Government public relations drive on gene edited food

July2022

Analysis

Westminster is pulling out all the stops to force gene-edited foods down UK throats. Its tactics are very reminiscent of those employed a quarter-of-a-century ago, when first-generation GM foods were imminent. However, a couple of lessons have been learned from that first PR disaster.

Escaped genes - a risk assessment minefield

March 2022

While conventional breeding speeds up the evolution of plants and skews it gradually to fit human needs, genetic engineering forces abrupt and disruptive changes in genome structure and function. The artificial gene (or edit) functions as it's designed to within the highly uniform genetic and environmental context of a modern commercial crop. How does it function in any other genome and ecosystem?

Risk assessment of GM plants has always focused on the intended artificial trait coupled to an assumption that if the altered bit of DNA 'escaped' into other plant populations it would fizzle out over time unless it conferred a clear, identifiable, risk-assessable fitness advantage. Now that we've grown GM crops in various environments for over two decades and there's been time for gene contamination incidents to inform the science, this trait-centred risk assessment is proving shaky.

GM safeguards scrapped in the UK

February 2022

As Westminster continues its love affair with high-tech industrial agriculture, the dismantling of GM safeguards in the UK is underway.

Towards the end of 2021, our Environment Secretary announced regulatory exemptions for field trials of "plants produced by genetic technologies where genetic changes could have occurred naturally or could have been a result of traditional breeding methods".

Gene-edited farming - rescue or last straw?

December 2021

Modern 'conventional' farming: too big, too uniform, too much fancy technology, too hype-ridden, and unsustainable.

Paving the way for the acceptance of Westminster's consultation on the regulation of genetic technologies, an opinion piece, written by a top UK crop-pest scientist, was published in the Guardian newspaper. Its headline was:

"Science can rescue farming. Relaxing gene editing rules should be the start"

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The villains that farming needs to be rescued from are "new (climate-change driven) plant diseases moving rapidly around the world", and some old plant diseases (such as the blight which caused the Irish potato famine in the 1840s) which still plague us, and the skill and patience required for the long process of conventional plant breeding.

The heroes which will rescue farming are super-fast, precise, trait-specific new crops courtesy of gene editing.

The article also acknowledged that, before farming can be rescued by gene-editing, gene editing will have to be rescued from negative consumer opinion.

Take a step back and look at why our agriculture is being caught so far on the back foot that it needs rescuing.

In old-style 'conventional' plant breeding (a.k.a. 'domestication'), seed is saved, exchanged locally, and possibly selected for planting the following year. The plants evolve* alongside the farmers and everything else which shares their mutual environment. Farmers are producers with key skills in food production, while their naturally genetically-diversified crops evolve into new genetically-diversified crops.

* Note Evolution is an ongoing, ecosystem-wide shifting to new states of equilibrium as all organisms interact with each other and with their non-living environment. "Like all organisms, humans alter the environments around them in ways which have evolutionary consequences" (Mueller and Flachs)

Seventy years of the inappropriately named 'green' revolution have given us new-style 'conventional' (a.k.a. 'traditional') intensively-bred crops which are mainly inbred-hybrids. Such crops have uniform genetics and often include desired traits induced by humans using random mutagenesis (absent safety testing). They are developed off-farm with a prime focus on high yield to supply a globalised market. Key to growing such crops are chemical inputs (fertilisers and pesticides), the cash to buy the inputs and new seed every year, water, and the machines to enable uniform planting, multiple chemical applications, and harvesting on a vast scale. Add to these, government subsidies and an elaborate market infrastructure. Farmers growing them have become consumers of whatever seed, chemicals and machines their suppliers want to flog them.

The green revolution's monocultures and transportation of seeds around the world are big players in the global spread of plant diseases (the ones gene-editing will 'rescue' farming from), and climate change.

The focus on yield, uniformity and scale has long side-lined the nutritional value, taste and sustainability of the crop, and the needs and knowledge of the local people, and evolution. While the on-farm environment keeps changing, just like it always has, industry-supplied inbred-hybrid seed has no capacity for evolution.

