Mandatory Labeling for GMOs or An Immediate Ban?
Each year, hundreds of children die from food allergies. Genetically modified foods (GMOs) contain proteins from other plants, making non-labeling a big concern for allergy sufferers. Because of lack of labeling people are now, unknowingly, exposed to substances that trigger allergies. For example, a tomato plant may contain a protein from peanuts – peanut allergy has more than doubled since 1997 — concern is that if scientists create new proteins and put them into foods people who did not have food allergies before could begin to have reactions.
According a 2007 study by the Food Allergy and Anaphylaxis Network, over
30,000 Americans are hospitalized due to food allergies each year.
Food allergies occur when a person’s immune system reacts to a protein in a food he or she eats. The allergic response can be as mild as a slight stomach ache or as severe as anaphylactic shock.
Genetically-modified plants, animals and processed foodstuffs were introduced to the international marketplace in the 1990s. North American production of corn, soybeans and canola is now more than 50% with transgenic traits (herbicide tolerance or bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) resistance), while milk from the US is produced with recombinant bovine somatatrophin (rBST), and meat is being produced with various biotechnologically-based growth hormones.
Countries that regulate the introduction of GMO’s are Canada, US, Mexico, Japan and the European Union (EU). Only the EU requires labels that specify the presence of GMOs. This potential “technical barrier to trade” poses challenges to producers, consumers and governments alike.
Over the past two decades there has been a 1500%
increase in children diagnosed with autism.
Without proper labeling of GMOs, consumer lack consumer sovereignty and is unable to make ‘rational consumption decisions.’ Goods where consumers lack information are said to be ‘credence goods’ because there exists some degree of consumer uncertainty that cannot be factored into purchasing decisions (Bureau, et al., 1997).
The true credence good is one that may have harmful (or beneficial) effects that are not discernible at the point of consumption. In many cases the full impact is not known for a long period of time. Transfused blood tainted by the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) or beef infected with bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) are two contemporary examples. In both cases the impacts of consuming those goods were not evident for years.
A report by the University of Saskatchewan, Canada said labeling products with words like “natural” or “naturally derived” does not mean the same as organic and does not mean the food does not contain GMOs.
Soy allergies jumped 50% in the U.K.
just after GM soy was introduced.
The report goes on to suggest that “if GM soy was the cause, it may be due to several things. The GM protein that makes Roundup Ready Soy resistant to the herbicide does not have a history of safe use in humans and may be an allergen. In fact, sections of its amino acid sequence are identical to known allergens.”
have increased by 56 percent in the past two decades.
Asthma and breathing difficulties were reported by people who inhaled Bt-corn pollen. They also experienced swollen faces, flu-like symptoms, fever, and sneezing. Some individuals reported long-term effects after exposure.
There is a great deal of evidence of toxicity and reproductive effects associated with GM foods. Sheep that grazed on Bt-cotton plants in India, for example, exhibited nasal discharge, reddish and erosive mouth lesions, cough, bloat, diarrhea, and occasional red-colored urine. Shepherds report that 25% of their herds died within 5–7 days.
Rats fed Bt corn showed toxicity in their livers and kidneys. And farmers link Bt corn with deaths among cows, water buffalo, horses, and chickens, as well as sterility in thousands of pigs and cows.
Animal feeding studies with Roundup Ready soy indicated toxic livers, altered sperm cells, significant changes in embryo development, and a fivefold increase in infant mortality, among others.
Until we have the proper research and safeguards in place, the US government should not risk the health of the entire population with GMO frankenfoods or to release these crops into the ecosystem where they may self-propagate for generations.
An immediate ban of GM foods and crops is
more not only justified – it is imperative!
Mandatory labeling is clearly a threat to the continued development of biotechnology products and processes. Therefore, in the absence of industry action to positively label and preferably ban GMOs, governments must be pushed by consumers and groups to impose mandatory labeling to ensure companies like Monsanto are held accountable for the product-specific credence uncertainties.
