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The Fear of Food: One by one, countries are coming out against crops with engineered genes, America is isolated (Monday, Jan. 27, 2003 -- CropChoice news) -- Fred Guter, Newsweek International: Tony Hall's career has always depended on his command of
certain facts about corn. For instance, did you know that last year the
United States produced more than 9 billion bushels, 42 percent of the
world'
s supply? And that a year's worth of U.S. exports would fill a train of
hopper cars from Paris to Beijing, by way of Calcutta?
BACK IN 1984-when Hall was a U.S. congressman from the corn-belt state
of
Ohio-he went on a fact-finding mission to Ethiopia, which had been
suffering
from famine, so he could better argue the case in Washington for
increasing
U.S. food aid. Hall found more than facts. When he and his entourage
drove
to the plateau north of the town of Alamata, "I walked upon a scene of
about
50,000 people just very peacefully lying around, moaning-and dying," he
recalls. "When I came home, I decided that there's lots of things you
can do in Congress that really don't amount to much. But this was
important."
Taking up world hunger as your own personal cause isn't the kind of
behavior you'd necessarily expect from an elected politician, but that's
what Hall did. He was instrumental in kick-starting several
congressional
initiatives to combat hunger, and in 1993 he even fasted for 22 days to
make
his point. Arguably his best shot at harnessing America's vast grain
harvest
for the world's greater good came last fall, when he arrived in Rome as
the
U.S. ambassador to the U.N. food agencies. His timing, however, couldn't
be
worse. Right now the last thing even the hungriest parts of the world
want
is genetically modified American food, like Ohio's golden corn.
The Case for Caution
Europe has for years turned its nose up at American products like
corn, tomatoes and soy, which scientists have engineered to contain
unnatural genes. Now, in yet another permutation of a global
anti-Americanism, the rest of the world seems to be following suit.
China,
one of the world's biggest agricultural producers, invested billions of
dollars in GM crops only to back off last year on imports and on new
foreign
investment in the development of engineered seeds. Even the world's
poor, it seems, don't want America's grain, thank you very much. In
November, India
froze food-aid shipments of corn and soy from the United States. And in
October, Zambia turned away 18,000 tons of U.S. corn, even though 3
million
of its citizens teeter on the brink of starvation. "I'd rather die than
eat
something toxic," President Levy Mwanawasa told Sky News.
Zambia's rejection, Greenpeace exulted, was "a triumph of national
sovereignty." But to Hall, for one, it was almost a personal affront.
"Just
when you think you've seen everything, you see food being shipped out of
a
country where starving people are stoning public officials and rioting,"
he
says. "This is not an intellectual discussion, it's a moral issue-a
matter
of life or death."
What has inspired such opposition to so-called Frankenfoods? The
answer has grown as complicated as the gene splicing needed to create
them.
American officials, isolated and perhaps a bit paranoid, see Europe's
influence behind every hesitation over GM crops. U.S. Trade
Representative
Robert Zoellick calls Europe's moratorium on new GM foods "immoral" and
"Luddite" and wants to appeal to the World Trade Organization. Europeans
deny arm-twisting other regions. "There is no European governmental
pressure
to do this," says Alexander de Roo, a Green Party member of the European
Parliament. "It's the governments themselves who are rejecting GM
foods." Of course, the European Commission's Health and Consumer
Protection directorate
general "did give documentation and research to concerned countries,"
says
spokeswoman Beate Gminder, "but we [do] not make attempts to influence
their
decisions."
Americans are suspicious, in part, because engineered corn seems so
safe. After all, it doesn't glow in the dark and gives off no lethal
radiation. In fact, it looks and tastes just like plain old corn and,
genetically, it's almost identical-except for one added gene, which
scientists in the laboratory transplanted from Bacillus thuringiensis ,
a
bacterium. The gene confers upon the corn the ability to repel pests
like
the bollworm, a pesky bug that has the nasty habit of devastating
cornfields. The most widely used GM crops-namely, cotton and corn-have
this
Bt gene.