The latest shift in agriculture is to crops which have been genetically modified (GM) or gene edited (also GM). These have desired specific traits engineered into them in the laboratory. In a desperate attempt to normalise these GM creations, genetic modification has been absurdly described as "a continuation of the ancient process of (crop) domestication" by which humans "have been manipulating their crops for millennia". Gene-editing takes the public sedation exercise a stage further: it "could happen in Nature" and “allows us to give Mother Nature a helping hand to accelerate the process of evolution". Since all GM traits are bred into existing crops varieties with uniform genetic backgrounds, they are quite clearly nothing to do with old-conventional, evolving, plant breeding and everything to do with new-conventional, non-evolving, green revolution crop production.

Consumers have every reason to be just as uncomfortable with gene editing as they were with genetic modification.

For one thing, there's the science (which isn't difficult to find or to grasp):

• Apart from the question of functional disturbances in the genome caused by the intended DNA change, there's a mounting body of evidence that the gene editing process itself induces damage elsewhere in the genome [1,2,3].
• The latest alarming discovery is the possibility that CRISPR gene editing can cause the chromosome to shatter and re-assemble haphazardly, with who-know-what effects on the GM organism.
• Crop scientists check the success of their genetic engineering by looking for the desired edit at the 'precise location': random wreckage elsewhere remains invisible.

For another thing, as some concerned New Zealand scientists pointed out "the risk of harm from gene technology accumulates over time and scale of production". If Big Biotech gets its way on the scale of gene-tech crops grown all over the world, it's just a matter of time before the risk of harm becomes actual harm.

Then, there's the desperate and unconvincing propaganda such as that described above. As the concerned scientists in New Zealand pointed out, "the risks from technology don't disappear by calling it natural" (and, an edited gene doesn't become natural by calling it evolution).

Suggestions in the crop-pest scientist's article for tackling the public confidence deficit in gene editing include the need for transparency and a 'national debate'. That same month, a letter published in Nature Biotechnology advanced principles for 'Responsible governance of gene editing in agriculture and the environment' which included 'robust, inclusive societal engagement'. Note that no one's suggesting any need for safety testing to reassure the public. What all that transparency, debate and engagement sounds like is a smokescreen for 'educating' the public to want this new-fangled GM food, just like in the 1990s when the first old-style GM crops emerged from the field.

Relaxing gene editing rules' as suggested by the top UK crop scientist translates into a means to avoid safety testing. Indeed, the outcome of the 'consultation' is that UK regulators will now permit field trials of gene-edited crops without risk assessment, and new legislation to exclude gene-edited organisms from the definition of a GMO is now on Westminster's agenda.

OUR COMMENT

The hype surrounding all things GM hasn't changed in quarter of a century. Don't let yourself be 'educated' to think that gene-edited foods will ever be anything but a quick, commercially-lucrative patch shoring up an over-sized unsustainable system with multiple opportunities for harm to health.

The top UK crop scientist acknowledged that "Organic farming has provided us with creative and powerful alternatives for how we grow food" and hints that combining crop 'improvement' using gene-editing with organic methods could be a solution for sustainable agriculture. Obviously giving Mother Nature a helping hand ... and giving the biotech industry an even bigger helping hand while compromising our future organic food supply. Organic farming doesn't need rescued, but it will if genetic engineers get their hands on it.

Ask your MP to take action. Rather than rush simplistic gene edited 'improved' crops to market, the UK government must promote small-scale, diversified, climate-friendly, unadulterated organic, regenerative, and agro-ecological methods that work with nature and put farmers back in the driving seat. In that way, farming might actually rescue itself along with our health, our food supply and our future.

In Scotland, our Environment Minister tells us: 

"Scotland's policy towards GMOs has not changed, and we have no plans for a similar review. As for gene editing, we are disappointed DEFRA would choose to move unilaterally on this. The Scottish Government is committed to keeping aligned with the EU, and we are monitoring the EU's position closely". 

Now is a good time to tell your MSP that you don't trust the new gene technology trajectory of English agriculture and that you fully support Scotland's no GM and no gene editing policy.


