GM wheat in Argentina

February 2022

In 2004, the US, Canadian and European wheat markets breathed a sigh of relief when Monsanto yielded to pressure and withdrew its glyphosate-tolerant GM wheat from the pipeline.

Predictably, it was just a matter of time before GM wheat popped up again, this time as 'HB4' with combined drought-resistance and tolerance to glufosinate herbicide.

HB4 has now been approved by Argentina: no surprise there, because the country has long been a key route used by the agrichemical industry as a bridgehead to the rest of Latin America for the (legal and illegal) dissemination of its products.

GM animals on the menu

January 2022

As we enter 2022, what happened to the GM edible animals that we've been promised over the years?

Super-fast growing GM salmon have been trying to emerge from the lab since 1989 [1,2,3].

Having gained regulatory approval in America in 2015, GM salmon are now legal to produce and sell there despite being declared unlawful in 2020 due to the absence of any environmental risk assessment.

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?

Clamour for GM safety testing

March 2018

No clinical trials on human health outcomes from eating GM foods have ever been conducted.

Although the need for post-market monitoring seems to appear in GM regulatory approvals, no health surveillance has ever been carried out. You don't have to look far to find the reason.

Environmentally-friendly, but dead

December 2017

In 1999, biotech boffins in Canada invented the 'Enviropig' genetically transformed to digest grain-based feedstuffs which pigs don't naturally eat, but which are now part-and-parcel of modern intensive pig-rearing [1].

This piggy-wonder was touted as being cheaper and greener to produce because, thanks to its novel digestive system, it wouldn't excrete huge amounts of polluting phosphates, and wouldn't smell. 'Environmentally-friendly' is always a good PR hand to play.

A hopeful herd of Enviropigs was maintained for 17 years, waiting for the market to want to eat them.

The pigs are all dead now. Total disaster. No customers. All cost and no return.

GM sugarcane

July 2017

Brazil has been a major supplier of non-GM soya to Europe. While huge tracts are planted with GM soya, the country has a very large land area and is confident it can keep GM and non-GM separate.

Last year, saw reductions in several GM-growing areas around the world: two countries (Romania and Burkino Faso) discontinued GM agriculture, India dropped GM cotton cultivation due to pest problems, one of China's biggest provinces implemented a 5-year ban on growing, processing and selling GM crops, Chinese GM cotton planting dropped 24%, while Argentina moved to crop diversification and away from GM. However, globally, the hectares planted to GM crops continue to edge upwards because the reductions have been offset by continuing increases in North and South America where 90% of GM plantings take place.

In Brazil there has been a rise in GM crop area, most of which will be soya, accompanied by reports of the deforestation of nearly 2 million acres of the Brazilian Amazon, the first in a decade.

This renewed environmental destruction may portend something more ominous than just more GM soya.

Regulators in Brazil have approved the commercial use of GM sugarcane.

Glyphosate causes crop disease

June 2017

In 2003, during a 5-year study of crop disease, the first alarm was raised that wheat appeared to be worse affected by 'fusarium head blight' in fields where glyphosate herbicide had been applied just before planting. Laboratory studies at the time also indicated that fusarium grows faster when glyphosate-based weedkillers are added to the medium they're growing in.

Fusarium head blight is a devastating fungal disease which destroys a fifth of wheat harvests in Europe alone. This fungus produces 'mycotoxins' (poisons) known to cause cancer of the liver and kidney, disorders of the blood and lung, vomiting, and damage to the immune system. Anything which promotes fusarium is a serious business.

Bt insecticide risks in the agricultural landscape

April 2017

As the biotech industry and regulators cling to the notion that 'Bt' insecticide is toxic only to the target pests and is easily digested by mammals just like any other protein, science is throwing a few flies in their ointment.

GM crop plants have been created which generate one or several artificial versions of 'Bt' insecticides. These proteins, in their natural forms, are produced by soil bacteria, Bacillus thuringiensis.

It's disturbing to read in a recent scientific paper that:

"Bt toxins can be transferred via the food web and accumulate in organisms to different degrees".

All maize is wormy now

March 2017

If you've been following the GM issue for a while, cast your mind back to 2006. A long-standing, respected British science journal gave its "Outstanding Paper Award for Excellence" to a study which could be better described as a pro-GM PR initiative dressed up as science.

To assess what influenced consumer purchasing decisions, the study offered 'Bt' insecticide-generating GM sweet corn for sale in a Canadian farm shop beside conventional sweet corn. One of the more blatant exercises in propaganda used during this 'study' was the descriptors attached to the two types of sweet corn: the conventional one was labelled 'wormy' followed by a list of the pesticides sprayed on it; the GM one was labelled 'quality' with the 'Bt' (insecticide!) part kept separate.

