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nafex - Re: [NAFEX] GMO and Breeding

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  • From: Ginda Fisher <list@ginda.us>
  • To: Anton Callaway <marillen@earthlink.net>, North American Fruit Explorers <nafex@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [NAFEX] GMO and Breeding
  • Date: Sat, 31 Dec 2005 10:38:16 -0500

First, I should mention that I think genetic engineering is incredibly exciting, and offers the possibility of great rewards - especially in medicine, where there have already been successes in breeding plants, animals, and micro-organisms to produce, for instance, human insulin or human factor 8 making these delicate proteins available to sick people (in these cases, diabetics or hemophiliacs) much more safely than in any other way. Prior to genetic engineering, diabetics got insulin from pork or beef and frequently became allergic to it. Hemophiliacs got factor 8 from pooled human blood donations - and most of them were infected with AIDS shortly after it emerged.

I think it holds promise in crops too. For instance, I hear there is work in inserting genes from apple trees that are resistant to fireblight into cultivars that are susceptible. If this can be done without too much accidental damage to the rest of the genome, it could be very promising.

However, I am troubled by the lack of governmental oversight and consumer labeling. The FDA (or whoever regulated this stuff - the department of agriculture?) decreed that genetically modified foodstuffs were essentially the same as conventionally bred foodstuffs, and did not require any special testing or tracking. the only reason we have as much tracking as we do is because the Europeans (and some other food-buying nations) have refused to import the stuff, so the market needs to try to keep it separate.

On Dec 30, 2005, at 8:48 PM, Anton Callaway wrote:
. . .
This brings me to the next point. The fact is that the agribusiness industry is >very< strictly regulated. Government regulators do not just "accept" reports from these companies. It is largely because of the government oversight (which I support) that these products are so expensive to bring to market. Even if you buy into the notion that agribusiness is all about money, these business folks are not stupid. If they ever released an unsafe food product, they would lose money and lots of it. Even before these potential products reach the government regulators, they have passed layer upon layer of safety testing, allergenicity tests, animal trials, metabolism studies, environmental impact studies, digestion studies, and many other tests. It is a process that is decidedly more rigourous than food safety tests for other food products, including the myriad of Ho-Ho's and ring-pops that pose a real threat to our nation's dietary health.
. . .

I'm glad to hear the agribusiness industry is concerned about safety, but your claims about government oversight directly contradict what I have read. Perhaps my sources have been biased. I probably get most of my GMO news from "New Scientist", which is a British publication aimed at a population that is intensely wary of GMO food. I also heard something to the effect that there is no government oversight of GMO food on an NPR program recently. I would appreciate any source of info on how much government oversight we actually have around GMO food. (GMO drugs are very carefully tested, of course, as are all new drugs.)

The second issue around GMO food, other than the safety question, is the problem with private ownership of the genome of common food plants. If a farmer lives downwind from someone who grows GMO crops, and his seed is contaminated with patented genes, he can be sued and put out of business for saving and growing his own seed. That wasn't the intent of the law, but it is the consequence of the promiscuity of plants and existing patent protection laws as they apply to crops. Frankly, I think the problem here is the law more than the crops (his special crop could be contaminated with genes from any other crop, too) but I don't see any likelihood that the law will be changed. In fact, patent protection just keeps getting tougher, as far as I can tell. The GMO companies have offered "suicidal" genes that don't grow the second year, but that just means instead of having a contaminated crop the unfortunate downwind farmer has a crop failure.

It is not a coincidence that the US is less concerned about GMO than, say Ireland or England. Most of the countries that control the genes are US companies. (I think there's a big Swiss one, too.) They are not going to act in a way that leads the children of their officers to starve. There is zero chance that some international incident will cause an American company to refuse to sell seed to American farmers. (Unless we start outsourcing our production of GMOs, I suppose) People in most other countries don't have that certainty, and are much warier of allowing a foreign company to control their food supply. I mentioned England and Ireland. Both of those countries (and especially Ireland, which is especially hostile to GMO) are all too familiar with the problems that can arise when outsiders control your means of production of food. No one wants to be on the receiving end of the next potato famine.

Ginda




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