Theodora Filis is an accomplished journalist, editor, writer, and blogger. Theodora's articles on Hydraulic Fracturing (Fracking), Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs), Nuclear Fallout's, Poisonous Chemicals and Ground Water Pollutants have appeared in newspapers and magazines around the world. Theodora has been a guest speaker on several radio shows, is a college instructor, and the Contributing Editor for UK Progressive Magazine, Moderator for LinkedIn Climate sub-group, and the Publisher & Editor of The Gaia Reports. You can view Theodora's blog "The Gaia Reports" here: http://thegaiareports.weebly.com/#/
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You are wrong by the first sentence. GE plants do not contain proteins from other plants. Not the ones currently on the market anyway. There are only a few genes used: the genes for cry proteins (which have been used in organic farming for years but somehow only became controversial the moment they were put directly into the plant), genes for an EPSP synthase protein with IIRC an altered binding site (all plants have a form of this protein), the bar gene that degrades glufosinate, and viral coat protein genes, which actually result in halting the production of the protein and you’d likely find more of the protein in non-GE plants. None of these are associated in any way with allergies. You consume thousands of proteins every day, but only a minority (such as those found peanuts, soy, and nuts) provoke an allergic reaction. To say that GE crops prose a unique allergy risk is just not true. Sure, you can move those genes around too (like the time they moved a protein from Brazil nut to soy and found it invoked a reaction [note that this was never intended for human food; it was for higher protein cattle feed]). That’s like saying that because someone can bake peanuts into a pie we should be wart of pie.
This year I grew, among other things, purple broccoli, white tomatoes, and string beans that were both white and purple. To deviate from the ‘normal’ varieties (although as a big fan of biodiversity I am loathe to think of any given thing as ‘normal,’ just widely cultivated or undercultivated) these crops needed some sort of change in the proteome. Maybe the enzyme that produced the red lycopene in the tomatoes was altered (just like the EPSP synthase gene used in GE crops), and maybe there was some sort of mutated protein or proteins that built a pathway to produce some sort of purple pigment (no idea what this chemical is). My point is, there was something happening to produce those results, but that doesn’t bother me. There’s tons of genetic changes in everything we eat, and so very few things result in any sort of reaction, that I had no problem eating those ‘natural’ unknowns. I certainly have no qualms about eating something where I actually know what’s happening (I guess I should state that I know a thing or two about plant physiology & genetics). I also greew somethings that were totally different species from what is normally consumes: kiwano, ground cherry, lichi tomato, and goumi. Got some sunchoke to dig up too. While the first three are least related to commonly grown crops, goumi isn’t even in a commonly consumed family! Think of all the unknowns, and all new proteins and chemicals. But again, didn’t bother me. I know how rare allergenic proteins are in the grand scheme of proteins.
The comment about autism sounds very familiar to what the anti-vaccine movement claims, and is misleading for the exact same: correlation does not imply causation. It’s the classic global warming vs pirates scenario. As global climate rises, the number of pirates has been going down, but you’d never claim the two are related. Have you considered that the better diagnosis and understanding of the autistic spectrum is what leads to those diagnoses? Children are no longer ‘a little stupid’ or ‘just weird’ but we know understand that they may be autistic, or have aspergers, or be at some point on the autistic spectrum.
In the UK, you have labels, yes? Here, we don’t, and I’m okay with that. We don’t label a lot of things, like if something was produced with mutagens, or somaclonal variation, or induced polyploidy. We don’t label if something was grown from a tissue cultured or grafted plant. In many instances, we don’t even label the variety of things. If you buy fruit, you don’t know if you’re getting a Apache or a Navaho blackberry, if you’re getting a Flamin Fury or Red Haven peach, if you’re getting a Jewel or Ozark Beauty strawberry. You rarely if ever see labels on the variety of any vegetable, nut, herb, spice, or grain. About the only thing labeled is apples, cherries, and pears, and if it is a processed product, you rarely get even that. Why aren’t any of those things labeled when there is clearly genetic difference? Why would my purple broccoli and white tomato not need labels, yet if you did the same thing with genetic engineering, you say they would? The reason GE crops are not labeled is because the process does not matter nearly as much as the product, it would be inconsistent to treat one method of causing genetic change differently than the rest, and while you can play the ‘right to know’ argument, that is also inconsistent. Where is my right to know if I’m eating tissue culture food, or the variety of my blueberry or carrot? More information can always be provided about any product (like what PGRs were applied and when, where the crop was grown, or mutation makes a watermelon yellow), but a certain point sufficient information has been provided, and if you want more, that’s fine, but it is on you, not the government. It becomes very much like the Kosher and Halal labels.
I also note that labels in the UK just say genetically modified, yes? As if there were no difference between virus resistance genes, herbicide tolerance genes, and insect resistance genes. To treat all GE crops as if they were the same is absurd. To use a car analogy, it would be like saying that modifying a car with spinning rims is the same as modifying it by installing a more powerful engine is the same as modifying in by putting in one of those big annoying speaker systems. It shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the subject at hand.
