Playing Genetic Roulette With Our Food

It looks like we are letting another genie out of the bottle. According to a recent report in the prestigious science journal Nature, DNA from genetically engineered (GE) corn has contaminated native varieties growing in the remote, mountainous Sierra Norte de Oaxaca region of Mexico. This happened despite Mexico's moratorium on new plantings of GE corn, in place since 1998, and the nearest that any such crops had ever been grown was sixty miles away.

According to promoters of engineered crops, such contamination could never happen. For years they have been claiming that GE crops would not crossbreed with natural plants, but the latest research by University of California scientists shows otherwise.

This isn't just abstract science, but a serious threat to our health. Over 450 scientists from around the world have signed an open letter that cites cancer, damage to the immune system, and the spread of antibiotic-resistant bacteria as possible consequences of GE food.

How could we let this happen? Through blanket acceptance by decision makers of the GE industry's other major claim: that the human body cannot discern genetically manipulated foods from pure foods, the finding of a Food and Drug Administration study in the early 1990s.

But the FDA report pushed science aside to appease agribusiness. In one of several internal memos made public as part of a lawsuit against the FDA, Dr Louis J. Pribyl, an FDA scientist reviewing a draft of the study, asked "What has happened to the scientific elements of this document?" And, he complained, the report was becoming a "political document" rather than a scientific one.

Like other FDA researchers, Pribyl considered the report "very pro-industry, especially in the area of unintended effects." As one of his colleagues, Dr. Linda Kahl, stated, "the processes of GE and traditional breeding are different, and according to the technical experts in the agency .they lead to different risks." The FDA, she wrote, was "trying to force an ultimate conclusion that there is no difference" between engineered foods and crops developed through traditional cross-germinating.

Not only did political appointees in the first Bush administration ignore the concerns of the scientists, they distorted the scientists' conclusion that GE foods could have unpredictable and possibly dangerous effects on human health. The office of the President's White House counsel wanted the scientists to change their report and declare that genetic engineering was more predictable and safer than traditional plant breeding techniques. As one FDA veteran put it, the "government agencies have done exactly what big agribusiness has asked them to do and told them to do."

The FDA scientists did not conclude that GE foods were harmful, only that "in this instance ignorance is not bliss." However, the research cited by the scientists in their open letter shows that the early concerns of the FDA staff were justified.

Given bad faith on the part of elected officials and the junk science they promulgated at the behest of their corporate partners, merely labeling genetically modified food will do little to protect people or the environment. Labeling would give the corporations that backed this regulatory debacle freedom to place a dangerous technology at the center of our food production system. Meanwhile, unaltered foods likely would become specialty items unavailable to many, as with organic food today.

In light of the news from Mexico, "protection" through labeling might prove yet more illusory. The letter from the world's community of scientists calls for suspending "all genetically modified crops and products, both commercially and in open field trials, for at least five years" and for a "public enquiry into the future of agriculture and food security for all."

We should demand such a moratorium now, lest we later find ourselves unable to choose at any price.

Jeffrey Kaplan writes for ReclaimDemocracy.org