Food fight! The polarized GM food debate

Robert B. Horsch Vice President of Product and Technology Cooperation, Monsanto Company

Raj Patel Policy Analyst, Food First

1. From your perspective, what are the benefits and risks inherent to GM agriculture?

2. Should consumers and farmers have a choice between GM and non-GM maize?

3. Do you see genetic engineering of crops to be different than traditional plant breeding?

4. Does GM maize pose a particular threat to centers of genetic diversity such as Mexico?

5. And finally, what is the most interesting fact you know about maize that isn't common knowledge?

1. From your perspective, what are the benefits and risks inherent to GM agriculture?

Robert B. Horsch
The benefits of GM agriculture include increased income for small and large farmers, higher production of food and feed, reduced dependence on pesticide sprays, less detrimental impacts on the environment, and a pipeline of traits for more nutritious foods and higher productivity under stressful conditions such as drought. These benefits are inherent to specific genes and the proteins they encode—not to biotechnology generally. In like fashion, potential risks are inherent to specific genes and the traits they convey in their new home. For this reason, while there is a comprehensive battery of tests that all engineered genes are subject to, the answers are case-specific. Each new GM trait in each crop goes through extensive testing and analysis by regulatory authorities prior to commercial use. The safety of current biotech crops that have been planted on nearly 750 million acres since 1996 has been confirmed by international scientific bodies, regulatory authorities and health and environmental experts around the world....

Raj Patel
...For farmers and consumers...there are many risks, and a few certain and dire consequences. First, GM agriculture consolidates control of the agriculture in the hands of a few corporations. This is killing family farms, preventing farmers from storing and experimenting with seeds as they have done since the dawn of agriculture, and shrugs off the accumulated knowledge of thousands of generations of people who work on the land. Second, there are many environmental and human health concerns that have yet to be addressed because independent science has been stifled and government agencies haven't the funds to conduct their own investigations. In short, we don't know what the full effects of introducing GM into our environment and food system will be, but the corporations that invented it are pushing us to do it anyway. Third, alternatives are being smothered. Studies by Food First and other organizations have consistently shown that small-scale, family-farm agriculture produces more of the things that people need to live—fuel, food, medicines and shelter—than industrial agriculture's monoculture model. But small-scale farming can't compete with the subsidies and other favors being granted by the US government to Monsanto and other agribusinesses. The death of these alternatives, and the rural livelihoods that go with them, are the most certain casualties of GM agriculture.

2. Should consumers and farmers have a choice between GM and non-GM maize?

Robert B. Horsch
Yes...The issue isn't if there should be choice, but rather how that choice is presented. In the US, information about a product is given on the label because the FDA requires it or because it food marketers add it to attract customers. In the first case, anything that impacts the composition, nutritional value or wholesomeness of foods or that carries a specific risk for any category of people, must be labeled according to established FDA rules. In the second case, companies are allowed to voluntarily list information on the label to inform customers about the product or how it is made (like organic foods). Any information on the label must be verifiable and not mislead consumers. Organic foods do not have to be labeled as organic, but they must meet a set of verifiable standards before they may be voluntarily labeled as organic. For GM or non-GM foods, as with organic foods that do not change the nutritional content or the safety profile of the foods, voluntary labels seem appropriate and are available and in use where market demand supports them today. For GM foods that do change the nutritional content or the safety profile, mandatory labeling is already in effect—there just have not been any such products introduced....

Raj Patel
...We just don't know enough about GM food, or about its long-term environmental and human health impact to be able to certify it safe for people to choose. Legal questions about who bears the costs of cross-contamination remain unanswered by the USDA. And there are many alternatives to GM available today. Until we know more, there should be a moratorium on GM maize. Until there is a moratorium, people ought to know what they're consuming. Every other food in the US is labeled to the hilt to help facilitate consumer choice. More than 90 percent of US consumers said in a recent survey that they'd like to have their food labeled. If GE is as safe as the industry claims it is, why is the industry so concerned to suppress labeling?

3. Do you see genetic engineering of crops to be different than traditional plant breeding?

Robert B. Horsch
The process is different but the result is very similar. Genetic engineering uses a different method of changing the genetic make-up of a crop, and can add characteristics from other species that would not be possible through traditional cross breeding. This is the source of both its power and the reason for regulatory control of the process. But the types of GM traits in commercial use today are not different from existing types of traits already in the crop. Breeders have been selecting for and identifying insect resistance and herbicide tolerance and many other traits as well—many more kinds of traits than currently conferred with engineered genes....

Raj Patel
Overwhelmingly, the independent scientific community sees genetic engineering as profoundly different from traditional plant breeding. With these new technologies come new unknowns—we don't know which genes are turned on or off, we don't fully know what the long-term effects these manipulations will be, and the transfer of genes between different plant and animal kingdoms is without scientific precedent. Shooting fish genes into strawberries just isn't the same as regular breeding. Reasonable doubts still fill the scientific journals about GE and one wonders why else Monsanto would have been granted so many patents on GE were it not fundamentally new and different.

4. Does GM maize pose a particular threat to centers of genetic diversity such as Mexico?

Robert B. Horsch
No, if used wisely, GM maize could help to protect genetic diversity. At a recent meeting on this topic in Mexico City, many speakers concluded that there are risks of loss of genetic diversity of maize and its ancestor species, teosinte, in Mexico—but not from biotechnology. Teosinte, and many other species, are at risk via loss of habitat where they grow or live in nature. This habitat loss is from human expansion of agriculture, roads, housing and other human uses of land. Increases in demand for maize could further threaten wildlife habitat, if low-yielding varieties are grown to fill that demand. But higher-yielding varieties, including varieties improved with biotechnology, could reduce this threat. In the US, use of high-yielding varieties and efficient management practices have permitted conservation programs to remove land from cultivation and return it to habitat for wildlife....

Raj Patel
When US researchers found genetic contamination in Mexico, their report was savaged by Monsanto, as were researchers allied to it. Since then, a number of independent studies have further shown that the researchers were correct—there has been genetic contamination in Mexico. The particular threat comes from not knowing what, exactly, is being inter-bred with existing corn in these areas. There's no remedy for the farmers who've suffered yield losses as a result of this cross-breeding. And, as a recent USDA study has shown, there's no known way of undoing this damage.

5. And finally, what is the most interesting fact you know about maize that isn't common knowledge?

Robert B. Horsch
Maize is not a natural species and cannot survive in nature on its own. It is most likely a variant of teosinte that can only survive with the help of humans who gather the cobs, shell the seeds and plant them deliberately. One major theory suggests that the ear was derived from a progenitor tassel that gained several important new features, including the ability to hold hundreds of kernels in a tight package, making harvest and storage easy while also allowing simple processing, consumption and re-planting.

Raj Patel
US maize farmers' backs are up against the wall, and GM maize is part of the problem. While US corn growers are losing over US$20 per acre on all varieties of corn, they're losing an average of US$3.26 more per acre on Bt corn than on conventional varieties, according to an Iowa State University study. In other words, US farmers are poor, and GM maize is making them poorer.

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Food fight! The polarized GM food debate

Americans and Canadians react to Mexico corn-troversy