And there is no strong evidnece whatsoever to indicate that GE crops are intrinsically dangerous in any way. If you look at the total of the studies out there, no one has ever linked genetic engineering to any sort of health problem, heck, no one has even been able to put forward a plausible biochemical mechanism as to why that could happen. no one says what is in GE crops to make them dangerous, how it is produced, what its mode of action is, ect. Whatever you cite sounds very suspect. Sounds you picked some inflammatory blog or site of low reputation (like Jeffrey Smith or Alex Jones or some other joker) and took them at their word rather than looking at the evidence as a whole. That’s cherrypicking, the same tactic the climate change denialists use to make it look like they’ve got a point, and it is no better when the GMO deniers use it either. You say this is just Monsanto bribing all the scientists to make a buck, they say it is just Al Gore bribing all the scientists to make a buck. No difference, both wrong and for the exact same reasons, but it is funny that certain groups reject one scientific consensus yet demand that everyone accept the other. Sounds political. If you actually talk to people who work in this area, to agriculturalists and plant biologists and biochemists and geneticists (and I’ve spoken to quite a few at my university), you get a very different picture from the standard fearmongering. You could write a book on all the ways those accusations don’t even make sense.
Personally, I think my government should expedite the process of approving GE crops. We need more. So far they’ve cut pesticides used and greenhouse gasses emitted, reduced runoff into aquatic environments via facilitating the spread of no-till agriculture, and saved the Hawaiian papaya industry from destruction. Out of well over a trillion meals containing GE ingredients all over the world, not a single confirmed case of anyone being hurt by them has ever been reported. And we should ban them based on some vocal group using debunked studies and their own lack of knowledge? I certainty hope not, and advocating that GMO pseudo-skeptic position makes you no different than the climate pseudo-skeptics who say that because climate fluctuates naturally humans can’t change it.
GH: Thank you for your comment and your interest in obtaining correct, up-to-date information vital to the health and safety of our world’s population.
BTW, I am an American citizen. Born, raised and educated in the great state of NY. I have lived in Europe, and work with organic and conventional farmers, agriculturalists, plant biologists and biochemists, geneticists, universities, and university professors throughout Europe and the US.
My knowledge of GMOs, conventional farming methods and organic farming practices are first hand — not out of a book, or through “actually talk(ing) to people who work in this area”. I am someone who “actually” works in this area.
“You could write a book on all the ways those accusations don’t even make sense.” I am writing a book on all the ways the biotech industry, and Monsanto in particular, are working very hard to force GMOs on to every acre of farmland worldwide.
Coming out very soon…
That’s interesting then. I confess that I personally don’t work in this area (although I have some lab experience in plant genetic transformation), but everyone I know who does has a very different take on this than you do, and so does pretty much all of the studies published and as far as I know the general consensus of the scientific community. So that is a very different from what I’ve encountered.
I don’t find it too surprising that a company that sells GE seeds is looking to expand the amount of land they’re grown. That’s what companies do. Monsanto, like every other company out there, wants to sell more. Although I don’t quite see them as trying to force it on anyone, nor are they covering all farm acres with GE crops (by and large they are interested only in agronomic crops). I’m not trying to go out of my way to defend them or say they don’t have their own problems or anything (the wisdom of allowing a single company to have control of so much of the seed market & purchase so many competing companies seems questionable to say the least, but that is not related to any given plant improvement method), but I don’t see them as the Monsatan they’re often made out to be either. And I do not see how forcing every farm to grown GE crops (a fairly strange proposition given all the plants that would need to be approved for this to happen) is any different than forcing GE crops off farms with a ban. I’d say let the farmers make that call themselves. If 90% or 0% of the soy farmers choose to plant GE crops, then they should be able to make that I think the adoption rates speak for themselves, in fact, one of the problems with the insect resistant GE crops is that the legally required refuge areas are not being planted they way they should. Far from being forced by Monsanto, these farmers willingly prefer the GE varieties.
