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  • From: "Lawrence F. London, Jr." <lflj@intrex.net>
  • To: permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [permaculture] GM is Not the Way to Sustainability
  • Date: Fri, 31 Oct 2008 22:35:57 -0400

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: [SANET-MG] GM is Not the Way to Sustainability
Date: Wed, 29 Oct 2008 17:18:29 -0400
From: jcummins <jcummins@UWO.CA>
To: SANET-MG@LISTS.IFAS.UFL.EDU

GM is Not the Way to Sustainability
ISIS - Institute of Science in Society, 29 October 2008
http://www.i-sis.org.uk:80/GMnotthewaytosustainbility.php

GM crops are unsound and unsafe; the biotech corporations are still
making promises that they cannot keep while their real aim is to
tighten their stranglehold on seeds to starve the world. Prof. Peter
Saunders

Conventional agriculture is not the answer, neither is GM

"In agriculture, the starting point, I think, has to be the
recognition that the commercial industrial technologies that are used
in agriculture today to feed the world are technologies that are not
inherently sustainable and they have not worked well to promote either
self-sufficiency or food security in developing countries." Most
people would be surprised to learn that these are the words of Robert
Shapiro, then the CEO of Monsanto [1]:

And earlier [2]: "Loss of topsoil, salinity of soil as a result of
irrigation and ultimate reliance on petrochemicals [which are]
obviously not renewable. That clearly isn't sustainable."

This is the sort of statements you'd expect to come from a campaigning
group rather than a big corporation. It's a solid condemnation of the
Green Revolution and a warning that the current attempt to extend it
to Africa is misguided. Of course Shapiro was pushing what he saw as
the alternative to industrial agriculture, namely genetically modified
organisms (GMOs) for crops and livestock.

In fact, the evidence shows that the answer lies neither in
conventional industrial agriculture nor in GMOs, but in organic
agriculture. The 400 scientists who contributed to the recent report
of the International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology
for Development (IAASTD) certainly did not see GM as the answer to the
food problem. On the contrary, they concluded it could have at most a
relatively minor role [3, 4] (GM-Free Organic Agriculture to Feed the
World, SiS 38).

The truth about genetic engineering is that it has consistently failed
to deliver. It has not increased yields [5]: for example, researchers
at the Universities of Kansas in the United States found that the
yields of GM soya were about 6 per cent lower than those of their
nearest conventional relatives [6], confirming results obtained since
2002 [7] (GM Crops Failed, SiS 13/14). It has not decreased the amount
of herbicides and pesticides used. Since Roundup Ready crops have been
widely grown in the USA, glyphosate application on major crops has
gone up by a factor of 15 [8]. That has not been merely a matter of
farmers switching to Roundup (Monsanto's proprietary formulation of
glyphosate); the application of other herbicides has also gone up.
And it has not increased the profits of farmers: for example, a study
has shown that farmers in the American state of Georgia who grew Bt
cotton did not make more money than those who did not [9, 10]
(Transgenic Cotton Offers No Adva!
ntage,
SiS
38) and the mass suicides of cotton growers in India are all too well
known (see GM is Dangerous and Futile [11], SiS 40).

The only group that have gained from GM are the biotech companies.

The supporters of GM continue to make extravagant claims for what it
can accomplish, and you can easily be taken in if you do not look
carefully at the evidence. For example, in the abstract of a recent
paper in Science [12] the authors write: “Our data suggest that Bt
cotton not only controls H. armigera on transgenic cotton designed to
resist this pest but also may reduce its presence on other host crops
and may decrease the need for insecticide sprays in general.”

The abstract is all you can read for free on the web, and it is what
most commentators are likely to quote, especially if they are
supporters of GM. In the full paper, however, the authors report that
mirids, podsucking bugs that used to be controlled by spraying and by
competition with the bollworm, have now become key pests of cotton in
China. They conclude their paper with the statement: “Therefore,
despite its value, Bt cotton should be considered only one component
in the overall management of insect pests in the diversified cropping
systems common throughout China.” That’s not at all what you would
infer from the abstract.

Do they really believe what they say?
How far do the biotech people themselves really believe the claims
they make in public? In their more thoughtful moments, some of them
talk quite differently.

Nature Biotechnology is more or less the house journal of the biotech
industry, and regular readers of SiS will know that we and others have
criticised them twice within the past year for blatant bias in favour
of GM [13-16] (Letter to Nature Biotechnology: Systematic bias in
favour of no adverse impacts from GM feed, Letter to Nature
Biotechnology: Prepublication Review Yes, But Review Panel Must be
Balanced, and From the Editors, Science in Society 37). Even so, here
are extracts from an editorial that appeared a couple of months ago [17].