Fast forward ten years and check out how these two sweet corns would truthfully be labelled today. The wormy one is still wormy and still sprayed with multiple pesticides. And the quality one?

D.I.Y. bugs

October 2016

Photo Creative Commons

Ever since CRISPR [1] hopped onto the biotech platform, replacing bits of the living world to suit your individual tastes or whims has suddenly become possible [2]. And you don't have to be a scientist to do it.

TTIP is about GM

August 2015

Photo from Creative Commons

Disquiet about the 'Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership' (TTIP) continues to grow [1].

The goal of these secretive negotiations is to open up trade between America and Europe. Since the discrepancy between US administration’s 'light-touch' voluntary attitude to GM produce and rigorous GMO regulation in the EU is irreconcilable, there is real concern the TTIP will be used to circumvent vital European GM controls.

A constant supply of GMO contamination

June 2015

Photo Creative Commons

Switzerland has never allowed the cultivation nor import of GM oilseed rape. Despite this, in 2011 and 2012, GM rape was found to be growing wild along railway lines near the freight station and in port areas in Basel.

The following year, further more detailed sampling was carried out to investigate how this has come about.

Answer to bee die-off?

June 2015

Photo Creative Commons

Bee die-off is soaring alarmingly in America. US government figures show that honeybee mortality has risen to 42% in the past year. While hives will shrink over the winter, losses in excess of 15% are deemed unsustainable.

A whole range of factors has been blamed for the bee deaths, including virus-bearing mites, winter food insufficiency, trucking the hives around the country to rent-a-bee at sites where mass crop pollination is needed, and non-target effects of applied and systemic insecticides.

Hives which are already too small and weak at the start of the winter, simply won't survive.

GM crops in decline

May 2014

Field of cotton in Canada. CC photo by Mike Beauregard on Flickr

The total area planted with GM crops in industrialised nations has fallen for the first time since the technology was commercialised in 1996. Last year, GM plantings in those countries fell by about two percent.

 

These figures don't come from any "wicked", "environmentalist", "Luddite", "GM crop-trashing vandals" trying to say "I told you so". They come from the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-Biotech Applications (ISAAA).  

Kicking the science into shape

January 2014

CC photo of a biotech lab - via Tuur van Balen on Flickr

In 2004, three Canadian Government scientists were dismissed for “insubordination” after publicly expressing serious reservations about the approval of GM products they believed would harm the food chain and, ultimately, threaten the well-being of Canadians.  Since then, the Canadian Government has kept tight control of the situation and successfully pushed GM foods, unlabelled, throughout its domain [1].

How it managed to do this seems, ironically, to have been down to the failure of subsequent government scientists to question the science, or to question the validity of what their employers ordered them to do.

Gene pollution update 2013

November 2013

Wheat growing in Oregon, USA. Photo Gary Halvorson
Oregon State Archives [Attribution], via Wikimedia Commons

The chance discovery of illegal GM wheat growing in a field in Oregon highlighted some uncomfortable home-truths (see GM CONTAMINATION DÉJÀ VU - June 2013).

Despite its wholesale move to GM agriculture and widespread field-trials of experimental GM plants, America isn't monitoring gene 'escapes': the rogue herbicide-tolerant wheat only became obvious when it survived spraying with Roundup herbicide, and its source has never been pin-pointed. While it seems unlikely that a single field could become so widely contaminated accidentally, no other similarly polluted areas have been identified.

Why 'co-existence' is impossible

January 2013

Canola. Photo Gary Halvorson, Oregon State Archives [Attribution]
via Wikimedia Commons

1. GM canola flows along roads

A year ago, we reported that GM canola (oil seed rape) was being found everywhere.

This “everywhere”, referred to the well-established and happily inter-breeding GM plants now widespread on roadsides in Canada and America.

New US laws to regulate GM foods

January 2012

Rally for the Right2Know About GMOs, Washington DC, USA
Photo by Millions Against Monsanto on Flickr

Up until now, the biotech industry has succeeded in blocking just about every attempt to introduce honest labelling of GMOs in the USA. The result is that 74% of Americans don't know they're eating GM foods at all, and their food supply is being steadily polluted with both legal and experimental genes.

However, awareness is gradually spreading. The voices of dissent are beginning to shout in unison from Washington to San Francisco, and the scene is set for some new legislation which won't so easily be lobbied into oblivion by industry.