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Frankenfoods get funkier (Thursday, Nov. 7, 2002 -- CropChoice news) --
Margaret Wertheim, LA Weekly, 09/19/2002: Strange things are happening among the corn rows, quite apart from crop
circles. More and more foreign bits of DNA are being woven into our food
supply: Viral DNA, bacterial DNA and insect DNA are now routinely
engineered into crops destined for the table. Asleep at the wheel for
decades and
largely ignorant of modern farm practice, consumers are finally waking
up to the less than delectable reality of industrial food production. The
question is: If we shouldn't have to inhale secondhand smoke, why should
we be
forced to ingest secondhand genes?
Zambians don't think they should be, and so recently rejected U.S. food
aid because the offer included genetically modified maize. Vying for the
Marie Antoinette "Let Them Eat Cake!" award, a USAID representative
declared
that "Beggars cannot be choosers."
But Zambians fear that their own crops could be contaminated with
foreign genes, polluting native strains and damaging exports to nations
that do
not want GM produce. When asked about the matter at the World Summit in
Johannesburg, U.S. delegation head John Turner claimed that the United
States does not use aid as a political weapon; nonetheless he added, in
a masterpiece of coded understatement, "We leverage our assistance to our
expectations."
No technological innovation except nuclear power has engendered more
public disapprobation than genetically modified food, particularly in
Europe,
where the anti-GM movement is huge. Yet in the U.S., GM food is a fait
accompli: Close to 100 million acres of GM crops will be planted here
this year,
and 60 percent of items on the average supermarket shelf already contain
GM
ingredients.
Unless you're growing your own, chances are you are eating "frankenfoods"
at
pretty much every meal. Now, you might think, as many Europeans clearly
do,
that the right to know what you are eating is pretty fundamental, but in
that case you'd have failed to appreciate the force of the trade winds
blowing across the Atlantic.
In March, the U.S. muscled through the Codex Alimentarius Commission --
a U.N. panel that adjudicates issues about international food trade -- a
ruling that consumers have no intrinsic right to know if food they are
eating ultimately derives from genetically modified plants. Under
intense pressure from the U.S., supported by its usual flunky Australia,
the CAC
rejected calls from the European Union to allow governments to demand
genetic "traceability" of GM foods. Disclosure of genetic heritage will
be required only "when a risk to human health has been identified."
The Codex's acquiescence to the U.S. lobby was a triumph for Monsanto
and its Big Biotech buddies, as well as for the forces of globalization,
who
will brook no speed bumps on the drag strips of international commerce.
In effect, the CAC ruling has made it a trade violation to embargo GM
produce.
As the last few rounds of WTO talks proved, and as the meeting in
Johannesburg has confirmed, if you're a big, rich nation, stand-over
tactics will get you everywhere. Still, the biotech industry is aware of
the GM
public-relations nightmare, and now one of its own scientists has
proposed a solution that he believes will make everyone happy. Dubbed
"Exorcist,"
this clever genetic trick would snip out all foreign genes from a plant
before the crop is harvested -- agricultural producers could get the
benefit of
GM strains, but consumers would still eat au naturel (more or less).
In the land of having-your-cake-and-eating-it-too, Exorcist is as nifty
a concept as they come. The idea was dreamed up and presented earlier this
year in the journal Nature Biotechnology by Pim Stemmer, vice president
of research at the Redwood, Calif. company Maxygen, and his colleague
Robert Keenan.
Exorcist is made possible by a little protein called Cre that comes from a
bacterial virus. Cre acts like a pair of molecular scissors that snip out
any DNA that lies between two special DNA markers called loxP. Stemmer's
notion is that whenever scientists insert a foreign gene into a plant
they would also insert the genes for Cre and loxP. Snipping out the
foreign
genes can then be triggered by another gene called a "promoter" that
turns the
Cre/loxP mechanism on or off when needed. Stemmer has even proposed a
modification so you could delete all traces of the Exorcist genes
themselves. The deleted DNA forms little loops that quickly break down or
are diluted to undetectable levels -- that's the theory, at any rate.
Exorcist is a high-tech solution to a high-tech problem, and it's pretty
darn ingenious. But then, so was Olestra. You remember Olestra, the fat
substitute that mimicked the creamy taste and silky-smooth feel of real
fat
but that wouldn't make you fat. Several years ago, this fat-free fat was
touted as the final solution to America's ever-expanding waistline. But
as
they say, there are no free lunches. The problem with Olestra was what the
manufacturers coyly termed "anal leakage." Since the fat wasn't going onto
your waist, it had to go somewhere, and where it went was straight through
your system and into your bowels -- and, well, out again. After a good
helping of Olestra, a person better have Depends on.
If Olestra was meant to be fat-free fat, what we're being sold with
Exorcist
is GM-free genetic modification -- in other words, another brilliant
invention from the department of wishful thinking. Stemmer is right in
that
the Cre/loxP system can excise foreign genes, but how efficient is this
mechanism? One researcher whose work Stemmer cites notes that while
Exorcist can be extremely effective in plant tissues such as leaves, in
his
experiments on seeds it has had a high failure rate. David Ow at the U.S.
Department of Agriculture's Plant Gene Expression Center in Albany,
California, has also shown that even when foreign genes are deleted they
can
mysteriously persist inside a plant's cells -- a ghost in the genetic
machine. Ow doesn't know how this works, but these gene wraiths are
clearly still haunting the organism.
Norman Ellstrand, a professor of genetics at the University of California,
Riverside, warns that we must be careful of such high-tech mechanisms,
which
may work well in one environment but not necessarily in another. Ellstrand
worries that while a technology like Exorcist might be effective in a U.S.
field, that does not guarantee it will work in the highlands of Mexico,
say.
Since vast amounts of U.S. grain are exported to Mexico and other
places, we would have to be sure that any such genetic mechanisms would
function
properly under all potential field conditions.
For most GM opponents, moreover, the primary problem is not toxicological,
it's political. Sure, there's concern about the health risks of foreign
genes (such as when the gene for a protein that causes Brazil-nut
allergy got into a GM soybean), but a desire for culinary caution is not
the
driving energy behind the anti-GM movement. To those of us who are
skeptical
about genetic modification of our food supply, the real question is not
how to
make this technology safer, but whether we should be using it at all. You
need an exorcist only if you let the demons in.
Opposition to GM crops is first and foremost a political stance against
the
industrialization of our food supply and the takeover of agriculture by
big business. Exorcist will do nothing to allay these concerns. Indeed, it
only exacerbates the problem by piling on yet more genetic modifications,
thereby increasing agricultural reliance on proprietary technology that
enriches
a few mega-corporations at the expense of small farmers the world over.
That is why in 1998 Zambia and a dozen other African nations endorsed a
statement to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization's negotiations
on "The International Undertaking on Plant Genetic Resources" declaring
that any science imported to help alleviate the continent's food problems
"should be building on local knowledge, rather than replacing and
destroying
it."
The very soul of agriculture is at stake here; what we need is not some
genetic conjurer with a magic disappearing wand, but a serious social
debate about how our food is produced and what price we are prepared to
pay for
a GM-free tomato.
Margaret Wertheim's latest book is "The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A
History of Space From Dante to the Internet." | |
