By Robyn Marshall
We will not know if the food we put in our mouths has been genetically engineered, if proposals from the Australian and New Zealand Food Authority are accepted by the government. There will be no requirement that fruit and vegetables be labelled so that we know the food has been genetically modified.
This is despite the fact that more than 3000 submissions to the authority supported full labelling and monitoring. There is serious danger of a repeat of the ecological and environmental disaster inflicted on farmers by the "green revolution" of the '60s, which brought a massive increase in the use of pesticides.
Genetically engineered tomatoes are called "substantially equivalent" to ordinary fruit and so will remain unlabelled. The term "substantially equivalent" has no legitimate scientific basis and is totally undefined.
All these fruits will contain peculiar proteins because of the insertion of a piece of DNA from other organisms. No-one knows if large numbers of individuals will develop allergies to these peculiar proteins, which have never before, in our entire evolution, been part of the diet of human beings.
This will include fruit in which has been inserted:
- a gene to produce Bt toxin, a protein that can kill insects;
- DNA from a virus;
- antibiotic resistance genes (used as markers during production of modified seed);
- herbicide tolerance genes.
Increased chemical sprays
The last genetic modification is the most worrying; it means the plant is resistant to certain herbicides. This allows the grower to use multiple spraying of chemicals without killing the modified plant. The theory is that all weeds without the foreign gene will be eliminated. It will mean that chemical residues on the plant are up to 200 times previous levels.
Creating such herbicide tolerance is the reverse of normal logic. In the short term, industry could have modified plants genetically to give them an advantage over weeds.
However, this method would have eliminated the enormous profits of the big chemical corporations that produce the sprays, such as Monsanto.
Gene transfers into weedy relatives or the selection of tolerant weeds through over-spraying may create herbicide-tolerant super-weeds. Already super-weeds tolerant of Roundup (a Monsanto product, also known as Zero) have been produced on Australian farms, a world first.
The first genetically engineered whole food was Monsanto's "Roundup ready soybean". Growers can spray Roundup on their fields and plants more often, less carefully and at higher doses to kill weeds better.
The engineered soybeans are grown separately but are mixed after harvest with normal soybeans.
Roundup has a half-life of 60 days in soil and two weeks in water. Monsanto has asked the US Food Authority for a 200-fold increase (up to 200mg/kg) in permissible Roundup residues in soybeans. A majority of processed foods contain soy or soy products.
The antibiotic-resistance marker genes are also a real worry. Every cell of every plant in broad-acre crops such as engineered canola seeds will contain antibiotic-resistance genes. A 1992 UK inquiry recommended that they be removed from engineered organisms because their transfer to pathogens may cause more untreatable diseases, by increasing the load of bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics.
Now companies wants it both ways. To the patent office, they claim that gene technology food crops are new and different, and they have obtained monopoly rights for 17 years. To the regulators, they say such crops are "substantially equivalent" and need only minimal regulation.
All novel foods should be labelled for the duration of the patent. The health effects of foods will be unknown for years, so a register for adverse reactions must be implemented to determine any new patterns of illness.
Disabling seeds
After 12,000 years, farmers may soon be unable to save their best seed for planting for the next season or breeding improved varieties. In March a US cotton seed company, Delta and Pine Land, announced a patent on a technique to genetically disable a seed so it will not germinate when replanted. It's called Terminator Technology.
So far it has been used only on cotton and tobacco, but the technology is straightforward, and any molecular biologist could put it in place in any plant, vegetable or fruit.
Delta plans to use it on a much wider range of crops over the next few years. The primary targets for Terminator are crops such as rice, wheat, sorghum and soybeans. With the patent, the world's two most critical food crops — rice and wheat, staple food for 2 billion of the world's poor — may enter the realm of private monopoly.
Progressive Farmer magazine says that Monsanto has hired private investigators to identify farmers who save seed and is aggressively enforcing its patents and contracts on transgenic soybeans. The company recently began legal action against more than 100 growers, alleged to have violated the soybean licensing agreement which prohibits seed saving, makes farmers responsible for the use of their crop after harvest and allows Monsanto agents to enter land unannounced to rip out suspect crops.
Friends in power
In another battle over food, Oprah Winfrey was the protagonist in a lawsuit after she commented adversely in her popular talk show about hamburgers. A syndicate of cattle ranchers sued Winfrey under "food disparagement" laws, which exist in 14 US states.
These laws prevent people from publicly questioning such practices as feeding bovine offal to cows or meat products to animals that are essentially herbivores. Winfrey won her case, but the laws remain on the books.
Legislators and bureaucrats are enthusiastic defenders of the interests of the big food corporations and agriculture multinationals. Last December, the US Department of Agriculture proposed a new standard for organic farming which would have allowed fruit and vegetables that had been genetically engineered or irradiated or treated with additives or raised on contaminated sewage sludge to be labelled "organic".
The department has retreated after protests by small farmers, consumer groups and the general public, but the incident makes clear whose side the USDA is on.
The consumption of organic food is rising by 20-30% a year, and in some countries is likely to become the dominant land use. Organic farming is labour intensive and responds to small-scale production, matched to the peculiarities of the land. Big business can't operate like this so, it is determined to destroy it.
The USDA proposals would also have prohibited setting other standards higher than those established by the department. The next step would be to force other countries to accept the US "organic" label under unfair competition provisions of the World Trade Organisation or using the Multilateral Agreement on Investment. This is the means by which European consumers are being forced to eat beef and drink milk contaminated with injectable growth hormones.
The gene revolution will intensify the huge environmental, social and health costs of industrial agriculture. Agribusiness's promotion of gene technology as the cure-all for world hunger is a cruel hoax.
Our ecosystems are being depleted at a rate far beyond replacement. Each kilo of grain, fed to feedlot beef and battery chickens, costs up to 5 kilos of topsoil, washed or blown away.
Genetic engineering would entrench industrial agriculture, through greater corporate control, just when the World Watch Institute is warning that the amount of food the world can produce is in long-term decline.
Australian governments back the factory farming model along with genetic engineering. Millions of taxpayer dollars are pumped into engineering plants, animals and microbes to suit our degraded environments and to grow bulk commodities for trade.
In contrast, modern ecological farming systems could feed the world, produce environmental benefits, create permanent jobs, revitalise rural communities, strengthen local food self-reliance and offer a healthy diet. A large body of modern sustainable farming knowledge exists in permaculture. However, this isn't going to happen until agribusiness is replaced by socialism.
[Information for this article from the Gene File, Genetic Engineering Action update, No.1 1998.]