August 1998
The National Agricultural Environment Council hosted a conference three weeks ago on the subject of genetic engineering (GEing). It was modestly attended by the agro-chemical industry, farmers, academics, researchers and government. My attendance was a great learning experience as each community presented pros and cons for GEing amid claims, counter-claims, heated debate and demands for references. It would be pertinent to share with you a summary of the information I gathered and to represent the views of the organic community.
Genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are a major recent trend in modern agriculture. They have been commercialized for the last three years with herbicide tolerant canola now accounting for half of the canola production in western Canada. Corn borer resistance is engineered into about 20% of the corn acreage in Ontario. About 40% of the supermarket food contains some amount of GMOs. This first phase of GEing provides primarily an agronomic application. The imminent second wave will focus on food processing such as shelf life. The third phase promises consumer traits such as taste, colour, and nutritional value. In promoting GEing, the proponents argue that the benefits outweigh the risks.
Organic farmers and organic consumers have not accepted GMOs; the standards for organic products strictly forbid GMOs on the farm and in food processing. A year ago, the US Department of Agriculture drafted a national organic standard, at the request of the organic community in order to harmonize organic standards among the private certification bodies. In the process, industry and internal lobbying inserted opportunities in the standards to permit GMOs, irradiation and sewage sludge in food production. The organic community reacted swiftly and with full condemnation of the document which was retracted.
No-one argues that GMOs are absolutely safe, not even the manufacturers. They argue that the benefits outweigh the risks. What benefits? The manufacturer is obviously the first to benefit as long as sales of the products are good. In my sales career, I have learned that there are two ways to sell something: 1) satisfy a need or 2) create a need to satisfy.
Farmers would allegedly benefit with easier pest control. Despite some advertising that talks about getting the weeds "once and for all", they will never go away. We all know that. We have created and expanded the problem ourselves chiefly through mono-culture crops. With constant weed pressure and increasing resistance, no-one is going to avoid the challenge. Organic farmers refuse to play this game of leap-frog with pests that has no winner except for the manufacturer as the farmers continue to pay more with no long term benefit.
Your vendor of GMO’s will highlight the potential of higher yield and more crop revenues. If we assume for a moment that the pest control is effective and that the yield is higher, then greater forces will take over. The simple market law of supply and demand will meet the higher crop production with lower prices. Look over the past decades as your yields improved; prices in current dollars went down. The result: higher input costs, more work, and the same or lower revenue. Someone at the conference even suggested that farmers should purposely reduce yields in order to increase prices for less work and less expense.
And will GMOs feed the millions of starving people? Never! These people don’t have the money to buy the food even if GMOs produced a bumper crop in North America. Farmers don’t want to give their crop away for free and our taxpayers don’t want to foot the bill. Nothing feeds the millions of starving people unless they feed themselves. And they can’t afford to buy GEed seed nor the herbicides to go with them.
Time has proven that humanity is incompetent in dealing with such a fundamental tinkering of nature. There are many inventions that society has learned to regret. Nuclear energy was great until Chernobyl exploded and we were unable to deal with nuclear waste. Smoking was in vogue until public pressure created laws that severely restrict where you can smoke. A few drinks were fine at one time, until the cost to society motivated the campaign against drinking and driving. Products such DDT and breast implants were safe and then withdrawn when we learned otherwise. After years of fossil fuels, we are searching for ways to reduce smog and save the ozone layer. Inventing the internal combustion engine is one thing, but tinkering with genetics is a Pandora’s Box that is beyond us and we will live to regret it eventually.
We are being told that GMOs are safe. The manufacturers are biased by their own interest in selling the product for short term gain. There is little research available that could prove that it is unsafe simply because there is no funding for research that cannot sell something. True, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency regulates GMO’s and supposedly protects the public’s interest by ensuring the safety of new products. How reliable is their verdict? CFIA explains to us that nothing is considered absolutely safe, only that new products to be approved are no worse than the current acceptable agricultural practices. CFIA has no research facilities nor mandate to verify the safety claims of the manufacturer and CFIA does not audit the manufacturer’s application. The applicant is wholly and solely responsible for the data. So who says that GMOs are safe?
Safety is a relative question. Like so many of environmental problems today, a problem with a GMO could take several years to develop and many more years to detect, isolate and argue about. In the meantime, the safety investigations of GMOs today last only a few months or cycles of the organism. Several potential safety concerns loom: inadvertently crossing a GMO with its wild cousin; horizontal transfer of the gene via a virus to another species; the development of new allergies in the food system.
It is illogical for a farmer to create his/her next big problem: resistance by the target pest. The agro-chemical industry agrees that resistance to pesticides is a reality today, hence their recommendations to rotate crops and chemicals to overcome resistance. The manufacturers are so concerned with resistance that they impose a contract on the utilization of their GEed product including practices to manage resistance. The manufacturers even forecast optimistically that it will take 5 to 10 years for resistance to occur. Novartis tells us that resistance management includes a refuge zone on your farm, constant surveillance, detection and reporting of resistant insects. When resistance occurs, the solutions include a quarantine of the region, the stacking of two or more GEed attributes to take action in a variety of ways, the rotation among crop varieties with different gene modifications and different pesticides to accompany them. If a product cannot make our pest problem go away and the product will increase our management burden, they why use it?
The implementation of GEing severely affects our right to choose. Don’t look for notices on the labels to advise you about GMOs in your food. Despite a fundamental right to information when making a food choice, Canadian law does not require such notification. Work is in progress to develop the terminator gene that makes a crop seed incapable of reproducing itself thus removing the farmer’s ability to re-use his/her own seed. Don’t expect these products to be advertised like the current GEed products are. An organic farmer who is trying to produce non-GEed crops is now exposed to cross-breeding from crops in neighbouring fields. Common logic would suggest that the person about to cause harm must keep a safe distance, but it is unfortunately the organic farmer who must maintain the buffer.
Fundamentally, organic and ecological food is about working with nature, setting the stage to help nature do what it does best and with quite acceptable results in terms of the quality and yield of foodstuffs and with low input costs. Organic farming works! Therefore, it is unnecessary, illogical and unsafe to modify nature.
A contribution by Tom Manley
President of Homestead Organics