GMWATCH number 7: monthly review (7/3/2003) | |
7 March 2003 ================================== ------------------------------------------------------------ Sir John Krebs of the Food Standards Agency is at it again. He is accused of hi-jacking the governments public debate on GM foods by starting a breakaway debate with no independent oversight - and using taxpayers money to produce pro-GM propaganda materials. For the full story, see our IMPROPAGANDA section. Instead of his usual activities of blindly promoting GM foods and attacking organics, Sir John would do well to investigate the shameful absence of GM food safety data. This month sees the second part of our overview of such studies, or lack of them (for part 1, see GMWATCH number 4). One of our subscribers has voiced what is, Im sure, a wider concern that we have a duty not only to inform you about GM issues but also to let you know what you can do to help. This month, in our IMPROPAGANDA section, we include details of two campaigns: how you can help bring the FSA to heel as the public servant it is paid to be; and how you can help bring balance to the science strand of the public debate. Regarding the latter campaign, please dont feel you cant contribute unless youre a scientist. Anyone with a modicum of common sense and some acquaintance with the NGIN/GMWATCH list is well equipped to state a view or ask a searching question on such issues as food safety, environmental risks and the actions of government regulators. Please continue to let us have your views and tell us about any GM campaigns you may be involved in. Claire Robinson <[email protected]> ----------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------------------------------------- Our previous review focussed on food safety concerns and in particular, Bt crops. This time, we shift the spotlight to herbicide resistant GM crops, developed to allow farmers to douse the crop with herbicide without killing the crop. Before we get down to the individual studies, heres geneticist Dr Michael Antoniou explaining why ALL genetic engineering of food is potentially dangerous: "Professor Richard Dawkins's assertion that genes are a software sub-routine, which can therefore be moved with precision by genetic engineering between totally unrelated organisms (T2, January 28), reflects the naivete of individuals who theorise about genetics rather than those working with it first-hand. "Genetic engineering, either in an animal or plant context, always has unpredictable outcomes and they are frequently greater than the intended change. This is because it is wrong to consider genes as independent units of information, which can be accurately slotted into the genetic code of any organism. Genes have evolved within a given organism to work in combinations in the context of an immensely complex genetic, biochemical and ecological environment. "The Luddism of the Prince of Wales and Peter Melchett in objecting to GM food on this occasion is supported by empirical scientific observation." - Michael Antoniou (Lecturer in molecular genetics), King's College London UNEXPLAINED DEATHS THE MYTH OF SUBSTANTIAL EQUIVALENCE 1. GM maize: Two lines of Chardon LL herbicide-resistant GM maize expressing the gene of the PAT-PROTEIN (conferring herbicide tolerance) showed significant differences in fat and carbohydrate contents compared with non-GM maize and were therefore substantially different. Toxicity tests were only performed with the PAT-PROTEIN even though with this the unpredictable effects of the gene transfer or the vector or gene insertion could not be demonstrated or excluded. The design of these experiments was also flawed because: Thus, GM maize expressing PAT-PROTEIN may present unacceptable health risks. 2. Herbicide resistant soybeans were claimed to be substantially equivalent to conventional soybeans. However, several significant differences between the GM and control lines were recorded and the statistical method used was flawed because: 3. Herbicide-resistant soybeans: Studies were conducted on the feeding value and toxicity for rats, broiler chickens, catfish and dairy cows of two GM lines of glyphosate-tolerant soybean (GTS). The growth, feed conversion efficiency, catfish fillet composition, broiler breast muscle and fat pad weights and milk production, rumen fermentation and digestibility in cows were claimed to be similar for GTS and non-GTS. However: Thus, the claim that the feeding value of GTS and non-GTS lines was substantially equivalent is at best premature. 4. GM soybeans: Rats had meagre weight gain when fed GM soybeans. 