to ban the importation of foods made with biotech crops. Unhappily, a different low-quality journal, which exercised no additional peer review, decided to republish Séralini’s paper in June 2014.

  Climate Consensus Yes—Biotech Consensus No

  Leading environmentalist organizations insist that the public and policymakers accept the strong consensus regarding the reality of man-made climate change. “You have the strongest consensus we have seen in the science community about global climate change since the conclusion that tobacco caused lung cancer,” asserts Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) president Kevin Knobloch. Greenpeace also argues, “There is, in fact, a broad and overwhelming scientific consensus that climate change is occurring, is caused in large part by human activities.” And Friends of the Earth has gone after ExxonMobil because it “has repeatedly attempted to undermine the scientific consensus on climate change and actively resisted attempts to limit carbon dioxide emissions through law.” Good for them for defending the research results of climate science. But for these same environmentalist groups, not all scientific consensuses are equal.