The Washington state initiative to label genetically modified foods appears to have been defeated, although Politico reports that, with most of the votes still uncounted, it may be days before we are 100% sure of the final outcome.
We've seen this drill before – in California last year – an initially popular referendum to require labeling went down in a narrow defeat after the food and agriculture industries lavished tens of millions of dollars on TV ads claiming that labeling would raise the price of groceries for consumers.
Critics call foods made from GMOs (genetically modified organisms) "frankenfoods", evoking images of sinister scientists cobbling together vegetable monsters in their laboratories. It doesn't help that the key purveyor of genetic engineering is Monsanto, recently voted "the most evil corporation in the world", beating out by a wide margin bad players like BP and Halliburton, in a survey of 16,000 readers of the website "Natural News".
Genetic scientists at corporations like Monsanto splice genes from one organism into the DNA of another in order to produce certain desired traits in the offspring. Breeders, of course, have been creating new crops for centuries by cross-breeding different strains of the same plant species. Until the development of genetic engineering, however, we could not combine genes from biologically dissimilar organisms. This technology, with its virtually limitless capacity to redesign life, is understandably scary to many people.
Over 90% of Americans – Republicans and Democrats virtually equally – want to see GMOs labelled. And if they are labelled, there is little doubt that many consumers will simply stop buying the products, as has already happened in much of Europe.
The first GMOs were created in the laboratory during the 1970s, but they weren't widely marketed until the introduction of Bt potatoes, corn and cotton in the mid-1990s. In these crops, genetic material from the bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) bacterium, a micro-organism that produces its own insecticide, is inserted into plant DNA to make them toxic to insects.
In some respects, Bt is an environmental success story. It has slashed the use of toxic agrichemicals and boosted productivity for many farmers.
Monsanto's best-selling Roundup Ready crops, however, are another story. These plants have been genetically engineered to withstand repeated dousing by the insecticide Roundup (a trade name for glyphosate), which is currently being sprayed on over 100m acres in the Midwest alone. This relentless chemical dousing has led to the recent spread of "superweeds" that have developed a resistance to Roundup, forcing farmers to use even more toxic poisons, like 2,4-D – an ingredient of the Vietnam War defoliant Agent Orange – and Dicamba in order to control them.
Bt and Roundup are like the good cop and the bad cop of the GMO world. The former has been a boon to farmers and the land that they farm, the later is now turning out to be a poison-spewing curse.
But what most people are concerned about is not so much the environmental impact of GMOs as the perceived health risks from eating them. Many are convinced that these foods are unnatural, and that they are leading to epidemics of all sorts of illnesses, like allergies and immune disorders. Is this in fact the case?
Monsanto assures us that GMOs are safe. The FDA has ruled that they are substantially equivalent to conventionally grown varieties. But we don't have to take either the FDA or Big Ag's word for it. There are now thousands of independent research studies published by unaffiliated scientists on the safety of genetically modified foods. And the scientific consensus is increasingly clear: there is no convincing evidence that GMOs are any more likely to be harmful than conventionally bred varieties.
Frankly this surprises me. I initially assumed that a process as seemingly invasive as genetic engineering would create harmful rogue proteins. In a Guardian piece last year, I wrote of research in England that purportedly showed that food allergies spiked after GMO soy was introduced to England. It turns out that the study was bogus. The rise in allergies had begun long before the genetically modified soy was even in British supermarkets.
There are other studies that GMO critics cite as evidence that these foods may be harmful. But virtually all of these studies have been shown to be seriously flawed – not by corporations like Monsanto, but by neutral scientists who have evaluated them. Moreover, there are reams of independent research indicating that currently available forms of genetically modified foods are safe to eat.
As I write these words, I know that some readers will dismiss them. Many are thoroughly convinced that there is a conspiracy afoot to suppress the news that GMOs are destroying our health. They are not interested in what science has to say, if it contradicts their preconceived ideological position. But I urge those who are interested in learning more to take a look at Nathaniel Johnson's frightfully smart series of articles on GMOs in the online environmental publication Grist.
Johnson, a green journalist in good standing and no corporate shill, concludes, after exhaustively combing through the science, that genetically modified foods are safe. Or as safe as anything is nowadays. He says:
I'm much more comfortable feeding my daughter Bt corn than corn sprayed with organophosphates, that's for sure.
There are a whole lot of dangers out there. People are becoming obese in record numbers from quaffing refined foods and sugary drinks. Diabetes rates are soaring. Heart disease, osteoporosis, even certain types of cancer are on the rise, arguably at least in part because of our nutrient poor diets. But nobody has yet demonstrated that GMOs make us sick.
Does this mean that we don't have to be vigilant? I think not. Margaret Smith, the Associate Director, of Cornell's Agricultural Experiment Station, told me that whenever a new crop variety is developed, there is a risk that it will contain toxic proteins. This is true for conventional breeding, she says, even more than with GMOs, because cross-breeding is a messy business. It mixes thousands of genes promiscuously together with thousands of others – producing a staggering number of possible recombinations.
Genetic engineering, by contrast, is actually a far cleaner process, which surgically inserts just one carefully selected gene into an already existing chromosome. That doesn't mean that it won't ever create novel toxins – all forms of breeding have got this risky potential. And that's why we need to test new varieties rigorously for safety.
Smith cites the case of a conventionally bred potato, which contained high levels of glycoalkaloids that were dangerous to eat. Fortunately, breeders tested the potatoes before marketing them and caught this problem in time. The same kind of self-policing can work with genetically modified foods as well, she argues.
I also interviewed Marion Nestle, a professor of nutrition and public health at New York University who is known as an outspoken critic of America's food system. She told me:
I'm trained in molecular biology and have a hard time thinking that [GMOs] will make people sick.
What Nestle worries about are not GMOs, so much as the chemical-intensive farming methods used to grow them.
We're cutting down the Amazon to grow soybeans to feed beef cattle. Industrial agriculture is degrading the soil and depleting our diminishing groundwater reserves. And as we have already seen, it puts farmers on a madcap chemical treadmill in which they need to use cocktails of ever more deadly toxins to grow our food. This is not just unhealthy, it is unsustainable in the long run – whether the seeds planted are genetically modified or not is beside the point.
Food activists have been focused for a long time on the Boogeyman of GMOs, and their poster boy Monsanto, which have served as easy-to-identify focal points for our fears and angers. I know where they are coming from; I, too, think that Monsanto is a corporate bully that has put its own bottom line above the good of the planet.
But having said that, I also believe that trying to eliminate genetic engineering is a fool's errand – this genie is not going back into the bottle anytime soon. Furthermore, the struggle against GMOs is at best fighting the symptom, while ignoring the disease. The disease is humanity's abuse of nature. The disease is the factory farming on steroids that is poisoning and exhausting the natural systems that we humans depend on for our survival. The problem with genetically modified foods is not that they are genetically modified; it is that they have been designed to become cogs in the machine of this destructive system. It is the system that needs to change, not the seeds.
So I have a small request for my food activist and environmentalist friends: let's take yesterday's Washington vote as a signal to move on.
The same passion that has been expended in fighting a technology which is here to stay needs to be used to address the real challenges that confront our planet. With climate change breathing down our necks and arable land and other key resources in increasingly short supply, we simply can't afford to be sidetracked any longer into this fruitless battle against GMOs.