5. GM tomatoes: The first and only safety evaluation of a GM crop, the FLAVR SAVR tomato, was commissioned by Calgene, as required by the FDA. The test has not been peer-reviewed or published but is on the internet. The results claim there were no significant alterations in total protein, vitamins and mineral contents and in toxic glycoalkaloids. Therefore, the GM and parent tomatoes were deemed to be "substantially equivalent." However, some rats died within a few weeks after eating GM tomatoes. In toxicity studies with male/female rats fed these GM tomatoes, toxic effects were claimed to be absent. In addition, it was concluded that mean body and organ weights, weight gains, food consumption and clinical chemistry or blood parameters were not significantly different between GM-fed and control groups. However: ------------------------------------------------------------------------- GM SCIENCE REVIEW PUBLIC MEETINGS SLAMMED "The term 'scientific' was used systematically to suppress or ignore inconvenient issues. This bias operated at many levels... Fragmentation of issues... Selective citation or even misrepresentation of scientific findings... Omission of research... Biased chairing: Censorship of comments..." - Dr Les Levidow "I came away thinking it was little better than a propaganda exercise for GM technology... It was, quite frankly, a disgrace to call this a discussion about GMOs. The speaker line-up and format combined to make it a very one-sided event which has not significantly advanced the debate." - Dr Doug Parr "A more intelligent and evidence-based approach to public engagement is possible - but it needs one thing that is often lacking in the scientific community and that is humility" - Dr Gary Kass "This was not the only public meeting on the science issues that has been lacking in an appropriate platform for other views... the public meeting on GM food safety as part of the science review on 23rd Jan... largely consisted of scientists enmeshed in the approvals process talking to each other" - Dr Doug Parr ROYAL SOCIETY ACCUSED OF SEEKING TO RIG GM SCIENCE DEBATE GM LICENSING TO GET GO AHEAD Margaret Beckett, the environment secretary, has decided that 18 applications to the EU for growing and importing crops such as GM maize, oil seed rape, sugar beet and cotton are unstoppable and the British government has no alternative but to process them. In the past few weeks Bayer has applied directly to Mrs Beckett to plant and market GM oil seed rape, and Monsanto has applied to import GM maize. The public debate on the issue is due to begin in May and conclude in September. A spokesman for Defra confirmed that licensing would take place without considering the outcome of the public debate: "It is a debate not a referendum." Beckett claims European law forces the UK government to go ahead with the approvals immediately, a point disputed by GM campaign groups. The excuse that "we have no choice under European law" is widely relied upon by the UK government when it wants to force through unpopular policies. Its been used to justify the building of polluting waste incinerators and the mishandling of the foot-and-mouth epidemic, among other debacles. Independent legal advice has frequently challenged such claims. FSA ATTACKED OVER BREAKAWAY GM DEBATE Last March an unnamed Government Minister warned that the GM Debate would be "nothing but a carefully orchestrated 'PR offensive'" and said "don't be in any doubt - the decision [to commercialise gm crops] is already taken." This powerful alliance of organisations has accused the FSA of taking a line on GM foods that is virtually indistinguishable from that of the pro-GM lobby. It is also being accused of failing in its duty to represent public health and consumer interests. Five Year Freeze has written to Sir John Krebs protesting FSAs action in holding its own breakaway debate consisting of issuing pro-GM propaganda with taxpayer money without public consultation or independent oversight. See their letter at The current concerns over the Food Standards Agency's attempts to hijack the GM public debate can only be understood against the record of the FSA under Sir John Krebs. Consider the following: 1. Sir John was known to be unsympathetic to concerns about GM foods before he was even appointed, dismissing them as "shrill, often ill-informed and dogma-driven". 