The Biotechnology Industry Organization’s (BIO) slogan for its annual
meeting held in San Diego in June was ‘Heal, fuel, feed the world.’

On no count is this equivocal or faltering or modest. Of course,
perhaps that should be expected of an industry lobby organization
whose job it is to proselytize the potential of its members’
technology and products. But the problem is the slogan just isn’t very
realistic.

“There are hundreds of thousands of acres of genetically modified
(GM) crops being grown around the world, but they are not at present
addressing key agricultural problems for poor farmers, such as
salinity, desertification and drought. Nor are they addressing
problems such as malnutrition (although with Golden Rice, they could).”

(Actually, Golden Rice can’t contribute to the problem of malnutrition
because it can’t supply anything like the required amount of
&#946;-carotene and what there is won’t be converted to vitamin A if
you are undernourished [18] ('Golden Rice' - an exercise in how not to
do science, TWN/ISIS publication), but let’s go on.)

And although biotech has addressed a few orphan diseases, produced new
therapies in infectious disease, cancer and autoimmune disorders, and
recombinant versions of biologics for diabetes and growth disorders,
it hasn’t delivered on the promised ‘cures’ of genetic therapies or
even the wide adoption of molecularly targeted medicine. Certainly, it
hasn’t done much to address disease and malnutrition among the world’s
poor.

“This journal champions biotech research, so we are not downbeat on
its prospects to, one day, generate products that will heal, fuel and
feed the world. That is, nevertheless, an outrageous act of faith
bordering on the religious.” [emphasis supplied]

All that from a committed supporter of GM!

What can GM do?
In September 2008, the British government announced that it was going
to change its policy and allow GM crops to be grown in the UK. The
then science minister, Ian Pearson, explained that the world needs GM
because “we can grow drought resistant crops”. (And as we have just
learned from environment editor Geoffrey Lean of the Independent on
Sunday [19], that was part of a secret plan instigated by the pro-GM
president of the European Commission José Manuel Barroso with the UK
and 26 other European governments to spread GM crops in Europe.)

Except that we can’t make drought resistant crops by GM. Even the
editor of Nature Biotechnology admits we can’t. What the minister
should have said was “The biotech companies have promised us that at
some unspecified time in the future they will produce drought
resistant crops by some method that they haven’t yet developed, and
that is why in the present we are going to allow them to grow Bt maize
in the UK even though we don’t need it and the consumers have made it
abundantly clear that they don’t want it.”

There’s a gap in the logic there, and an even more important gap in
the science. In the first place, contrary to what is often stated,
genes don’t make traits like higher yields, drought-resistance, or
being perennial instead of annual, or even, make women want to marry
older men and men want to marry younger women [20]. (No, I didn’t make
the last one up. It’s one of the classic claims of so-called
evolutionary psychology). What genes do is to code for the production
of proteins. The traits we observe, what biologists call the
phenotype, as distinct from the genotype, arise through the complex
interactions of these gene products with other gene products and with
the environment.

Secondly, while most people think of a gene as a piece of DNA, that is
at best a vast oversimplification. Not only do genes come in many
separate pieces, the pieces don’t even all have to be on the same
chromosome. The same piece of DNA can be part of two genes at the same
time. And there are other complications as well. The situation is so
complicated that modern molecular biologists define a gene by what it
does rather than by what it is. [21] (see also [11]).

Now in genetic engineering, what we do is to cut out or copy a piece
of DNA from one genome, or take an entirely synthetic piece of DNA,
and insert that into a DNA molecule in another genome. But whatever a
gene is, it is not a single stretch of DNA, so what is being
transferred cannot be a gene. Add on to this the fact that most traits
are determined by more than one gene, and there is little reason to
suppose that genetic engineering can work at all, save for the
simplest characteristics, such as insect resistance or herbicide
tolerance, which is practically all we have now.

We certainly cannot just choose any trait we want and use genetic
engineering to make a crop that has it. Stan Cox has described how he
and his colleagues at the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas, are using
the traditional techniques of selection and hybridisation to produce
perennial grain crops [22] (Ending 10 000 Years of Conflict between
Agriculture and Nature, SiS 39). This may strike you as a bit old
fashioned, and you may have wondered why they do not simply transfer
the gene for being perennial to the crop plant, or the gene for high
yield to the perennial. The answer, as Cox pointed out, is that there
are no such genes. For example, for sorghum, originally a tropical
plant, to be perennial in a temperate climate depends on genetic
material on 9 of the plant’s 10 chromosome pairs. Transferring such a
trait by genetic engineering is clearly impossible.