Background

[1] THE PRECISION PROBLEM IN GENOME EDITING - August 2021

[2] CRISPR'S EPIGENETIC SCARS - August 2021

[3] CRISPR CATASTROPHE IN THE MAKING - August 2021

SOURCES:

·         DEFRA Consultation outcome, Genetic technologies regulation: government response, updated 29.09.21

·         Nick Talbot, Science can rescue farming. Relaxing gene editing rules should be the start, Guardian 19.09.21

·         Natalie G. Mueller and Andrew Flachs, September 2021, Domestication, crop breeding, and genetic modification are fundamentally different processes: implications for seed sovereignty and agrobiodiversity, Agriculture and Human Values

·         Barbara Van Dyck, The Stories We Trust: Regulating Genome edited Organisms, Agroecology Now! 23.07.21

·         British farmers 'could lead the way' on gene editing after Brexit, Farming UK 4.12.18

·         Jack Heinemann and others, Calling the latest gene technologies 'natural' is a semantic distraction - they must still be regulated, The Conversation, 22.09.21

·         Doria R. Gordon, et al., September 2021, Responsible governance of gene editing in agriculture and the environment, Nature Biotechnology Correspondence

·         Mitchell L. Leibowitz, et al., 2020, Chromothripsis as an on-target consequence of CRISPR-Cas9 genome editing, Preprint (subsequently published in Nature Biotechnology)

·         Chromothripsis: Bad news for gene editing, GM Watch, 22.09.21

Photo Creative Commons

How much don't we know about our food?

November 2021

Pity the poor plants. If you find something trying to eat you, you can run away, hide, bite back, kick, claw, or twist your way out, or avoid being in the wrong place at the wrong time to start with. Plants, held fast by the earth, can't evade or fight off predators: and there are lots of animals out there wanting to eat them.

One self-defence trick plants do have is a huge arsenal of chemicals with which to make themselves taste bad, look bad, indigestible, or poisonous.

Just how huge this arsenal might be can be judged by the composition of the humble iceberg lettuce. Mainly water and a little green colouring you might think? The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) recognises eleven constituents in an iceberg lettuce: detailed analyses have identified more than 4,000.

For those of us shoe-horned into thinking of food in terms of sugar, protein and fat with a few vitamins and minerals thrown in, this one real-life figure of 4,000-plus in a lettuce tells us just how dumbed down the information about our food is.

We're back!

August 2021

Dear readers,

Welcome back to GM-Free Scotland!

While GM-Free Scotland has been in lockdown, the biotech industry has been busy convincing our food regulators that gene-editing is somehow so safe and dependable that it doesn't need regulation, testing or labelling.

Biotech industry rhetoric, obediently repeated by government (both Westminster and Holyrood), is that gene editing is "like nature", simply "speeding up something which would happen with breeding eventually", "precise" and involving "no foreign genes". We are told we must not "shut our eyes to scientific advancement" and that we must "be led by the science on gene editing technologies". But this science-led advancement doesn't seem to extend to actually using science to make sure these new GMOs are safe and healthy for the current generation, for future generations, for our food crops and for our environment.

If you're not sure what the problem is with gene-edited food, make sure you catch the next few GMFreeScotland articles on what science is telling us about them.

Stay safe!

Quotes are from:

Farmers to be at the helm of future policy direction in a new Holyrood by Claire Taylor, the Scottish Farmer, 29.4.21

Why new genetic techniques need to be stringently regulated, Third World Network Biosafety Information Service, 4.04.21

The Brexit race to the bottom

January 2020

By the time this article pops up on the net, who knows what Brexit chaos might be unfolding. It is, however, worth being forewarned about what's been sneaked into place at the time of writing. As GM Watch points out, there's so much political upheaval in the UK and Europe, we risk "being so overwhelmed by the noise and sense of urgency that we miss what's really going on".

For example ...

GM in sewage

December 2019

One concern about GM crops which European regulators have always taken seriously, is the possibility of the horizontal gene transfer of artificial antibiotic-resistance genes from GM food plants into strains of bacteria which cause human and livestock disease.