2. The FSA under Krebs has failed to examine the safety of GM foods, despite the high level of consumer concern. Business as usual was guaranteed by the FSA taking its advice from the same old committee (ACNFP) as MAFF. 3. Instead, Krebs FSA conducted a safety enquiry into organic food, which has a high level of consumer confidence. Dr Patrick Wall, the chief executive of the Food Safety Authority of Ireland has described Krebs' views on organic food as "extreme". 4. The FSA spun the results of its own research on GM foods to claim it proved the safety of eating such food when the opposite conclusion could easily have been drawn. The study involved feeding one meal containing GM soy to human volunteers and seeing if the GM DNA survived passage through the digestive tract. In spite of the worrying finding that GM DNA did survive passage through the stomach and small intestine and transferred to bacteria in the gut, the FSA announced that GM food was safe since the GM DNA did not survive passage through the large intestine. No attention was paid in FSA press releases to possible repercussions of the transference of GM DNA to gut bacteria or the possible effects of ingesting GM DNA in people with intestinal damage, such as leaky gut syndrome, ulcers etc. 5. Krebs is far from alone at the FSA in terms of links to the biotech lobby. The director of the Scottish arm of the FSA is Dr George Paterson -- the former director general of Health Canada's Food Directorate. Paterson has been linked to major food safety scandals in Canada involving both fast track approval for a Monsanto GM crop and the overriding of government scientists' health warnings on a GM product. 6. Krebs' acted as OECD's GM conference chair in Edinburgh -- an occasion described by Dr Arpad Pusztai, the only critical food scientist invited, as not so much a conference as "a propaganda forum for airing the views and promoting the interests of the biotech industry." 7. Krebs collaborated with Social Issues Research Centre (SIRC), a pro-GM food-industry-funded body, in instructing journalists on how they should report issues like the GM debate. 8. The FSA opposes enhanced GM food labelling. The EU would like to enhance GM food labelling so that derivatives such as oils and starches are labelled for the consumer. The Food Standards Agency has spoken out against this on the grounds that such derivatives are indistinguishable from their non-GM counterparts, since they contain no remaining GM DNA. However, there is evidence that this is not true. One GM testing company told us that around 50% of oils and samples of the soy derivative lecithin contain enough DNA to test for GM presence. 9. The FSA played a key role in producing weak international guidelines on GM food allergenicity testing. Krebs has not only emasculated the agency but turned it into a public platform for his extreme support for GM and his antipathy to organic food. Krebs puts the "con" into consumer protection! This leads us to ------------------------------------------------------------------------- TELL FSA BOARD WHAT YOU THINK ABOUT KREBS AND THE FSA Then send your own polite, clear and fact-based letters direct to the FSA Board Members (a few of them are on our side!): Robert Rees, Country Elephant Ltd, Norfolk House, Bisley, Stroud GL6 7AA Ann Hemingway - send by email to her secretary at the Welsh FSA - Michael Gibson, Macbeth's, 11 Tolbooth Street, Forres, Moray, Scotland IV36 1PH Michael Walker Karol Bailey, Holly Tree Farm, Chester Road, Tabley, Knutsford, Cheshire WA16 OEU Baroness Howarth of Breckland, House of Lords, London SW1A OPW Ms Sandra Walbran, Food and Safety Manager, South Lakeland District Council, South Lakeland House, Lowther Street, Kendal Cumbria LA9 4UD [email protected] Richard Ayre, 69 Drayton Gardens Ealing, London W13 OLG Dr Jeya Henry, School Of Biological And Molecular Sciences, Oxford Brookes University, Headington Campus, Gipsy Lane, Oxford OX3 0BP Vernon Sankey, Non-Executive Director, Pearson plc, Shell Mex House, 80 Strand, London NC2R 0RL Sir John Krebs, Chair, Food Standards Agency, Aviation House, 125 Kingsway, London WC2B 6NH Full details of Board Members are at - ------------------------------------------------------------------------- AGENCY IGNORING ITS ADVISORS ------------------------------------------------------------------------- MEP SLAMS GM "POLLUTED PAYS" PROPOSALS Reacting to the proposals, Ms Evans said: "The Communication argues that the responsibility for co-existence measures such as buffer zones or pollen barriers "should fall on the economic operators (farmers, seed suppliers, etc.) who intend to gain a benefit from the specific cultivation model they have chosen". This approach would turn the "polluter