So if we want perennial crop plants that yield as well as their annual
counterparts, it looks like we’re going to have do it by the sort of
breeding that’s been known for centuries. The same is true for most
traits, including almost all of those we would really like our crops
to possess.

GM hazards to health
We should not lose sight of the fact that there are serious health
hazards associated with GM crops [11], which would be a reason for
rejecting them even if they performed better than conventional crops,
and they do not.

The biotech industry is fond of saying there is no evidence that any
humans have been harmed by eating GM food. In the first place, that’s
because they’ve very carefully not looked for evidence and have
ignored all the reports of real incidents. They have also worded their
usual statement very carefully to make it sound much stronger than it
is. Eating GM food is not the only exposure that can be harmful, as in
the Philippines and in India, where villagers and farmers exposed to
Bt maize pollen and Bt cotton suffer allergy-like symptoms since 2005
[23, 24] (GM Ban Long Overdue, SiS 29; More Illnesses Linked to Bt
Crops, SiS 30), and this is continuing in India to the present day
[25] (see Save Farmer Movement for the latest news,
http://www.kisanbachaoandolan.co.cc/).

There is ample evidence that animals have been harmed by GM feed in
laboratory experiments [11]; from the findings of Arpad Pusztai and
colleagues on rats fed GM potatoes, of Irina Ermakova on the offspring
of rats fed GM soya, of researchers at the CSIRO in Australia on mice
exposed to transgenic pea containing a gene from a bean, which you
would have thought would be relatively safe because the two plants are
closely related, but the transgenic pea made the mice seriously ill.
Then farmers have witnessed cows in Germany that died after being fed
on Bt maize; and sheep, goats, cows and other livestock in India that
fall ill and died after grazing on Bt cotton crop residues or even
cotton seed cakes [25].

Whether humans have been harmed by actually eating GM food is hard to
tell because there is no labelling in countries like the USA where
people are most likely to be eating GM food (though most of it has
probably gone into animal feed after processing). Also, the effect may
take time, just as the effects of smoking and asbestos do.

We do know, however, that serious allergies are much more common now
than they used to be, and we also know that humans and animals can get
allergic reactions to GM food and pollen, which is not surprising as
new molecules are involved. That doesn’t prove GM was the cause, but
there’s certainly no justification for claiming that it wasn’t.

GM hazards to the environment
Contrary to what Shapiro claimed, GM crops are no better than
conventional agriculture in their effect on the environment, and in
most cases worse: more pesticides and herbicides used after just a few
years [8], less biodiversity [11], secondary pests explode as the
targeted primary pest becomes diminished [12], or worse, become
resistant to the pesticide; and herbicide resistant superweeds [11].
Just like conventional crops only more so, GM crops degrade the soil
because of the heavy use of herbicides and pesticides and because of
their reliance on chemical fertilisers. They also contaminate other
crops by of cross pollination [26] (GM Contamination At 21 km and
Farther. No Co-Existence Possible, SiS 35) or by horizontal gene
transfer between unrelated species, especially via bacteria in the
soil [27] (Horizontal Gene Transfer from GMOs Does Happen, SiS 38).

The biotech industry and the regulators sometimes claim that a
separation of only a few metres between GM and conventional fields is
enough to prevent contamination. This is patently not the case, as
confirmed by the most recent large scale study carried out by
scientists at the US Environment Protection Agency, showing
contamination at 21 km away [26]. In large areas of Canada there is no
longer any GM-free canola [28].( Do Not Let our Nightmare Become
Yours, Warn Canadian Farmers, SiS 17}; The herbicide resistance has
also spread to weeds [11]. So after a few years of whatever gain there
is from growing Roundup Ready crops, the farmer is likely to be worse
off than before. And it is not just the farmers who choose to plant GM
seed that will have the problem. All farmers will have to cope with GM
superweeds.

Monopoly on food
The only party that have profited from GM are the biotech companies.
Some supporters of GM will even admit to that, though they immediately
go on to say that in the future we will all gain, clearly a case of
pie in the sky.

The reason biotech companies are so keen on GM crops is because they
are patentable, unlike ordinary crops. If you breed seeds by
conventional methods, you can only get “breeder’s rights”. Exactly
what that entitles you to varies a bit from country to country, but
essentially it means that no one else can market seeds of that variety
until the rights expire. Farmers are, however, specifically permitted
to save seeds for their own use. In complete contrast, because GM
varieties can be patented, the biotech companies can and do prevent
farmers from saving the seeds, as Canadian farmer Percy Schmeiser
discovered.[29] (Schmeiser's Battle for the Seed, SiS 19).