But if the issue is Monsanto, then perhaps more people should support publicly funded research. Monsanto (certain patents aside) does not own genetic engineering any more than McDonald’s owns cooking. OI do not believe it is right to treat the issue as if the two are inexorably intertwined. If you take the case of the Rainbow papaya (produced by the University of Hawaii, and the only non-corporate GE crop on the US market) you will see that it can be done, although at present the regulatory hurdles are more than many university scientists can handle. From the cisgenic potatoes at the University of Ghent to the CSIRO’s low GI wheat (both of which despite being publicly funded were destroyed by ‘activists’), BXW resistant bananas in Uganda to Bt rice in Iran, BioCassava to the USDA’s HoneySweet plum (among many other projects around the world) there is quite a number of GE plants out there not with Monsanto or any other large corporation’s name on them. There are even those developed by fairly small businesses, like the Arctic apples. Yet if you look at the case of Golden Rice, it has been sitting around for years and is still highly protested despite it not being one of Monsanto’s endeavors. Clearly, there is something more here than opposition to a particular company. I’m sure the people working on these projects would like to see them widely cultivated, which is to say, promote a push to grow GE crops on even more farmland, even without Monsanto. Ironically, the barriers to entry form GE crops insure that only a large corporation like Monsanto will be able to bring them to market. Ironically, strong anti-GE sentiment is probably one of the best things to happen to Monsanto because it keeps public research from challenging them.
GH is obviously a spokesperson for Monsanto. I hope that he and his family will enjoy ingesting their GMO food and the many chemicals that accompany it.
The good thing about eating 100% organic and avoiding GMOs is that I’ll outlive the GH’s of this world and won’t have to listen to their idiocy for long.
Bon Appetit!
@ Michael Freeman
Wow, accusations of being a corporate shill, gee, it isn’t like I don’t get that all the time. Yep, anyone who disagrees with your position is part of the Big Monsanto Conspiracy and therefore you can ignore them. What gave me away, the part where I implied it was dangerous to have one seed company have as large of a market share as Monsanto’s or my support of publicly funded GE research projects? Pretty soon I’ll do something really shilly, like point out that public funding should be directed to apomixis traits which would enable plants to produce genetically identical seeds which would allow farmers to save seed while getting the benefits of hybrid vigor which would destroy the business model of the seed companies.
Oh, and what are the chemicals that accompany GE food? Lets see, we’ve got the cry proteins that are used in the insect resistant varieties. Hmm, better avoid organic food if you don’t like that, because guess where that one came from? There’s the glyphosate or glufosinate, which (barring the standard FUD of course) are pretty benign and rapidly biodegradable. Or is it the mRNA found in viral resistant plants that you’re worried about? But lets just assume these are dangerous. What does that say about any other GMO? Absolutely nothing. How one can make such a broad generalization either in support or opposition is well beyond me.
But the thing is, they’re not. And speaking of chemicals, here’s a fun fact: assuming you eat eating your daily recommended amount of fruits & veggies (and most people unfortunately aren’t), you get about 1500 mg of nasty, carcinogenic, poisonous chemicals that WILL kill you if you have them in a high enough dose. Scary thoughts huh? Good thing you choose organic right? Well, I never said they were sprayed on. If you’re a plant, you can’t move or run or defend yourself from the trillion creepy crawlies that want to eat you, so what do you do? They came to the same answer humans did: poisons. That 1500 mg of chemicals I mentioned are 100% all natural produced in the plant for the plant by the plant poisons. For reference, exogenously applied pesticide residues account for about .9 mg, several orders of magnitude less. If ‘natural’ were a chemical property then maybe you’d have a point. However, maybe you should look up the term ‘appeal to nature.’
And by the way, chemical is not a four letter word. Everything is chemical. Stop using it like it is something scary. That shows only your own ignorance. Speaking of which, the world must listen to my idiocy, hmm? Well then, please enlighten me. Explain in excruciation biochemical detail how Ge plants harm humans, what exactly is the structure of the harmful agent, its biosynthesis pathway, and mode of action. I’d be really interested in knowing. Personally, I’m waiting for iron age superstitions and magical thinking to fade away. Ideas like chemicals are bad and the notion that a the properties of a molecule or anything else are determined by whether or not it happens to occur in nature. Given that we still have people out there who say vaccines cause autism or that they’re sensitive to radio waves I don’t expect this to happen anytime soon, but it does underpin the lack of scientific literacy that produces these, the belief that organic food is somehow superior, and many other unscientific positions.
By the way, you think organic food is transgene free, guess again. You’re not transgene free either. Look up how much of the human genome is viral in origin, fragments of ancient diseases picked up over the course of your ancestor’s existence. You might be surprised at just how natural transgenic plants really are (not of course that natural means anything, but it is pretty interesting the places genes have turned up).
Also, if you’re a real purist, you might not want to eat fruit. Fruit is grafted. If you don’t know how that relates to genetic engineering then you quite obviously haven’t been following this subject very closely.