pays" principle upside down. Instead of those who produce and use GMOs being responsible for what they do, the conventional and organic farmers would be expected to prevent GMO contamination. It's crazy that we should expect the polluted instead of the polluter to have to pay." MONSANTOS GM WHEAT A "MARKET DESTRUCTOR" - NEW VIDEO "It is critical [that] customers perceive the bakery's bread as being GM-free." Warburton's (UK) "Personally, I don't think Roundup Ready offers a lot to consumers." Alex Waugh, National Association of British & Irish Millers. "GMO wheat will for sure be a market destructor" Andre & Cie (Belgium) "If you do grow genetically modified wheat, we will not be able to buy any of your wheat - neither the GM nor the conventional." Rank Hovis McDougall (UK) "Flour millers strongly doubt that... GM wheat or even conventional wheat that may contain GM wheat will be acceptable to the Japanese market." Japan Flour Millers Associaton "The European milling industry will simply not buy one more kilo of US wheat at all if Roundup Ready wheat is commercialised." Grandi Molini (Italy) "We will not do anything to erode consumer confidence" General Mills (UK) "Give us Roundup Ready bread? I dont think so." US Wheat Associates For excerpts from the films commentary see ------------------------------------------------------------------------- AMERICAN CONSUMERS TO SUE US GOVT OVER GE CROPS ------------------------------------------------------------------------- BT COTTON FAILS IN ANDHRA PRADESH, INDIA - ITS OFFICIAL Raja Mouli, a farmer of Nagaram Village, Warangal District, now curses the temptation that led him to experiment with Bt Cotton, "The official report has only confirmed what I knew all along. I have experienced the failure of the crop first-hand. Now that the truth is out, I want other farmers to be saved from this disaster - the government should stop these criminal companies at least in time for the next season." http://members.tripod.com/~ngin/050303a.htm PRO-GM SCIENTIST ATTACKS BT COTTON PAPER AS A "SHODDY PUBLICATION BASED ON MEAGRE AND QUESTIONABLE DATA" What makes the attack remarkable is not only where it was published but the fact that the author, Shanthu Shantharam, is a strong proponent of GMOs and Bt cotton who supported the campaign against Quist and Chapela's Mexican maize paper. He writes of the Bt cotton claims, "This kind of shoddy publication based on meagre and questionable field data in reputed journals like SCIENCE do more harm to science and technology development, perhaps set GMO technology backwards." Shantharam writes, "[The SCIENCE paper] raises serious questions about the falling standards of 'peer-review'. The entire process of 'peer-review' has now degenerated into you pat my back and I pat yours." In fact, the SCIENCE paper was based on outdated data from field trials carried out in 2001 by the Maharashtra Hybrid Company (MAHYCO), a subsidiary of Monsanto - not from commercially farmed cotton. The report spoke of a 70 to 80 percent yield increases of Monsanto's patented Bt cotton, compared to conventional hybrids. http://ngin.tripod.com/200203a.htm INDIA'S BT COTTON DISASTER REPORTED AS COLOSSAL SUCCESS! Following dire publicity over the performance of its GM Bt cotton in India, and with many poor Indian farmers facing ruin, Monsanto-Mahyco came up with findings which it provided to the Indian government showing that really it had all been a great success! Unfortunately for Monsanto, Greenpeace-India sent its own researchers to check up on how the data had been compiled and, amongst much else, the researchers collected testimonies from farmers who said that they had been advised by the company to inflate their real yield figures! ------------------------------------------------------------------------- WORLD POPULATION SET TO DECLINE [Re world population] "A growing number of demographers now believe that the world is settling onto the path that follows recent UN low range estimates. These make startling reading. According to the latest version, published earlier this year (World Population Projections to 2150, UN Population Division, New York, 1998), the world population will peak in about 2040 on 7.7 billion and then go into long-term decline. Not just a small decline, either. By 2100 we could be back under today's population, and by 2150 the projection is for a world population of 3.6 billion, less than two-thirds of today's. "It is worth noting that this doesn't assume any global catastrophe, just couples carrying on doing what they have always done, making rational decisions