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.

Gene-edited tomatoes

July 2022

According to media headlines, the UK government has declared gene-edited tomatoes could be in our supermarkets in 2023.

Gene-edited mushrooms

July 2022

In 1932, a legal issue which started with a tenacious Scottish single-parent shop-assistant, who took exception to being served up a decomposing snail in her ice-cream float and pursued her complaint all the way to the House of Lords, ended with the creation of a consumer rights law which became established throughout the world.

The significance of this case is that manufacturers of "articles of common household use" have a legal duty of care to ensure the safety of their products for anyone likely to use them.

From a GM food perspective, novel foods have never been comprehensively tested to ensure their safe, life-long, consumption by any likely consumers.

GM sceptics might suggest that the failure to carry out human trials or use up-to-date analytical techniques on GM foods is to make sure the manufacturer doesn't know about any potential problems.

What better way to avoid that pesky duty of care to ensure safety?

Natural gene editing just doesn't happen

July2022

Under intense industry lobbying, regulators around the world are being persuaded to by-pass safety testing of gene-edited foods [1]. The main argument for ignoring such a basic safeguard of human health is that the genome changes inflicted "could happen in Nature".

This claim is based on a century-old theory that genetic mutations are 'normal', ongoing, random mistakes arising in the inherited "factors or elements"* in cells during reproduction, leading to natural evolution.

* The 1964 Oxford English Dictionary's definition of a 'gene' is "One of the factors or elements of which a germ cell contains a pair transmitted each from one parent"

Throughout the subsequent discovery of chromosomes, DNA, epigenetic modifications to the expression of DNA, and gene-mobility, -families, -linkages, -duplications and -networks, scientists have been unable to let go of the age-old dogma.

Gene-edited crops: controlling, unjustifiable and unnecessary

July 2022

Governments are being persuasively lobbied by the biotech industry to rubber-stamp gene-edited crops with claims that they are democratising, sustainable and necessary.

Democratising?

Herbicide tolerant GM soya is insecticidal too

June 2022

Glyphosate-tolerant GM crops aren't something that usually bring insecticides to mind.  Indeed, historically, US soyabeans were only sporadically challenged by insect pests.  Things changed around 2000 with the arrival of the soybean aphid which can only be controlled by foliar spraying.  Hot on the heels of this pest invasion came dramatic increases in bean leaf beetle which prompted the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to issue an emergency exemption for neonicotinoid insecticidal seed treatments. 

GM crops adding to ecosystem collapse

June 2022

A key selling-point for 'Bt' insecticide-generating GM crops is that they reduce the need to spray chemical pesticides on the crop. It is claimed this makes them 'environmentally-friendly'.

Indeed, a study published in 2014, which combined data from 147 studies world-wide, showed a significant 42% reduction in the quantity of pesticide applied on Bt crops compared to conventional ones. This was much hyped as proof of the benefits of GM in agriculture by the pro-GM lobby and by the UK government committee which reported it. The study was, however, narrowly focused on comparisons of the weight of pesticide applied in kilograms per hectare or per year. Pre-emptive systemic insecticides, put on the seed but not sprayed onto the crop in the field, were not factored in.