The Future of Food

Research Confirms the Dangers of GM Food and Global Opposition Rises – But Canada Resists
by Helke Ferrie

“Facts are stubborn things.”
- John Adams, First US President, author of the US Constitution

These days, many of us feel a sense of dread and embarrassment when we find out, from time to time, what our government has done on the international stage. Being a Canadian is a bit like being the parent of a teenager who is into drugs. When the telephone rings you hope and pray it’s not the police again. Well, the feds did it again, and here is where and how. The why is as mysterious as the inner workings of the minds of one’s juvenile delinquent kid.

Most people know about the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, whose reports are paid attention to by the entire family of nations. Discussion, debate, dissenting views, and endorsements are all part of the process these reports set in motion.

There is a parallel organization, also convened by the United Nations, and it is devoted to agriculture – the International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology Development (IAASTD). The purpose of its now completed four-year $10 million project is to do for hunger and poverty what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is mandated to do for global warming. From April 7 to 12, 2008, representatives of the governments of 63 countries gathered in Johannesburg, South Africa, to debate the future of agriculture on the basis of IAASTD’s first report, which is the work of hundreds of scientists chosen by those 63 governments involved. At this meeting in April, 59 countries endorsed the report – only four refused to do so, and in fact walked out of the meeting.

Those three countries were the US, the UK, Australia – and Canada. Not only did they refuse to accept their own scientists’ report, they also ignored the demands of their own citizens. In Canada, every poll in the last few years has shown increasing dislike of genetically altered foods (opposition is now standing at 97%). Nevertheless, Canada walked out of the IAASTD summit alleging their final report was “unbalanced and one-sided”, even though these countries had sent only those scientists in whom they themselves had placed perfect trust.

The IAASTD report concluded that “the ecological footprint of industrial agriculture is already too large to be ignored.” Gene Ethics observed on June 5, 2008, that this report also makes it clear that “the agriculture of the future is one that works with nature and the people – not against them.” Furthermore, the report specifically points out that “genetically engineered crops are highly controversial and will not play a substantial role in addressing the key problems of climate change, biodiversity loss, hunger, and poverty.” Its chair, Professor Robert Watson of the World Bank, was asked if genetically modified crops could solve world hunger. He replied: “The simple answer is no.”

From now on, wrote Gene Ethics, the conclusions of the IAASTD report will be a “key reference point for the future of agriculture and impact UN and World Bank projects around the world”. Not only does this report condemn genetically engineered crops, it also states that the trend must quickly move from large corporate-controlled agriculture to the only possible sustainable techniques of small, regional farming methods to avoid a world food crisis. Further, the IAASTD report explicitly recommends that “governments should recognize consumer preference with respect to GE crops, protect farmers’ seed rights, and ensure that no cross contamination takes place.”

GM Crops Described as Gene Pollution

A month earlier, Monsanto suffered a landmark defeat in the courts when it had to agree on March 19, 2008, to pay all the clean-up costs of the Roundup ready canola that contaminated farmer Percy Schmeiser’s fields. This sets an important precedent because it is now legally established that patented plants are potential trespassers, which makes them contaminants to be treated as genetic pollutants. This ensures that all those farmers currently threatened by Monsanto’s legal actions for having GE seeds drift into their non-GE fields, will have their own natural crops protected.

Back in the 1990’s, without his knowledge, Schmeiser’s fields had been contaminated with Monsanto’s GE canola, for which Monsanto sued him on the grounds of patent infringement. Back in 2004, our Supreme Court judges ordered the Canadian government to amend patent laws to reflect this new technological reality – which has so far not happened.

Schmeiser won the 2007  “alternate Nobel”, Sweden’s Right Livelihood Award, for having “given the world a wake-up call about the dangers to farmers and biodiversity everywhere from the growing dominance and market aggression of companies engaged in the genetic engineering of food crops.”

New Evidence that GM Foods are Dangerous to Public Health

The propaganda which the GE industry tried to palm off on the public as reality has failed to deliver on two claims – namely that these foods are good for us, and are just as good as nature’s products. 

Interestingly, the first health disaster maliciously attributed to natural health products turned out to be a GE-caused tragedy. Jeffery Smith, who recently published a magisterial survey of all the known science to date on the health effects of GE foods, first uncovered the true story involving tryptophan.

In its natural form, tryptophan is an essential amino acid found in milk, turkey meat and other foods. Being an “essential” amino acid means that it is an absolute requirement for life, and as such it interacts with a host of targets within an organism. Messing with an amino acid means messing with all parts of the human body.

In his book, Smith tells the story of how in the late 1980’s a lot of people suffered sudden and extreme nerve pain, and their legs and arms filled with fluid; they also had trouble breathing. The Mayo Clinic discovered that these people had taken contaminated tryptophan. About 100 people died and thousands became seriously ill (the symptoms were given the name eosinophilia myalgia syndrome (EMS).

The Journal of the American Medical Association reported on July 11, 1990, that all these victims had in common the fact that they had taken GE-contaminated tryptophan pills traced to one manufacturer who had used genetically engineered bacteria – genes had been inserted into these bacteria to produce higher concentrations of this amino acid. When Science reported these findings as well, the FDA “blasted” the authors for causing an adverse “impact on the industry”.

The scientists presented in Smith’s book document exactly how GMOs do harm: by promoting sterility, increasing infant mortality, provoking serious allergies, setting in motion cascades that result in organ damage, increasing vulnerability to childhood diseases, challenging and breaking down immune responses, harming the nervous system and – most importantly – that these foods are not nourishing.

