Genetically modified organisms (GMOs): reactions and realities
If you believe food made from GMOs endanger public health, then boy, you have much to fear, as transgenic (those unfamiliar with this term should see this article cotton has conquered cotton production in the U.S. The same can be said for transgenic corn and soybeans. “HT” stands for “herbicide tolerant”, allowing a farmer to spray an entire field with a herbicide that kills every plant except the crop being raised. The term “Bt” stands for the bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis, and signifies that the crop has a gene taken from this bacteria, allowing the Bt corn and cotton to produce its own insecticide.
Even if you do not eat corn and soybeans directly, you consume large amounts of them indirectly. Most processed foods contains at least one ingredient from these crops. Much of the sugar you consume in sodas was made with transgenic corn, and virtually all of your meat, dairy, and eggs came from animals that were fed transgenic corn and soybeans. So ubiquitous are GMOs in agriculture that not consuming food made from transgenic crops is extremely difficult.
Figure 1—Transgenic cotton, corn, and soybean adoption in the U.S.
The purpose of this lecture is to take a series of reactions to these transgenic crops and compare them to reality—at least, what I consider to be reality.
Are transgenic crops safe to eat?
Food activists will say no, claiming that no long-term health studies of GMOs have been performed and that they have collected many personal testimonies of people whose health improved after they stopped eating food made from transgenic crops.
The claim that long-term health studies have not been performed does seem mostly true, but this is because scientists have no legitimate reason to insist upon such trials. If transgenic corn is deemed “substantially equivalent” (if you are unfamiliar with this term see this article) to conventional corn varieties, then requiring expensive trials for transgenic corn implies the same trials are necessary for conventional varieties, and that is both too expensive and seemingly unnecessary.
There are some scientists with considerable qualifications who believe GMOs to be unsafe. A group of 230 scientists have signed a document saying “[there is] no consensus on GMO safety.”(F1) Earth Open Source published a book in 2012 arguing that GM food is unsafe, and list the many animal feeding trials to back up their claims. With sentences like, Mice fed GM soy showed disturbed liver pancreas and testes function….Old and young mice fed GM Bt maize showed a marked disturbance in immune system cells in biochemical activity ... Female sheep fed Bt GM maize over three generations showed disturbances in the functioning of the digestive system ... ”(A1)
We should never expect something as complex as genetic modification to elicit unanimous agreement from all scientists, but given this complexity, the majority of scientific opinion is in that GMOs are indeed safe. The 2004 report from the National Academy of Sciences stated that while any genetic manipulation (even from selective breeding) can have unintended impacts, no health farms from GMOs have been recognized, and there is no reason to expect any more health harms to arise than those from traditional breeding. This is the general agreement among most of the prestigious scientific organizations around the world, like the following.
- The American Association for the Advancement of Science
- The American Medical Association
- Food Standards Australia & New Zealand
- The French Academy of Science
- The Royal Society of Medicine
- The European Commission
- The Union of German Academies of Sciences and Humanities
- Seven of the World’s Academies of Sciences (Brazil, China, India, Mexico, the Third World Academy of Sciences, the Royal Society, and the National Academy of Sciences of the U.S.)
- World Health Organization(A2,B2,C1,D1)
Because I am an agricultural economist it is impossible for me to evaluate the scores of studies comparing GMOs to their traditional counterpart. The most rational thing for me to do, then, is to accept the judgement of National Academy of Sciences and their peers. To do otherwise would be quite arrogant on my part.
What about Europe?
Transgenic crops have conquered American agriculture, but is generally unwelcome in other advanced democracies, like those in the European Union—despite the fact that institutions like the European Commission and the French Academy of Science deems GMOs to be safe. Most foods made from GMOs must be labeled as such, and there are restrictions on planting transgenic crops in some member countries.(O1) Are Americans simply more in-tune to the latest scientific findings? Not likely, but American citizens are more receptive to GMOs than their European counterparts. In the 1990s two-thirds of American consumers supported GMOs, while about the same percentage of French citizens opposed them.(L1)
While it is difficult to say exactly why Europeans seem more skeptical of technologies that scientists deem safe, perhaps it is has something to do with the food safety scares Europe has encountered in the last few decades, some, like Mad Cow disease, which emerged from practices that scientists had deemed safe.
The public response in Europe to GM crops might be very different if the outbreak of BSE, or Mad Cow disease, in the United Kingdom had not occurred in the 1980s. Despite reassurances from the British health officials that consuming British beef was safe, in 1996 the consumption of BSE-tained beef was presumptively linked to a variant form of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease…the appearance of BSE in cattle in other European countries further eroded the European public’s trust that governments were able to assure the safety of food—a trust that had been damaged by a series of food scandals in the 1980s. —Greif, Karen E. and Jon F. Merz. 2007. Current Controversies in the Biological Sciences: Case Studies of Policy Challenges from New Technologies. The MIT Press: Cambridge, MA.
if Bt corn makes its own insecticide ...
