EC Newsweek 04/04/06
http://www.ethicalcorp.com/content.asp?ContentID=4199

GM remains a bad idea for all sorts of reasons,
says Graham Thompson of Greenpeace UK

Why should we be worried about genetically modified food?

Last year an Australian project to engineer a GM pea was abandoned because rats developed allergic reactions when fed the experimental peas. Not the biggest food scare in the past few years, admittedly – the problem was picked up and the project abandoned. So where’s the danger?

Well, the tests needed to pick up this effect are not part of the European or US food safety regimes. Furthermore, the peas were “substantially equivalent” to normal peas – “substantial equivalence” means containing the same chemicals in the same quantities – and could have been approved on those grounds.

The problem was picked up through luck, and the pea could have been allowed through Europe’s allegedly over-protective, precautionary regime with no-one knowing about the health risk. They had already been deliberately released into the environment in field trials. Do we know that the GM crops already on their way to market could not cause similar problems?

The studies have not been done.

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The vast majority of European consumers do not want to eat GM food. Unfortunately, as US trade representative Rob Portman recently noted, “public opinion isn’t the standard. The standard is a rules-based system in the World Trade Organisation. That’s why we’re in the WTO.”

This statement is truer than you might imagine, as if the WTO has its way, not only will we consumers not be allowed to keep GM out of our countries, regardless of how loudly and clearly we ask, but the consequences of what amounts to the enforced importation and growing of GM crops is that we won’t have the option of keeping them off our plates either. Widespread contamination will make non-GM food a thing of the past. The EU is even proposing a threshold of 0.9% GM for organic food. As things stand, zero contamination just won’t be possible. So much for consumer choice, and so much for protecting the environment.

Grand vision

But these concerns are trivial compared with the grand vision the GM lobbyists are selling. According to the sales pitch, it is vital for Europe to overcome its dangerously protectionist and unjustifiable precautionary stance on GM in order to allow the GM industry to do what it has allegedly been chafing at the bit to do for decades – eradicate world hunger.

The industry’s crops, however, aren’t quite up to the job. Florence Wambugu’s sweet potato, described by New Scientist magazine as “Monsanto’s showcase project in Africa”, has been comprehensively thrashed by a crop created at a fraction of the cost using traditional breeding methods, which has all of the positive attributes erroneously claimed by the GM variety and none of the worrying health and environmental risks.