Antibiotic-resistance has been described as medicine's climate change: a modern day plague [1].

Historically, most commercial GM crops incorporated antibiotic-resistance genes as part of their development procedure, and many 'newer' GM crops on the market are little more than stacked versions of the old. Although there's been a shift to the use of other marker genes in GM crops for the US market, antibiotic-resistance genes continue to be present especially in GM consumed in 'lower resourced countries'.

Climate change and GM go hand in hand

September 2019

Paul D. Thacker, a journalist with a nose for industry-led corruption of science and regulations, has commented that climate change denial and promotion of GMOs go together like peanut butter and jelly.

At first glance, it's not obvious why: it seems to involve a unique ability to entertain two opposing beliefs at the same time.  Climate change deniers say climate change isn't happening so we don't need to do anything.  GMO promoters say we need GM 'solutions' to feed the world and to save the environment because of climate change. 

However, when there's money involved, some people can believe anything.  Admitting that climate change is a damaging reality and rejecting GM foods are both harmful to big business

Bogus bleeding beef

August 2019

Remember the bleeding GM veggie-burgers rolled out across America in 2017? That's the fake meat produced by a similar method to the way Belgian beer's been made for nearly a thousand years? [1]

The Impossible Burger arrived courtesy of $80 million worth of research plus $300 million worth of promotion from foodie celebrities, and a heap of hype. Breathless write-ups name the Impossible Burger this year's 'It' food craze taking America by storm, and a wake-up call to the meat industry.

Indeed, the long-term goal of the bogus burger's manufacturer, Impossible Foods Inc., is to disrupt the meat industry and convert meat eaters to their products. Impossible Burgers are set to be followed by Impossible Sausages for pizzas and Impossible Steak.

New gene editing - more of the same old thing

July 2019

Gene editing has been described as 'promising', 'powerful', 'precise', and of course 'safer'. What is it actually going to do to our food and farming?

Recently published work by Chinese scientists is probably a good indication of what to expect.

Roundup on trial

May 2019

Monsanto has spent four decades manipulating the science, the regulators, the media, and patent law in pursuit of profit from its blockbuster glyphosate-based herbicide, Roundup [1]. When the Roundup-causes-cancer scare reared up, Monsanto seemed confident it could manipulate that too. Bayer, a company well used to handling litigation over harmful products [3], also seemed confident it could ride out the storm, and proceeded with its acquisition of Monsanto despite the impending law suits.

It's interesting to see what's been unfolding in the American courts, where two glyphosate-based cancer cases have so far been judged (although the appeals will no doubt stretch out for some time to come).

Super-maize with super problems

April 2019

In 2018, the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) GMO panel gave a positive opinion on a new five-event stacked GM maize for food and feed use in the EU.

By breeding together five existing GM variants, the biotech industry has produced a maize which generates three Bt toxins to kill moths plus three Bt toxins to kill beetles, and which can be sprayed with extra glyphosate and extra glufosinate herbicides due to a doubling of the genes conferring tolerance to both.

It seems the GMO Panel considers unexplained agronomic changes* in the GM crop to be outside its remit, even if these could indicate the presence of elements harmful to human health.

Rigging the science (and the regulations)

March 2019

Scientists recognise three pillars of data considered key to the judgement of whether a substance might cause, or contribute to, cancer, namely laboratory animal experiments, gene disruption assays, and epidemiological studies. These pillars respectively show that the test substance can be linked to cancer in mammalian models, that there's a demonstrable mechanism for cancerous cell formation, and that there are signs of real-life cancers in an exposed population.

In 2015, the International Assessment for Research on Cancer (IARC) examined glyphosate-based herbicides which are used on most GM crops [1]. It found "sufficient" evidence in animal studies, "strong" evidence of cellular and genetic damage of a kind known to induce cancer, and a suggestion of an association with cancer in a large US farm study (the Agricultural Health Study). The latter is on-going, and the authors indicated that the suggested link "should be followed up as more cases occur" over time [2].