The big seed companies are buying up the smaller ones, and Monsanto
has been particularly aggressive in acquiring seed companies in recent
years. It controls more than 90 percent of the market in many
important crop seeds, and Iowa attorney general Tom Miller has been
investigating the company to determine if it violates antitrust
laws.[30]. As the company controls more and more of the market, it
makes non-GM seeds harder and harder to get, and it won’t make any
attempt to improve those that remain. It is able to raise prices to
whatever level it likes, and farmers are already paying higher seed
prices with less choice in the marketplace. If nothing is done to
combat this, every farmer in the world will have to buy seeds every
year from one of half a dozen or fewer corporations that will thus
have a complete stranglehold on the world’s food supply.

That’s bad enough in the USA, but in the third world, where farmers
are typically close to the margins, it is disastrous. If farmers have
to borrow money to buy seeds they stand to lose their farms if the
harvest is not what they were promised. Thousands of suicides in India
have been blamed on GM cotton. The only thing that saves them is to
switch back to growing organic with their traditional varieties [31]
(Message from Andra Pradesh:Return to organic cotton & avoid the Bt
cotton trap, SiS 29), the seeds of which they can save from year to
year and get a bumper harvest without fertilizers and pesticides to
get them into a cycle of debt..

Conclusion
The evidence is clear: industrial agriculture is out; GM agriculture
is worse and unsafe. Organic agriculture, on the other hand, can feed
the world, and feed it well, as Catherine Badgley and colleagues in
the University of Michigan have shown by a careful analysis of data
already published [32], and as many other studies have confirmed in
ISIS’ own report [33] (Food Futures Now *Organic *Sustainable *Fossil
Fuel Free). Especially relevant is the project carried out by Sue
Edwards and colleagues at the Ethiopian Institute of Sustainable
Development in Tigray over a period of seven years, documenting how
compost produced yields 30 per cent greater than chemical fertilisers.
(Not surprisingly, crops treated with chemical fertiliser did better
than those that were not treated at all, so if this had been a Green
Revolution project it would be claimed as a great triumph for chemicals.)

A couple of years ago, some ordinary rice in the USA became
contaminated with GM rice that was being trialled. This was not picked
up by the Americans, which shows how feeble their testing is, but was
noticed in Europe. The authorities were slow to act, the UK worst of
all [34] (GM Rice Contamination How Regulators Tried to Sidestep the
Law, SiS 32), but the consumers would not tolerate it. You can see
just how strongly they objected from a packet of rice found in a
London greengrocer. The original label described the contents as
“American Long Grain Rice”, but this apparently referred to the
variety of rice, not its origin. So the distributor had covered it
with a new label, informing the consumer that this was “Long Grain
(Non USA Origin): Please Ignore All References to the USA”.

Can GM be stopped? Yes, it can, if consumers refuse to buy it and if
farmers refuse to grow it. That little package of rice reminds you
what can happen when consumers will not buy something they don’t trust
and don’t want. And if consumers don’t want to buy GM, farmers have
even less reason to grow it. Among the strongest critics of the lax US
regulation and quality control that allowed contaminated rice to be
exported were American rice farmers who saw their overseas markets
disappear.

And when governments and industry give up devoting so much time,
effort and resource to what even the IAASTD considers to be a side
issue as far as feeding the world is concerned, we will be able to
concentrate on measures that will really make a difference.

This article is based on lectures delivered at the International
Conference on Climate Change, GMOs and Food Security, held on 1-2
October, 2008, in New Delhi. India, and the Forum on Genetically
Modified Organisms: “Have GMOs Delivered?” held on 16 October 2008 in
Manila, Philippines.

References
1. Shapiro, R. Agriculture and biotechnology: Considerations for the
future. Talk given to the 4th annual Greenpeace Business Conference, 8
October 2000. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/468147.stm

2. Shapiro, R. Talk to the Society of Environmental Journalists, 1995.

3. Report of the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge,
Science and Technology for Development. April, 2008.
http://www.agassessment.org/

4. Ho MW. “GM-free organic agriculture to feed the world”. Science in
Society 38, 14-15, 2008.

5. FAO The State of Food and Agriculture, 2003-4,
.http://www.fao.org/es/esa/en/pubs_sofa.htm

6. Gordon, B. Manganese resistance of glyphosphate resistant and
conventional soybeans. Better Crops with Plant Food No. 4, 2007. See
<http://www.ipni.net/ppiweb/bcrops.nsf/$webindex/70ABDB50A75463F085257394001B157F/$file/07-4p12.pdf>

7. Lim, LC and Matthews J. GM Crops Failed. i-sis news13/14, 31, 2002.

8. Who benefits from gm crops? The rise in pesticide use, executive
summary, Friends of the Earth International, Amsterdam, January 2008.