As the U.S. agriculture industry is eager to point out, the
technology has been a big success: it has reduced the amount of
pesticides
farmers have had to spray on their cornfields, with happy consequences
for
the environment and human health. U.S. health regulators haven't been
able
to find anything wrong with eating Bt corn. It is now found in roughly
two
thirds of all corn products on American store shelves. GM foods already
on
the market "are unlikely to present a problem to people's health," says
Jorgen Schlundt, director of the World Health Organization's Food Safety
Program. Even Europe's officials admit that health risks are minute. So
why
won't the rest of the world just relax and bake some corn muffins?
"Because
of doubts, ignorance, evil," says Hall.
Perhaps. But there may be more to the skepticism over GM crops. In
India, for instance, officials have always maintained European-style
safety
concerns about genetically modified foods. Although the government
approved
Bt cotton last March-after a bruising four-year battle-it has never OK'd
GM
corn or other edible crops. And the controversy over cotton has only
stiffened resistance. Last November, authorities demanded a written
guarantee that aid shipments from the United States contained no GM
grains
whatsoever. Relief workers at CARE and Catholic Relief Services couldn't
comply. After six months of stalemate, they had the sacks of flour
shipped
off to Africa. In the meantime, India has allowed no new shipments of
U.S.
corn-soya flour. Other products have similarly stalled: in November, New
Delhi also put off a decision on whether or not to accept GM mustard
plants,
even though they've been testing them for years.
Regulatory officials are often as afraid of public opinion as of the
crops themselves. "We took a lot of flak over GM cotton," says former
Genetic Engineering Approval Committee chairman, Achyut Gokhale. "It was
my
job to ensure we weren't accused of overhastiness [over GMgrains]." The
Indian public, like those in countries from France to Zimbabwe, seems to
have equated GM foods with U.S. agriculture-and trust neither. They are
afraid of foreign genes somehow contaminating their own crops and
fields,
and they're afraid their farmers might grow dependent on U.S. companies
for
GM seeds. "Genetic modification is just a weapon to bring Indian
agriculture
under the dominance of American corporations," says Devinder Sharma,
chairman of the Delhi-based Forum for Biotechnology and Food Security.
Indian activists remember vividly the row a few years ago over
StarLink, a form of GM corn that had been approved for animal feed in
the
United States, but which was found, to the great embarrassment of the
U.S.
agricultural industry, to have made its way into Taco Bell burritos and
other products intended for human consumption. StarLink had been
engineered
to contain a foreign protein suspected of causing allergic reactions.
Subsequent tests proved otherwise, but the damage was done. Suddenly
just
about all U.S. grain, GM or otherwise, was suspected of
contamination-and
loudly opposed.
China's recent about-face on GM foods also has as much to do with
politics as with science. The People's Republic was actually an early
and
enthusiastic adopter of genetic farming. Chai Hongliang and his brother
Zhenbo, who farm cotton in Langfang, about 30 miles southeast of
Beijing,
used to dump tons of pesticides on their crops to keep the bugs from
destroying their harvest. Five years ago they started using
government-approved Bt cotton, made by U.S. biotech firm Monsanto; the
brothers saved so much on pesticides they doubled their profits. They
even
opened a tiny shop to sell the seeds for Bt cotton. Chinese cotton
farmers
increased their productivity by 10 percent last year, by some estimates.
But overall, Chinese farmers still could not compete against cheaper
U.S. crops, now available after the country joined the WTO. In the
spring,
officials began requiring labels on all imports of GM crops. Ships
loaded up with 1 million tons of soybeans slated for export to China sat
in U.S. ports
for weeks. Beijing eventually granted a reprieve, but U.S. soy exports
to
China slipped 20 percent for the year. Beijing has also declared a
moratorium on investment by foreign seed companies in the development of
several new strains of genetically modified plants.