Today, science is moving so rapidly in dispelling old GE propaganda that I have a hard time keeping up with the volume of results published by universities focusing on health effects and comparing GE crops with organic and regular crops:

• GE corn has been shown to cause kidney damage and measurable liver toxicity in animal studies
• GM potatoes show cancer links
• Roundup-ready soy is known to cross the placenta and damage human fetuses
• Agricultural pests like the bollworm and bacteria harmful to humans have been shown to develop resistance to both pesticides and antibiotics making them into super-pests, so-to-speak
• Research studies on 500 pregnant women showed that the babies of those who ate organic dairy foods were significantly less likely (than those who ate conventional dairy foods) to develop allergies later. (ScienceDaily Feb.8, 2008; Third World Resurgence No. 176, April 2005; The Independent, UK, Feb 17, 2007; Newstarget April 10, 2007; Daily Mail, UK, Nov. 10, 2007).
• Organic farms have now been shown in long-term studies to be just as productive (and often more so) as conventional pesticide-contaminated farming, and while growing crops organically, these even clean up the groundwater in the process. (Science Daily July 14, 2005; July 24, 2007; July 20, 2007; March 26, 2008; May 8, 2008.)

In May 2007, German researchers confirmed earlier observations showing that genetically altered crops do not maintain their genetic integrity, as claimed by those who hold the patents. In fact, such altered plants seem to have little if any genetic integrity because they are not held together, as it were, by millions of years of evolutionary reinforcement. In fact, those foreign genes that reside in crops in which they did not evolve have now been shown to jump the species barrier.

The Observer in the UK reported on May 28 the findings of geneticist Hans Heinrich Kaatz, of Jena University, which showed that “the herbicide-resistant genes [inserted into] rapeseed transferred across to the bacteria and yeast organisms inside the intestines of young bees.” This finding, if supported by further and already ongoing research, would totally shatter the myth that GM crops and standard crops are “substantially equivalent.” Naturally evolved plants don’t pass their genetic material on to other organisms; the whole point of DNA is to stay put and take care of its own context only. Genes taken out of the context within which they evolved appear to become loose cannons in nature.

Cloned Animals Proven Unsafe

A parallel finding has also been made with regard to cloning animals. The propaganda would have us believe that cloning propagates the finest and the best, a sort of eugenics program for food producing farm animals – the best steak replicated forever and ever. However, that is not how those see it who actually are familiar with the processes involved.

One of the leading cloning scientists in the world, Rudolph Jaenisch of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said recently: “You cannot make normal clones. The ones that survive will just be less abnormal than the ones that die early. There has been no progress – none – in the last six years in making cloning more safe.”

Health Canada Abandons Surveillance of GM Crop Impact on Consumers

In his book, Smith tells an interesting story about Health Canada’s concern for public health in the age of GMOs: “Tracking down the impact of GM foods is even more difficult in North America where these foods are not labeled [no control group - as the GE industry hoped to escape liability]. Regulators at Health Canada announced in 2002 that they would monitor Canadians for health problems from eating GM foods. A spokesperson said, “I think it’s just prudent and what the public expects…”

But according to the CBC show Current Affairs on September 25, 2006, Health Canada “abandoned that research less than a year later saying that it was too difficult to put an effective surveillance system in place.”

Public Resistance Continues Unabated

The UK Alliance for Natural Health won three court cases in the European Union (2005), the International Court of Justice (2006) and the British High Court (2007) on behalf of natural medicine and the GMO issues versus Codex regulation.

In an interview on June 24, 2008, the Chair of the UK Alliance for Natural Health, Dr. Robert Verkerk, explained that the Irish “No” vote against the EU on June 12 was primarily due to issues surrounding natural health products and the desire to have foods remain uncontaminated by genetically engineered varieties. The latter issue motivated an attempted injunction against the ratification of the EU constitution in the British High Court (Times, June 21, 2008). This failed, but then Czechoslovakia refused to ratify as well, and the populations of the UK, France, Denmark and the Netherlands are demanding a national referendum on the EU question primarily because they don’t want GMOs allowed in Europe (EU-Referendum.org, June 5, 2008).

Here in Canada, we still have two bills awaiting our joint demand for passage: C-510 which would make GE crops illegal and ban pesticides, hormones, antibiotics, and rendered slaughterhouse waste from food production; and C-448 which would ban terminator technology as well.

Who would have thought that food and medicine would become the world’s central concerns! And yet ... what else could possibly be more important?

Sources and Resources:

• www.agassessment.org for the documents on IAASTD
• www.anhcampaign.org for the European Alliance for Natural Health defending EU countries’ rights on natural health and organic farming issues
• www.i-sis.org.uk for the research on GMOs and organic agriculture published by the Institute of Science in Society in the UK
• www.organicauthority.com for worldwide news updates
• S. Chopra. Corrupt to the Core – Memoirs of a Health Canada Whistleblower. Kos Publishing, 2008 (519-927-1049)  www.kospublishing.com
• H. Ferrie. Which Part of No! Don’t They Understand? Kos 2008 (519-927-1049)  www.kospublishing.com
• C. Holdrege & S. Talbott. Beyond Biotechnology: The Barren Promise of Genetic Engineering. University of Kentucky, 2008
• M. Pollan. In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto. Penguin, 2008
• J. M. Smith. Genetic Roulette: The Documented Health Risks of Genetically Engineered Foods. Yes! 2007
• T. Traavik & L. Ching eds. Biosafety First: Holistic Approaches to Risk and Uncertainty in Genetic Engineering. Tapir, 2008
• P. Weirich, ed. Labeling Genetically Modified Food: The Philosophical and Legal Debate. Oxford, 2008
• R. Ronald & R. Adamchak. Tomorrow’s Table: Organic Farming, Genetics and the Future of Food.  Oxford, 2008