for themselves about how many children they want. As the Australian demographer John Caldwell told the UN population conference in Cairo in 1994: The experience of the past 20 years makes it much more likely that we will end up with a declining population (This Week, 17 September 1994, p 6)." - "Will the world cope with a rapidly ageing population?" Fred Pearce, New Scientist 6/20/98, p. 20 http://www.math.wustl.edu/~nweaver/pop.html GM CROPS NOT NEEDED TO FEED WORLD BETTER WAYS TO FEED AFRICA THAN GM CROPS ------------------------------------------------------------------------- SYNGENTA POSTS LOSS ------------------------------------------------------------------------- POLICE RAID MINISTRY OF THE ENVIRONMENT AND ENVIRONMENTAL GROUPS IN BELGIUM ------------------------------------------------------------------------- 600,000 DEMAND PARDON FOR FARMER BOVE WHISTLEBLOWER JOURNALISTS APPEAL COURT ORDER TO PAY $24.3 BILLION COSTS The ruling assessing the fees came on the heels of a ruling overturned an August 2000 jury verdict and $425,000 award to Jane Akre. Jurors had concluded she was pressured by Fox lawyers and managers to broadcast what the jury agreed was "a false, distorted or slanted story" and was fired for threatening to blow the whistle. But the jury decision was later reversed on a legal technicality when a higher court agreed with Fox that it is technically not against any law to slant or distort the news. The court said the media overseer, Federal Communications Commissions prohibition against news distortion is merely a policy, not a law. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- DOLLY DIES YOUNG ------------------------------------------------------------------------- GE CHILDREN TO "DOMINATE THE WORLD" - JAMES WATSON Psychologist Oliver James accused Watson of "ropy thinking" which ignores the role of nurture in intelligence. Watson also fails to consider environmental influences - certain pollutants are known to diminish IQ. Many scientists point out too that environmental influences feed back into the genome, changing the DNA for better or worse. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- DEMISE OF GENE THERAPY 1. The viral vectors used to carry the desired "healthy" gene into the host genome are dangerous, in spite of repeated attempts to find safe vectors. This problem is also central to GM foods. Doubts have been expressed by independent scientists, including Joe Cummins, Mae-Wan Ho and Arpad Pusztai, about the safety of the vectors (which carry the desired gene into the host genome) and promoters (which switch on the gene and prevent it being rejected by the host plant's immune system) commonly used in creating GM food plants. See NGIN/GMWATCH's extensive archive on the cauliflower mosaic virus (CaMV) promoter. 2. The most brilliant scientists can claim that they have genetically engineered the chosen virus to make it "safe" and yet be wrong. 3. Scientists with excellent reputations can deliberately ignore danger signals because of ulterior motives. These may include greed for funding money, but (according to the lawyer for the family of the teenager killed by this gene therapy experiment), the motive is as likely to be a religious zeal to achieve a brilliant cure with gene therapy, resulting in the normal cautions being thrown to the wind. 4. The much-hyped cures expected from gene therapy have not materialised. The few apparent cures have not been reliably replicated, and some patients have suffered severe complications and deaths. A recent gene therapy trial was abandoned when two children developed leukemia. These failures were predicted at the outset by scientists who have kept up to date on genetics and know that the genome is not a static entity like a car engine whose faulty bits can be successfully replaced by healthy bits. It's a fluid entity where genes work in combination with other genes in complex relationships, and where genes change and respond to influences in the environment. Future cures are therefore more likely to come from therapies that involve the patient as a whole in the context of his environment. "In 1998 [before the gene therapy trial], Jesse was as healthy as I had ever known him" To see the Trial and Error programme summary, visit NEW ZEALAND GOVT FAST TRACKING GE MEDICINES IN CASE OF BIO-ATTACK ----------------------------------------------------------------------- To subscribe to the 'WEEKLY WATCH' To subscribe to 'GMWATCH' (monthly) To unsubscribe to any of the the NGIN lists: archived at: NGIN website: Donations made out to 'NGIN': |