GH, I appreciate that there are no studies showing that GMO is a direct immediate threat. But I am concerned.
There is a lot that we don’t know about the environment, about out immune systems, about food in general. For instance, over the past hundred years, we’ve been developing wheat that produces a much higher gluten content than our ancestors ingested. This seemed harmless. It’s a normal, healthy portion of the plant. But currently, 1 in 133 people are diagnosed with Celiac. Some due to better dx processes. Some due to awareness. But certainly not enough to account for the large number of individuals. The higher exposure to gluten is a likely possibility.
Apply this to GMO in the fact that we don’t know what to look for as a potential effect. We do know that since we started bio-engineering seeds using DNA and test tubes, there have been a significant rise in a variety of health conditions. More than can be accounted for by simply improved diagnostic techniques.
Therefore, anything new in that time frame is suspect. Did you miss that soy allergies rose after the introduction of gmo soy? So the scientists didn’t expect it. Doesn’t mean that our body’s didn’t ‘read’ the GMO variant as a danger sign and reject and attack it. We don’t know *why* allergies develop in individuals, we only have the barest of understandings about IgE and Mast cells.
I believe that as an individual, I (as all individuals) deserve the right to choose what goes into my body. Which means, I deserve truth in labeling. If biotech companies believe in GMOs, they should label them proudly. Let the consumers decide. If the consumers don’t want them, that choice needs to be respected, not circumvented.
@MV You’re certainty right in that there’s always going to be unknowns. That’s why you can’t say, with 100% certainty, that GE crops are safe. You can only say ‘there is no evidence that they’re dangerous.’ But consider, that applies to everything, not just GE crops. You can’t say that, for example, a new rootstock, or new hybrid, or some new variety is safe with 100% certainty. Are you going to include those in with the possible causes of the soy allergies? That is of course assuming they actually have risen…I have heard the claims but have yet to see the evidence, and sounds an awful like the ‘rise in autism’ we’re always hearing about from the anti-vaxxers (the one that famously didn’t actually happen).
We do know fairly well what sorts of things cause allergies. In fact, one of the things they look for when inserting proteins into GE plants is if the protein has similar sequences to known allergens. The handful of genes currently used in GE crops currently approved GE crops simply don’t, and we know of no reason why a GE crop would act any different from any other genetically modified (as in with other methods) plant. Without that evidence, sure, it might be the case, but given what we know, and the very nature of the argument at this point (which is essentially an appeal to ignorance), it is highly unlikely. Thing is, you can’t falsify unknowns. We have extensively examined GE crops and found nothing. I suggest you read the story of Carl Sagan’s dragon for better understanding of this problem. If I claim there’s an invisible dragon in your garage, I may be right. But how many times must you fail to find the dragon before you will go back into your garage without fear? Not long I suspect. I ask the same question of GE crops. There is no plausible mechanism, as to how they could hurt you, let alone detailed proof that they do. Sure, tests should be done, and they have been, but by any standard, haven’t we reached that ‘post-dragon’ point yet? And if not, when do we? What evidence falsifies your belief? Because without standards for falsification, the notion is, as they say, ‘not even wrong’ (look it up).
Foods containing GE ingredients are not labeled for the same reason no other plant improvement technique is labeled. The fearmongers trying to get people to think GE foods are ‘frankenfood’ probably doesn’t help either. And yeah, I think there is some apprehension to labeling GE crops, and food good reason. If you were a farmer, and you were enjoying spraying less pesticides on your crop as a result of GE seeds, would you openly advertise it if there was some scientifically illiterate group lying through their teeth about the safety of what you’re growing? Maybe the situation would be different if the various anti-GE groups would stop spreading misinformation. I’d certainly label food as ‘biotech by choice’ if I sold it, but keep in mind that the those who sell the seed, the farmers, and food processors are different people.
The process of inserting genetic material into an organism crosses a line that I, and many consumers, are not comfortable with. Consumers have voiced their concerns and comfort levels. Labeling GE crops is not a question of ignorance, it’s one of respect for the consumer.
And while farmers growing GE crops may not have to spray pesticides (since they are enhanced in the plants themselves) they do end up pouring a lot more herbicide into the herbicide-resistant (eg, ’round up ready’) crop.
I think that labeling GE crops is a reasonable request. There are a variety of problems with our food supply right now. GE is just one of many concerns. But consumers deserve to know whether their food was grown from traditionally harvested seeds or genetically modified ones. If that right was acknowledged, maybe the GE ‘fearmongers’ wouldn’t feel a need to fight so hard.