What's interesting is that Beijing's moves are not simply a
protectionist ploy-reimposing de facto trade barriers forbidden under
WTO
regulations. Backtracking on GM foods extends to China's own growing
agricultural industry. Since the late 1980s, Beijing has lavished money
on
research into genetic farming techniques; it currently spends $100
million a year by some estimates. The idea was to boost productivity and
push exports
beyond the 5 percent of agricultural production China currently sells
abroad. More than 100 labs have sprung up, and researchers have invented
150
different strains of transgenic, or GM, crops. "We all believed this was
going to be very important technology," says Chen Zhangliang, a
researcher
at Beijing University who developed virus-resistant tomatoes and sweet
peppers. But last year, just as labs were ready to commercialize their
new
crops, the Chinese government stopped approving them.
Although officials cite the usual safety and environmental concerns,
the prospect of being shut out of export markets may be the more
compelling
fear. Once GM crops are planted widely, it's difficult, if not
impossible,
to remove them from the agricultural system. Keeping GM and non-GM
grains
apart proved difficult in the case of StarLink. What's to keep GM corn
crops, with their powerful added gene, from overtaking weaker natural
corn
strains-especially when Chinese peasants, mindful of their
pest-repelling
qualities, plant them surreptitiously in their gardens? China fears
forever
tarring its exports with the GM brush, which would put the kabosh on
markets
in Europe, not to mention skittish Asian countries like South Korea.
It's
not a theoretical threat. After China developed GM strains of tobacco,
Europe shut the door to Chinese imports in the 1990s. "It significantly
affected trade," said Huang Jikun, director of the Center for Chinese
Agricultural Policy in Beijing. "The government realized the [economic]
impact biosafety concerns could have."
China's turnaround has underscored just how isolated Washington now
is. "We figured China was our buddy on biotech," says a U.S. official.
"Most
of our resources were going to problem areas like Europe." That's now
changed. The U.S. government recently started training Chinese
regulatory
officials on transgenic crops. Lobbyists for the U.S. soybean industry,
which supplies China with half of its soybeans, buttonhole Chinese
officials
at conferences and send scientists information about GM soy.
Environmental groups sense Washington's desperation. Greenpeace set
up shop in Beijing last summer and began working through the Chinese
press
and Communist Party-controlled neighborhood committees to "build public
awareness of genetically engineered food," says Zhou Yan, the group's
information officer. Greenpeace newsletters can now be found in the
waiting
rooms of almost any governmental or scientific office that deals with GM
crops. In late 2001, Greenpeace teamed up with an environmental group in
southern China to produce a report warning of the dangers of genetically
modified organisms, or GMOs. (Another government organization later
pronounced the report unreliable and had it recalled.)
There are signs that the Chinese public is beginning to have doubts.
When Huang's agriculture policy center surveyed more than 1,000 Chinese
consumers, 3 percent said they would not eat GM food-not many, but more
than
previous studies have shown. "A few years ago when I talked to
policymakers,
no one was against GMOs," Huang said. "But in the past two or three
years,
when I talk to some officials they say, 'I'm not going to eat biotech
food'
.." Says the U.S. official: "One nightmare scenario is that the [trade]
protectionists work with the environmental nongovernmental
organizations,
thinking it would be clever to encourage antibiotech hysteria. That
would be a disaster."
A change in the risk-reward ratio might give GM crops a fillip. So
far, genetic technologies haven't led to drastically lowered prices but,
as
supplies increase, some experts think 30 percent drops are likely. In
2001,
GM crops worldwide covered 53 million hectares, 15 percent more than the
year before, according to a recent study by the International Service
for
the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications, a research organization in
the
Philippines. Brazil, the world's second-largest producer of soy, has so
far
eschewed genetically engineered varieties. But Brazilian scientists are
developing several types of GM crops. If they come up with tempting new
seeds, Brazil may decide to take the plunge sooner rather than later.