9. Jost P, Shurley D, Culpepper S, Roberts P, Nichols R, Reeves J and
Anthony S. Economic Comparison of transgenic and montransgenic cotton
production systems in Georgia. Agronomy Journal 2008, 100, 42-51.
(doi:10.2134/agronj2006.0259)

10. Ho MW and Saunders PT. Transgenic cotton offer no advantage.
Science in Society 38, 30, 2008.

11. Ho MW. GM is dangerous and futile. Science in Society 40 (to appear).

12. Wu, KM, Lu, YH, Feng, HQ, Jiang, YY and Zhao, JZ, Suppression of
Cotton Bollworm in Multiple Crops in China in Areas with Bt
Toxin-Containing Cotton. Science 321, 1676-1678, 2008.

13. Ho MW and Saunders PT. Letter to the editor. Nature Biotechnology
25 (2007) 1355.

14. Ho MW. Systematic bias in favour of no adverse impacts from GM
feed. Letter to Nature Biotechnology (not published in journal).
Science in Society 37 , 10, 2008.

15. Saunders PT. Prepublication review yes, but panel must be
balanced, Letter to Nature Biotechnology (not published in journal)
Science in Society 37 , 11, 2008.

16. Saunders PT and Ho MW. A very inconvenient truth. From the
Editors, Science in Society 37 , 3, 2008.

17. Marshall A. Join the Dots: Pushing biotech as the ‘solution’ to
the world’s problems is doing more harm than good. Nature
Biotechnology 2008, 26, 837.

18. Ho MW. ‘Golden Rice’ – An Exercise in How Not to Do Science, TWN
Biosafety Series No. 6, TWN, Penang, 2002.

19. “Europe's secret plan to boost GM crop production”, Geoffrey Lean,
26 October 2008,
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/green-living/europes-secret-plan-to-boost-gm-crop-production-973834.html

20. Buss DM. . Mate preference mechanisms: Consequences for partner
choice and intrasexual competition. In The Adapted Mind. (Barkow, JH,
Cosmides, L & Tooby J, eds). pp 249-266, Oxford University Press, New
York. 1992.

21. See, for example, Darnell, J, Lodish, H and Baltimore, D.
Molecular Cell Biology. Scientific American Books, New York, 1986.
This text is over 20 years old, so the realisation that the gene is
not a simple piece of DNA came long before the big push into genetic
engineering that depends on the assumption that it is.

22. Cox S. Ending 10 000 years of conflict between agriculture and
nature. Science in Society 39, 12-15, 2008.

23. Ho MW. GM ban long overdue. Dozens ill & five deaths in the
Philippines. Science in Society 29, 26-27, 2006.

24. Ho MW. More illnesses linked to Bt crops. Science in Society 30,
8-10, 2006.

25. Save Farmer Movement, 23 October 2008,
http://www.kisanbachaoandolan.co.cc/

26. Ho MW. GM contamination at 21 km and farther, no co-existence
possible. Science in Society 35, 30-31, 2007.

27. Ho MW and Cummins J. Horizontal gene transfer from GMOs does
happen. Science in Society 38, 22-24, 2008.

28. Lim LC. “Do not let our nightmare become your”. Science in Society
17, 28, 2003.

29. Ho MW. Schmeiser’s battle for the seed. Science in Society 19,
13-14, 2003.

30. Peterson, C. Seed Company has expensive monopoly. Des Moines
Register, 17 October 2008,
http://www.desmoinesregister.com/article/20081017/OPINION04/810170347/-1/NEWS04

31. Gala R. Return to organic cotton and avoid the Bt cotton trap. .
Science in Society 29, 38-39, 2006.

32. Badgley C, Moghader, J, Quintero, E, Zakem, E, Chappell MJ,
Aviles-Vásquez K, Samulon A and Perfecto, I. Organic agriculture and
the global food supply. Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems 22
(2007) 86-108.

33. Ho MW. Burcher S. Ching LL. & others. Food Futures Now Organic and
Fossil Fuel Free ISIS/TWN, London, 2008.

34. Saunders PT. GM rice contamination: How regulators tried to
sidestep the law. Science in Society 32, 4-5, 2006.




  • [permaculture] GM is Not the Way to Sustainability, Lawrence F. London, Jr., 10/31/2008

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