... are cows eat insecticide-laced corn? In a way, yes, as all plants create a variety of chemicals intended to protect it from pests, and we ingest these chemicals in the natural process of eating. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is aware of this corn, and regulates it using a similar process it uses to regulate pesticides. Does that mean Bt corn is a pesticide? No, only that the EPA wants to make sure the pesticide within the corn does not pose a health risk.
Are GMOs responsible for the rise in food allergies?
According to the UCLA Food & Drug Allergy Care Center and six experts interviewed in a New York Times article, no.(N1)
Do GMOs give a few food corporations excessive market power, allowing them to control the food supply?
Food corporations are awarded patents when they produce a novel plant variety, and that is why a few companies sell most of the seed used in U.S. corn, soybeans, and cotton. Is this bad? Well, farmers are deliberately choosing to plant GMO varieties, and so these companies could be said to have earned their market power by producing a superior product, just like Google’s search engine has an enormous market share because their search engine is simply superior.
Economists dislike market power when it is acquired through corruption and political influence, but we see little problem with a business becoming near-monopoly because almost everyone chooses their product. There are some who contend that Monsanto bullies people into purchasing their GM seed (like a scene in the documentary Food, Inc., and though we do not doubt their aggressiveness, being in an agricultural college we encounter farmers on on a regular basis, and the general agreement is that farmers plant GM crops because they want to grow GM crops.
Most anti-GM activists take a counter view, and interpret the success of GM products as evidence of corporate hegemony, and often this seems to worry them more than the GM technology itself.
No, my problem with biotechnology is that the science has been hijacked by corporate interests, and that the subsequent wholesale rush to patent plant genes as the intellectual property of a handful of multinational corporations is placing the control of global food production directly into their hands. —Gunther, Andrew. May 15, 2015. “GE Crop Thriller Leaves Bond and Bourne for Dust.” Huffington Post. Green.
Do the rise of GMOs threaten our already-dwindling seed variety?
As has often been repeated in this course, diversity is the enemy of pests, but it is also the enemy of almost anything threatening an organism. Organisms can usually survive threats by having a diverse portfolio of genes to choose among, allowing natural selection to select the version of the organism that will make it into the future.
If farmers begin adopting very specific transgenic crops, and raise these crops from one coast of America to the other, they reduce the diversity of crop genetics. This was the story of Ireland. Although many potato varieties were grown in South America, only the Lumper varieties seems to have been adopted in Ireland. With such uniform genetics grown throughout the island, it took only one disease infestation to destroy it’s entire crop, ushering in one of the worst famines of the modern age.
This threat is real. The U.S. corn crop in the 1970 suffered large losses due to a lack of genetic diversity, and the case of the Cavendish banana plant has already been mentioned.
My problem has been less about health and safety of the [GM] technology than it has been about the political economy of GM and what it has done to American agriculture, to competition in the seed business, and to the size and sustainability of our commodity crop monocultures.
—Pollan, Michael [interviewee]. August 28, 2013. “Pointed Talk: Michael Pollan and Amy Harmon dissect a GM controversy.” Grist.com. Accessed August 30, 2013 at http://grist.org/food/pointed-talk-michael-pollan-and-amy-harmon-dissect-a-gm-controversy/.
At the same time we must also recognize that genetic modification is able to inject new genes faster into a crop’s DNA faster than nature or selective breeding. Shouldn’t this also count for something? This means genetic modification might increase our ability to deal with environmental threats. Who stands a greater chance of helping us continue to produce food despite threats from pests, seed corporations using the most advanced breeding technologies available, or book authors like Michael Pollan? Though the question may seem to have an easy answer to some, it should be noted that many people would choose Pollan.
Perhaps there is more plant diversity that it seems. Yes, Round Up Ready soybean (a transgenic soybean able to resist the herbicide Round Up) is planted throughout the U.S., but there is no such thing as a single Round Up ready soybean variety. There is a gene with the Round Up Ready gene, and this gene has been introduced into one variety of soybeans grown in the southeast, another soybean grown in Texas, another grown in Iowa, and so on. Figure 1 (above) may show herbicide-tolerant soybeans dominating the U.S. soybean market, but there are many varieties of that soybean.
Should labeling of GM foods be mandatory?