Predictably, Big Biotech rushed its damage-limitation machine into action, persuading willing regulators to accept its own, industry-style, science in lieu of the peer-reviewed science assessed by the IARC. The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) accordingly pronounced glyphosate "not likely" to cause cancer.

Rigging the regulations (and the science)

March 2019

New GMO blockbusters are predicted to include animals, algae and gene drives. These will be controversial, and the biotech industry knows it.

Before these new GM products can be moved forward, the priority is "a pacified regulatory environment" (Latham). And, what better way to achieve this than to take over GM regulation from the inside.

Populating GM assessment bodies with biotech industry employees and close collaborators is successfully hijacking the process from the start.

Natural excuses to avoid GM safety testing

March 2019

The biotech lobby is coming up with all sorts of fancy arguments to avoid regulation of new DNA-altering techniques which don't involve the insertion of novel genes (protein-coding DNA) into an organism.

Industry-led claims abound that small mutations are naturally present in all organisms, as is the presence of horizontal gene transfer between organisms. The story continues to say that because it is equivalent to 'natural', edited DNA is nothing to worry about. It goes on: organisms arising from intentional DNA-editing are similar to those produced by old, random mutagenesis techniques (such as irradiation). Since the latter have never been regulated, there's no reason to do so with the 'new' version. Moreover, DNA-edited organisms are so 'natural' that their identification is impossible and they are, therefore, untraceable, making regulation impossible to enforce. And, even if the changes are found, no one can tell if the mutation is a result of a natural DNA mutation or a deliberate one. In fact, in our Environment Secretary's view, since Mother Nature is already giving us genetic mutations and horizontal gene transfer, biotech scientists are merely giving Her a helping hand.

All this 'reasoning', however, seems to be more to do with commercial expediency than with science.

Take horizontal gene transfer seriously - now

February 2019

The risk to health from artificial antibiotic resistance genes being used as markers during the creation of most GMOs was recognised in Europe back in the 1990s. However, lulled by mathematical modelling suggesting horizontal gene transfer (HGT) would never be significant in a complex, natural environment, the problem wasn't taken too seriously [1].

Cost-cutting in Brazil

November 2018

In 2016, organic food sales in Brazil were mushrooming by 20 to 30 percent a year.  At the same time, some 70 percent of organic produce was being exported to Europe.  Farmers there recognise that "Growing organics is the future", and the people are increasingly "wanting healthier food free from pesticides".

Were it not for the alliance between the government and Big Agriculture, which is driving the economy, and the supermarkets, which are controlling the food supply system, organics would be a key growth industry.  Instead, it remains a tiny fraction of the whole, swamped by Big Ag's desire for GM crops and their supporting chemicals.  Supermarkets, of course, promote cut-throat competition amongst their suppliers, and the 'winners' are the unrestrained fraudsters passing off conventional pesticide-laden food as 'organic'.

Faced with this scenario, the Brazilian government is busy pushing through two far-reaching pieces of legislation.

Golden Rice: a new definition of precision

October 2018

Two years ago, a group of Nobel laureates published a letter in support of "Precision Agriculture (GMOs)", or more specifically, Golden Rice to combat vitamin A deficiency (VAD) in Africa and Asia.

This begs the question, what's so precise about GMOs, or more specifically Golden Rice?

Golden Rice: a curious sort of safety evaluation

October 2018

Project 'GM Golden Rice' was embarked on over 20 years ago to "reduce or eliminate much of the death and disease caused by vitamin A deficiency (VAD), which has the greatest impact on the poorest people in Africa and Southeast Asia".

Despite all these years of development, Golden Rice has still not been tested to see if it can alleviate VAD. Nowhere has it received the appropriate regulatory authorisation or institutional review board clearances, nor authorisation for unconfined environmental release. In short, GM vitamin A-enriched rice hasn't reached the starting line.

Curiously, however, the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) now developing Golden Rice has asked the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Food Safety Australia New Zealand (FSANZ), and Health Canada for an opinion on the GM rice.

Since Golden Rice is clearly not intended for cultivation or consumption in any of these areas, why start by seek confirmation of its acceptability there?