US food companies lobby for GMO food labelling!?

April 2013

Photo by MillionsAgainstMonsanto on Flickr

It seems secret meetings have been taking place between the food industry and the US Food and Drug Administration on the subject of GM labelling.

The word is that 20 major food companies, including giants like Wal-Mart, Pepsi-Frito Lay, Mars, Coca-Cola, General Mills and others, are lobbying for mandatory federal GMO labelling.

Put into another perspective, up until November 2012 these companies were throwing money at defeating a labelling bill in the State of California: so much money in fact that the bill was defeated (see NO GM LABELLING FOR AMERICA... YET - November 2012). By 11 January 2013, the same crowd were pleading for labelling.

What's changed their minds?

New GM testing rules for EU

April 2013

Photo by Carnotdigital (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

In February 2013, new EU regulations for the risk assessment of GM food and feed were voted into law. These represent a major shift in thinking.

Notably:

• They require a 90-day feeding trial.
• The results of this feeding trial must satisfy defined statistical criteria.
• Proof that a GM material is equivalent to the non-GM parent variety apart from the introduced trait must be provided by industry (GM Watch has been told that current GMOs on the market or in the pipeline would be unlikely to pass this test).

How pests control pests

April 2013

Cotton field in Texas. Photo by kimberlykv on Flickr

A collaboration of Swiss, British and American scientists have been investigating why increased pest problems are emerging in GM cotton crops designed to kill pests.

After the tortuous logic we've been following in examples of commercial research published as 'science' (see TURNING A GM YIELD LOSS INTO A GAIN and MORE MAYBE GM YIELD GAINS - April 2013), here's some refreshing real science.

One of the most commonly used GM cotton varieties is Bollgard II which has two insecticide-producing 'Bt' genes. The genes work in tandem to deal with cotton's most common pests, the cotton boll-worm, bud-worm and army-worm.

In fields where the boll-worm is being controlled by a Bt crop, a range of other troublesome pests are appearing, such as aphids, leafhoppers, mirid bugs, and stink bugs.

EFSA trying to get transparent

April 2013

The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) seemed very determined not to hear the GM safety wake-up call in Professor Séralini's long-term feeding study (see GM MAIZE NOT SAFE TO EAT - October 2012).

After requesting a 'new' opinion on the study, the Authority has persisted in rejecting its conclusions.

However, how 'new' this opinion was has been questioned: it was written by the same scientists who gave the GM maize the go-ahead in the first place, and consisted of nothing more than a compilation of all the critiques from pro-GM bodies.

More maybe GM yield gains

April 2013

Maize/corn field in USA. Photo by Lars Plougmann (originally posted to Flickr as In the corn field)
[CC-BY-SA-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Arpad Pusztai has suggested we distinguish between 'science' (the search for truth through like-for-like comparisons) and 'commercial research' (the search for profit). A recent example in the published literature illustrated this nicely (see TURNING A GM YIELD LOSS INTO A GAIN - April 2013).

Here's another one...

Turning a GM yield loss into a gain

April 2013

Arpad Pusztai has voiced his frustration that the kind of 'science' promoted by the biotech industry and its lobbyists is called 'science' at all:

“Science does not 'advocate' anything but seeks the truth and science cannot be 'junk' because then it is no longer science. Why don't we just use the term such as commerce research or something similar.”

His point is illustrated by an item published recently in a top science journal.

The secret viral gene in most GM crops

March 2013

Electron micrograph of CaMV virions
Image By Patou2602 (Own work)
[CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)]
via Wikimedia Commons

Fourteen years ago, the Institute of Science in Society (ISiS) issued a warning. It pointed out that the artificial genes in most GM crops are activated by a very problematic stretch of viral DNA copied and adapted from a plant pathogen, the cauliflower mosaic virus (CaMV).

This activator DNA, commonly referred to as the 'CaMV 35S promoter', is able to switch on genes in most, if not all, life-forms: it also has an inherent tendency to fragment and recombine with other DNA. Outside its viral-particle origins, the potential for these characteristics to promote horizontal gene transfer, create new pathogens or drive inappropriate gene expression must exist. Moreover, synthetic versions of CaMV 35S have been rejigged to boost gene expression: this increases the risk of all the above properties of the promoter.