It is not for me to say whether foods made from transgenic crops should be labeled as such, or whether that labeling decision should be voluntary on the part of food companies or made mandatory by the government. As should be evident by now, I believe GMOs offer many advantages and are generally safe. This country in which I live, however, is a Republic-Democracy, and if a majority of American wish such mandatory labels, then I support it as well.
Do Americans want mandatory labeling? In surveys, the vast majority of Americans say they do,(K2) but when they actually voted to require such labels in California the measure failed.
Whether Americans should want mandatory labels is another question. Some argue consumers have a right to know, and if that is what consumers really want and food manufacturers are not complying with their wishes, mandatory labels might be prudent. Yet think about what such labels would imply. Putting it on the label would naturally imply that there is something unsafe about GMOs, yet most prestigious scientific organizations believe otherwise. To label would, in a sense, be like lying (from some people’s point-of-view).
The good news is that even though GMOs do allow plant breeders more tools for facing the future, they are far from helpless without it. Selective breeding and radiation/chemical-induced mutation are still effective tools, and a number of new technologies like epigenetics holds great promise as well. For all the controversy about GMOs, perhaps it doesn’t matter all that much how the debate is settled ... or if it ever is settled.
Will GMOs help us feed the world?
Strangely, this question is addressed by most by asking whether transgenic crops increase crop yields. Yields are measured as a quantity of grain harvested per acre of land, but that is a silly measure of real productivity. A more productive crop is one that produces the same or more quantity of grain using less resources, and land is just one among many resources to be included—labor, water, fuel, machinery, chemicals, and other inputs count as resources also. Anyone can achieve a high yield by hiring one worker per fifty square feet of cropland to water, weed, shade, protect, and nurture growing plants—it would also be the most expensive grain ever grown. How are the total amount of resources measured then? The best measure is simply the farmer’s cost of production, and you can bet that if farmers are choosing transgenic crops they are doing so because it reduces the resources required for each bushel of grain produced. One can easily imagine a cotton farmer planting a transgenic cotton because it makes them more money, despite the fact that yields are lower. Yield reductions might lower farm revenues by 5%, but costs might fall by 15%.
So long as farmers continue to prefer transgenic crops and those crops do not endanger public health or the environment, it is difficult to see how they could not help us feed the world.
Are GMOs good for the environment
If yields are higher with transgenic crops that might reduce the amount of land needed to feed a population, allowing the saved land to be returned to nature. That would be a good thing, but it is not clear whether GMOs are universally increasers or decreasers of yield.
Most any technology that improves productivity will also reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and GMOs are no exception. Thus a recent article in The Economist was titled, “Frankenfoods reduce global warming”.(E1)
Bt corn and Bt cotton produce their own insecticide, and has thus lowered the total amount of insecticides applied by farmers. That’s a good thing. The transgenic corn, cotton, and soybean varieties allow farmers to apply only Round Up to the entire field. This may or may not reduce the total amount of insecticide that is applied (I’ve seen data pointing both ways), but Round Up is less toxic than most of the other herbicides that were used, and when scientists measure the total impact to the environment, they find that these Round Up resistant crops do indeed benefit the environment.(B3,B4)
This is not meant to be portrayed as a “fact” that GMOs are good for the environment. They are only calculations made under certain assumptions. Moreover, much of the answer to this question depends on how fast pests develop a resistance to the Bt insecticide and Round Up herbicide (as they certainly will) and what shape those recently-evolved, resistant pests take.
What else can GMOs offer?
From these lectures it must seem like the only thing a GMO can offer is better resistance against pests, but in reality the possibilities are unlimited. There are transgenic chickens that are resistant to, and do not carry, the Avian flu virus.(F1) Whether this chicken is adopted could affect whether whether Avian flu remains a potential pandemic or becomes an actual health crisis.
In the lecture The chicken manure blame-game discusses how the large concentrations of phosphorus in pig and poultry manure result in water pollution. One solution is to create a GM pig that better utilizes phosphorus, resulting in manure with lower phosphorus concentrations. Indeed, the pig was created, and aptly named the “Enviro-Pig”. Although this breed of hog could benefit lakes, rivers, and estuaries, because GMOs have become so controversial that its development was ceased.
Ironically, one of the reasons GMOs seem to benefit only corporations is because public sector institutions like my university are discouraged from using them due to their controversy. Oklahoma State University is creating genetically modified wheat varieties, but we don’t advertise it, fearful of attracting attention that will only interfere with our work. It has certainly discouraged us from conducting as much GM research as we would like, limiting our ability to solve public problems. The key word, however, is “limiting”as we have many other breeding techniques at our disposal, and we are confronting problems like soil fertility and water pollution as best we can.
