Works In Progress - June 2006 - The battle against biotech foods begins in your stomach

There's a new community group in town, OUT-GMOs (Olympian's United for Truth about Genetically Modified Organisms) that's working to spread awareness of the health and environmental dangers of GMOs. We're launching a free monthly movie/ conversation series this month, starting with the film Unnatural Selection. Catch it on June 9th at 7:00 PM at Traditions Café downtown. Please join us and our efforts!

Documentaries are trendy right now for a reason: films summarize information succinctly, they're entertaining, and let's face it: we have a lot of need for community education in our country. According to a Pew Research Center study, 60% of Americans said that they had never eaten a GM food. The scary reality is that nearly everyone in the US has eaten GM foods and the health effects of this are largely unknown. Currently, the FDA's policy is that "GM foods are generally recognized as safe" (GRAS) and they therefore require no safety testing. They leave it up to the company to determine if it's safe. Not all that surprising when you realize that the individual almost single-handedly responsible for this policy is Michael Taylor, a former attorney and vice president of Monsanto.

Monsanto is the same company that brought us such wonders as DDT, Agent Orange, Round Up, and Aspartame. Nowadays, Monsanto is a seed company, number one of ten multinational corporations that collectively account for half of the world's commercial seed sales. Monsanto alone controls 41% of the global market share in commercial corn seed.

The nightmarish cartoon version reads: "Uh, yes, I'd like one large GM Irish potato famine to go please."

There has been only been one peer reviewed human feeding study published and it has scary implications: GM genes can transfer into our gut bacteria, and continue to create their potentially toxic proteins long after we give up eating GM food. The GM crops currently on the market are Corn, Cotton, Canola, Soy, Hawaiian Papaya, Qwest tobacco, alfalfa and a little zucchini and crookneck squash. The "Flavr Savr" tomatoes with genes engineered for long shelf life coincidentally didn't last long on the store shelves and were discontinued because consumers didn't like them.

Outside the official marketplace is a wild, wild west of experimental outdoor releases. In Washington State, for instance, the USDA's APHIS just quietly "approved" two permits for outdoor releases of biopharmaceutical crops -- plants that are engineered to produce pharmeceuticals. Washington State University (WSU) was approved to release lactoferrin/lysozyme barley. SemBioSys's plans involve safflower, but that's all we know for sure-- they are, after all "trade secrets." The plants could literally be next door, but locations of plantings aren't publicly available.

The USDA's Inspector General issued a report in December 2005 that chronicled a widespread pattern of negligence in regulating genetically engineered crops on the part of APHIS from May 2003 to April 2005. This isn't a new phenomenon in the US; in 2000 "Starlink corn" cost the US food industry an estimated $1 billion. Little wonder businesses are increasingly opposed to outdoor releases of GMOs. For instance the Barley Commission and the Great Western Malting Company, which exports malt to Japan, are strongly opposed to WSU's plans to biopharm barley. In North Carolina, Ventria is also engineering lactoferrin into rice (protein found in a mother's tears, milk and saliva). The same company and field trials faced opposition from Anheuser-Busch when attempted in Missouri. The expression "tear in my beer" has never sounded quite so poignant.

Fortunately, the rest of the world is much more aware of GMOs in general, and are therefore more outspoken in their opposition. According to the 2003 Pew report, opposition in Europe runs between 65-89%, with Great Britain at the low end of the spectrum and France at the high end. In Japan too, 76% of consumers surveyed were overwhelmingly opposed to scientifically altered fruits and vegetables because of health and environmental concerns.

Why these differences in awareness and opposition? A possible explanation is that a few years back, a prominent research scientist in Europe with more than 300 articles and 12 books to his credit discovered serious health problems in rats fed a diet of GM-potatoes. Arpad Puztai's results were suppressed, yet still made headlines in Europe. There are other alarming studies as well, but these hardly ever gain momentum in the mainstream US media. Is it incidental that the US produces 59% of GM-Crops worldwide? In the EU, GM foods are labeled, and because of greater public awareness, they are quite unpopular in the market place- almost non-existent actually. Once Unilever announced removal of GM ingredients from its European products in 1999, the rest of the food companies there followed suit. Of course the same companies haven't done that here, because the consumers haven't demanded it.

I'm sure you value your personal health or at least the health of your family. Stop eating GMOs, and get involved. For more information, contact me.

Kevin J. Anderson is an Olympia resident and can be reached at kevanders@riseup.net