What ultimately happens in places like India, China and Brazil,
though, will depend a great deal on what happens in Europe. At the
moment,
GM foods aren't terribly popular with European consumers, whose memories
of
the fiasco over mad-cow disease are still fresh. Once better regulations
are
in place, attitudes may soften. This year the EU is putting in place
labeling rules. If liability laws were also strengthened, so that
consumers
felt they had better recourse against food-industry shenanigans,
European
consumers might alter their resistance to GM crops. "I think GM foods
are
going to be accepted by European consumers sometime in the next five to
10
years," says Julia Moore of the Woodrow Wilson International Center in
Washington, D.C. "If the U.S. is smart"-if it doesn't further alienate
European consumers with lots of trade-war chest-thumping-"we're talking
about closer to five than 10." The question is, will it be too late to
change the minds of consumers in the rest of the world, who won't have
the
benefit of such protections?
http://www.msnbc.com/news/861360.asp
2.The Case for Caution
'We believe that citizens should have the right to choose'
Jan. 27 issue - When China, India and Zambia decided to resist
genetically
modified food, they were widely perceived as following Europe's lead.
U.S.
Trade Rep. Robert Zoellick has threatened to drag Europe before the
World
Trade Organization over its policy on such crops. Pascal Lamy, the
European
Union's trade commissioner, tries to set the record straight.
WHY DOES EUROPE resist GM foods when scientists say they are safe?
Scientists everywhere in the world acknowledge that foods may be
toxic, provoke allergies or create environmental problems, be they GM or
non-GM. On the human-health front, the U.S. approach is to allow
marketing
without prior testing of GM foods that are deemed to be "substantially
equivalent" to the non-GM variety. Many scientists question whether this
is
a sufficient basis for regulatory approval. In Europe, we do more
thorough
testing on every GM variety. Our objective is to rebuild consumer
confidence, which has been badly shaken by food scares in recent years.
Why do Europeans dislike GM foods?
Like Americans, Europeans have preferences concerning food which may
relate to nutrition, to taste, to the conditions in which food was
produced,
to the political regime in the country of origin, to the organic nature
of
the food and so on. Some Europeans dislike GM. So do some Americans. We
believe that citizens should be free to choose.
Is Europe's stance on GM foods payback for other American policies?
This is not about the U.S.A. This is simply what Europe wants to do
in Europe's own interest. Consumers will be willing to buy GM foods if
and
when they are convinced that these products are safe for human health
and
for the environment-and if they see a benefit in the products. Public
authorities need adequate regulatory systems, and companies selling
biotech
products need to show what's in it for the consumers, be it in terms of
quality or price of the products concerned.
To what extent is GM foods a trade issue?
This is not at all a trade issue. Once a GM food is considered safe,
it can be marketed freely. We already import a lot of GM soy from the
U.S.,
as well as plenty of Argentinian GM corn. Europe's policy on GM food is
not
about protectionism. It is about meeting the legitimate health and
environmental concerns of our consumers and about allowing consumers a
choice.
Do you expect the U.S. to raise GM foods with the WTO?
There is no issue the WTO needs to look at here. Europe has a
rational and thorough approval process. The U.S. would like our process
to
run more quickly. A WTO case would provoke antagonism and would not be
helpful in creating the necessary consumer confidence.
What will labeling of GM foods in Europe accomplish?
Labeling is a means to ensure that consumers in Europe can make an
informed choice. Labeling will allow consumers to grow used to the
choices
and to assess the relative prices and values of various offerings.
Were Zambian officials fools or heroes to reject U.S. corn?
Zambia is a sovereign country and makes its own decisions. Zambians
do not need to be heroic to assert their sovereignty. Nor is it foolish
to
say, as Zambia does, that they are in favor of biotechnology, but want
to
look closely at some health and environmental issues before approving
the
import of some GM corn varieties. GM-free supplies are available in
surplus
in southern Africa. Europe's policy is to provide food aid procured in
the
region, rather than as a means of disposing of domestic stocks.
Did Europe have anything to do with Zambia's decision?
Nothing whatsoever. Europe has made it clear to Zambia that we have
already approved some U.S. corn varieties for import into Europe. We
have
also made it clear to them that we have never rejected any GM food
application in Europe as being unsafe for human use. We have also made
available to them the scientific assessments at our disposal. | |
