Safe Food_ Bacteria, Biotechnology, and Bioterrorism - Marion Nestle [165]
THE POLITICS OF FOOD BIOTECHNOLOGY: UPDATE
This book explores the disconnect between science- and value-based views of microbial contaminants and food biotechnology. With respect to genetically modified (GM) foods, what is most remarkable is how little has happened to resolve the disconnect. My shelf of books about GM foods gets longer each year, yet none of them has anything new to say. Agricultural biotechnology companies such as Monsanto and other proponents of GM foods continue to insist that use of this technology is essential for meeting the food needs of the world’s expanding population, particularly in developing countries. Opponents continue to ask when the promises of food biotechnology will be fulfilled and to question its purported benefits and safety.2 Although these conflicting views seem immovable, a few changes have occurred. Let’s take a look.
Use of GM Crops
The FDA has been approving GM commodity crops since 1994, yet few are in production today. These few, however, are so widely adopted that virtually all of the corn (85 percent), cotton (88 percent), soybeans (91 percent), and sugar beets (95 percent) planted in the United States are varieties engineered to resist herbicides or insects.3 Farmers prefer to plant GM varieties because such crops do not need to be treated with pesticides and herbicides as frequently as conventional crops. Farmers also believe that the yields of GM varieties are better. Whether such benefits are real and will last over time remains in dispute.
Despite continued international opposition, GM crops were grown in fifteen developing countries and ten industrial countries in 2008. In 2009, the European Union permitted farmers to plant only one GM crop: corn. Even so, Germany, France, Austria, Greece, Hungary, and Luxembourg banned GM corn, and Monsanto’s production of GM wheat also was expected to elicit opposition in foreign markets.4
Since 1994, the FDA has approved several GM fruits and vegetables for production and marketing. But were these foods actually for sale in the produce sections of American supermarkets? When researching What to Eat, I found no regulator or advocate who knew. Most thought that production failures or consumer opposition kept GM produce off the market. The one GM food that seemed most likely to be available was Hawaiian papaya engineered to resist ringspot virus. In 2005, as I explained in What to Eat, I paid a biotechnology testing company, Genetic ID, to check several different kinds of supermarket papayas for modified genes. Indeed, the conventionally grown Hawaiian papayas tested positive. A certified organic Hawaiian papaya did not, and neither did a papaya grown in Jamaica. But because GM foods remain unlabeled, the public has no way to know.
Genetic “Pollution”
In chapter 8, I discuss the travails of the Berkeley plant biology professor Ignacio Chapela, whose article in Nature came under attack for demonstrating that genes from GM corn had drifted into native Mexican varieties and that these genes were more unstable than others. Nature wished it had never accepted the article and said so publicly. Berkeley denied tenure to Professor Chapela, but later granted it after extensive protest. That the criticism of his work was the result of politics—not science—became evident when Nature reported that other researchers had confirmed some of his findings. Eventually, Nature suggested, he would probably be proved right on all counts. Nevertheless, researchers who published more recent studies critical of agricultural biotechnology