Safe Food_ Bacteria, Biotechnology, and Bioterrorism - Marion Nestle [140]
Mexican Native Corn. Plant pollen does not follow USDA rules; it follows air currents. During the FDA’s 1999 food labeling hearings, organic farmers testified that genetically altered pollen threatened the ability of their crops to qualify for organic certification. Later, the StarLink episode demonstrated how easy it was to commingle genetically modified seeds with conventional seeds. By 2001, transgenes could be found anywhere anyone looked for them: in fields certified as organic, fields of conventionally grown crops, grain shipments to Japan, food aid to Latin America, fields in countries that had banned transgenic crops, and “GM-free” products. Events the following year confirmed such observations. Monsanto and Aventis CropScience admitted that genetically modified canola seeds, not yet approved by the FDA, “might have found their way” into planted crops, and Australian scientists showed that genes from genetically modified canola readily transfer to conventional canola in neighboring fields.32
Such incidents evoke images of accidents: Pandora’s box and genies out of bottles. They also evoke a more sinister image—the Trojan horse—the deliberate manipulation of the food supply to undermine regulatory controls and consumer choice at the marketplace. As Friends of the Earth explained, “Legal frameworks were supposed to be adequate to ensure that GMOs wouldn’t endanger the environment or human health. Biotech companies were supposed to comply with those frameworks. Regulatory bodies were supposed to monitor and oversee GMO releases to ensure they were complying with the legal frameworks. But the reality shows a completely different picture.”33
Nowhere is the reality more starkly displayed than in the case of transgenic “pollution” of native maize grown in Mexico, where corn originated and where corn biodiversity is treasured. Early in 2000, letters to Science warned colleagues that the “introduction of transgenic maize varieties in Mexico may pose a risk to landraces or wild relatives of maize in its ancestral home,” and “the direction of gene flow is more likely to occur from [transgenic] cultivars to the wild plants.” According to Sierra magazine, transgenic corn came to Mexico “courtesy of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which opened the Mexican market to cheap grain from el norte”; Mexico now imports three times as much corn from the United States as it did prior to NAFTA. To protect the country’s corn heritage, Mexico banned the cultivation of transgenic varieties in 1998 but is unable to completely enforce this ruling.34
In 2001, researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, found transgenic corn growing in 15 of 22 remote areas of Oaxaca and Ixtlán and reported these findings in the prestigious British journal Nature. Val Giddings of the Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO) told a reporter from USA Today that the report posed no safety issues: “If there’s any impact at all, it’s likely to be positive. There are zero human health implications, zero environmental impact implications.”35 Perhaps so, but the uncontrolled spread of genetically modified traits to plants where they are not supposed to be has 100% implications for public trust in the industry and its government regulators—and for generating outrage.
To head off such reactions, industry supporters launched a remarkably nasty public relations campaign to discredit the Berkeley investigators. The campaign focused on their science and their politics. The researchers made two claims in the Nature paper; transgenes existed in native maize, and the transgenes were unstable (meaning that they could spread more easily). The discrediting campaign focused exclusively on the second claim. A public relations